The Diem Option

Posted on November 30, 2022 by thezman

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In the autumn of 1963, the Kennedy administration was made aware of a plot against the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. There had been growing unhappiness within the elite of South Vietnam over his handling of the Buddhist crisis and the Viet Cong insurgency. Earlier in the year a plot had been hatched by junior officers, but it had been suppressed. This new plot had the support of the generals.

Unhappy with Diem’s leadership, the Kennedy administration, upon learning of the pending coup, sent a cable to the American ambassador in Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, instructing him to inform Diem of their unhappiness with him and to let the generals know that they would not intervene in a coup attempt. This, in effect, gave Washington’s stamp of approval to the plot.

On November 1, 1963, the coup was launched, led by General Duong Van Minh, the senior general in the army and the main coup plotter. Diem’s loyalists were quickly scooped up by the army and then Diem and his brother were arrested. Instead of just deposing him, which was the plan communicated to the American government, both were executed in the back of an America armored personnel carrier.

The reason that this long forgotten bit of 20th century trivial still matters is it led directly to what Americans refer to as the Vietnam War. Instead of realizing that they had no idea what they were doing in that part of the world, the Kennedy administration plunged the country into a guerilla war in Asia. The result was a calamity for both the military and the political class of the United States.

In one of life’s great ironies, the people who cut their political teeth in the domestic revolts over the Vietnam War now find themselves in the same situation. This time they are the people in charge and the client state is Ukraine. Similar to 60 years ago, the American government has to deal with an erratic and reckless leader who may not be long for this world. That leader is Volodymyr Zelensky.

Contrary to all of the happy talk in Western media, the proxy war against Russia is not going well for the West. On the battlefield, the Russians are slowly grinding down the Ukrainian army, which has become a blackhole for Western arms. Everyone is waiting for the winter offensive that the Russians have been planning for months. This promises to put the Ukrainian army in an even more difficult position.

The Russians are also systematically dismantling the infrastructure of Ukraine with waves of missile and drone strikes. The Ukrainians have no way to defend against these attacks and contrary to the predictions of Western planners, the Russians are no where near running out of missiles. If anything, it appears they have ramped up their production of missiles and drones.

This promises to unleash a humanitarian disaster on the rest of Europe as Ukrainians flee the collapse of their country. Current estimates say that as many as eight million Ukrainians could make their way to Europe this winter. Europe is teetering on the abyss economically because of soaring energy and food costs, so waves of migrants from Ukraine could not come at a worse time.

This is where the Zelensky – Diem comparison comes into play. Like Diem, Zelensky is becoming a serious problem for Washington. They built him into a folk hero who must be supported at all costs. The trouble is Zelensky is a loose cannon who seems to be hell bent on escalating the war. The most recent example is the Ukrainian missile that landed in Poland. Zelensky still insists it was the Russians.

To make matters worse, Zelensky has surrounded himself with ultranationalist and Bandera fanatics. Even if Washington could find a way to have him agree to negotiations, the fanatics would probably kill him. Zelensky understands this perfectly well, which is why he continues with the overheated rhetoric. There is only one way out for him and that is getting NATO directly involved in the war.

This is an impossibility for Washington. The military sees that the foreign policy establishment badly miscalculated. There is zero appetite for getting involved in a war for which NATO is clearly not prepared. Compounding it is a growing Ukraine fatigue around the West, as the cost of this debacle begins to bite. Not only is there no appetite for escalation, but everyone is also growing tired of Zelensky and Ukraine.

This is where the Diem solution could become an attractive option. If something unfortunate were to happen to Zelensky, then that would solve a lot of problems for Washington and the collective West. They would be free of this folk hero they created and maybe have a villain on whom they could blame the defeat. Those nationalists around Zelensky would be easy to characterize as the bad guys.

It may seem a bit farfetched given the way in which the collective West has behaved over the last year, but they have no better options. Russian public opinion has shifted steadily against negotiations. The pressure on Putin to unleash the full fury of the Russian war machine on Ukraine grows daily. The destruction of the Ukraine energy grid is just the beginning of what lies ahead this winter.

This means the West has two options at this point. One is to find a way to keep Ukraine going as a civil society, which will cost hundreds of billions. This may not even be possible, given the complexity of the problem. The other is to accept the inevitable collapse of Ukraine, millions of refugees flooding into Europe and a total defeat of the Ukrainian army. In other words, the West can bleed to death or commit suicide.

That is why Zelensky will have to go and go soon. It offers a third way out of this problem that allows everyone to save face. Washington can blame the fanatics for his demise and the collapse of Ukraine. The Europeans will be free to abandon the ruinous sanctions regime. Worst case scenario Russia installs a new government. Best case scenario Russia is stuck with a failed state and thousands of armed lunatics.

Whether or not there is anyone in Washington smart enough to understand what is happening is hard to know. It may be left to the Europeans to save Washington from itself or maybe the Ukrainians make the same error as the Vietnamese. At some point someone with the power to make it happen is going to figure out that the way out of this quagmire is to get rid of Zelensky.

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A 20th Century Lesson

Posted on November 29, 2022 by thezman

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At the heart of libertarianism is the claim that in order to fully enjoy your natural rights you must be free of coercion. That is, you are not subject to the claims of other people either directly or indirectly. The only direct claim a person has on another person is the enforcement of a contract. Similarly, you can demand that whole society respects your autonomy and property rights. Otherwise, no person in a libertarian society has a claim on any other person in the society.

Simplifying it, the libertarian society assumes you have absolute dominion over yourself, outside of the narrow exceptions for the enforcement of contracts and the defense of private property. More important, maybe most important, members of a libertarian society have an obligation to respect the autonomy of others. The social contract, if you will, gives members the maximum liberty, in exchange for the maximum amount of minding your own business.

Hans Hermann-Hoppe identified two unsolved problems within libertarian theory that he has spent a long time trying to solve. One is that there is no way within libertarian theory to go from our current societies to a libertarian one. The other problem is there is no way within libertarian theory to police a libertarian society. The non-aggression principle rules out coercion as a way to keep people from straying from libertarianism into something like socialism or even communism.

It is the first problem that has occupied the minds of libertarians. How can we get from where we are now to even a few steps down the road toward paradise? One effort has been to convince people to become libertarians. Proselytizing has always been a central part of the movement, which is why many people outside of the libertarian subculture view it as something like a cult. The libertarian, like the vegetarian, is always ready to announce his membership in the cause.

The proselytizing has always come with an eye on politics. In theory, libertarians must reject the premise of liberal democracy. The closest they can come is some sort of democratic process for settling direct and indirect claims. Otherwise, there is no role for the state so there is no reason to have elections. Even so, libertarians have tried to use the democratic process to change the law in their favor. The legalization of drugs, for example, has been a main cause of libertarians.

A lot has been made about the effect this has had on conservatism. Way back in the last century, Frank Meyer cooked up a new formula for the American right that brought libertarians into an alliance with traditionalists and neoconservatives. This Cold War coalition would make up what was called the conservative movement. After the end of communism, this coalition fell apart. Today it is nearly impossible to see the difference between libertarianism and mainstream conservatism.

Something else happened during the last century. The contact with mainstream liberal democratic politics deranged libertarianism. Some libertarians, the left-libertarians, transformed into corporate libertines. In exchange for a comfortable lifestyle, they promote every degenerate fad of the left in the name of freedom. The left-libertarians have been enthusiastic for every subversive cultural fad, as long as it came with fat donations from corporate sponsors.

Right-libertarians have largely avoided the cultural issues, instead focusing all of their energy on the power of the state. Ron Paul has been the best known of the bunch, fashioning a political career as a platform to promote libertarianism. At the heart of his argument is the assumption that once the state is removed from the lives of people, the cultural questions will answer themselves. It is the state that puts its thumb on the cultural scale, creating the culture war.

It is a nifty bit of logic, which turns the old Marxist formulation on its head. Marx said that once you get the morality right, there is no need for politics. That is, once everyone has the same morality, there is no need to debate public policy. The friend enemy distinction goes away as we all share the same goals. Ron Paul argues that once you get the politics right, the moral issues settle themselves. Without an active state, there is no need for culture and therefore no culture war.

The last ten years has provided a test for that theory. It has also brought us back around to that second conflict within libertarianism identified by Hoppe. Over the last decade, corporations have assumed greater power over the lives of citizens and they have become active in directing the culture of society. On the one hand we have non-government elements of society that are trying to coerce others. On the other hand, that coercion is specifically over cultural issues.

For left-libertarians, this has not been a problem. They sold out to corporate interests long ago so this works fine. If you do not like Apple sexualizing your kids and funding grooming gangs, just start your own trillion dollar tech company. Interestingly, this approach was aped by neocons like Ben Shapiro. He was a leading voice in the “just build your own internet” phase of the crisis. The neocon – libertarian nexus is something that warrants further exploration.

Putting that aside, the right-libertarians have had a dilemma. You cannot on the one hand put personal independence at the top of your moral hierarchy and at the same time ignore or excuse the grotesque abuse of basic rights by corporations. The solution has been something like what you see in this Ron Paul post. You see, the tech giants are not rampaging through the culture and trampling your rights because they want to do it, they are doing it to please the state.

After a long story about Ed Markey howling for censorship, Paul writes, “Big tech companies silence their users to curry favor with politicians and bureaucrats, often after “encouragement” from politicians and bureaucrats. Therefore, to end big tech’s censorship, Americans should demand that all government officials — including the president — not violate the First Amendment.” You see, that army of scolds hired by Twitter was to please the state, not the shareholders.

The reason Ron Paul and other libertarians cling to this ridiculous idea that corporations are unwilling participants in the culture war is that they have no answer to the problem of corporate activism within libertarian theory. In fact, to even acknowledge such a thing as corporate activism blows a hole in libertarianism. The whole point of libertarianism is the maximizing of freedom. If it has no way to defend your freedom from powerful members of society, then why would anyone be a libertarian?

Of course, this is the problem Hoppe identified years ago. Individualism is a wonderful concept as long as it exists within a collective outer shell. In other words, the extreme individualism expressed by libertarianism works only if everyone has been so thoroughly conditioned by a pre-existing cultural framework that no one within the libertarian society would ever consider coercion. Libertarian man must be the result of severe cultural programming.

This is why Marx still matters and von Mises does not. Marx was wrong about many things, but he was correct about one big thing. If you get the morality right, then everything else falls into place. Politics is therefore about getting the morality right, even imposing morality on the whole, in order to make it possible for the citizens to maximize their life within society. Put another way, the point of political struggle is to define “who we are” and then put an end to the debate.

In the fullness of time, the 20th century will be viewed as a long human experiment with the ideas of the 18th and 18th century. Various forms of socialism, communism and libertarianism were put through their bloody paces, only to see all of them fail as an answer to the only question that matters. “Who we are” is the question every civilization must answer. That is a moral question. Perhaps the 21st century will be remembered for finally having answered that question properly.

Survival Of Rights

Posted on November 28, 2022 by thezman

Note #1: There will be no more Taki posts. I decided to bring that to a close in order to focus on other things. There is only so much time and I was stretched too thin so something had to go. I want to focus more on the pay-per-view content which has a steadily growing audience. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Note #2: I have received a few suggestions about other platforms like Gum Road and Locals, which is a Rumble creation. I am interested in any feedback from people familiar with these sites. RamZPaul is on Gum Road and the Duran guys are on Locals, but I know nothing about these platforms.

Given the current trajectory, it is reasonable to think that in the not too distant future some alien race will be digging through the rubble of humanity trying to figure out what happened to this strange species. Just as modern archeologists dig through ruins of ancient societies, trying to figure out what happened, those aliens will be doing the same with earth. They will dig through whatever is left, things like buildings, tools and cemeteries, piecing together the story of man.

The thing they will not find among the decaying buildings, rusting vehicles and collapsed bridges will be piles of human rights. They will not open a door of some oddly preserved building and find a bunch of skeletons who had found shelter along with their sacred human rights. In fact, they will probably find no trace of human rights or any discussion of the concept. Given that most of our knowledge is now digital, these sorts of things will be impossible to detect.

The main reason for this is human rights do not exist. They are a thing that humans invented late in the history of mankind. People say that human rights are real and point to various authorities to support the claim, but rights are not real things. They exist only as a figment of our imagination, like the concept of lust. No other species has this concept so it is possible the aliens will not understand it either. It will be as alien to them as our entirely made up concept of human rights.

That is something to keep in mind when people of the so-called “new right” go on about the importance of natural rights. Here is an example from Michael Anton where he addresses the idea of historicism. This is the argument that all human thought is the product of its historical moment. Men in one period accept certain things to be true that men in a different period would not accept as true. Loosely put, mankind and its mental constructs are a product of time and place.

What we think of as conservative in North America rejects this claim. It starts from the assertion that all men come into this world with natural rights. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the pithy expression of this. The very loose argument here is that the natural world, including the human place in it, operates from fixed and observable rules. The laws of nature and nature’s god. From these rules we can tease out things like the rights of man.

A quite simple example is ownership. You are born into this world as the property of your parents who created you and raised you. At some point, you leave the ownership of your parents and become a free man. You own you. Because you own you, you must own your activity, your labor. If you own your labor, it stands to reason that you must own the fruits of your labor. Hence the concept of private property. Ownership traces to the laws of the universe, which is its authority.

There are similar arguments for all sorts of things we consider to be natural rights, like equality before the law and self-defense. Some of these rights have a strong connection to observation of nature. The right of self-defense is something we can see in all of nature, not just mankind. The right to a speedy trial and a jury of our peers takes a few leaps to find some root in the laws of nature. Regardless, the claim is natural rights are rooted in the authority of nature.

Michael Anton makes two important claims in his response to Paul Gottfried that are critical to the current crisis. One is that this idea of natural rights is not time bound as Gottfried claims, but universal and timeless. Even when we were not aware of them, we had these natural rights. The other claim is that America, as currently constructed, can only exist if it is structured around the concept of natural rights. It is the only way a disparate people can coexist in a single society.

The first argument is what is called a gratuitous assertion. The logic of natural rights may be timeless, but it has always rested on something that is not timeless and that is a Christian concept of God and man’s relationship to God. In fact, it depends on a specific version of Christian belief. Many Christians reject the idea of a universe defined by fixed and unchanging rules. Other types of Christian reject that we can understand these rules, even if such a thing even exists.

The very loose foundation of the natural rights argument is that God is perfection and therefore he created the world without making mistakes. This means he has no reason to tinker with the rules. They never change. Further, when he created the world he had a purpose, just as a carpenter has a reason to make a cabinet. The world as we see it is not just random pointlessness. It is a world created with a purpose by God and it operates by a fixed set of rules.

If you reject this concept of God, then you reject what naturally flows from it, which is why the concept of natural rights is a cultural artifact. It is peculiar to European people, especially those west of the Hajnal line. Eastern Europe does not have a strong natural rights tradition, because they have a different conception of God. Muslims have no concept of rights because Allah is unknowable. Islam accepts that the rules of the universe are unknowable and therefore unpredictable.

In other words, we have no evidence that natural rights are universal and timeless, because the foundation lies outside of the realm of proof. If you accept the narrow idea of God and the universe he created, the natural rights arguments make sense, but if not then these arguments are nothing more than convenient inventions. The reason the phrase “I know my rights” means nothing in China is the Chinese lie outside the timeline of the people who invented the concept.

This brings us to the second point, which is that the only way America can function is if we all agree on this mental framework. This is the social contract argument updated for a modern audience, the people who now live as strangers in their own lands. Instead of the claim that we voluntarily came together and agreed to live by a set of cultural and political rules in the same society, the argument now is we better convince the new majority that we have to live by these rules or else.

In this regard, Anton is correct. The demographic revolution is already leading to a cultural and political revolution. The only way America returns to something like its former self is if the new people embrace the old rules. If Nikki Haley, Hakeem Jeffries, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib embrace the logic of Thomas Jefferson, then maybe we can continue to function by the old rules. If they reject natural rights theory, then we will need new rules to accommodate the new people.

The fact that we have to have this discussion is bad news for the natural rights crowd as it assumes the new majority is not embracing Thomas Jefferson. In fact, they have been busy toppling his statues and erasing his name from the history books, along with all the other people responsible for the natural right tradition. Whatever claims one wants to make about the universality of natural rights, it is clear that the new people and their enablers are not embracing the concept.

Inadvertently, Anton is confirming Gottfried’s central claim. What we think of as our natural rights are a product of a specific people living in a specific time. They are no more universal than conception of God. Natural rights may be more than just a fad, like powdered wigs or waistcoats, but they are tied to a people. Like all traditions, they live on in the memories of the descendents of the people who invented them and once there are no more descendents to carry on the traditions, they are gone.

The fact is, natural rights are a thing that come naturally only to Western people, so they are no more universal than blue eyes. Sure, some people outside of Europe will have blue eyes or green eyes, but most will not because the genes for these things dominate only among Europeans. The same is true for the European understanding of the universe and man’s natural place in it. Natural rights are the product of traditions peculiar to European people.

The unanswered question in Anton’s piece and the entirety of the movement calling itself the “new right” is this. What happens when the new people reject the Western tradition of natural rights? Should they be forcibly removed? Should they be compelled to change their ways? Maybe give up their old gods and go through a rigorous training in Calvinist religious doctrine? After all, the concept of free choice is part of the natural rights tradition. What if they choose to reject this concept?

That brings us back to where we started. If those visiting space aliens arrive and find natural rights, it will be because they find societies based on them. Those societies will necessarily be controlled and dominated by people who invented the concept and make it their purpose to maintain them, no matter what. Survival of the fittest is just as much a part of natural law as free speech. More so, in fact. In order for rights to survive, the people who created them must survive.

Happy Thanksgiving

Posted on November 23, 2022 by thezman

Thanksgiving is arguably the greatest American creation, despite being the one thing we have not tried to export. Around the world there are American outposts selling degeneracy of various sorts, along with the supposed ideals of the American empire, but you will never get a sales pitch on Thanksgiving. It speaks to the nature of the current ruling elite that gratitude is not something they think about when trying to change the minds of people abroad.

Regardless, the long holiday that is upon us is special. It is a long weekend of doing little more than giving thanks for what we have as individuals. We do not give thanks to our overlords for anything. We do not give thanks for our stuff. We do not even give thanks for the great fortune of being an American. It is much simpler and more honest that all of that. It is a day to be happy that you are alive, you have friends and family and you are able to enjoy those things.

What makes the holiday better than most is that it is at least a four day weekend and is slowly becoming a weeklong affair. Within living memory most people had to work Friday if they wanted to get paid for Thursday, but that is long gone. Most employers give their people Thursday and Friday off, except retailers, of course. Many offices now close up early on Wednesday. All week offices are light on staff as people use their personal time to extend the holiday.

If we had any sense as a people, we would make the whole week a national holiday, maybe even shutter retail for a few days. Friday is the start of the Christmas shopping season, so giving the retail people a few days off in advance would be the decent thing to do, but our greed heads will never go for it. Big box retailers now force their staff in on Thursday night to get ready for Black Friday. After the revolution, the people doing this will be hanged first.

The funny thing about Thanksgiving is it does not celebrate any of the things that have come to define America. There is no soulless gift giving. Christmas has been turned into an orgy of material self-indulgence. It is reasonable to say that what goes on in this country around Christmas is grotesque. Our other holidays are civic affairs designed to celebrate the government or warmongering. Usually, they are on a Monday so we get a long weekend, but they have no meaning.

Thanksgiving is unique in that it is about you as a person taking time to think about the good things in your life. The big traditional meal with friends and family focuses the mind on those human relationships. Even in these easy times, life is hard, so taking time to count your blessings is a gift you give yourself. Being grateful is one of those odd things that just makes you feel good. Having a long holiday to eat traditional foods and be grateful is an amazing thing we have created.

It is the gratitude part of it that gets to the heart of the current crisis. All around us are people doing nothing but showing their ingratitude. America is filling up with ingrates who do nothing but complain. One can possibly understand the ingratitude of black people, but the endless complaining from new arrivals is maddening. Even worse is seeing useless weirdos freeriding on society complain that the rest of us are not thanking them for being parasites.

Joe Sobran put it best. “The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy.” That is the heart of the matter and probably why we invented Thanksgiving. It is our nature to build and create, which is why we are naturally grateful for what we have. A people who built a great civilization out of nothing have a lot to be thankful for, so having a long holiday to take our time and be grateful makes a lot of sense.

Even now, with all that is going on, we have plenty of reasons to take the next few days to count our blessings. The Good Lord in his wisdom has provided us with enemies who possess none of the qualities we respect. They may have inherited power, but they lack the ability to wield it responsibly. Like men on death row, our betters walk around with an expiry date on them. It is a long struggle, but we know that in the end we will prevail and for that we must be thankful.

Of course, we also have the community of dissidents that is slowly forming up to provide fellowship and support as we struggle though this age. Those of you who were at AmRen last week certainly know what I mean. You come back from such things humbled and grateful, because you have been reminded of how fortunate you are to be alive in this time. To be blessed with a life of struggle, to have a reason to be better each day, is the greatest gift of all.

I want to thank everyone who comes to this site to read what I have written or listen to the Friday shows. Special thanks to the many people who fill up the comments every day with commentary that is often better than my posts. This is one of the best comment sections on the internet. It is something people often say to me. Posting will be light the next few days, but the comment section will be open as always. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone and thank you for all that you do.

An Unnatural Death

Posted on November 22, 2022 by thezman

Way back in the early days of the internet, those already on-line could not help but notice that the media was hilariously ignorant, but supremely confident, of this revolutionary new thing called the internet. On television, the people who claimed it was their job to keep the rest of us informed clearly knew nothing about this new “internet thing” or the people signing up for accounts. The print side of the media barely knew the internet existed and had no interest in it at all.

In those early days it was a glimpse into the weird combination of ignorance, insulation and confidence that defined the mass media. Television and radio are pure carnival acts, selecting for people who fit a role. The print side, the people engaged in “serious journalism”, are stenographers and cheerleaders, hoping to one day be noticed by the carnival operators so they can get on television. The whole thing is part of a large scale agitation campaign on behalf of the ruling class.

This is what makes the collapse of Twitter so amusing. The agitation machine that is the modern mass media was invited onto Twitter in the early days as a way to promote the product over the alternatives. Twitter was custom built for the slow-witted, but supremely confident people who make up mass media. All they needed to do is download an app, open it up and begin typing. Limiting it to short messages reduced the odds of them exposing their stupidity.

It did not take long before the mouth breathers of the Left followed the media onto the platform and it became an echo chamber. Of course, it did not take long before the enemies of this unholy alliance of the confidently stupid joined Twitter to mock and ridicule these people. For a short while it was amusing to see someone, probably posting from the john, wrecking the day of sanctimonious simpletons like David French or Max Boot, with mockery and irreverence.

Of course, that is why the whole thing was doomed. The agitation machine we call the media can only exist when the people inside of it are sure they are the intellectual vanguard, the cutting edge of history. That only works when they are not exposed to reality, which is what happened when they went on-line. It has been forgotten but the great censorship campaign began in the comment sections first and then spread to the rest of the internet. Twitter was late to the intolerance party.

Now the party is over. Contrary to the pained howling by conspiracy theorists like ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt, Elon Musk did not buy Twitter as part of some five cushion bank shot plan to bring back you know who. Musk bought the company because he thinks you can have a successful platform that allows open debate with limited moderation. Elon Musk is a civic nationalist who still believes all the old liberal ideals about the marketplace of ideas.

Of course, we live in a post liberal age. The people with real power no longer hold those old liberal ideals. They see themselves as guardians of humanity who must carefully manage the choices of the people. They are the elite of the managerial system and as the elite, their job is not only to set the direction for humanity, but to make sure the rules are properly enforced. All of their chanting about democracy aside, theirs is a totalitarian dictatorship of the managerial elite.

This is why Musk’s project is doomed. For starters, the agitation machine known as the media cannot exist on a platform which allows criticism of the media. That risks holding a mirror up to them. The dimwitted scolds that follow them around demanding censorship of imaginary things like hate speech cannot exist on a platform that does not provide them protection. This is why they avoid Gab. If they start demanding censorship there, the response is mockery.

This why the media are threatening to stomp off in a huff to the Mastodon, the federated system of independently created nodes. Because they are stupid and do not know how anything works, they think that there is a trust and safety team there waiting for them to arrive from Twitter. These people are so insulated they just assume the internet works by magic, rather than people. Just wait until they learn that Gab is a node on the Mastodon system. That will be a fun day.

The bigger problem for the Musk project is that the people with real power, like the duopoly that controls the mobile device market, will make sure he is never able to create his civic nationalist paradise. Apple is preparing to remove Twitter from the Apple ecosystem and you can be sure Google is doing the same. After all, both companies work closely to prevent competition. They have long ago worked out how to cooperate on censorship issues.

Then there are the advertisers and purchasers of Twitter data. The main source of revenue for Twitter and all internet firms is the sale of user data. They sell this in packages to companies, market researchers, political campaigns and the many intelligence services tracking our moves. All of the people running these outfits strongly believe in the dictatorship of the managerial elite. They see the Musk project as a direct challenge to the system, so they will oppose it.

Even if Musk was not walking headlong into the civilizational abattoir known as managerialism, large scale social media was always doomed. The reason is people self-segregate and they do this because they do not enjoy conflict. It is only the spiteful mutants who enjoy constant turmoil. The other 80% of humanity just want to talk about their stuff with other likeminded people. This is why all previous large scale social media projects eventually disaggregated.

While the whole thing is amusing, it should also serve as a reminder to dissidents that this abomination we call modernity is unnatural. Projects like Twitter that were supposed to control the culture run counter to human nature. Mother Nature is undefeated in this area, which is why the graveyard of intellectual thought is littered with the ideas that challenged human nature. Musk will fail for the same reason the ghouls before him failed with Twitter. It runs contrary to our nature.

The Idiocracy

Posted on November 21, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up and it is related to the topic of the day. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door so if you do not have a subscription, get one. SubscribeStar and Substack.

For most people, travel has always been looked upon as the necessary evil, a thing you get through in order to get somewhere. That week on the beach in Florida during the winter means a day of torment at airports to get there. The trip back is extra miserable because you are tired from having fun all week. Experienced travelers, on the other hand, figure out the system and it becomes a habit of mind. You know how it works so you know how to make it work for you.

Before Covid, the thing I could see was that the system was simply overloaded at various key points. The security system, for example, had broken down. At some airports you would wait over an hour for totally disinterested TSA workers to process you through the system. In Europe, you would hustle from line to line to clear passport control, when the only actual check was a zombified worker looking at the millionth passport that day and waving you along.

Covid cured that by first reducing travel to the absolute minimum and then conditioning people to not want to travel. An overlooked result of the almost two years of stay at home orders is people got used to staying home. In overgrown metro areas like Washington DC, working at home is common. Business travel never bounced back because everyone is used to Zoom sessions now. Now, economic concerns have put a damper on the travel business.

You see this at airports. I have been on the road a a fair bit this year and the one thing I keep seeing is light traffic at airports. There are fewer flights, so they are just as full, but the number of people in the concourse is still below the pre-Covid days. The travel industry claims things are bouncing back, but they lie like everyone else these days, so I trust my lying eyes rather than their lying mouths. This year on my travels I have not run into the volume issues anywhere in the system.

I just returned from Nashville, which is a sprawling metropolis full of strangers from other stranger lands. That is a recipe for a mobbed airport before a holiday. In the old days, the Sunday before Thanksgiving would have been nuts and got increasingly nuts through the week. The reason is all of the newly arrived mountain folk would have headed back to where they belong for the long holiday. Instead, the airport was as quiet as I have seen an airport in ages.

On the other hand, something else is happening. At BWI on Friday I tried to buy a beverage at one of the shops and the non-English speaking clerk just said something that sounded like “no work” to people. The payment system was down, as best I could tell, so she was left to chase away customers. I was reminded of the scene from the movie Idiocracy where the heroes arrive at Costco. The great thing about that scene is you realize the system can stagger on a long time.

On the plane, one of the flight crew sounded like a satirical version of how a waifu would sound if it came to life. The other was a local girl, for sure. Her accent and heavy use of local slang was oddly amusing. There was a third person on the crew who was the greeter at Costco in the above clip. I got the sense that he was in training, but it could simply be that he was not allowed to work unsupervised. He liked tossing packs of snacks at people from a few rows distance.

At Nashville, the crew at the Alamo rental counter was another collection of extras from that frighteningly prophetic movie. There was no line but a mass of people waiting, so I knew right away they were out of cars. The three clerks just stared out into space like they had been smoking weed prior to my arrival. Finally, one acknowledged my existence and waved me over to his station. He silently processed my order and then grunted about the wait and pointed to the mob.

Ninety minutes latter I was handed a rental agreement by another silent type who pointed to the door. He was a tall white guy so I think he was American, but I never saw him speak to anyone, including the weed smoking fellow clerks, so maybe he was a mute or possible an automaton from Europe. They have those now. I then headed through the garage to the rental car area where there was another mob of people waiting for their rental car to arrive.

The local attendant was a black guy and judging by his accent I deduced he was a local guy, rather than an automaton from the very southern Europe area. He realized that his company was screwing these people, so he tried to make up for it by being extra nice and apologetic, suggesting he had a soul and cared about his work. It turns out that the main delayed was they were out of car washers. That was the bottleneck in the system and he said it has been a problem for weeks.

Now, I could see the check in lane. I could see at least a half dozen Alamo workers there doing nothing as there were no cars to check in. Sunday morning is when lots of cars arrive, but Sunday afternoon is when the cars leave for the week. There were, of course, the crew of zombies at the rental counter. No where did I see anyone that would be in charge of anything. What I was experiencing was systemic break down due to a collapse of the smart fraction in the system.

On the return trip I got to the airport quite early. I had booked extra time in the trip back because of what I saw Friday. I was imagining the Alamo crew running TSA and me missing my flight because of a three hour line. Instead, the airport was weirdly quiet, even for a Sunday morning. Having extra time, I asked the Southwest person if I could change to an earlier flight. I had checked on my phone and saw a flight I could get on that arrived in Lagos much earlier than my current flight.

She silently took my ID and stared at the screen for an uncomfortably long time, which did not fill me with confidence. She then said the only thing she could do was put me on standby, so I said no and expected to get my ID back. Instead, she said to me that I was no longer on my original flight. After some back and forth, I learned that she had cancelled my original flight first and then tried to book me on the new flight, without bothering to tell me what she was doing.

What I realized was the woman was not malicious or disinterested, but that she was simply too stupid to perform her job. She was clearly panicked by what she had done as she now had an angry customer in front of her. Since I have a million points with Southwest and belong to their club, I called customer service while standing in front of the woman and explained the deal. They had me hand my phone to the woman who then followed instructions to fix my flight.

I was now booked on the earlier flight and pre-boarded. Because I only use Southwest for domestic travel, I always get the A-group and usually top-10. On this flight I had been checked in as A1, so I guess they thought bumping me up to pre-board was the required compensation for the screwup. I could not help but notice that they then announced that the flight was overbooked and one person would be asked to give up his seat in exchange for a $500 credit.

In Lagos, I learned that my bag had been sent on a separate journey. I expected this given what had happened at the other end. I went to the baggage claim office and was greeted by a local girl listening to very loud hip-hop music. She silently tapped on the screen for twenty minutes and out popped a single sheet of paper with about fifty words of original content. That is right. She needed twenty minutes of concentration to enter my information into the system.

Like everywhere in the system, the thing I noticed was not the low quality of human capital at the front end. That has not changed all that much. Most frontline jobs at an airport are filled with people who show up. The real issue was a near total lack of supervision all along the way. There was no one riding heard on these people to make sure they avoided error. The 21st century has begun and the evolutionary process has changed and is going in the opposite direction.

News Radio

Posted on November 18, 2022 by thezman

Been pressed for time this week so I took the easy way out and cranked out a show about the news. Thankfully, Trump made his big announcement so the news was full of loony stories about Trump. I have never been a big Trump fan, but I have appreciated the knock on effect of his career. He has flushed out many people who had previously been thought of as stable minded.

I recorded the show before I knew Nancy Pelosi fell off her broom. She has called it a career as leader of the Democrats. The race to succeed her will be interesting, as the bench is not very good. The scuttlebutt is that Hakeem Jeffries from New York is lined up to be the next Democrat leader. He could very well be more ridiculous than Pelosi, which is something few thoughts was possible.

This will be the first test of the transition from the geezers running the parties to the feckless airheads vying to succeed them. There will be other tests as Schumer and McConnell have one foot in the grave. Biden, of course, may already be dead but animated by secret forces. Washington is about to enter the clown shoe phase as they move from the dinosaurs to the circus freaks.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Trump Town
DeSantis
Death To Republicans!
Never Trust A Bankman
Ukraine Fatigue
Queering The Senate
Twitter Drama
David Harsanyi
Burn Baby, Burn!

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The Great Stupidification

Posted on November 17, 2022 by thezman

If you were alive in 1985 it would have been perfectly normal for you to argue with your liberal friends about the issues of the day. This was the time of the Great Interregnum, when it was possible to have open debate about most topics. People like Peter Brimelow and Jared Taylor were allowed on television to speak their minds about topics that are now totally forbidden. There were some limits, but for the most part everyone accepted that everything can and should be discussed.

It is hard to imagine such a condition, given the world of harsh censorship that we experience today. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but daytime talk shows would regularly have people on who claimed to be fascists. The host would make sure to let the audience know they were bad guys, but they got to say their piece. Holocaust deniers and black nationalist also were part of these shows. It was entertainment, for sure, but these people still got on the big stage.

Then as now the people we call the Left in America controlled the institutions, but forty years ago there more confident. The typical liberal person was fine debating a typical conservative, because they thought they were right. Both sides figured a good dose of facts and reason would bring the other side around. The people putting Black Hebrew Israelites on daytime television were sure that once people got a look at these people, they would laugh and then forget about them.

The thing that has been lost in all of the censorship and cancellation campaigns is the panic that motivates these things. The people trying to purge the public square of normal debate are doing so out of fear. That fear comes from a lack of confidence and that is driven by a sharp decline in intellect. The Great Fear we are experiencing is mostly due to a growing intellectual darkness that is consuming the liberal class that controls the institutions of cultural production.

You can get a sense of it from the Twitter drama. Musk bought a company that had 7,500 fulltime employees and 5,500 contractors. He summarily fired half of the staff and ninety percent of the contractors. Twitter has not gone dark or failed to work properly since the mass layoffs. It appears there were sabotage efforts, but those have either failed or were found out before they could be executed. In other words, half of the people working at the firm contributed nothing.

Slowly we are getting some insider accounts of what life was like for the people inside this company and it offers an insight into the rest of the hive. Most of the “workers” did no actual work, even people employed as programmers. Instead, they spent their days playing make believe, creating things like workers co-ops and support groups for increasingly exotic identities. Twitter had become an adult daycare center that catered to the needs of the increasingly unfit.

If this was going on at Twitter, a company that had to try and make a profit, imagine what happens in places with no need to turn a profit? It explains why CNN turned into 24-hours freak show. They were collecting over a billion a year in revenue through the tax farming system that is your television service. Corporate activism threw billions more onto their coffers for political reasons. When ratings ceased to be a concern, it is no wonder Don Lemon was their featured star.

The most extreme example, the engine of wokeness in the modern age, is the American academy, which is totally disconnected from reality. Hundreds of billions pour into the system regardless of the product. Small private colleges tend to be more practical because they have to make ends meet, but even there they have found a way to get on the free money gravy train. Oberlin College is a finishing school for the mentally unstable females of bourgeois America.

The American university is awash in cash, so the administrators are free to indulge the whims of the infantilized faculty. In fact, all of the selection pressure is in favor of the sorts of people who fall for these ridiculous academic fads. Absurdity and stupidity have become moral signifiers on campus. Empiricism and probity are now seen as the sins of the white power structure. Acting white is now the greatest sin, so the inhabitants seek to produce the most antiwhite fads possible.

The great stupidification of America is obvious in the language. The great and good now salt their language with abracadabra words like disinformation. The fact that they regularly confuse disinformation with misinformation is the tell. The hair-hat on CNN wailing about disinformation on-line has no idea what the word means nor does he even care, because for him it just means forbidden. Like a chimp flinging his poo at an enemy, he flings the word disinformation at the audience.

Conspiracy theory is another popular abracadabra word. The World Economic Forum posted on Twitter a video they labeled The New World Order. This is a phrase they have been using for decades. Twitter then puts a warning on the tweet that reads, “The New World Order is a conspiracy theory which hypothesizes a secretly emerging totalitarian world government.” Clearly, the term “conspiracy theory” now simply means anything the hive mind has banned from the hive.

The hive now has lots of these words and phrases. They seem to think they just need to position one of these magic words next to the thing they fear and it will magically disappear from their presence. Alternatively, if they label someone with one of their magic words enough times, that person will disappear. The dullards at the ADL now believe if they chant “antisemitism” enough times everyone they hate, which is 70% of the population, will simply vanish.

This is not the behavior of intelligent and confident people. This is the mindset of a primitive man, terrified of the world around him, so he embraces various rituals and incantations to provide him protection from the unknown. Instead of chanting a magic phrase to invoke the gods, the modern progressive chants “racism” and “fascism” to chase away the evil spirits they are sure lurk in the shadows. This is why public debate has suddenly become impossible.

It has been said that the Eskimos have many words for snow. The reason is snow plays a huge role in their life, so they need a nuanced understanding of it. Similarly, the modern progressive has many words for outsider. The reason is they are obsessed with the imaginary wall between themselves and the outside world. The reason all of these magic words mean outsider is the obsession is the wall. The modern progressive is defined by that wall, so it is his obsession.

What appears to have happened within the managerial class is that the smart fraction is slowly being overwhelmed by the deranged faction. Twitter is a good example of how an insulated institution succumbs to bourgeois excess. This is surely happening all over government, just as it is happening in the academy. Work still gets done, but the capable are now dragging a massive sack filled with gender theorists and critical race theory workshop participants. The burden is becoming unbearable.

Twitter may be a foreshadowing of what comes next. Now that the election system has been fortified for democracy, the ruling class can begin to relax. The threat is receding so they can begin to shed the defense system of howling lunatics they accumulated over the last decades. Like Twitter hacking off its useless parts, we may see something similar across the ruling class. These useless primitives are no longer worth the cost of carrying them, so they will be cut loose.

On the other hand, Twitter could be a rearguard action. The Marching Morons solution is no longer possible, because the smart fraction within the managerial elite has already been overcome by the crazies and stupid. The people who had to be protected from criticism because they were too weak cannot be challenged now, because they are too strong, so they will now define the managerial elite. The system will collapse under the weight of its own stupidification.

Trump 2.0

Posted on November 16, 2022 by thezman

In the before times, Bill Buckley would claim that he could know everything about a man’s politics based on his opinion of Israel and abortion. These were clarifying issues that did not easily allow for nuance or ambivalence. If you had any politics at all, you had an opinion on these issues. To some degree it is still true, but the clarifying issue of this age is Donald Trump. You cannot engage in politics at any level without having a position on the most famous pitch man in history.

All politicians, once they become famous, evoke strong opinions. This is due to the hive mindedness of the ruling class. For them, the friend-enemy distinction has come to dominate every aspect of their being. They have imposed this binary mindset on the culture so everyone, even the least informed, feels they must have a strong opinion on everyone and everything that is in the news. These opinions are moral signifiers that users wear like badges to indicate group affiliations.

Trump is something different. His biggest fans can and often do talk about his many faults as a politician. They can list all of the failures of his administration, while also praising him as a man and president. Many have fallen into a cult-like trance, but most of his fans are clear-eyed about the reality of the man. Despite his many faults and failures, they remain loyal to him because of what he represents. He is the ultimate protest candidate for people not allowed to protest.

For dissidents he has mostly been an amusing bull in the China shop, creating havoc among the beautiful people. Lots of people on this side foolishly thought he was going to be a something other than Donald Trump once he got into office, so they are still a bit salty about Trump, but they did enjoy the show. Others saw Trump as a chaos agent who created havoc in the enemy camp. The demise of conservatism was underway, but Trump swung a wrecking ball through it.

Last night Trump made it official. He will be running for president in 2024 and he is the prohibitive favorite to be the Republican nominee. The usual suspects are now rushing out to play their role in the drama. Here is state media making sure the drones in their cult know that Donald Trump hates democracy. The yesterday men of conservatism are doing their same old act. Then you have the moral panic crowd promising to be as ridiculous as ever.

Many on this side of the great divide are not thrilled by this. Again, some are still salty over falling for the god-empower stuff. Others, like RamZPaul, think Trump is too old and want someone younger. Ron DeSantis is half Trump’s age and seems to hold most of the same views as Trump. Having a young and more predictable version of Trump has obvious appeal. DeSantis has also shown that he understands government and could possibly get something done as president.

The other issue with the reboot of the Trump franchise is that his act feels dated now, like a now out of clothing style. When Trump bulldozed his way through the primaries and then the Clinton campaign, it was hilarious because it was refreshing to see someone give these people the business. His name calling and snide comments are not as funny now. His targets are just as loathsome, maybe more so, but Trump’s attacks just lack the same punch as 2016.

American politics is not kind to second acts. Pat Buchanan had a great run in 1992 but was largely ignored in 1996. Ron Paul had a similar run in 2008, but his 2012 reboot was a flop. Ross Perot is another example. Trump stands out because he won the primary and the general election, but like his populist predecessors, he will face strong headwinds from an audience not fond of reboots and sequels. That and the GOP will call in their vote counters this time around.

That is the critical question for dissidents. Is it better that they steal the 2024 election from Trump or is it better that they steal it from someone else? What happens if the GOP assembles their dream ticket of Nikki Hailey and Tim Scott only to see the magic of mail in votes hand the election to Biden? That is the other piece of the puzzle that has been ignored. It now appears likely that Joe Biden will be the first zombie to top the ballot for a major party.

On the other hand, what if the GOP rigs their primary this time and they assemble their dream ticket despite strong opposition from the voters? Pulling shenanigans on DeSantis or someone else would not get much attention. If they do this to Trump, it will be a disaster for the party. Given the corruption and incompetence of party leadership, this is a very possibility. Keep in mind that Democrats did this to install Joe Biden as their nominee in 2020, so it a strong possibility.

There is plenty to chew on for dissidents with regards to Trump 2.0, but now the debate must shift from whether he should run to how best to take advantage of it. Trump made the call and he will no doubt spend 2023 barnstorming the country doing rallies and media events to keep himself in the news. As with 2016, this has to be viewed as nothing more than an opportunity to change some minds. Who knows? Maybe Kanye West will join him on the campaign trail.

Third Rate Managers

Posted on November 15, 2022 by thezman

Starting somewhere in the middle of the last century, American corporations decided that they needed to invest in developing their managers. Historically, American business relied on nature and the tools of society to cultivate their workforce. The workers would get a basic education in the public schools. Natural talent and upbringing would sort the workforce the rest of the way. The best and brightest would naturally rise through the ranks to populate the management layer.

This was slowly replaced in the 20th century with a new model where senior management implemented programs to train their people, but also cultivate the sorts of people who would become managers. In the back quarter of the 20th century leadership training became popular in corporate America. Managers would receive the same sorts of leadership training officers in the military receive. Developing the next generation of corporate leaders is now a hundred billion dollar industry.

Because it has been normalized over several generations, no one notices the contradiction in these programs. All of the people subject to this training are in positions where no one would want leadership. These are administrative jobs filled with people tasked with following the rules. They may be required to supervise others who are also tasked with following rules. These are not positions that demand leadership, but rather roles that demand obedience.

Of course, the military has solved this contradiction. A squad leader is trained to use the materials at his disposal, including his men, to achieve the assigned objective within the rules of the operations. He is not allowed to question the rules of engagement or the objectives of his squad, but he is free to utilize the resources made available to him, plus what he can find on his own. In other words, it is leadership within the artificial construct of the military system.

Corporations borrow this general idea. The want their managers to be goal oriented and use the resources available to them to achieve the goal. The shipping manager does not select the shippers or what gets shipped, but he is given a crew, tools to box and ship items and certain goals to meet. He gets to select within a limited number of options how best to get the assigned items shipped out and the incoming items received into the shipping department.

Another way this is put is they want the shipping manager to take ownership of his department like it is his business. It is not his business and will never be his business, but they seek to trick him into acting as if it is his business. That way he will sacrifice, and perhaps encourage his people to sacrifice, in order to meet the goals laid out for him by his superiors. Like the actual owner of a business, he will act as if there is no separation between him and his work.

All of this leadership training sounds good in theory, even if it contains a central contradiction, but there is another problem. The nature of management and the nature of man tell us that the last thing a manager will want is a natural leader as one of his direct reports. That hotshot in shipping could get noticed by the big bosses and be promoted up the ladder, perhaps at the expense of his boss. Systemic pressure will always reward obedience over leadership.

It is the old line about leadership. First rate men attract first rate men, while second rate men attract third rate men. To a great degree, this is the problem that leadership training is trying to address. The people at the top, the senior managers, want to keep the pot bubbling so that they can spot the managers with potential and promote them into middle management. They do not want the natural talent boiling off because it is blocked by a ceiling of mediocrity.

The military has always suffered from this problem. Peacetime armies tend to develop a leadership class that is good at politics, but not war fighting. Wars always result in changes at the top and a restructuring of the officer class. We have seen this in the Ukraine war where both sides have changed their command structure in response to the reality on the ground. Corporations suffer the same phenomenon; except they lack war to force a pruning of the system.

The exception to this is the private company. The owner is there and he has every reason to find the best people to populate his ranks. Elon Musk has fired half the Twitter staff because they were there to serve the goals of managers, not owners, so as far as he was concerned, they were useless. The owner of the business does not need leadership training in the corporate sense, because he does not have to be trained to take ownership, as he is the owner.

This is the dilemma facing America. It is a society run by managers who have turned the owners into passive share holders. This is managerialism. Like a publicly traded company, the owners care only about returns. The overall management of society is left to a class of managers. Those managers, in addition to making sure the owners think they are getting a positive return, have the additional goal of making sure they remain the senior managers of the system.

Like senior management in a corporation or the senior officers in a peacetime army, the management class of America is primarily concerned with preserving their position at the top of the system. That requires them to always be on the lookout for people down the ranks who could be a threat. The solution to that is the solution all second rate men find and that is to promote third rate men. The managerial system that runs America selects for decreasingly talented managers out of necessity.

You see this with the Twitter situation. Elon Musk replaced a collection of ridiculous people with himself and a small team of his people. When you examine the titles of the people wiped out in the first wave of layoffs, it is clear they played no role in the profitability of the company, other than as an expense. They and their roles existed to serve the narrow interests of management. They were of no use to a genuine owner taking an active role in the running of the company.

Managerialism was on display in the past election. Mitch McConnell diverted tens of millions of dollars to safe Senate races, but starved out many contested ones, because that served his interests as the senior manager of the party. It is better for him that a third rate zombie like Murkowski returns to the Senate than a potential threat like Blake Masters gets promoted into the Senate. Instinctively, Mitch McConnell selects third rate people because it serves his interest.

That is the key to understanding the current crisis. The system selects for the sorts of people who naturally become Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi. Even the richest people are forced to select between two narrowing options. The second rate men select third rate men who in time take their place at the top, selecting for people who will be non-threatening to their position. Managerialism always ends with incompetence at the top and that fosters a culture of paranoia.

This is the inherent contradiction in managerialism. It is supposed to check the power of the ownership class, but it ends up replacing it with an increasingly incompetent management class. That management class, sensing its own vulnerability, selects for increasing incompetent people up and down the system. It is how we have a political system run by octogenarians promoting brain damaged zombies and obsequious sycophants into the highest offices in the system.

This always ends one way. In the corporate sphere, companies like Twitter either go bust or they get taken over by ownership. In the military sphere the rulers are forced to replace the politicians in the officer ranks with genuine wartime leaders. For the managerial society, the result is systemic collapse and replacement with a modified form of private rule. This is what happened with the Soviet Union. Communism was replaced with a form of oligarchy.

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