Abracadabra

Posted on December 20, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Instead of the normally optimistic post, this week is a look at the court fights that lie ahead. No Sunday podcast this week, but I do have a post up on the Ray Epps story. This insurrection show trial could turn out to be an amusing and embarrassing debacle for the regime.

One of the striking features of public discourse in a liberal democracy is the narrowness of language used by people with speaking roles. This narrowness of language reflects the narrowness of acceptable thought. The people allowed on stage signal their conformity to the hive mind by using the approved language. This means using the popular words and phrases of the moment. It is why the mass media resembles fireflies at dusk, blinking at one another as if they are coordinated.

A ridiculous example was the aftermath of the 2010 election when Barak Obama came out and said his team had been “shellacked” in the election. This is an old fashioned term that used to be common in sports. The media, unfamiliar with sports and sports metaphors, spastically repeated it. They were sure their cult leader has just invented the term and they seemed to be sure it was designed to cure their pain. For weeks they found a way to insert the term in every story.

It was not just monkey-see-monkey-do with them. There was a strong odor of incense about how they kept repeating it. This mysterious new word was like a sound in the darkness telling one another of their presence, The repeating of it was a way to move past the disconfirmation of the election. Instead of facing the fact that Obama was not Black Jesus, they reassured one another that their beliefs were valid. The use of the leader’s new word was a form of re-confirmation.

We are seeing something similar happening in the aftermath of the failure to pass Biden’s big spending bill. The term Build Back Better has become a bizarre abracadabra phrase for the true believers. They are sure that every problem can be solved with Build Back Better. The far-left activists who chased Senator Kyrsten Sinema into a toilet were chanting “Build Back Better” as if they thought the phrase would magically transform her into a believer.

Senator Joe Manchin refused the Build Back Better sacrament over the weekend, thus scuttling the bill for this year. The result has been a flurry of incantations in the media using the term to mean everything. Here we have CNN explaining how the faithful were let down by the running dog heretic Joe Manchin. The phrase is used half a dozen times but there is no effort to explain what it means. Everyone knows that it means the final push to promised last stage of history.

Here we have a story telling us the long dark winter Joe Biden has been promising for two years is finally upon us. The reason is the Build Back Better plan was defeated by the forces of darkness. Goldman Sachs is now saying the economy, like the earth when Persephone returns to the underworld, will now go into a period of mourning over the loss of Build Back Better. How or why this will happen is not discussed, because to do so would possibly offend the gods further.

The fact that the bill itself is meaningless gibberish that only exists as a concept adds to its mystery. Since no one can point to the text and find fault, because the text is just word salad at this point, makes it unassailable. This allows the believers to cast onto it all of their hopes and dreams. Build Back Better is just a catchphrase to mean the great leap forward into the last stage of history. As a result, the believers are baffled as to why Manchin opposes this unalloyed good.

The fight over this bill is a good reminder that conservative explanations for left-wing behavior are mostly wrong. If they were about money and power, they would have done something different here. The fact that they have all of the money and power yet still engage in this ritualized behavior is another important point. The religious fervor over Build Back Better, the moralization of the slogan, suggests these people are acting from some sort of religious impulse rather than politics.

The root of that impulse is the assumption that once everyone agrees on the morality of something, the solution is self-evident and beyond debate. It is why they cannot accept that Manchin and others could be right that the trillions in new money creation proposed by the believers could create terrible trade-offs. There can be no practical objections to the plan when the morality of it is settled. There must be something else at work, which is why they will turn Manchin into Trotsky.

Another aspect of this morality-politics dynamic is that politics is now a sign of moral ambiguity or worse, dissent from accepted morality. Logically, if politics ends when the morality is settled, the continuation of politics means the moral issues have not been settled or some oppose the settled morality for some reason. What lies behind the structure of the Build Back Better bill is to end politics by delegating what should happen in the legislature to the administrative state.

Put another way, what the Left seeks is an end to politics, but they are not interested in debating the morality. From their point of view, the moral issues are settled so the task now is to stamp out the remaining political resistance. Given the slim differences between the two parties, they are not mistaken. A big Republican win next November will probably mean the Build Back Better plan gets passed as a way to “unite the country after a contentious and divisive election”.

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Xirl Science

Posted on December 17, 2021 by thezman

In my youth when we hunted the mammoth and sabretooth, it became clear to me that a lot of jobs in corporate America are pointless. I was working at a big company that had to go through a round of layoffs. They called is Reduction In Force, which quickly became RIF. People were riffed rather than fired or let go. The banality of evil lies in corporate jargon. As a low level functionary with computer skills my job was to keep track of who had been riffed by their job function.

The first thing I noticed is management did not seem to know what many of their positions did for the company. The managers could talk about their direct reports, but the people creating the titles and roles were often unsure about the reason the positions were created in the first place. Most jobs seemed to evolve into an all-around staff assistant after they were created. Assistant accounting manager was just an office clerk that worked in a cubicle over in accounting.

The other thing that became clear is the work being done by the people riffed was not all that important as no one missed it. Some tasks were moved to other people, but most of it was just busy work that was eliminated with the person. The 20% cut in office staff did not result in 20% less work. It just reduced the number of meetings and the volume of paper moving around the office. The truth was, many of the remaining jobs were just make work as well.

When you read the work product of the academy, the thing you see right away is much of it is nonsense busy work. These are people with no useful skills and nothing to do so they fritter away their time in a game of make believe. They imagine themselves as academic and intellectuals. Their specialty is basically a hobby of their own creation, which is an offshoot of their mentor’s hobby. You could eliminate the social science and humanities and no one outside the academy would notice.

The other thing you notice about these nonsense fields is the struggle to apply these boutique theories to anything resembling reality. Queer studies makes perfect sense within the extremely narrow scope of academic queerness. Outside of that narrow scope it makes no sense whatsoever. Much of what is produced in these pseudo-intellectual fields – that is a generous description – is a desperate attempt to apply these crackpot theories to real world situations.

The financial structure of the American university system is unsound and serious cracks are starting to appear. There has been a 15% decline in public university enrollments over the last two years. Some of it is due to the Covid panic, but that is just an accelerant in this trend. The higher education Ponzi scheme cannot withstand drops in enrollment without it creating very serious financial problems. Demographics is only going to make this issue more obvious.

You have to wonder if what lies over the horizon is the biggest reduction in force we have seen since the collapse of the buggy whip industry. Colleges will be forced to cut costs and the low hanging fruit is the nonsense studies. It is not hard to imagine a university system riffing entire departments. We may be seeing the peak of bourgeois decadence in higher education. What lies ahead is a massive contraction that eliminates these sorts of fields entirely.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro and Holiday Schedule
Identity Politics
Whitey & Whiteness
Xirls and Xims
Our Glaciers, Ourselves

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/81ZbxfjlpdA

The Kennedy Psy-Op

Posted on December 16, 2021 by thezman

Who “really” killed President John F Kennedy over a half century ago may be the first modern conspiracy theory. Few people accept the official explanation from the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald did the deed on his own. Most assume he had help from some powerful friends. The Mafia is a popular theory since one of their associates assassinated Oswald soon after. Jack Ruby’s role in this whole thing never made much sense, given his lifestyle.

For generations now the government has kept a massive trove of files hidden away from public view, which has driven speculation about their contents. There is no reason for these documents to remain secret, given that everyone involved is now dead and the Cold War is long over. In 1992 the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act was passed by Congress. The act called for the release of the secret Kennedy files within 25 years, but Trump set the deadline aside.

Typical Trump, he promised to release all of the documents, but then turned around did the opposite. In most cases, these reversals were the result of Trump being an outlandish liar, but in this case, it was pressure from the FBI and CIA. Their claim is that the thousands of documents locked away in the archives contain secrets that could endanger people and methods. The absurdity of these claims is never questioned as everyone is afraid of the secret police.

The people manipulating the corpse of Joe Biden had him declare a restart of the process to release the remaining documents. Some are supposed to be released this week and then another batch next year. There is a review process in place and the implication is some things will never be released. As long as there are documents hidden from public view, the assumption is the truth is not known. On the other hand, that could just be a ploy to keep the conspiracy going.

That is one angle the conspiracy theorists never consider. The real scandal in the Kennedy case is that the American secret police were so bungling and incompetent that they missed Oswald despite many red flags. After all, this is the semi-official explanation for what happened on 9/11. We know the FBI had six million warnings that these people were up to something involving airplanes. Lost in the aftermath is the fact that the reason it happened was bureaucratic bungling.

This is one of the main weapons of a secret police unit. They bank on the opponents of the state wildly overestimating their ability. Fear of infiltration and detection is how they keep opponents from organizing. Not only is everyone worried everyone is an informant of infiltrator, but would-be plotters also think the secret police has special technology to crack their communications. It is why they pay Hollywood to make movies about the super smart intelligence agencies with super-duper spy gear.

If the full story of the Kennedy assassination revealed that the CIA and FBI was full of hacks and bunglers, that would undermine the agencies. The texts messages made public in the FBI sedition case in 2016 revealed that the people at the top of the agency carry on like teenagers most of the time. If the people running these agencies today are that incompetent, maybe this has been true since the beginning. Maybe that is why these documents remain secret.

Of course, it is possible there is nothing there at all. From the perspective of the state, the assassination created one very big problem. It called into question the competence of the state. They needed to show they could solve the mystery. It is possible that they never did know more than what we have always known. Instead of admitting it they cooked up the official story and then locked away the “evidence” to protect their super-secret methods from the bad guys.

This would be another reason to keep the farce going long after everyone involved is dead and the methods are obsolete. Imagine if the remaining documents were released and they are just thousands of blank pages and other useless stuff that have no information at all. Imagine the conspiracy theorist’s reaction. Imagine the public reaction to the news of a three generation long hoax. It could be that old lies are still haunting the regime to this day.

You can work this puzzle another way and wonder about who would not be hurt at all by some long forgotten bit of information. For example, would anyone care if the truth in those files is that the Soviets helped Oswald? The Cubans? The Cold War is over so revelations about long dead commies harms no one. Given the regime’s obsession with Russia, they would welcome such a disclosure, so logic says the secret files contain no incriminating evidence about the Russians.

The point here is that the secret documents probably contain nothing interesting or revelatory, but their secrecy serves current ends. The biggest voting bloc in the country right now is white Baby Boomers who still think about this event. Keeping this story alive helps keep them engaged with the old idea of America. The Kennedy assassination has been used as a long running psy-op on this cohort and until they are off the scene, the psy-op will continue. There is no reason to end it.

The New Segregation

Posted on December 15, 2021 by thezman

Walk around in public and it is increasingly obvious that Americans now live in at least two parallel worlds. For the bare-faced, the masked are a strange and alien people who are starting to fade into the scenery. The weirdness of these people strapping amulets to their faces has faded and it is now just something to be ignored, along with the person wearing the amulet. In fact, the weird collection of beliefs that lie behind the bizarre face-gear are also fading into obscurity.

The mask is no longer about following directions, complying with authority, concerns over public health and so on. It is about membership in a parallel universe that occupies the same physical space as this universe. If you want to know what segregation in the South was really like, go to a grocery store. Jim Crow was mostly two groups of people operating under mostly the same rules but living psychologically apart from one another in the same public spaces.

The masked versus unmasked is just the physical manifestation of the new segregation in current year America. Behind the mask lies paranoia and fear about those not wearing the magic amulet. The bare-faced are Trump supporters, possibly even insurrectionists or white supremacists. They most certainly are not vaccinated and therefore carry the latest letter of the Greek alphabet. These are the people against whom the elect are chosen to wage the holy war.

It sounds insane, but it is a generous description of the people living in the parallel universe that is the Left in America. Theirs is a world of magic and miracles where dark forces are resisted by the forces of light. They cannot explain how this works, but they have plenty of examples. The massive tornadoes that hit the bad people in Trump country were the wrath of Gaia. She is angry over climate change so she sent another warning to the sinners.

Exactly no one in the Gaia cult can explain how any of this works, but that is not how religions work anyway. The rituals and incantations are simple ways for the believer to show she is a believer, without knowing the logic of the belief. The overlap between Gaia worshippers and Covidians is not an accident. Both of these are viewed as supernatural occurrences by the Left. It is why your vaccination status matters so much to them. They have been told it matters, so they believe it.

Behind those masks is not just fear of Gaia, but a general fear of mysterious forces operating in the universe. It is why the Russian collusion hoax still circulates among these same people. They were never able to explain how it works, but they just knew it because that is how they imagine the world works. That is where you see the parallel universes at play. In one universe, hoaxes get debunked and people move on while in the other they become part of the canon.

In the world of normal people, the great struggle of life is the great struggle over the small things like money, family and work. Behind the mask, the great struggle is the defense of democracy. There is a war on democracy waged by those who oppose democracy for some reason. The faithful need Joe Biden to take on the real enemies of democracy in order to save it. Of course, those who criticize Joe Biden, in his noble quest, are threatening democracy by weakening his resolve.

One interesting thing about this new religion is it is mostly a grab bag of old ideas put to less interesting ends. For example, the crazies now have their version of the Inquisition where they will torment suspected heretics. Mark Meadows has been named by the Inquisition and will be brought to justice. He is charged with using the Devil’s own language to direct the armies of Satan. The point of this Inquisition is to finally defeat Old Scratch himself, former president Donald Trump.

To normal people, this obsession with the January 6th protests is completely insane, but lots of people believe otherwise. Behind those masks you will find that many, maybe most, buy into the insurrection myth entirely. Just as their magic amulet is about being on the right side of history, the basket of boutique beliefs swirling around the managerial class are about picking sides in the great struggle. The “insurrection” has become a rallying cry for those covering their faces in public.

Stand around in a public place where you can see a lot of believers and think about something that lies at the heart of it all. Can our societies continue to function when a significant minority of people believe these insane things? What Covid has really done is move this question to the forefront by bringing these people out of the shadows and giving them constant reinforcement. Those magic amulets are not just warding off the evil spirits, but reinforcing their faith in the new religion.

For the last two years the normal portion of the population has been buoyed by the hope that this will all peter out eventually. The madness of the Trump obsession would go away once Biden was in office. The Covidians would move onto something else once the cost of their madness was too much for them. Wait long enough and things will return to normal. It is looking like they can remain irrational for as long as it takes to pull the roof down on all of us.

One of the forgotten bits of truth about the segregated South is that without outside intervention, the system would have carried on indefinitely. The talented ten percent of blacks grumbled about not getting access to the elites and white merchants grumbled about the restrictions on commerce, but most people found it workable. Contrary to the cartoon version of the period popular with the crazies, the system kept the peace and most people saw it as an acceptable compromise.

The lesson is that two different people can live together in peace even if the separation is just psychological or cultural. Perhaps this is where things are heading. There will be no return to normal. One group will walk around with their magic amulets on their faces while normal people simply ignore it and much of what they say. The masked will traffic in their conspiracy theories about insurrectionists and white supremacists, while everyone else gets on with the struggle of life.

Regime-ology

Posted on December 14, 2021 by thezman

Back in 2014, Rolling Stone published a story about an alleged rape on the campus of the University of Virginia. Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus” story was a bombshell story that became a national controversy. It seemed to confirm everything the Nth-wave feminists were saying about the scourge of white males raping white women on the college campus. All of the usual suspects rushed to the nearest outlet to display their outrage over the incident.

Of course, this later became known as the “Virginia Rape Hoax” as the story was completely fake. The only things about it that were true is the star of the story was a human who attended the university and the writer used her real name. Otherwise, the story was a total fabrication and a ridiculous one at that. Sensible people noticed huge problems with it from the start. The two big clues that it was fake were that it read like a bodice ripper and the villain was named Haven Monahan.

In retrospect, this story was a turning point for mass media. By the old rules, everyone involved would have been shamed out of the public eye. The writer, Sabrina Erdely, would have been drummed out of the profession. Jackie Coakley, the coed who was the fake victim, would have been destroyed by an angry media. Erdely faced no repercussions and still works in the media. Coakley was mostly ignored and has gone on with her life, not having suffered from it.

The news was always biased and lots of reporters fabricated stories to fill up their stories, but there was always risk to being a fabulist. Stephen Glass, the guy who cooked up legendary whoppers while at the New Republic was drummed out of the business and the reputation of the magazine was destroyed. Jayson Blair. the black New York Times reporter was fired for making up stories. Imagine a black reporter being fired today for anything, much less for slandering white people.

Prior to the Rolling Stone story, a reasonable person knew the media was biased toward left-wing causes and left-wing institutions. They would favor the Democrat over the Republican, for example. They would promote left-wing causes and ignore or dismiss right-wing issues. After the Rolling Stone hoax, the prudent person assumes that everything in the media is fake. The question is, what is possibly true and what is the agenda behind the proposed narrative.

In other words, reading the American media has taken on the same quality as reading the Soviet media in the Cold War. You read it like you read any piece of fiction in that you are looking for clues in the narrative to discovery the deeper meaning. Instead of Kremlinologists, Americans have to be regime-ologists. The regime media offers clues about what is going on behind the veil. Those clues help understand the workings of the inner party and what they are plotting.

Take this story in Yahoo News about a high-tension cloak and dagger affair that supposedly happened in Washington during the Trump years. The story has a female heroine named Ali Watkins, who is a strong independent female journalist working for the New York Times. It has a villain, a shady character named Jeffrey Rambo, who worked at a secretive Customs and Border Protection division. The two of them engage in a high stakes game of cat and mouse in the capital.

The story seems ridiculous and oddly familiar. The reason for that is it is ripped from the ham-fisted television shows about rogue government agencies. Of course, the main character is described like someone from female fantasy literature. Instead of the villain being named Haven Monahan, he is Jeffrey Rambo. The story does not describe him as having a thick New York accent or dropping from helicopters with a bayonet between his teeth, but you just know it happened!

There are some things about the story that are true, like the names of the two main characters, but the story is most assuredly fake. The first clue the story is made up is that this fantastic story is in Yahoo News, rather than the New York Times where the protagonist works. Instead, it is at a C-list outlet written by a nobody whose prior work was reporting on the FBI. Dumping these stories on nobody reporters is standard practice for the regime. It is part of the subterfuge.

Another clue is the main character. She is not the strong independent female journalist speaking truth to power. She is the tramp who was having sex with James Wolfe, the Security Director of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee. He was busted for giving her information that she used in her stories. She denies it but this is not an issue in dispute, so we can add liar to the morals charges. Watkins at the time was in her mid-20’s and Wolfe was in his late-50’s.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Wolfe was the Security Director of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee for 29 years. This means he was one of a small number of people seeing the nation’s most sensitive intelligence data. In other words, he was a professional spook who knew the game. Most likely, in addition to getting some young flesh ,he was also using Watkins to peddle disinformation. This is not a new game between “young reporters” and old DC hands.

Using our regime-ology skills we quickly see that the drama of the story is mostly fake and intended to get attention. The real story is the FBI is peddling a story to the media that both damages another agency and helps their friendly media. They picked Jana Winter because she has nothing else going on, is desperate for a break and has been a willing stenographer in the past. She will not ask too many questions. Again, this is old hat in the game of media manipulation.

That raises the question as to why this story was planted by the FBI. There is the special prosecutor glacially investigating the Russian collusion hoax and the FBI’s role in promoting it. The Trump people did use the “rogue agency” in question to uncover the Wolfe-Watkins operation. It is possible Durham is using the same assets to investigate the FBI or allies. It could also be another smear job against Trump that will be later used in the campaign against him.

At this point, it is hard to know, but it is good practice in reading the media in order to tease out what is happening behind the veil of secrecy. Given the effort put into writing this whopper, it will come up again at some point. All we can know is there is trouble inside the security operations. One branch is not happy with another and is now taking their war to friendly media. Perhaps soon people will be airbrushed out of official photos, a practice popular in authoritarian regimes.

The Assange Case

Posted on December 13, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Behind the green door is the Sunday podcast as well as some thoughts on the Army – Navy football game.

Thirty years ago, the typical right-wing person would have held a dim view of whistleblowers and their media accomplices. Those whistleblowers were always left-wing people with the strong odors that come with it. They were motivated by left-wing morality rather than republican virtue. Their complaints about the government were motivated by their opposition to America. These stories usually made those who stood for republican order look like the villains.

Probably the most famous example is Daniel Ellsberg. He is the man who released the top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in the Vietnam War to The New York Times and Washington Post. This was in 1971 and Ellsberg was a fanatical left-wing antiwar protestor. He violated a number of laws in releasing those documents, but he was on the Left, so it was okay. Left-wing lawbreaking was always okay as long as it served left-wing interests.

That was another country ago. Today, the typical right-wing person has a new respect for the government whistleblower. You see this with Julian Assange, who is being transferred to the United States for a show trial. The only people speaking out about his treatment are conservatives. Here is a story in Breitbart that manages to tie Assange to an old paleocon concept. It is one of those times when you know they do not know the source of the phrase, as otherwise they would never use it.

The Assange story is a good example of how partisanship within the mainstream makes rational discourse impossible. When Assange was leaking information damaging to the Bush crusades, they were not fans of Assange. Of course, the Left loved Assange and treated him like a modern day Che Guevara. When WikiLeaks embarrassed the Democrats then the Left suddenly hated Assange. It took a while, but eventually the conservatives figured out how to back the whistleblower.

Interestingly, those same conservatives have nothing but contempt for Chelsea Manning, the sexually confused former Army soldier who provided documents to Julian Assange back in the Bush years. For a lot of reasons, Chelsea Manning makes for a troublesome hero for them. Of course, Democrats moved heaven and earth to get their favorite crossdresser out of prison. Then “she” turned on them, as it were. Saying bad things about the police state is no longer left-wing.

These cases, and you can probably put Edward Snowden in there as well, present some interesting dilemmas. The biggest conundrum is the role of the media in these sorts of affairs. They are the platform for disseminating the information being leaked by the whistleblowers. They also shape the narrative around the leaks to paint the person doing the leaking as a hero. The TV tabloid 60 Minutes recently did a puff piece on the leaker, Reality Winner, painting her as a hero.

In a rules-based society, people who break the rules should suffer consequences commensurate with the damage done by the rule breaking. A general principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is that the punishment fits the crime. If the crime, however, prevents a much larger crime from occurring, the rule breaking ceases to be a crime and becomes a public service. While this theory makes sense to a sensible person, its abuse by the deranged and dangerous suggests a serious flaw.

Then there is the issue of the media. In the old analog days, it was easy to make an exception for the press. In these cases, they were treated like neutrals. Even though they knew the material they were reporting was illegally obtained, they were allowed to report on it because a free press trumps government secrecy. In the digital age where we no longer have a free press or actual reporters, this no longer makes sense. The media is just the marketing arm of the unofficial ruling party.

Can we have a civil society in the digital age when billionaire public relations firms are able to work with the state to embarrass opponents? This is what we saw with Trump when the New York Times got his tax returns. Clearly, someone in the IRS or Trump’s accounting firm stole the documents. Then they handed them to the press. This is trafficking in stolen goods. If the item in question was a piece of art from Trumps’ office, everyone involved would be in prison.

This is what makes the Assange case interesting. Whether the rulers know it or not, they are putting this idea front and center. If WikiLeaks is not allowed to publish leaked material, then how can the New York Times do it? There are only three solutions to that puzzle and one of them is the farce of a free press is now over. In other words, if only regime supportive media is protected, then we no longer have an independent media with constitutional protections.

On the other hand, if the courts decide Assange gets the same protections as the New York Times or Washington Post, then the age of secrets is over. In the digital age it is simply too easy to spill the beans on official shenanigans. This then spills into personal areas, as rich people make for good headlines. The NDA’s famous people make their staff sign suddenly mean very little. The only solution for the ruling class is to pump out even more disinformation through official organs.

The third option is the courts begin to nibble away at this media exceptions, which is something the Supreme Court has hinted at recently. If possession of stolen goods is the same for the media as it is for everyone else, then these sorts of cases become very complicated for the media. Suddenly, the SPLC publishing e-mails from one of the people they are harassing becomes a criminal case. At the minimum, it becomes the basis for a civil case against the outlet.

Taken together, all of this points to a central question that lurks beneath all of the recent troubles in America. Can a large culturally authoritarian society like American maintain itself in the digital age? The Assange case is only possible in the digital age and the contradictions it reveals are also only visible in the digital age. In fact, much of what ails modern America is made possible by the Internet. It may be that a secular theocracy like America is impossible when information flows even semi-freely.

Words With Enemies

Posted on December 10, 2021 by thezman

The show this week is on a topic that comes up here in different ways from time to time but will become more of a focus in the future. That topic is the intellectual and spiritual underpinnings of the new religion. Our side has the bad habit of judging this stuff by objective standards, which has some minor utility, but is of no use in developing suitable defenses or an alternative moral philosophy.

The first step in that process is the same as in war, which is to reconnoiter the enemy in order to understand his strengths and weaknesses. In the sense of the culture war, that means going into the enemy’s intellectual territory to understand how they think and get a grip on their code. Every subculture has its own language and the new religion is not an exception. They have their own jargon which we have to learn.

This parallel language is not just something they use in private with other cult members, but part of their everyday lives. What makes it effective is that the objects of their wrath are ignorant to the secret meanings. The enemies of the new religion still rely on dictionaries for words like race and sex. As a result, normal people are ignorant of the scheming that is often happening in plain sight.

As an aside, this is why the hard-thumping believers spend a lot of time cooking up imaginary code words used by their imaginary enemies. In the Charlottesville trial, the plaintiffs brought in a psychic to explain various internet memes. Projection is a big part of the new religion, so they assume that their enemies, real and imaginary, are speaking in coded language just as is done by the Left.

That said, dissidents do rely on coded language and esoteric language to communicate in the public square. Otherwise, the usual suspects would have an easy time of rounding up their opponents. In fact, every post here contains coded messages embedded in the text, along with the key for decoding them. The key, of course, changes every day and is why there are no Saturday posts.

This Week’s Show

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00:00: Opening
05:00: Me Talking A lot

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The New Religion

Posted on December 9, 2021 by thezman

Note: Somewhat related to the post today is a post behind the green door about the classic movie Ben-Hur. It is an amazing film to watch in the current context, especially when you think about the audience of the time.

Imagine you were a peasant in the early medieval times and one day you looked up from your toils to see some men on the road wearing funny outfits. You see that they must be of means as they are not covered in muck and they have men of arms guarding them, but they are strange and different. They are headed in the direction of the lord’s home. You assume they are nobles of some sort. You are a peasant, so you go back to toiling away and think no more of it.

Days later, the lord’s men come to round up you and your neighbors. Everyone is herded down to the river. The lord is there and to your surprise the men you saw the other day are there as well. The lord announces that everyone is now something called a Christian and worshipping the old gods will no longer be allowed. Along with the other peasants, you are walked out into the river where you get dunked while the strangers say something in an alien language.

This is not exactly how Europe was Christianized, but it is not far off. Men from the Church would cut deals with the local rulers. The nobles would get financial help from the Church, maybe even promises of military support. In exchange the nobleman would become a Christian and his people would also become Christians. Early on, the Church took the “whatever means necessary” to win over converts. Many conversions were sincere of course, but many were out of convenience.

We don’t know if the old religions swept Europe the same way. It is possible they followed agriculture as it swept Europe. Regardless, the same paradox of conversion must have existed. There is a point at which they went from some older form of belief to the more personal and concrete belief of polytheism. Like the paradox of the heap, there is some point at which a society stops being defined by one set of beliefs and is defined by a new set of beliefs. We are in such a phase now.

If you are old enough to remember the Cold War, then you are like the medieval peasant at the beginning. All of a sudden, the people in charge now believe weird new things for no obvious reason. You try to assign the usual reasons for what you see, things like power and money, but they make less sense over time. After all, the people in charge have all of the power and money. What is in it for billionaires like George Soros who underwrite this strange new faith?

One reason for what is happening is something called isomorphism. This post in City Journal explains why social pressure is causing the people at the top to conform to this bizarre new faith informally called Wokism. Humans are social animals with a strong instinct to conform. In a world full of uncertainty, both personally and collectively, Wokism offers structure and a form of shelter. The underlying logic of this new religion is not as important as the structure it promises.

The problem with that post is it does not address the origins of this strange new religion and why it got started in the first place. It also fails to grasp that Wokism is a religion, rather than a social fad. It is assumed that religions require a well-defined anthropomorphic deity or deities, but this is a cultural bias. The evidence suggests that these well-defined gods were a product of settlement. When man was in the hunter-gatherer stage, nature was his god.

When viewed as a religion, things make a bit more sense. Religion first and foremost explains the natural world. For ruling-class people their environment is now the culture that has evolved in urban areas. They have little interaction with nature, other than to see it from their window. The natural environment of most people, especially those embracing this new religion of Wokism, is the highly urbanized and socially constructed world of the Cloud People, like universities.

It is not surprising that this new religion would be born on campus. They have been the monasteries of America since the beginning. The Puritans founded Harvard soon after they arrived for the purpose of training preachers. The beliefs of the ruling class of America have always been incubated and maintained on the college campus, so it is no surprise that this new faith was hatched there. The newly minted faithful then went forth to convert the masses.

It is also no surprise that the corporation have taken the lead in conversion. One of the few things the old radicals in the last century got right was the relationship between corporate America and the culture. Corporatism has always been the organizing principle of the American empire. Corporations sell the culture through advertising, entertainment and consumer goods. Now they are selling the religion and forcing the conversion of the people.

This is why the old liberals are baffled by it all. The New Left is in bed with corporate America in a way that would have shamed the Right not long ago. The old school lefties, trapped in the old ideology, are unable to grasp what is happening, because they are operating from the old framing. Similarly, conservatives are unwitting dupes in the process of conversion because they were conditioned to defend corporations from the “socialists and communists” on the Left.

Getting back to the primary role of religion, this new faith is catching on with the rulers because it explains what they are seeing in their natural world. First, they see the browning of the West. Even though they could put an end to it tomorrow and even reverse the trend, that requires things of them they no longer possess, so the new religion makes it seem like a naturally occurring thing. The arc of history is toward a multicultural universe free of white supremacy.

Wokism also explains why people are not the same, despite the unshakable belief that all men are created equal. The disparate outcomes must be the result of the social structures of society. The new religion not only explains the conflict between reality and their beliefs, but it also gives them a purpose. Overturning the white power structure to liberate the people from white supremacy is the ritual and practice of the faith. Wokism tells them the universe cares about them and has a plan for them.

This is why it is delusional to think this stuff is just a fad and will fade without having to confront it in the culture war. That is the old libertarian impulse to cower on the sidelines while pretending to be above it all. The new religion may be at odds with reality, but reason has never played the defining role in the ways of men. The woke can remain unreasonable longer than the reasonable can remain smug. Our peasant from before learned that when he was eventually forced to abandon his gods.

The Clash Of Ideas

Posted on December 8, 2021 by thezman

The most difficult thing for most people to grasp is that the first mover of history is not people or events but ideas. The thing that sets it all in motion is a mental construct or a set of constructs that form the concept of a potential future. It is this mental image, not always well defined, out on the horizon that motivates men. Often the popular players in the drama are not fully aware of the ideas behind their actions. They are men of action, not thinkers, so they act on what they believe they know.

The simmering conflict in Ukraine between Russia and the American empire is a good example of how ideas drive events. On the surface it looks like a petty and pointless conflict between two old rivals. As Pat Buchanan notes in his recent column, Ukraine is meaningless, in terms of national interest, to the United States. Buchanan is speaking in practical terms here. Ukraine has nothing but corrupt politicians and poor people who deserve better than their current rulers.

This lack of practical interest does not prevent the usual suspects in the American foreign policy establishment from claiming otherwise. They see Ukraine as another block in the containment wall they are hoping to build around Russia. For them, the Cold War never ended, because their hatred of Russia goes back to much older ideas about Russia and Eastern Europe. For them, Ukraine is important because it is important to the Russian sense of itself.

For Russia, Ukraine is the line in the sand. Their role in the region goes back to the very dawn of the Russian people. Not only does this region have practical interests for the Russians in terms of doing business with the West, but it is the Russian frontier with the West, the place where the West ends and Eurasia begins. The American empire annexing Ukraine into the West is an act of war because it is the next logical step in the West invading Russia proper, a habit going back to Napoleon.

There you see another one of those ideas that is driving the scheming sessions in the West over Ukraine. The American empire is animated by a set of ideas we now call liberal democracy. One of the ideas within that basket of concepts is the belief that there is only one moral way to organize a society. That one way, conveniently enough, is liberal democracy. Anything and anyone opposed to it is outside the family of man and standing athwart the flow of history.

The alternative to that universalist belief in liberal democracy, the thing that stands in the way of history, is not an alternative universal belief, but rather the rejection of the claim to a universal order. The opposite of the unipolar, global order organized around a secular religion is a multipolar world that reflects the different histories and traditions of the human family. In other words, what opposes liberal democracy is the rejection of it being the one true god of man.

This is what lies at the heart of the Russian interest in Ukraine. Few in the West bother reading Dugin, but he is rejected as a neo-fascist ideologue because that is how the hive mind of liberal democracy works. In reality, Dugin is not much of an ideologue but more of the rejection of ideology. Universalism is the traveling partner of ideology just as it is with religion. The ideologue starts from the assumption that his beliefs are correct, which by defining means the alternatives are wrong.

Duginism accepts that there are many ways for a people to organize themselves and these ways are tied to their history as a people. What works in the West is not going to work in Africa or Eurasia, because the history and traditions of the West that created liberal democracy do not exist in other places. To impose liberal democracy on a people without the necessary ingredients for it is no different than forcibly converting a people to a new religion, which is the liberal project at heart.

As this applies to Russia, it means the interests of the Russian people are only tied to the global order in so far as the global order tries to impose on them. History says Russia needs to maintain a buffer zone between itself and the West in order to guard against whatever the global order is calling itself at the moment. The long open country was what defeated Napoleon and Hitler. It is what is required to defend against the American empire and its cultural forces.

This is why war between the West and Russia may be inevitable. Universalist creeds like liberal democracy cannot abide by dissent. That is why the West in general and America in particular operate like theocracies now. Dissent, even in the mildest form, suggests the one true faith is flawed. Worse yet, it suggests it is proper to question the tenets of the faith. This suggests the wheel of history does not move as the faith requires, which calls the whole project into question.

This is why the American empire must bring Russia to heel. Washington views Russia as it does heretics at home. The annexation of Ukraine is not about mundane things like money and power. For sure, powerful people are benefitting from this by cutting deals with the crooks running Ukraine. Opportunists exist in every stage of history. What is animating foreign policy, however, is a millenarian zeal to finish the liberal project and bring about the final chapter of humanity.

On the other side, it is why Russia must resist this encroachment. In order for there to be a Russia it must exist outside of this ideological space called the West. Russia is defined by being both in Europe and outside of Europe. The Russian people have always been at the top of this alternative order populated by the people of Eurasia, so they exist to maintain it. To succumb to the West, to be incorporated in the liberal order, is to cease to exist as a unique people.

At a practical level, the war over Ukraine is a pointless fight over trivial stuff, but it is the ideas behind it that make it world changing. From the perspective of the mullahs in Washington, the survival of the West is at stake. From the perspective of Russia, the survival of the Russian people is what is being challenged in Ukraine. Even though the Finlandization of Ukraine looks like a practical solution, in reality there is no compromise between these two conflicting ideas.

Political Cosplay

Posted on December 7, 2021 by thezman

Politics in a liberal democracy is first and foremost performative. Getting attention is the first goal for political types and they do that by comporting to familiar roles. How well they play those roles, as in any type of theater, establishes their status in the hierarchy of the political theater. Some actors, of course, take a short cut and play one of the various fools or jesters in the political drama. If done well this is a fast-track to attention, but the role itself is always on the periphery of the main show.

If most people were operating from self-interest and had a reasonable sense of their self-interest, political theater would not exit. For example, why would people line up to vote when they know their votes will be ignored? Most people know this to some degree and the science bears it out, but people still vote. In fact, voter participation has gone up as the effectiveness of voting has declined. The theater of democratic politics blinds people to the futility of it for some reason.

This is most obvious in the cosplay brand of politics. This is where people dress up in strange outfits and play make-believe on the streets. Antifa is just cosplay for people with a taste for violence. Instead of playing characters from their favorite TV shows, they play characters from their misreading of history. The black outfits make them the heirs of the Schwarze Scharen or maybe the red makes them the modern day Rotfrontkämpferbund or the post-modern Khmer Rouge.

Their view of themselves and their role in the political drama is as imaginary as the characters they are playing. No one bothers to ask any of them why they go around smashing windows and harassing people. Why do they show up at some right-wing political event? What is the point? There is no practical point. They do it because politics for them is a real life fantasy game. They have to show up at these things to keep the game going. That is the whole point of it.

Of course, their analogs are the flag and costume characters who are eager to play their part in the drama. Since the 1960’s anti-Semites have been staging flag and costume shows. They play the part of the Freikorps in this endless replay of the interwar years in Germany. The credit for this belongs to George Lincoln Rockwell who landed on the idea of playing dress-up to get attention. He dressed up as a cartoon Nazi and marched around with his followers.

For fifty years now anti-Semites and make-believe Nazis have been doing flag and costume parties in the public square. They say they are trying to draw attention to their issues, but that is part of the fantasy. After more than fifty years, everyone is well aware of the issues they support. In reality, it is just political cosplay. Like the Antifa people, it is all about maintaining a fantasy version of politics and history. Instead of the hammer and sickle eventually winning the game, it is the swastika.

What lies beneath cosplay politics is escapism. Like libertarianism, this type of political theater is a way to avoid reality. There is the personal reality of the players themselves, who are low-status people with no role in society. They will never be the important people they dream of being, so they play one in minor politics. At a higher level there is the grim reality of liberal democratic politics. No one wants to face the fact that the will of the people plays almost no role in the affairs of men.

The absurdity of political cosplay plays another role. It allows people who turn away from these ridiculous performances to believe their brand of performative politics really do matter. Serious Progressives, for example, condemn street violence as it distracts from their important issues. Conservatives condemn the “Nazis” because they make them look bad in front of their liberal friends. Cosplay politics gives them an excuse for why their performative politics is equally ineffective.

This addiction to performative politics is the primary manifestation of the narcotic of liberal democracy. Once a people accept the “general will” as their god, they have an unshakeable believe in the power of persuasion. They are forever convinced that if they can just win the next election, have the right performance, they can gain the backing of the general will and the wheel of history will turn their way. Heroin addicts have a better grasp of their circumstances than people in a democracy.

The Roman poet Juvenal is credited with coining the term “bread and circuses” to explain how rulers gain public approval. To generate public approval, they use public spectacle and satisfy the base requirements of the people. As long as people are fed and entertained, they are compliant. Juvenal’s actual point here was to condemn the people for selfishly going along with it, but over the centuries the expression has come to mean a ruling ethos, especially in democracies.

The magic of liberal democracy, at least in the short run, is it becomes something of a self-licking ice cream cone. The people, in search of bread and circuses, create their own circuses in the form of political theater. To underwrite the drama they endlessly seek to improve their conditions in order to have more time and money for the political circuses they are creating. The people in charge just put their thumb on the scale in order to direct the activity to their benefit.

Therein lies the real alternative to modern politics. Since there is no voting your way out of democracy, the only solution is to boycott it. If the audience fails to show up for the great political drama, the players have no purpose. Performative politics requires an audience as that is its point. Boycotts are not as fun as playing dress-up or voting harder, so it is at a disadvantage. It may be that the only solution to the narcotic of democracy is for the people to vote themselves to death.

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