The Organism

Posted on February 15, 2023 by thezman

The typical politician in Washington knows what his staff tells him, plus whatever he remembers from his prior life. Given the nature of the life, what happened in the before times is a fading memory. Of course, few of these people ever did productive work before they got to Washington. In fact, having ever had a real job is close to a disqualification in politics. As a result, most have always been in politics and this is the peak of their political career.

Those staffers who make up the reality for a politician are not earthy men of the people, spending their days talking with the hoi polloi. They are from a specific class and spend their days socializing and networking with one another. What they know about the world is what they tell one another and what they get from the media. Their main focus is to make sure their guy is on the right side of the current trends and primed to say the right things at the events they organize for him.

Of course, the news of the world that flows from the media to the staffers and then to the politician is not news of the world. The content creators in the media do very little in the way of actual reporting. Their job is to take what is given to them by the agency they are assigned to cover and make it into a story. Most of the time this means taking canned quotes they get via e-mail and using them to salt a narrative, always with the phrase “sources say” to make it sound right.

The government agencies feeding the media have their agenda, which is always about what is good for the agency. Pournelle’s law of bureaucracy is on full display at this point, which means the people dishing to the media are people who care only about the bureaucracy they serve. In modern Washington, it is no longer about power and money, but rather the weird internal competition in the system. Leaks to the media are often about signaling between factions.

Washington itself has become something like an organism. All of its parts have a prime directive and that is to benefit the whole. Their secondary directive is to benefit their part of the whole. This means that everyone inside the organism is surrounded by nothing but other bits of the organism. To be inside the system is to live entirely around those who in one fashion or another serve the whole. Washington is both a system and a collective with its own sense of identity.

This helps explain why the war in Ukraine staggers on with no effort by Washington to make a deal with Moscow to end the war. Objectively, a deal should be easy to make and in the best interests of the West. Russia is not an expansive, ideological state with designs on the rest of Europe. There would be no war in Ukraine if not for the senseless meddling of the neocons that run American foreign policy. Making a deal to end the war basically means Washington stops poking the bear.

We hear nothing like this in Washington. There are zero politicians questioning the sanity of American policy. A few make noises about how the money is being spent, but they do not know why those lines are in their script. The people who put them there, those staffers, saw something about this in the media. The media is told by the Pentagon that there are worries about the accounting. Otherwise, no one questions anything because no one has a reason to question anything.

This dynamic plays out in the bureaucracy too. To be in good standing is to be on the right side of the current initiatives. In this case, everyone who knows what is good for them in the Pentagon makes sure to put on that Ukraine lapel pin. Information about what is happening on the ground leaks into the system, but there is no demand for it, so it sits in unread reports. The current narrative demands different facts, so people are busy getting those facts together.

This is also why we get insane press conferences from the people running the war machine part of the organism. Larry Johnson gives some useful commentary on the absurdity of what Milley and Austin had to say. Both men are reading from a script, prepared by people who care first and foremost about the bureaucracy they serve, which is the Pentagon and the military. They probably know the reality on the ground, but there is no incentive to mention it.

Probably the best example of how the organism works is the catastrophic train derailment in Ohio. The DC pols have nothing to say about it because their staffers have not put it in their scripts. The lone exception is J.D. Vance, the newly minted senator from Ohio, but he has yet to be assimilated. The staffers have no idea where Ohio is or if it is even in America. The reason is the media is full of stories about balloons, weird sex stuff and Trump news.

Here we have the most serious environmental disaster in decades and the organism has yet to respond. The reason is none of the entry points into the organism have pathways linked to the middle of the country. All of those pathways open in coastal cities and only the ones that matter to the organism. Unless what is happening in Ohio poses some risk to the organism, it does not exist for the organism. Ohio could become a dead zone and Washington does not care.

This is why our politics are insane. America is run by what amounts to a closed religious cult that cares only for its internal operations. Like any other organism, it draws sustenance from its surroundings, but unlike any other organism, it has little interaction with its surroundings, other than for defensive purposes. It is why elections have no impact on policy. Whatever the result, what gets sent to the organism is digested and put to use by the organism to defend the organism.

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Artificial Stupidity

Posted on February 14, 2023 by thezman

Over the last few months, the internet has been buzzing about artificial intelligence, largely due to the release of ChatGPT. Lots of people have been having fun with it and lots of bad people have been making it do bad things. Even more people, those who fashion themselves as big-brained thought leaders, have been telling us what this means for the future of humanity. Of course, everyone selling a product is quickly adding the letters “AI” to their marketing kit.

The ChatGPT is an interesting project, but as the bad people referenced above have shown, it is still a work in progress. Even so, it does reveal two things that are important in the much larger discussion of artificial intelligence. One is that there has been some progress is creating what feels like intelligence. A bit of software that feels like it could be a human making small talk is a big step. That big step, however, is relative to where things were to this point.

This is a barely perceptible move forward, relative to where things need to be in order to start discussing anything close to artificial intelligence. In fact, you would need a much more powerful algorithm to detect the progress than what we currently possess, in order to quantify the progress. The main reason for that is we are not entirely sure if we can define human intelligence at the moment. In fact, we cannot even agree on where to start with such a project.

Now, HBD types and psychometrists might bristle at that, but crude methods to quantify aspects of intelligence are not the same as understanding the nature of it. We can sit two children down, give them a battery of intelligence tests and make some mostly accurate predictions about their life outcomes. We have enough data now to make statistically significant observations about relative intelligence. That is not the same as understanding the nature of human intelligence.

The reason for this is we do not understand human consciousness, of which intelligence is just one aspect. In fact, the human sciences are struggling to come up with a definition of consciousness. The physical sciences operate under the assumption that collections of non-conscious agents can come together somehow and create consciousness, but that is probably wrong. There is a good chance that it puts the cart before the horse.

That is, conscious agents are what cause non-conscious agents. What we think of as space-time and the objects within it are the result of human consciousness. This is the basis of Donald Hoffman’s book The Case Against Reality, in which he explains why much of what we assume to be true about the universe is probably wrong. For those who prefer an audio version of his work, here is a good interview of Hoffman by the ubiquitous YouTuber Lex Fridman.

Hoffman’s approach rests on two things that seem to be true. One is that nature does not reward accuracy in our perceptions, but rather the fitness of our perceptions, which Hoffman stated as Fitness Beats Truth. The short version is that evolution only cares about that which impacts fitness. As a result, a strategy that seeks only to improve fitness will, over time, dominate a strategy that seeks to create a more accurate perception of the world.

There is a lot of math involved in Hoffman’s presentation, but there is a much simpler way to think of it. We see in the marketplace for goods and services that the most popular product is never the ideal product. The Windows desktop won the computer wars not because it was the platonic ideal of the personal computer, but because it was good enough and cheap enough to win the fitness game relative to the other options, some of which were technically better.

The game of life works the same way. That which makes it easier for a living thing to replicate itself gets rewarded. That which inhibits replication gets punished. That is it and nothing more. If human perception evolved to improve our fitness, then it means it did not evolve to give us a more accurate perceptions of reality. That does not mean we live in a dream world. It just means that we cannot assume that our perception of non-contextual reality is accurate or even real.

The other thing Hoffman points out in his book is that theoretical physics has run into a very big problem. That problem is local realism. This is the principle of locality which states a thing is changed only if it is touched. The second half states that properties of objects are real and exist in our physical universe independent of our minds. This is the foundation of physics and it may not be true. Experiments have challenged locality and realism, suggesting one or both are false.

This brings us back to the artificial intelligence problem. The likelihood of us creating intelligence, much less conscious intelligence, even by accident is so low as to not be considered a serious topic of discussion. As Hoffman explains in his book, we are not close to understanding the nature of consciousness. We are not even sure the world we assume to be objective reality is more than an interface. It could literally be a figment of our collective imagination.

Like discussion of space aliens floating balloons over North America, talk of artificial intelligence is a nice distraction. We seem have a need to believe that such things are possible and perhaps discoverable in our time. In reality, they lie well outside our ability to grasp, other than the fictional. Intelligence is an aspect of consciousness and most likely that is not the result of non-conscious agents. That means intelligence is not simply clever math operating on non-conscious agents.

If a non-human intelligence were to visit our local concept of space-time from its place on the N-dimensional manifold that is reality, it would point out that our fancy new AI is not much more than a relatively faster calculator. From its perspective, it would be comically simplistic compared to our own consciousness. AI and the pursuit of it is a fun distraction, but it is not the dawn of super-intelligent robots enslaving humanity. We can do that without the aid of a clever chatbot.

The Coming Election Show

Posted on February 13, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the chess game between Moscow and Washington over Ukraine, a post about the great neo-Nazi threat to Lagos and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

It is hard to think about it, but the first presidential debate of the next cycle will probably happen in the late summer, which is about six months off. Assuming the Republicans stick to the old calendar and do not follow the Democrat plan to rearrange the primary schedule, the first votes are less than a year off. That means the candidates are now preparing to kick off their campaigns. Whether we like it or not, another presidential campaign show is about to get started.

At this point, the action looks like it will be on the Republican side, as no one is prepping to challenge Joe Biden on the Democrat side. He may be a vegetable, but the people running the government think he is a useful vegetable. If the secret document business was supposed to push him aside, it did not work. Bernie Sanders has been bought off, so they do not have to worry about him causing trouble. The only plausible alternative is Gavin Newsom, who has done nothing so far.

That leaves the Republicans to put on a show for us. Of course, we know Trump is running and is the favorite at the moment. Mike Pompeo lost a bunch of weight to look better on television, so he is running. John Bolton says he will run as the blow up the world candidate. Nikki Haley has thrown her panties in the ring. Tim Scott is now preparing to announce soon. Amusingly, the yesterday men of conservatism think Scott and Haley provide ideological diversity.

The guy everyone is waiting on is Ron DeSantis. He has put on a good show in Florida, especially with regards to the cultural stuff. He gave Disney the business over their grooming stuff, so he has won over a lot of normal people. He recently stepped in to halt the AP Afro history stuff that amounted to little more than an antiwhite lecture, so he is not just picking low hanging fruit. In another age, DeSantis would be the ideal candidate to lead the Republican ticket.

What we see shaping up is a repeat of the 2016 primary. You have a collection of zombies that have no business in politics, but they are acceptable to the people who actually run things. Then you have Trump and DeSantis, who will be filling the Ted Cruz role in this performance. In 2016, the party could have rallied early to Cruz and maybe had a shot at stopping Trump, but they waited too long. This time many see DeSantis as the key to preventing Trump for a third time.

The trouble with that is most of the people running the Republican party are as delusional as everyone else in the managerial elite. They really think the voters are waiting for Captain Diversity to ride in and save them. Tim Scott is like catnip to these people, so they will be drooling all over him. Of course, Haley is a strong diverse female and everyone knows the world cannot get enough of strong diverse females, so she will get lots of support as well.

The wild card is whether the party will fortify the process for democracy. Politics is monkey see, monkey do, so the Republican party leadership is no doubt working on a way to fortify the process for democracy. Joe Biden was made the nominee when the party stepped into to fix the process and get around all of those voters who thought anyone was better than a senile old man. You can be sure the most devious rats in the GOP have been working the problem for 2024.

For all his faults, Trump is the prohibitive favorite. Tim Scott may be diverse, but his trophy case is empty. He sold insurance for a few years until he signed on to be a political performer and he has spent the last three decades being the diverse Republican at various levels. Nikki Haley is a strong diverse female, who spent eight year criticizing the South as the governor of South Carolina. She will go over well in Silicon valley and New Delhi, but nowhere else.

The only plausible challenger to Trump is DeSantis, but boring people tend not to do well in national politics. That and the uniparty does not like him. He has the same trouble as Ted Cruz, in that he exists somewhere between the populist base of the party and the elitists leadership of the party. Leadership sees him as a potential threat, while the voters see him as a potential fink. Given his personality and Trump’s name recognition, it is a tough spot for DeSantis.

None of this matters all that much. If you look at the map you can see right away the problem for the Republicans. When you tick off all of the states that the democrats have fortified for democracy, they start with a lock on the election. For any Republican to win in 2024 it means flipping states like Pennsylvania that have already cast their votes for Joe Biden, whether the voters know it or not. Many do know it now, so they will not bother showing up to play make believe.

This election presents the people in charge with a dilemma. On the one hand, Trump losing in the primary would let them claim that the popular unrest has been quelled and it is back to the old ways. The trouble is, they have fortified the general election for democracy and there is no way to explain it. If DeSantis is selected as the nominee and loses to Joe Biden, who is going to think that is legitimate? Even the people at National Review will start to question the result.

On the other hand, if they install their dream ticket, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, the voters will be too busy laughing to bother voting. Worse yet, they will get smoked in the general election thus discrediting the diversity scheme. The New York Times will demand that the Republican Party disband because its voters are so racist, they would not vote for diversity against dementia. It would be a hilarious result, but it feels too ridiculous, even for the Republicans.

You can see the problem. Having a vegetable atop the Democratic ticket when the election has been fortified for democracy quickly leads to absurd results. Once they started down the road of fortifying lections for democracy, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the pretense of legitimacy. In the fullness of time, the robot historians will say that the great mistake was in not coopting Trump. Reckless fury led to reckless actions that have made elections into absurd spectacles.

The Egalitarianism Curse

Posted on February 10, 2023 by thezman

It is impossible to overstate the impact that the concept of equality has had on the Western world, especially in the last century. In the fullness of time, the American experiment may be recast as the radical egalitarian experiment. Like the Covid virus, it escaped the lab and spread around the world. It also has had its greatest impact on the West, which may not survive it.

It is tempting to lay the blame at the feet of Jesus. After all, the great preachers of egalitarianism start with the idea of spiritual or moral equality, even if they explicitly hate the baby Jesus. If all men are equal in the eyes of God, then it must follow that all men should be equal in the eyes of one another. Since they are clearly not equal in reality, there must be something wrong with human society.

This is not true, of course. One does not logically follow the other, but the hallmark of Western thought since the late Middle Ages is the error of assuming that observations about nature or nature’s god lead to rules about human behavior. For most of Church history this was understood, but then philosophers took over from theologians and the virus of egalitarianism escaped the lab.

In our time, egalitarianism has worked like an acid, dissolving all of the organic institutions of society. The churches are overrun by degenerates. Civic organizations are either crippled by laws requiring the inclusion of everyone or they have been transformed into weapons in service to egalitarian ideals. Political opposition has been made into an enabling operation that confirms the prevailing orthodoxy.

That means any genuine opposition to the prevailing order starts with a rejection of the universal equality of man business. Whether one looks to Scripture, biology or some ideological or theological movement, the only real opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy starts with the acceptance of human diversity. People are not equal and therefore groups of people can never be equal to other groups of people.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Some Background
The Egalitarian Challenge
The Right’s Response
The Left’s Response
When You Accept Their Premise

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

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The Paradox Of Openness

Posted on February 9, 2023 by thezman

At the core of the American cultural outlook is the assumption that the more open something is, the better it will become over time. Openness means a low barrier of entry and a low of barrier entry means lots of people with a wide variety of ideas can enter the system, thus improving the system through competition. Therefore, the more open a system is to new people and ideas, the faster it will mutate and improve into something better than the original.

As much as conservatives like to label the cultural lunacy we see happening as the product of Marxism, it really is the product of Americanism. Sure, the people who brought us novelties like gender and racial grievance were trained up in radical philosophy, but they have always operated under the assumption that reducing the barriers to entry is a primary goal. In fact, their presence in the academy is the result of this bedrock belief in total openness.

Whether it is the marketplace of ideas or the marketplace of goods and services, the starting American assumption is the more the better. If you want better health care, so the argument goes, you need more competition among providers. Get more providers competing for patient dollars and inevitably the quality of service will improve and the cost to the patient will decline. Similarly, open the marketplace of ideas and the number and quality of competing ideas will improve.

George Soros is now a stock villain in normie politics, but look at what he calls his umbrella organization. It is the Open Society. George Soros literally seeks the end of all borders in the world. That is not just national borders, but all of the cultural and social borders that define human society. In many respects, Soros is the extreme representation of the core American principle of openness. He imagines the world as one giant wide open frontier.

Of course, the frontier is why Americans love openness. The founding of the American way of life was based on the idea that you could always head west and find a new place to call home if you were not happy. This later transformed into the natural mobility Americans take for granted. The typical European lives his life in one place, only leaving for holiday trips. Americans move all over the place, often from one type of community to another, without thinking much about it.

You cannot move from Boston Massachusetts to Nashville Tennessee if the people in these areas are naturally hostile to strangers. The typical person from Tennessee may think the typical person from Massachusetts is a mean word, but both people assume it is immoral to exclude someone based on their place of origin. We will never see a campaign by one region to block the migration of people from another region, even when it is terrible for the receiving end.

We have a good example in Idaho. People are fleeing California due to the economy, crime, taxes and general lunacy. They first moved to Colorado where they promptly started voting for politicians that promise to ruin Colorado. Now people are leaving the state because it is getting as bad as California. The people of Idaho know this and should erect barriers to entry in order to protect themselves from California, but they would rather die than be rude to the newcomers.

American openness is the heart of the immigration problem. You can get a majority behind enforcing the laws against migrants flowing freely over the border, but you cannot get majority support for an end to all immigration. The idea of closing a border brings shame and guilt to the mind of the typical American. He cannot explain why he thinks closing the border is wrong, he just knows it. Like the Idahoans, Americans would rather die than be mean to newcomers.

In fairness, American openness was a great advantage. The openness to new ideas and new people turned an empty continent into a superpower. It made it possible to flood the continent and make the most of the natural resources. If Americans were not willing to pick up and move, the West would never have been conquered. Much of the technological progress the world enjoys is the result of openminded sorts coming to America and challenging old assumptions.

When the continent was protected by two massive oceans that were not easy to cross, this ethic of openness was a great asset. Now that the world is much more crowded and oceans are no longer a barrier, openness is a liability. Not only are millions of people flowing into the country ever month, every stupid and toxic idea is free to jump on stage and do its worst. American openness is turning the country into the dayroom of a lunatic asylum with no way to close the doors.

Many blame the problems of the West on individualism, but the more serious problem may be American openness. Since the middle of the last century, American values have been imposed on Europe. They now sound like grievance studies professors because of the American cultural dominance. For three generations, the ticket up the status ladder has had the stars and stripes on it. As a result, openness is now as much a European principle as an American one.

In the West, it is now immoral to close the door on anyone or anything, with the exception of those who want to close the door. The surest way to be removed from polite company is to question the open door policy. Only fascists and white supremacist want barriers to entry and objective standards. Paradoxically, the most tolerant and open culture in human history is violently intolerant of anyone suggesting that there must be a limit to tolerance and openness.

Fitness applies to all things, even morals and ideas. It is looking like the open society, like many species, was able to flourish in an exceptional environment, but once the environment returned to the norm, the open society is no longer fit. Like the giant panda, the open society is only suited for specific conditions. Unlike the giant panda, there will be no zookeepers to maintain it. Either openness is abandoned or it dies out taking the people with it.

The End Is Nigh

Posted on February 8, 2023 by thezman

A popular narrative among libertarians, gold bugs, doomsday types and other pessimists involves the end of the dollar. Because of the structural flaws in fiat money, the abuse of the dollar’s reserve status, excessive money printing, the prettiness of gold or other factors, the world will one day decide that it no longer wants to use dollars and the dollar will collapse. Peter Schiff has built a media career using a combination of these causes to predict the end of the dollar.

There is an old joke about the market pessimists having predicted ten of the last three market crashes that applies here. The people predicting the end of the dollar, or the petrodollar as many prefer, have been making this prediction since Nixon closed the gold window fifty years ago. All of the predications have turned out to be wrong, but that has had no impact on the dollar pessimists. It turns out that there is good money to be made in being wrong about the dollar.

There are a number of reasons why the dollar remains the global currency, despite the abuse of it by the Global American Empire. This post on Revolver by an anonymous former U.S. Treasury official covers some of the major ones. The simple elevator speech on why the dollar remains the reserve currency is that the major powers of the global economy prefer it for now. China, Russia, India and the OPEC cartel continue to use the dollar as they work on the coming alternative.

That last bit is an important part of understanding what will come in the next decade with regards to global currency. The unipolar world controlled by Washington is slowly slipping away, being replaced by a multipolar world. For ideological and practical reasons, Washington is fighting this with all of its might. It is a losing fight as a unipolar world was an accident of 20th century history. It turns out that Samuel Huntington was right and Francis Fukuyama was wrong.

The great challenge of this age, it turns out, is that the emerging civilization centers of the world are emerging into the unipolar world. On the one hand, they need to remake the world order to reflect this new reality. On the other hand, they still depend in significant ways on the old structures from the unipolar order. They cannot overthrow the old order without incurring significant costs. Of course, there is the Global America Empire, which stands athwart history yelling “stop!”

In this regard, the dollar is a symbol of the current crisis, because it is the symbol, the primary tool, of the old unipolar order. Just as removing the dollar as the reserve currency would bring about significant economic costs, removing America as the center of the global order brings serious risks. Not the least of those risks is an increasingly unstable political class armed with nuclear weapons. Joe Biden prattling on about nuclear war does not inspire confidence.

The result is the emerging new power centers are becoming extremely cautious as they proceed down the path toward a multipolar world. China could take Taiwan by force if it chose, but that brings risks it is unwilling to assume. It is not just the cost of war, which would be significant, but also the cost of victory. The sight of an American carrier, on fire, sinking into the Pacific could collapse the American empire. That would take the dollar with it and everything that counts on it.

Similarly, the Russians could have hit back at the West over the economic sanctions, but instead it has simply chosen to avoid them. The reality is, every European country is looking for ways around the sanctions. These workarounds are costly and they are hollowing out their economies, but they are the better than alternative. For Russia, the sanction regime is mostly a nuisance, but it buys time as they and the other emerging global power centers build their infrastructure.

In a way, we are seeing a real world example of what Joseph Tainter described in his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. Collapse is only possible if there is no supporting structures surrounding the society. The Western Roman Empire collapsed because there was nothing around it. It was a complex society in isolation, as what surrounded it was a collection of tribal societies. America, in contrast, is deeply connected to the other complex societies.

Instead of collapse, what we are seeing is a controlled demolition. The Russians, for example, would welcome the return of rational governance in Europe, they would prefer to avoid radical change. An economic crisis could easily trigger a political crisis and unleash sudden political change. The last two times this happened have not been good for Russia. The first time brought Napoleon to Moscow. Of course, the last time it brought Hitler to Stalingrad.

China, India, the OPEC countries and even Brazil have similar concerns with what lies between the present order and the multipolar order that is coming. The Global American Empire, including its control of the global reserve currency, is an obstacle that lies between now and then, but it is a problem that must be carefully managed. The efforts by Washington provoke a crises in Asia and Europe are viewed as an effort to derail the transition from a unipolar world to a multipolar world.

This brings us back to the dollar. If the world avoids catastrophe, then it will avoid the sudden uncontrolled collapse of the dollar. Instead it will be a slow transition to a world of multiple trusted currencies that rely on separate financial systems. Those currencies will be linked to the only true global commodity, which is energy. The relative strength of each currency will reflect the trust and accuracy of the corresponding financial systems that make transacting in the currency possible.

What this means is the petrodollar will slowly become the petro. All the large global currencies, including the dollar, will be pegged to the supply of energy, plus or minus the relative trust of the political systems of the issuing society. Again, this assumes the world avoids catastrophe. If a controlled demolition of the Global American Empire proves impossible, then all of those off-grid living videos you watched will suddenly and explosively come in handy.

The Museum Keepers

Posted on February 7, 2023 by thezman

Last month Paul Gottfried wrote a brief note in Chronicles about an event hosted by The Philadelphia Society. The event was a virtual debate between Christopher Owen and Glenn Ellmers on the topic of which is the more important founding document, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Presumably, this is some sort of old person role playing game where the two men reenact the debates between Harry Jaffa and Willmoore Kendall from half a century ago.

In fairness, revisiting this topic is useful for those wondering why conservatives have a fetish for Lincoln. Maybe not this debate specifically, but the debate between Kendal and Jaffa in the last century. So-called conservatives embraced Jaffa’s rewriting of American history because it solved their race problem. If one wants to understand the “conservative case for” and the “democrats are the real racists” memes, you start with Harry Jaffa’s Lincoln project.

Putting that aside, the purpose of Gottfried’s post was to point out that these sorts of conservative groups operate like eccentric museums. They claim to exist in order to promote debate, but in realty they exist to prevent debate. Gottfried could be describing all of Conservative Inc. with this line. “Although founded by Frank Meyer in 1964 as a center for vigorous debate on the intellectual right, the Philadelphia Society now exudes the freshness of an ancient Egyptian tomb.”

That is a slander against Egyptian tombs. At least when someone finds a tomb, there is some curiosity about what is inside it. There is a chance that archeologists will find something new or maybe answer an ancient question. Inside conservative institutions there is nothing new. No one needs to be curious about what is inside because everyone knows what is inside. The point of these operations is to make sure nothing new ever happens on the so-called Right.

Gottfried goes on to call for some new voices to be invited into these institutions in order to freshen up the debate. Even if the geezers inside are not interested in new ideas, at least they can freshen up their old arguments a bit. Even museums spruce up the exhibits from time to time. Of course, this will never happen and Gottfried concedes that it can never happen as long as the tomb managers remain. Politics on the Right advances one funeral at a time.

The thing is though, it is not all that clear that the actuarial tables will solve the problem that haunts Conservative Inc. Look around at the various institutions and you see plenty of young people, but they were selected for their obsequiousness rather than their willingness to challenge old thinking. They get picked and promoted in the same way the Chinese exam system promoted people in the Song dynasty. Conformity is the highest virtue in the conservative ecosystem.

The model for this is National Review. When Bill Buckley started searching around for a successor, he went through a few talented men until he found Rich Lowry. Those talented men threatened to change things at National Review. Lowry was simply too stupid to change anything. More important he was an obsequious rumpswab who would tend to Buckley’s lifelong project like the men assigned to keep Lenin’s body on display in the Kremlin. He was the ideal museum keeper.

This is not just a problem with conservatism. The ruling class of the Global American Empire is the product of the 20th century. It evolved for the 20th century and therefore seeks to maintain the conditions that made it possible. It is why the origin point of every subculture within it is the 20th century. Every issue is jammed into a narrative structure that dates to 1938 or 1968. Every foreign enemy is a new version of Hitler and every domestic villain is Bull Connor.

This is why there can be no airing out of the institutions. Even if the crypt keepers of conservatism fling open the windows and let in some fresh air, they will be forced to close those windows. The survival of conservatism depends on it fitting into that 20th century narrative structure that controls the ruling class. The only way those windows remain open is if it is a bankruptcy sale. That particular institution is being sold off because it is no longer needed.

It is also why the new “conservative” operations quickly begin to conform to the old narratives as soon as they get attention. As long as they are not an explicit rejection of the old thinking, they are assimilated into the collective. First some famous people show up to look around, then the money begins to flow. Before long, the “rebels” are beginning to enjoy the perks that come with submission. They are assimilated into the blob and become another node of the system.

Modern conservatism suffers from the same malady that plagues most of the institutions of the empire. That is, it has no purpose. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the organizing purpose of the West collapsed with it. The difference was the West thought it won the Cold War and therefore was validated. The communists were under no such illusions, so they got busy escaping the 20th century. The West thought it had arrived at the end of history.

While it would be nice to see a wrecking ball smash through these decrepit institutions of conservatism or maybe see a peasant revolt against them, the reality is they will stagger on as long as the empire exists. A feature of every dying empire is a fear of change and we are clearly in that stage. Those old men keeping the museum exhibits going on the Right, as well as their youthful apprentices, care only for keeping the lights on for another day which means keeping the doors locked.

The Paradox Of Liberal Democracy

Posted on February 6, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the great awakening, a post about the 1980’s classic comedy Trading Places and the Sunday podcast. This week the plan is to do some more Ukraine stuff, given the uptick in war news. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

The communists were fond of picking at what they claimed were the inherent contradictions within capitalist societies. They argued that these contradictions were irreconcilable and would eventually bring down the system. The accuracy of their claims is debatable, but the examination of contradictions within a system is a perfectly valid analytical technique. Conflicts in logic are often the cause of defects in a system and not just political or economic systems.

In fact, software developers spend much of their lives hunting down these sorts of errors in the code. Perhaps the cause was poor coding or maybe it was the business logic which defined the code that was flawed. Those bugs in the software are the result of one set of rules contradicting or overriding another set of rules. One user enters data and gets one result, while another user enters data and gets a different result, despite both users expecting a similar result.

This software analogy is further useful in that the users will lose confidence in the system if these internal contradictions are not resolved. Systems are sets of rules and if the user of a system cannot trust the rules, they cannot trust the system. Many software systems have been scrapped due to a collapse in confidence. The same holds for political and economic systems. Some communists thought if they could exploit the contradictions in capitalism, confidence in it would collapse.

When we look around at the general lunacy that has come to define the West, it is often assumed that the lunatics are operating outside the rules of liberal democracy and that is the cause of the lunacy. “If we just go back to our constitutional principles” is the call of every civic nationalist in the comment sections of Conservative Inc. No doubt the people in support of the lunacy have similar claims about their opponents not following the new rules of blessed progress.

What if the reason our age is so deranged is the rule-set that defines the ideology we call liberal democracy? What if the crisis facing the West is simply the result of a system that contains irreconcilable contradictions? People are naturally reticent to think like this because liberal democracy has been sacralized. Democracy means good, so anything it touches must be good. Liberal democracy is even better because it contains two words that have come to mean morally good.

If we take a step back and look at what liberal democracy means in theory, it may help explain why it is increasingly deranged in practice. The off the shelf definition of liberal democracy is the combination of a liberal political ideology that operates under a representative democratic form of government. The word liberal here means the political philosophy based on individual rights and liberty. Individuals are equal before the law and equal in their political relationship.

A liberal society, regardless of the political system, will be defined by things like equality before the law and the rule of law. Further, those laws are written down so everyone can understand them. Those laws also codify things like the right to own property, the right to speak and organize in order to address the government, and a market economy that is open and transparent. There are other things that can be part of a liberal society, but in general it is a society based in individual rights.

Democracy, of course, is where everyone gets a say. In theory, everyone participates equally, but this is obviously not possible in a large society. As the political theorist Robert Dahl showed, you cannot have a true democracy in a large society. Instead you have the features of democracy to one degree or another. You can have free and fair elections in which everyone can participate, even though many people will simply choose to ignore the process entirely.

There you have liberal democracy in a nutshell. It is a set of rules based on liberal moral philosophy where the people, through direct voting and through indirect representation participate in the rule making of society. Right away you can see a problem. If the people can make the rules, then they can vote to get rid of those rules that are based in liberal moral philosophy. The public could be persuaded that free speech is a bad idea and vote to suppress political speech.

Now, the usual suspects will jump up and down and say this is not so because those liberal rules are placed outside the democratic process. They are based in nature, maybe, or rooted in the ancient traditions of the people. In fact, they are written on a piece of paper which is kept in a museum. That way everyone knows that those rules are off limits to further tinkering. This is obviously not true, which is why America is shaking itself to pieces over those timeless rules.

Liberal democracy has the same problem that any democratic system has in that the people are the source of all authority. Those timeless rules based in human nature are deemed timeless by people who pretend they are based in human nature. They are not, in fact, rooted in a moral authority outside man. Since an axiom of all democratic systems is that no parliament can bind subsequent parliaments, all rules, even the timeless ones, are open to question.

In theory, liberal democracy has the same problem as communism and libertarianism, in that it has no answer for what happens when people change their minds. It has no answer for what happens when a decent number of people decide that those liberal rules are no longer working. If authority lies in the people, which is true of all democratic systems, then whatever rules you make, however you describe them, will be subject to the whims of the people.

Communists solved this problem by creating a new class of people who will be the vanguard of the revolution. The party makes sure that the rules remain fixed, so that the people never get any wild ideas about communism. Libertarians, of course, solved this problem by never coming close to creating a libertarian society. Even in their solons where everything exists in theory, they never solved this problem, because there is no way it can be solved.

Interestingly, the post-Marx culturalists landed on what they think is a solution to the internal contradiction in liberal democracy. They relied on anachronistic language to appeal to their audience at the time, but in the modern age, repressive tolerance has become the solution to popular dissent. In modern hands, this means those who are deemed a threat to our democracy are surrounded by the defenders of democracy and threatened with destruction if they continue.

Putting that aside, liberal democracy has no solution within the ideology of liberal democracy to the paradox of liberal democracy. If the people are sovereign, it means their are the authority for all the rules of society. That includes those foundational rules that the creators would like to think are immutable truths. When the people are the source of authority for the rules of society, they can change even those immutable rules of the universe if they so please.

This is why America has become increasingly chaotic as it has become increasingly democratic since roughly a century ago. In a time when a limited number of men of high status controlled the rule making, respecting those limits on the popular will was not just possible, it was necessary for their survival as a class. Once authority began to expand through expansion of the franchise, the cancer of democracy began to eat at the rules and the reasoning behind those rules.

As is true of other ideologies, the only way to make them work is to find some authority outside mankind to legitimize those fixed rules. Theocratical liberalism, for example, could work if the holy text codified the liberal moral code. A liberal dictatorship could work, assuming the people at the top saw an advantage in maintaining the liberal order for their people. Tradition could also work as a useful authority. Even belief in the simulation could work if explained properly.

In the end, liberal democracy suffers from the same central defect of all radical ideologies, which is that it seeks to free man of coercion. The liberals dreamed of a world free of political coercion. The Marxists dreamed of a world free of economic coercion, while the post-Marxists dream of a world free of cultural coercion. As the last radical ideology standing, liberal democracy promises a world free of all coercion, which is a direct threat to society itself.

It turns out that humans evolved to live in societies and societies are nothing more than a system of rules. In order to maintain the rules, people must often be coerced into abiding by the rules. Therefore any ideology that promises to eliminate coercion is promising to destroy that which makes society possible. Liberal democracy is a direct challenge to the very idea of human society. it is a suicide pact, which explains the the lunacy of the current age.

Farewell Pat Buchanan

Posted on February 3, 2023 by thezman

Last week I mentioned the retirement of Pat Buchanan and a few people suggested doing a show on the man. He looms large for people on this side the great divide who were around when he ran in 1992. For younger people on this side he probably does not resonate the same way, simply because you had to be alive back in the 1980’s and 1990’s to appreciate the full impact of the event.

The thing is though, even if you were around then, you did not appreciate what was happening until much later. Trump’s run in 2016 is what brought it home. Then the monstrous assault on Trump and his administration reminded some of us of what happened to Buchanan but also the paleos. The ugly face of the people behind the last thirty years of American politics came into focus.

When you dive into Buchanan’s career, you appreciate why the paleos lost, but also why they were never willing to take the next step. They grew up in an America that was about as close as you get to the ideal of America. It was a country that prospered because it was a system that worked. It was not perfect, of course, but it was about as good as anyone could expect.

Buchanan’s career, starting in the 1960’s, was about trying to get back to the system which produced the glory years of the 50’s and 60’s. What made his run in 1992 possible was the flicker of renewal in the 1980’s. For his generation, that time must have felt like a turning point in the great return. Then they saw the scaly tentacles of the neocons wrapped around it.

Digging into Buchanan’s career, prepping for the show, I came to appreciate why guys like Jared Taylor stop short of criticizing the system itself or why Steve Sailer pines for a return to his salad days in California. People who recall good America do not have to think about an alternative to the present. They lived in one. I do not think we can return to it, but I appreciate why they would desire it.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Buchanan’s Background
Paleoconservatism
The Bush Years
The 1992 Race
Buckley’s Betrayal
Critiques of Buchanan
Legacy

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Doomsday Approaches

Posted on February 2, 2023 by thezman

The shadow that has hung over the Ukraine war is the fear that it could lead to a direct clash between Washington and Moscow. Given that both sides have large arsenals of nuclear weapons, conflict could lead to Armageddon. Compounding things is the fact that Biden cannot stop talking about nuclear war. Given his mental condition, this suggests that he is often in earshot of the decision makers, who may be seriously discussing the possible use of nuclear weapons.

The dynamic of the war thus far has been Washington poking Moscow hoping for a response, which it can use to justify escalation. First, they said that they would not supply Ukraine with Western weapons, then they sent Western weapons. Then it was long range guided missiles. Now we see modern tanks being prepped, with discussions about F-16 fighter jets on the agenda. All of these weapons transfers are intended to provoke a response from Moscow.

The proof of that is the fact that none of these systems can make a difference on the battlefield for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is that the West has designed its weapons to be used in combined arms warfare. Alone, these weapons are not terribly useful and may even be a hinderance to the Ukrainians. The M777 howitzer, for example, is known for being maintenance heavy. Giving the Ukrainians these weapons just adds to their onerous sustainment burden.

Of course, the “cry out in pain as you strike” tactic is the regime default. This is used domestically and internationally. It goes back a long time. In his ongoing criticism of Washington with regards to the war in Ukraine, Douglas Macgregor likes to remind people that the Roosevelt administration did everything it could to bait the Japanese into launching an attack on American assets. They needed a reason to get into the war and that was viewed as the best avenue.

When you combine the psychological instability of the people running the war for the regime and the long history of provoking adversaries, the prospects of a nuclear holocaust start to look better or worse, depending upon your perspective. If the usual suspects stick to their usual patterns, it means they will keep provoking the Russians until they get the desired response. That desired response will justify some further provocation eventually leading to all out war.

The first question to answer here is what response from Russia would warrant a direct attack on Russia by NATO? The obvious answer is an attack on NATO. This is why the Poles rushed to the nearest microphone demanding war with Russia when the Ukrainian missile landed on Polish territory. The Polish president knew the plan and assumed it was go time. It turned out to be a Ukrainian missile, but the incident confirmed the thinking within the West.

Assuming the Kagan cult has concluded they need a Russian attack on a NATO country in order to launch their nuclear war, what would the West have to do in order to provoke such an attack by the Russians? That is turning out to be a tough question to answer, given what the West has done thus far. Russian people have been attacked in NATO countries like Estonia. Russian assets have been seized. The West even engineered the assassination of Alexander Dugan’s daughter.

Over the last year, the West has done a number of things that would justify a response, but so far the Russians have been careful to avoid the trap. The closest they have come to a direct retaliation was the missile barrage after the Brits set off the truck bomb on the Kerch Bridge in the Crimea. Given that the missile attacks on the Ukrainian power grid have continued, that may have been a coincidence. The missile barrage would have required advanced planning.

The fact is time is on Russia’s side and they know it. Every day this war goes on drains the West of vital resources. The Pentagon is already making noises about the Ukraine war harming its ability to deal with China. The war has also exposed the fact that Europe has let its militaries and arms production go to seed. Germany, France and Britain no longer have a military for all practical purposes. It will take them years to fix the problems, even if they find the will to do so.

If the Russian have a very high tolerance for provocation, then the question flips around to the other side. What limit is there in Washington? Where is the line that the people running policy in the Biden will not cross? Given that regime players have been gleefully talking about “de-colonizing Russia” for the last year, it is hard to imagine a red line that they would not dare cross. If you are bragging about your plans to regime change Russia, you probably have no red lines.

Now, there is another angle here. This could all be the result of a bluff that has badly backfired on Washington. The initial taunts before the war were not intended to bait the Russians into launching their operation, but were a bluff. The subsequent economic sanctions and arms shipments were a further bluff. Washington was telling Moscow that they were in it for the long haul and would stuff Ukraine with arms. The hope was that Moscow would reconsider and retreat.

It is entirely possible that the Global American Empire is facing a catastrophe in Ukraine because the Russians called their bluff. It is also possible that the Russia misread the signals coming from the West. Given the mistakes they made early in the war, it could simply be the Russians read things the wrong way. They not only did not see it as a direct threat to intervene, they assumed it was just the usual hot air. One side was bluffing while the other side did not see the bluff.

Either way, once things got going the regime seems to have fallen into a form of the sunk cost fallacy. They invest in new bluffing strategies in order to save the investment in the previous failed bluffing strategy. At this point, the Russians know the limitations of the West in terms of time and material. The huffing and puffing from the West is seen as a bluff, one that can easily be ignored. Will Washington accept this reality or pivot to some desperate action?

That last question could decide the fate of the world. At this point it is clear that the Ukrainians cannot win. The death toll is staggering. The Russians cannot be bluffed or bullied, so what does Washington do next? Do they try one last desperate attempt to provoke the Russians into something foolish? Are there any sane people left in Washington who can step in and stop this madness? The fate of the world may rest on the mental stability of the crazies who started the war.

Regardless, it appears that the neocon scheme to de-colonize Russia is reaching a denouement in the coming months. Ukraine is running out of men to throw into the meat grinder and the West is running out of machines. The war will end in 2023, but how it ends is the question. Can Washington find some way to strike a deal with Russia that Russia will accept? Have the Russians concluded that no deal can be made with such untrustworthy people? We will know soon.

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