Affirmative Action

Posted on June 30, 2023 by thezman

This week I thought it would be useful to talk about the Supreme Court case regarding affirmative action in college admissions. As I pointed out on Gab and Twitter, the ruling is a big nothing burger when you read it. Schools cannot come right out and say they are not taking Whites or Asians, but they can still discriminate to their heart’s desire as long as they frame as a character evaluation.

Judge Roberts wrote, “nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.” Colleges will no doubt read this as a license to go crazy with their antiwhite agendas.

I did not cover this in the show, but this case is a good reminder that words on paper will never constrain a ruling class. The letter of the law means nothing to people who have no respect for the spirit of the law. Right now, our ruling class has no respect for the rules that are supposed to govern Western societies. No amount of ink spilling will cause them to change their minds about it.

Another thing worth mentioning that I did not cover in the show is the implied cowardice in these cases. When the Left had the whip hand on the court, they rammed through as much as they could as fast as they could. When the Right has control of the courts it is nothing but baby steps and concessions to the Left. This recent case was a chance to roll back a lot of horrible ideas, but they cucked.

This removes the last argument for voting Republican. We know that when they have control of Congress they will fink on their voters. When they have control of the White House, they will appoint people like John Roberts to the bench. Even with a stacked court the people who vote Republican cannot expect to get anything for their support, so what is the point of voting for a Republican?

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This Week’s Show

Contents

The Cases
The History
The Logic of Affirmative Action
Civil Rights Legislation
Four Ways To Manage A Diverse Society
Hard Segregation
Soft Segregation
Proportionalism
Free Association
The Problem With These Cases
Conclusion

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Questions Of Competence

Posted on June 29, 2023 by thezman

The crisis of competence has been a popular topic in dissident circles but largely ignored by mainstream politics. Human intelligence is a dangerous subject in this increasingly primitive time because it points to immutable differences in human beings, which contradicts the new religion. If who we are is determined by our genes, then many of the popular social fads are invalid. This makes discussing the declining competency of Western societies difficult.

Even so, the reality of the situation is hard to ignore, and we are seeing more mainstream writers notice the topic. Here is a post in the Claremont Review of Books discussing one cause of the decline. While the article focuses on how civil rights theology has warped the law, this warping of the legal system is having a deleterious impact on society by reducing competence to happy accident. When vague notions of social justice are primary, competence is an afterthought.

The most recent Budweiser panic is a good example. The ethic inside the company was built around notions of representation and equitable outcomes. These magic phrases did not spring from nothing. They are rooted in the same civil rights theology as the legal mechanism that enforce diversity quotas. It is a straight line from expecting equal outcomes to thinking you need to market cheap beer to crossdressers in order to make sure everyone is represented in your marketing.

Instead of a company making cheap beer, imagine the same company making airplane parts, elevator controls or military equipment. Competence is just as essential to beer making as making any other product. There is no reason to think that the company providing safety services to airports is less concerned for their diversity goals than the company making cheap beer. When diversity is our greatest strength, it means competence is somewhere down the list.

Of course, the new religion is not the only cause of the crisis of competence we are seeing throughout American society. This long article on the impact of diversity quietly mentions another elephant in the room. While not explicitly stated, the decline in intelligence brought on by immigration is making it more difficult to maintain the complex systems of our society. The millions moving to America are not fleeing well-run, high-IQ, high-trust societies. They are the exact opposite.

Again, this is not a new topic on this side of the great divide. Here is a post from 2022 on how the decline in competence led to the Ukraine war. Here is another post from last year going into the impact of the general decline in IQ. In 2018 Ed Dutton and Michael Woodley wrote a book on the topic of declining Western intelligence. Quantitative bloggers and HBD commentators have been talking about the impact of intelligence on society for decades now.

There is a chicken and egg angle to all of this. Is the spread of the new religion the prime mover of these observed phenomenon? For reasons as yet explained, the ruling elite of the Global American Empire embraced these vague notions of equity and diversity because they solved some unexamined psychological need or maybe they were deemed useful in promoting group solidarity. The resulting policies led to a decline in competence and general intelligence.

On the other hand, material prosperity reduced the risks in life, which resulted in more stupid people making it to sexual maturity. More of these people were then able to reproduce thus increasing the percentage of stupid people in society. Generation after generation the stupid multiplied due to the work of the intelligent in making life safer for the stupid. At a certain point, ideas like diversity and equity start to make sense as the stupid begin to overwhelm the competent.

The best evidence in support of this theory is the social fads. You have to be outlandishly stupid to think people are assigned a sex at birth. In fact, stupidity alone does not explain this lunacy. It must be amplified by a fanatical zeal to conform. In other words, people are not just dumber, they are increasingly terrified of the world around them and naturally seek safety in numbers. Western man has gone from being wolves taking on nature to moronic sheep hiding from nature.

All of this reads like a warning, as if there is something that can be done about the rapid decline in general competence. The immigration people say that ending immigration will help arrest the decline, but it is probably too late. Even if all immigration ends today, America becomes majority-minority by 2050 at the latest. It would also take competence to end immigration and we probably lack the ability to do it now. In other words, we have passed the point of no return.

The question then shifts from what can we do about it to what happens as the population loses the ability to maintain the social systems? For example, you cannot have a rights-based political culture with a low-IQ, low-trust population. You cannot leave people to question the rules and be inventive when you have to fear the consequences of their inventiveness. The Western way of organizing society can only work when the population is smart and competent.

This raises another question. It is not as if the future will be universal stupidity as it was in the movie Idiocracy. The future is going to be pockets of occidental competence in a sea of vibrant stupidity. Will high IQ, homogeneous New Hampshire want to be in the same country as diverse and stupid New Mexico? The former has an average IQ of 103, while New Mexico comes in at 95. Throw in the language and cultural barriers and you can see the problem.

This brings us to a final question stemming from the crisis of competence. If we cannot have the social structure we had when America was a European society, then what sort of social arrangements can we have in the diverse and stupid future? What sort of society is possible with the demographics of the future? Will all of the people of the future accept such those arrangements? Will the rump occidental population tolerate those conditions or seek to change them?

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What Is Happening Inside Russia

Posted on June 28, 2023 by thezman

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth” is a famous quote from Sherlock Holmes. While it can easily lead to the logical fallacy called the false dilemma, it is useful in arriving at a set of possible solutions to a problem. You first remove the answers that are impossible then think about the range of solutions that remain. It may not yield the exact right answer, but at least you avoid the wrong answer.

Such is the case with the Russian coup. Last weekend the head of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, announced he was going to march on Moscow with his troops and forcibly remove the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu. He quickly amended that claim to saying he was staging “a march for justice” to demand the removal of Shoigu and his top deputy Valery Gerasimov. Then a few thousand of his men drove up the highway toward Moscow, stopping at a nearby city.

Some sort of negotiation was initiated by the Kremlin, which led to a deal brokered by the head of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko. The “coup leaders”, including Prigozhin, would not be arrested. Instead, they would head off to Belarus with a contingent of the Wagner fighters. Presumably, these are the fighters who went with Prigozhin. The rest of the Wagner groups would be offered a deal to sign contracts with the Russian military or go back to civilian life.

In the history of military coups, this is the weirdest. An ironclad rule of putting down coup attempts is you punish the leaders of the coup in such a way that terrifies anyone thinking about staging a coup. The ghoulish punishments of the past came about in response to attempts to topple the king. The English used hanged, drawn and quartered, for example, as a special punishment for treason. Cutting open the traitor and pulling out his internals while still alive made a big impression.

Prigozhin going into semi-retirement in Belarus does not make much sense if he was staging a genuine coup. Whatever he was up to, the Kremlin has decided that his goal was not regime change at the top. Further, they decided that no one else thought it was a genuine coup either, so they were free to be lenient. In fact, it appears that the Kremlin has decided that extreme leniency serves their interests. Whatever happened here, we can reasonably assume it was not a coup attempt.

Another possibility is that this is some sort of four-dimensional chess maneuver to get the Wagner group into Belarus. From there they can attack Kiev. We can eliminate this option as the number of Wagner forces headed to Belarus is small, just a few thousand, so they are not attacking anything by themselves. To attack Kiev, you would need several hundred thousand troops. Kiev is a huge city with lots of defenses and tens of thousands of Ukrainian forces in and around it.

We can probably eliminate the other 4-D chess theories as well. The Russians are not fond of these sorts of public relations stunts. If for example, the Kremlin wanted to get rid of Prigozhin, they would not put on a show like this. Similarly, if Putin were looking for a way to sure up his position with regards to the hardliners, he would not risk letting them stage a coup. The right answer lies within the domain of people acting in what they thought was their own interests.

Starting from the least likely, the first possibility is that Prigozhin was operating as some sort of double agent. He was talking with Washington about staging a coup or maybe he was talking to the Ukrainians. In reality he was working with Moscow to help flush out some conspirators in the Ministry of Defense. Prigozhin’s march to Moscow was his final favor to Putin before he heads off to retirement. The drama worked as cover for the Kremlin as they rounded up the real conspirators.

This is possible, but very much in the four-dimensional chess zone, so it is probably the least likely answer. Putin’s position is secure, so he would not have to do this sort of Game of Thrones stuff to deal with troublemakers. He has made plenty of personnel changes during the last year, so he could arrest a couple of traitors. That and there has been no word on anyone being arrested. Russia is a modern country. If someone important disappears, everyone soon knows about it.

There is the possibility Prigozhin went mad. Like Colonel Kurtz, he lost touch with reality and this half-baked coup was the result. The fact that most of his troops refused to participate is an important data point. According to reliable sources, only a few thousand Wagner fighters went on the march. Given the increasingly erratic behavior of Prigozhin and his prior insane statements, this is a strong possibility. He went mad and the Kremlin simply found a peaceful way to manage it.

A similar and slightly more plausible option is that Prigozhin allowed his dispute with Shoigu to get the better of him. His genuine complaints about the conduct of the war were spoiled by his public airing of those complaints. His support within the military collapsed and he found himself with two bad options. One was wait to be fired and the other was to force his way into a better deal. In the end he gets to retire in a form of house arrest in neighboring Belarus.

Another version of this is that Prigozhin misjudged his support within the Kremlin, and he overestimated his public support. He made his move thinking he had a strong hand but once he reached Rostov, reality became clear to him. The reason the Kremlin quickly offered him a golden bridge out of his predicament, is they were confident they had the situation in hand. It also suggests they anticipated this was a possibility and were ready to end it without bloodshed.

Further support of this option is the way the Kremlin quickly moved to offer Prigozhin a way out of his dilemma. Russian forces had already circled Wagner at Rostov, with the Chechens on their way as a sign of unity. It was if they anticipated this possibility and not only prepared a response but had time to consider how it would look to their friends and allies. Independent polling also suggests this went over very well with the Russian people. Putin’s popularity is at a record high.

While the evidence suggests Prigozhin either acted from madness or hubris, there is one wrinkle that is worth mentioning. The usual suspects rushed out to post their fantasy version of what was happening as the events were unfolding. Many stated that they knew about this plot all along. Senior Kagan cult member Anne Applebaum had a narrative out on the first day. Note that her husband, a Polish diplomat, posted on Twitter about the Nord Stream bombing as it happened.

The Russians have used this to claim that Prigozhin may have been working with outside forces, strongly suggesting Washington was involved. The Biden people have been rushing around to deny these claims. The reason is they see that it will give the Kremlin an excuse to escalate in response. Yesterday the Russians bombed a hotel in Kramatorsk, which housed foreign mercenaries. The subsequent video revealed a lot of Americans digging through the rubble.

It has been clear for a while that the hardliners are not happy with the pace of the war, but Putin has been reluctant to go harder on Ukraine. He has also been the least bellicose of the Russian leaders with regards to Washington. Putin has always been in the dovish camp regarding the West. This Prigozhin incident may have opened a road for Putin to take toward the hawks. This Kramatorsk attack could be the start of a new period of escalation by Moscow.

In the end, we do not know the real story behind these events. All we can do is eliminate the impossible. Once you do that, we are left with a picture of the Russian leadership that is trying to avoid World War Three, but also balancing internal politics in order execute a war of attrition with the West. The end result of this Prigozhin incident will not be the end times as imagined by the Kagan cult, but it could lead to a more aggressive stance by Moscow toward the West.

Brain Dead Idiots

Posted on June 27, 2023 by thezman

If you were around in the 1980’s and old enough to have noticed politics, then you probably recall the smug satisfaction of liberals when they criticized Ronald Reagan and the people who supported him. You see, conservatives were uneducated rubes easily fooled by a jocular actor who took naps during the day. Smart and educated people were not fooled by this stuff. It was mostly a coping strategy, of course, as Reagan was wildly popular so liberals could only grumble.

The claim was not entirely without support. For most of the 20th century it was the Left that could claim intellectual rigor. Smart people went into various forms of liberal politics and churned out new ideas and proposals. From the New Deal to the Great Society, liberal intellectuals drove American politics. It was in the 1980’s when that started to change, and the right started to be the place where smart people went to debate the issues of the day and the polices to address those issues.

In fairness, there were very smart people on the Right prior to the Reagan years, but it was a small club. James Burnham, for example, wrote his foundational work during the Second World War. Bill Buckley was challenging the Left in the 1960’s. In other words, there were conservative intellectuals before the 1980’s. It is just that Reagan’s success worked to legitimize the right as an intellectual endeavor, which in turn brought in waves of young smart people.

The truth is the American Left never recovered from the civil rights era. The arc of American progressivism begins with demands to end slavery and ends with the demand that fat naked men have a right to wave their genitals in your face. While it is reasonable to say that the Left is degenerate and evil, the reason they embrace this stuff is that they are morons. The Left is now dominated by credentialed idiots who think being loud and obnoxious is the peak of humans thought.

As is their nature, however, the people who continue to identify as conservative followed their friends on the Left into idiocy. There was a time when the flagship publication of conservatism, National Review, sported some of the smartest and most original thinkers and critics in the country. That was a long time ago. Today you will find jarringly stupid posts like this one. That post is an echo of this longer and much dumber post in something called Law & Liberty.

There was a time when a phrase like “right-wing Marxism” would have been met with howls of laughter. The reason is the term is ridiculous. More important, there was a time when conservatives knew enough about Marxism and what it meant to be right-wing to know the term is ridiculous. The person who posted that item at National Review does not know this. The author of the source item seems to think the word “Marxism” is just another word for “bad.”

Putting aside the stupidity of the key phrase, the original article is riddled with errors that should have been noticed by the editor. An easy example is his claims about Russell Kirk, who has been forgotten by modern conservatives. The reason National Review types sent Kirk down the memory hole is he sided with the paleos. He proudly supported George Wallace, for example. Kirk was also the Michigan chairman of the Pat Buchanan campaign.

The author of that Law & Liberty article is either an idiot or a liar. He clearly does not understand the material. He does not know the history of the intellectual tradition that he is claiming to defend. Worse yet, his main argument is that the paleos were unpopular, which is proof they were wrong. There is no form of conservatism that claims truth is determined by popular consent. In fact, the rejection of that idea is the very first principle of conservatism as presented by Russell Kirk!

This brings us back to where we started. There was a time when conservatism was a vibrant and dynamic intellectual space. There was room for Sam Francis to critique Russel Kirk and a place for Mel Bradford to rebut the claims of Harry Jaffa. Those days are long gone now as conservatism has suffered from a long brain drain. What has replaced it is a narrow conformism. Dimwits like Bobby Miller and Michael Lucchese are now what passes for conservative thought.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor, this state of affairs was predicted by many of those old paleos hated by modern conservatives. Sam Francis observed that Buckley’s movement would inevitably have to compromise its principles in order to have a place at the table. The price of admission was accepting the moral claims of the people who controlled the political system. You could not be a critic of that system and be a beneficiary of it. Something had to give.

These moronic posts on conservative platforms are the inevitable result of the necessary brain-drain that started when conservatives joined the club. Smart people ask questions and asking questions is always a good way to fall afoul of the prevailing orthodoxy, so conservatism began to select for the incurious and dull. The long arc of conservatism ended with morons shrieking phrases like “right-wing Marxism” while they point at the intellectual debate to their right.

The Hour Is Late

Posted on June 26, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about a terrible, but instructive movie called Ooga Booga, a post about the Grim Reaper and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Note: American Renaissance is having its annual conference in August at the usual location in Tennessee. It is a great event and anyone who is interested in the sort of politics discussed here should make it there at least once. You can sign up for the event at the American Renaissance website.

Corruption is a natural part of government, regardless of the type of government, because men are not angels. Government has the power to compel which means it will always attract the sorts of people who are comfortable using force to take the property of others. In this regard, government corruption is a measure of the tolerance of corruption in the system. Government corruption is a function of the culture that controls the actions of the people in government.

By way of example, think about cheating in sports. Baseball developed a steroid problem because the culture within the sport came to tolerate it. No player dared report another player as it would lower his status in the sport. Once the league instituted tough drug testing measures, the culture changed. Players caught cheating let down their teams and even cost teammates money. This lowered their status so the culture of tolerance flipped to a culture of intolerance.

Police departments have always struggled with the culture of corruption. In the last century, big city police departments would go from clean to dirty almost overnight due to the actions of a few crooked cops. The crooked cops would find ways to get other cops to take bribes or participate in shakedowns. This made all the cops guilty to some degree, even if they just remained silent. An otherwise honest precinct quickly became corrupt because the culture changed.

Police corruption is useful in understanding government corruption. Police departments have a high degree of group loyalty. Fraternity is promoted and reinforced in many ways, thus discouraging cops from reporting corruption. No one wants to be seen as a rat, so the natural tendency is to ignore bad behavior by fellow cops. Corrupt cops easily turn this virtue into a vice, by using this high group loyalty as a way to pressure their fellow cops into ignoring their corruption.

When you look at corrupt police precincts, the pattern repeats. The dirty cops start small, often roping in fellow cops on small things like stealing money from the people they arrest. The victims are not only outsiders, but viewed as the bad guys, so no one is running to the boss to report it. At some point, a critical mass of cops is doing this stuff and the culture changes. The “cool guys” are the ones shaking down drug dealers, while the “squares” look the other way.

We may be seeing the same process in Washington. The credible charges against the Biden family are piling up, but so far, few are speaking out about it. Fringe bomb throwers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are making noises about it, but people with status have been slow to say anything. Chuck Grassley is the most soberminded person to raise the issue, but he was mostly ignored by his fellow senators when he raised the issue last month.

What we know so far is that while Joe Biden was Vice President, he extorted the government of Ukraine. We know this because he used to brag about threatening them into firing the prosecutor looking into corruption. We now know that the Ukrainian prosecutor was looking into Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, which was making deals with prominent Washington people. Hunter Biden was given a no-show job at the company, so we know what was happening here.

We also know that Hunter Biden shook down a Chinese company via text message, using Joe Biden as a threat. We also know the Chinese company gave money to Hunter Biden immediately after the threatening text message. In any other context this is a simple case of extortion. In the political context it is influence peddling. When this is added to the millions of dollars in mystery payments received by members of the Biden family, it suggests a long-term pattern of corruption.

Again, this sort of thing is to be expected. What matters here is the weird cone of silence around this story. Regime media mentions it in passing, often shaping these revelations as partisan bickering. Senior Republicans are trying hard to ignore the whole thing. One reason for this wall of silence is that this sort of corruption is so common that no one knows who is clean and who is dirty. Like the corrupt police precinct, the culture of corruption breeds a culture of silence.

The Hunter Biden stuff strongly suggests that this is not an isolated thing. Everyone in Washington knew that Hunter Biden was a crackhead. The only reason anyone would do business with him was to gain favors from his father. Everyone in Washington knows how things work, so no one can claim ignorance. It is a small town and everyone knows what everyone is doing. They may not have the nitty-gritty details, but they know the general outlines. There are few secrets in Washington.

The other thing that points to a widespread culture of corruption is the outlandish nature of the crimes. Biden bragging about threatening the Ukrainians never raised any alarms in Washington, because it was the new normal. Hunter getting a no-show job at a foreign company raised no eyebrows because everyone was doing it. Hunter being a crackhead doing deals with foreign companies should have raised alarms, but official Washington looked the other way.

This raises the question as to why we are hearing stories about Biden corruption from various whistleblowers and anonymous leakers. Speculation is that it is a way to ease Biden out of the way without a messy primary. That is possible, given his failing mental condition, but there is another reason. Based on his recent public appearances it is clear that he is fading quickly. It is possible he drops dead soon and that would mean putting the moronic Kamala Harris in charge.

Another answer is that no one cares. Things have reached the point in Washington where everyone shrugs at this stuff. Like the corrupt police precinct, morality has been turned on its head. Those not involved in shakedowns and influence peddling are viewed as fools, while the smash and grab people are high status. This behavior is now a form of ingroup signaling. Your willingness to take money and your creativity in doing it is what elevates your status in Washington.

None of this bodes well for the civic nationalist types. A system that presents the voters with a choice between two men in ski masks is not going to result in one of them turning on the other. What this all points to is that we are in the final phase of what Sir John Glubb described in The Fate of Empires. The American empire has entered the final phase where looting is the norm and decline is embraced. Everyone is grabbing what they can before the music stops and the party ends.

Social Justice

Posted on June 23, 2023 by thezman

Whenever I do a show on the new religion, I am struck by the stupidity of the claims made by these people, but also the radicalism of it. The people pushing this stuff are not just attacking the Western idea of individual rights. They are attacking the notion that you are an individual with some control over your life. Essential to the social justice cause is the assertion that you are a product of social forces.

Because your protestations against the various social pogroms that come out of the new religion are the result of your conditioning, the social justice warrior sees your resistance as proof of her claims. The more you try to explain why you do not want to submit to the new rules, the more certain she is that she is right. It is why these people are always on the attack. They need the feedback.

Ideologies, like religions, usually fall into two main camps. One camp is world-affirming and one is world-denying. The former accepts the reality of the human condition, while the latter assumes the human condition can be transcended. Folk religions seek help from the gods for practical things like a good harvest. Universal religions promise relief from suffering in the next life.

The new religion is a strange combination of these two main ideas. It starts with the unfairness and inequity of this world. The fight for social justice does not expressly promise salvation or relief from suffering, but the implication is that at some point in the future we attain social justice. On the other hand, it also seems to expect tangible benefits in the present if certain rituals are followed.

In practice the new religion promises the believers liberations from whatever it is they think is oppressing them. The blacks will be free of whiteness. The xirls will be free of the pale penis people. The fat will be liberated from gravity. This desire for liberation from some aspect of the present reality lacks specificity, which suggests it is a destination that lies outside the realm of material existence.

Integral to these claims is the blatant cries for vengeance. The attacks on white people, for example, are purely based in racial vengeance. Whether it is black teens attacking white people on the streets or the system being corrupted to exact vengeance on white people in official settings like a courtroom, the whole purpose is to get some payback in the here and now, not after the revolution.

Of course, much of what all of this depends upon is the mediocrity of the people embracing the social justice religion. Modern technological society has been difficult on the sorts of people bourgeoise society produces in abundance, which is the credentialed mediocrity. These are the people who think they are smart, but struggle with the complexity of modern life.

The new religion offers them refuge. They have to learn a bunch of esoteric insider language and concepts, which reinforces their belief in their own intelligence, but this is not math, so the right answer is a matter of perspective. Everyone gets their own truth and the sense they had to possess special qualities in order to gain it. Social justice is an ideal religion for alienated bourgeoise females.

This Week’s Show

Contents

The Question Weapon
What Is Social Justice?
What Is Equitable?
What Is Privilege?
Main Principles of Social Justice
How Does This End?

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Religious Equity

Posted on June 22, 2023 by thezman

Recently the Supreme Court struck down an Alabama redistricting plan on the grounds that it needed one more black district. The majority claimed that the Voting Rights Act demands racial proportionality in congressional districting, even though it says no such thing and if it did, it would be unconstitutional. The courts follow the news, and these judges understand what happens when you question racial orthodoxy, so they invented a new reason to conform with orthodoxy.

While the trend toward threatening judges, as is common in other corrupt societies, is an interesting topic, what matters here is the proportionality claim. One of the ideological shadows over this age is an old claim by the post-Mark culturalists, or what used to be called the New Left, is this idea that equity demands proportionality. Equity is the claim that a just society requires all people to equally participate and equally benefit from the stuff that come from society.

Back in the old days when left-wing meant high taxes on rich people, racial antagonists would argue that representation should be by race and sex. Congress should be composed along racial and sexual lines. If thirteen percent of America is black, then there should be fifty-seven blacks in Congress. Since roughly half the adult population is female, half of Congress should be female. This idea never got far, but the concept is embedded in the calls for equity.

At this point it is common to note that it makes no sense to hurl men into the void for noticing race while also demanding racial filters be applied to all outcomes. If it is true that black people know things about blackness that only black people can know and that requires that they be proportionally represented in all matters to ensure they get what they deserve, then race is not just real, but it is the only reality. The same can be said of sex, which gets the same treatment.

The inherent stupidity of the new religion is the main appeal. Ingratitude and grievance are functions of intelligence. The smarter you are, the less likely you are to think the world is unfair or that you are owed more than you deserve. Stupid people prefer to think their condition is the fault of others. The more magical and mysterious the cause, the more appealing it is to the aggrieved. Disproving something nutty like institutional racism is like disproving paranormal activity or astrology.

Putting that aside, the proportionality idea is not without some merit. Politics is about normative trade-offs. There is no empirically correct tax code, for example. Taxes are collected to pay for government. Who pays those taxes is a moral decision. The same is true for all public policy. The right policy is not something that can be established by the scientific method. It is what the rich people who control government think is the right policy or what they hope will keep the peasants docile.

With that in mind, if you are going to have representative government, then the legislative bodies should reflect the moral diversity of the people. The easiest way to sort people in terms of moral outlook is by their religious affiliation. Jews will have a different moral code than Muslims or Buddhists, for example. While all religions share moral claims, they have important differences. If the differences were superficial, there would be no need for separate religions.

Here is a recent list of congressmen and senators by religion. Presumably, this is based on what the person says about his religious identity. Many no doubt lie. For example, Joe Biden claims to be a Catholic, but he actively promotes things that are specifically against Catholic dogma. Is Hank Johnson a Buddhist? He is the guy who thinks Guam might flip over if too many people stand on one side. Moron is not a religion, but it could probably describe many members of Congress.

With that said, the most represented faith in Congress is Catholicism. They make up 28% of the elected officials. Catholics are 21% of the population, so the Vatican is significantly overrepresented in Washington politics. The next group is listed as “Protestant unspecified” at 20%, which probably means the person grew up in a secular home with a Protestant history. If you add this group to those who have no religious identity, this cohort of American is well-represented.

The group not getting equitable treatment, using the language of the new religion, is the largest religious identity in America. Protestants are roughly 45% of the American population but only 35% of Congress. Again, many of the people calling themselves Episcopalian or Presbyterian are faking it like we see with Catholics. What are the odds that Senator Chris Van Hollen can name a single Episcopal church in his state, much less the last time he went to mass?

This raises another consideration. About 30% of Americans attend services regularly, which is usually defined as at least once a month. About a third of Americans attend services for events like weddings, funerals, and holidays. It is fair to assume that a good portion of that group would attend regularly if the churches had not succumbed to the modern disease. Why go to church when you can hear a similar sermon during half time of the football game?

Now, how many elected officials regularly attend church services? How many of them even believe in God? There is no data on this, but it is a good guess that only a small portion of elected officials are genuinely religious. Instead, their views on religion and morality reflect the people who bankroll their campaigns and control the important parts of the managerial state. If you want to have a good career in Washington, you best keep your religious views to yourself.

If you want to know why so-called conservatives fall for every left-wing social fad, there is the answer. These people are experts at talking about religion and morality, but they exist in a world that has a different moral order and a radically different moral code from the people over whom they rule. Congressman X instinctively puts a sodomy flag on his Twitter profile, because that is what everyone else he knows is doing. The fact that he claims to be a Baptist is not in the front of his mind.

The point of all this is that one major cause of the current crisis of trust is that the ruling class of America has a different and district moral code. This shows up in the normative decisions made by Congress and elected officials. If Congress truly reflected the morality of the people, much of what drives Americans crazy about national politics would not exist, much less be the center of debate. Our politics would reflect our shared moral code and our shared moral priorities.

One of the ironies of this age is the people hopping up and down about equity also rail against religion and religious people. Yet the most likely way of reaching some sort of equitable result would start with equity in Congress. If the house and Senate truly reflected the moral sensibilities of the people, many of the issue at the heart of the social justice demand would be resolved. Religious equity in Washington would go a long way toward creating a just society.

Nixon’s Ghost

Posted on June 21, 2023 by thezman

Fifty years ago, Nixon was run out of politics mostly for the crime of having insulted the sensibilities of the new class in Washington. Through the Second World War, Washington had been a provincial backwater in terms of elite culture. The war changed that, turning the city into the imperial capital with a high culture of its own. Richard Nixon was an offence to the sensibilities of the bourgeois radicals who came to dominate what is now known as permanent Washington.

When you read the bill of indictment against Nixon from this point on the time line, it has a quant and innocent feel to it. Other than the Watergate break in, the rest of the alleged misdeeds look like an idealized version of the Clinton years. His accusers claimed he interfered in various executive agencies, which was a spurious claim at the time and laughably ridiculous from the perspective of this age. Nixon was a piker compared the presidents who followed him.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor is that the the young radicals of half a century ago are now in charge, doing all of the things that supposedly outraged them back in the Nixon years. Joe Biden, who was in national politics fifty years ago, an incredible fact all by itself, was fond of saying of Nixon that he was a singular problem, not a reflection of the system or his party. The argument in favor of defenestrating Nixon was that it was in defense of the system.

It has been clear for a long time now that Biden is personally corrupt. His son is a drug-addicted degenerate who has made tens of millions for the Biden family by selling access to and favors from his father. Fifty years ago, Biden and all of official Washington would have said such behavior is a threat to the system and the offender must be removed from office. Today, they say talking about this is a threat to our democracy and you need to be removed.

Of course, the news of Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal brings up another great parallel to the Nixon years. That is the modified limited hangout. A “limited hangout” is a bit of tradecraft used when the official story for an operation is blown. The operative then fully admits that the cover story is fake and volunteers some bits of the real story, but omitting the parts that he wants to conceal. This diverts public attention to the new narrative away from the real story.

In a meeting to discuss the unfolding Watergate scandal, H. R. Haldeman described to President Nixon the new public relations plan to contain the scandal. In the conversation he described it as a modified limited hangout. Interestingly, this is now common practice in Washington. We call it spin. Every day that goofy looking African woman reads the latest narratives to the Washington press zombies who then dutifully repeat the story on their platforms.

The Hunter Biden plea deal is a modified limited hangout. The first phase is the press release describing the deal. Then the media zombies will be fed some juicy details of the crimes in order to shift focus away from the other crimes. Anyone who raises the issue of Biden taking bribes from Ukraine will then get accused of being a conspiracy theorist or maybe a shill for Putin. In other words, the Biden family admits to a small crime in order to shift attention from the big crimes.

Obviously, the difference between now and then is the media. Nixon faced a much smaller mass media, but it was extremely hostile to him. Biden will never be asked about it or have it mentioned in his presence. This is why they went with such a small hangout, rather than something more substantive. In fact, this plea deal looks like a deliberate middle-finger to the rest of us. Even brain-dead zombies in conservative media have noticed this.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the degeneracy of the mass media since the Nixon years is quite a thing to behold. Not only are they defending this crooked deal, they are treating Hunter Biden as a victim. You see, these charges are never brought, but he is the son of the most popular man in human history, so he is being held to a higher standard of justice than mere mortals. The obsequious media rumpswab is the first line of defense for our managerial tyrants.

All that said, the argument against Nixon was fundamentally a republican one, in that his critics demanded that his defenders place loyalty to the institutions over loyalty to party or the man himself. There is no doubt that many of the Republicans who finked on Nixon thought of themselves as a modern Brutus. Even though they had doubts about the motives of his accusers, sacrificing Nixon in order to elevate republican virtue was a trade they made with conviction.

Now that the roles are reversed, those radicals of fifty years ago now demand loyalty to the man in order to defend “our democracy” which simply means the system that allows them to rule unchallenged. It is a good reminder that the lawful can never deal lawfully with the unlawful. That was the mistake fifty years ago. The lawful should have done what was necessary to physically remove the radicals from society. Instead, they thought their loyalty to the law would be enough.

It is an example of the Frank Herbert quote. “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.” For the radicals of fifty years ago, republican virtue was a bus they rode to power. They made those arguments because they thought they would work. Once in power, they got off the bus and climbed aboard the authoritarian bus.

The Crisis Of Trust

Posted on June 20, 2023 by thezman

The primary concern for any ruling elite is to remain the ruling elite, which means they must always look out for the peasant revolt. By definition, ruling elites are a minority population that rules over the majority. The relationship between the elite and the masses must be asymmetrical, which is why there are no elites that are poorer than the people over whom they rule. Combined with the numerical disparately this makes managing the relationship a primary concern for elites.

Second, but still in the primary group of concerns, is the palace coup, which is a way of saying instability in the elite class. There is a hierarchy within every elite and elites are composed of humans with a fixed lifespan. This means the people at the top of the elite class will not be there forever. This gives hope to younger members at the bottom who have ambitions about rising up the ranks. Every ruling elite needs a way to control this so that the elite can appear unified to the masses.

To see how this works, one only has to consider the most common form of rule in human history, which is monarchy. The king must always balance the needs of the people against the needs of his family, but he must also balance the interests of the prominent families against one another and his own interests. The king does not want angry peasants showing up at his castle, but he also has to make sure the nobility thinks he is their best bet to remain a nobility.

This is the key to the monarch’s success. The nobility, the church and the peasants all have to see the king as their best chance at peace and prosperity. If any of the three begins to see the king as the cause of their troubles or a threat to their position, they no longer have a reason to support the king. Maintaining the balance, therefore, requires the king to be the very symbol of order. It is only in an orderly world that you can be sure that your interest will be protected.

In the modern age, the same rules apply, but they are expressed in more abstract and arbitrary terms. For example, the party in charge is responsible for keeping a good economy, which is not always easy to quantify. Even in the best of times, there are people unhappy with the economy. In the booming 1980’s, the working classes were not happy because their jobs were being sold off to foreigners. The middle-class was thrilled because their jobs were booming.

That three-legged stool on which monarchy rests, the nobility, the church, and the peasantry, does not work in a liberal democracy. No one is loyal to anyone in liberal systems because we are all individuals. What fosters cooperation is individual loyalty to a set of ideas that define the system. The three-legged stool of monarchy is replaced with economics, security, and culture in a liberal democracy, which is held together by trust in the official holders and the institutions.

If you look at American elections going back since the dawn of this liberal democratic empire, they have always been about the same topics. Economics is always a top concern of voters and the pols seeking their vote. Security is a close second, expressed as crime fighting or foreign policy initiatives. The third item always on the list is something from the culture war that never ends. Elections turn on which side is most trusted at the moment on these items.

Go back to the beginning and you see it in presidents. Eisenhower was trusted on foreign policy because that was the top concern. Kennedy won in 1960 because the culture was becoming the top concern and Nixon was not viewed as a trustworthy political actor, despite his competence on other issues. Nixon won in 1968 by appealing to Southerners on cultural and security grounds. He also won votes from other regions due to his foreign policy credentials.

While democracy obscures elites from the people, the superficial aspects of the system operate by the oldest of rules. The people will generally support those who are most trusted on the pressing issues of the day. If it is the economy, then the side viewed as sympathetic to that issue will do well. When people are concerned about the culture, then those viewed as normal will triumph over those indulging in cultural experimentation and novelty.

This brings us back to the needs of the ruling elite. The dynamics of democracy are supposed to address both of their primary concerns. On the one hand, it is a useful feedback loop to keep the peasants from revolting. Instead of angry peasants showing up at the castle with a list of demands, the peasants select the options presented by the ruling class on election day. The rulers then know where to fix their attention and the peasants feel like their concerns are being addressed.

Of course, elections and the industry around them help solve the other problem within the elite, which is the palace coup. Elections are a sort of scoreboard used by elites to settle differences between the sides. It also helps them gauge how the peasants are responding to elite initiatives. This prevents elites from imposing polices that are good for the elite, but hated by the peasants. It reinforces the survival logic that must guide the internal behavior of all ruling elites.

If we look back at the two great revolutions in Western history, we can see how this natural order was at the center of the revolt. In pre-revolutionary France, the peasants were facing increasing pressure economically. The nobility was increasingly at odds with the king. The church was coming under pressure by the changing cultural landscape brought on by new ideas. All three legs of the system were faltering while trust in the king was declining.

Tsarist Russia faced a similar crisis. On the one hand, the peasants were under pressure from the changing economic conditions of the empire. On the other hand, the urban working class was demanding reform. The conservative culture was failing the peasants, but it was in opposition to the workers. The fracturing culture threatened the position of the nobility. Instead of being that which held the system together, the Tsar was increasingly viewed as the problem.

When you look at the current crisis, you first see that the feedback loop that allows the elite to take the temperature of the peasants is broken. The elite stopped trusting the election system after 2016. The elite response to this collapse in trust resulted in the peasants losing trust in the system in 2020. In other words, the trust system is collapsing on both sides of the relationship. This is what makes the debate over economics, security, and culture so bizarre.

The disconnect can be seen in the issues. The people are worried about the collapse of the American system, but the elites are pushing radical cultural fads like pedophilia and ritual child mutilation. The people are increasingly concerned for their safety, but elites are unleashing black criminals and promising global war. Inflation remains the top concern for Americans, but both parties ignore it. The political system and the voters are two ships passing in the night.

When you look at the other half of the elite concerns, the palace coup, it is clear that the elites are highly paranoid about one another. The behavior of the secret police toward the political class reflects that loss of trust in the political system. The increasing narrowness of debate within the media reflects the general fear of being seen as disloyal to the system. The people at the top are not just paranoid about the peasants but they also fear their own people.

Following the loss of the Russo-Japanese war, a delegation of liberal reformers led by an aristocrat named Sergei Trubetskoi went to the Tsar and told him that the people still trusted him, but they could no longer tolerate the chaos. In other words, it was not the policies of the Tsar that were causing civil unrest. It was the failure of those polices to restore order. Therefore, reform was needed to restore trust. The Tsar seemed to agree and then set about doing the opposite.

What followed was increased activity by the secret police and the unleashing of gangs loyal to the regime. Like Antifa, the SPLC, the ADL and the other regime aligned toadies and thugs, the Black Hundred set upon anyone suspected of questioning the Tsar or the tsarist system. Disorder was met by elite policies that created more disorder. Tsarist Russia was plunged into a spiral of declining trust by the one thing that held the system together, the Tsar himself.

The relevance to this age should be obvious. The current unrest is not due to incompetence or perfidy among the political class. That is an issue, but that has always been a feature of the liberal system. The cause of the current unrest is a collapse of trust in the system itself. In order to preserve their status, the elite is acting outside the agreed upon rules. This further erodes the peasant’s trust in the system, which feeds the elite distrust of the peasantry.

America is rapidly approaching that point where the calls for reform contradict the demands for order. The elite can initiate reform, but this puts their position at risk, so they view calls for reform as a physical threat. Therefore they choose to impose order, which is viewed by the peasants as a threat to their safety. Those two irreconcilable forces, reform and order, end up on the same track heading for a crash. This is never settle by the ballot box, but by the cartridge box.

Juneteenth Musings

Posted on June 19, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about drone technology, a post about the classic antiwar film All Quiet on the Western Front and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Integral to the managerial polyarchy is the narrative. This is the semi-official story for how the managerial elite believes events ought to unfold. The narrative promotes some cause or issue popular with the elite or it can simply work to promote solidarity in the managerial class by underscoring the difference between the members of the managerial class and the masses. The narrative not only frames reality, but often it is expected to shape reality by altering behavior.

The Ukraine war has provided good examples. When the war started, regime media figures were decorated with Ukraine flag lapel pins and instructed to say “keev” rather than Kiev, which everyone used up to that point. The official narrative was that Ukraine was the good guys and Russia the bad guys. For no reason at all, the evil Vladimir Putin decided to launch an attack on Ukraine. Soon, the volunteer army of regime toadies online was chanting the official lines.

The concept of “no reason at all” is a standard feature of regime narratives that are primarily about establishing a moral dichotomy. The bad guys are always described as acting irrationally and without a describable reason. The good guys being good are always acting from the best and most easily understood motives. Vladimir Putin is “crazy Ivan” capable of anything, while Zelensky is the heroic defender of democracy who only wants to defend his country.

It is an interesting inversion of cult behavior. To members of a cult, the rules of the cult are perfectly rational. The appeal of the cult is it provides clarity to the members who struggle with a disorganized mind. The member find herself surrounded by people who see things through the same lens. On the other hand, to those outside the cult, what happens inside the cult is strange and counter to objective reality. It is why cults have a negative connotation. They appear irrational.

The managerial class looks at the masses as a cult. The people who vote for the wrong candidate in elections are not acting from rational self-interest. They are not even acting from subjective preference. They are irrationally lashing out out of fear and anger for no reason at all! The role of the managerial class in the great narrative of life is to impose their rules on these people. Those wreckers and deviationists are cast into a role that supports the narrative.

We see this with the holiday of Juneteenth. If you lived in some parts of the South, you may have known about this event prior to now. Most black people did not celebrate the holiday, contrary to the current narrative. In fact, most black people heard about it when most white people heard about it a few years ago. As part of the ongoing pogroms against white people, the managerial elite decided to take this obscure regional event and turn it into a national holiday.

Of course, this holiday is part of a narrative that has been central to the managerial class since the middle of the last century. The great struggle is one of the main plot lines in the story that justifies the existence of the managerial elite. The struggle is against those backward, recalcitrant bad white people who tirelessly work to turn back the clock and overturn progress. As Joe Biden likes to say, those bad whites want to put black people back in chains.

Essential to the success of any narrative, according to managerial culture, is control of the means of cultural production. They have a materialist’s view of culture as a product that comes from the television or the internet, rather than the result of human interactions over a long span of time. They think they can use the media to flood the public space with their narratives. That will change the behavior of the masses as people will assume the narratives are true.

This has the side effect of reinforcing to the managerial class that their current narratives are not only factually correct, more morally correct. Afterall, everything they read in the media tells them that they are on the side of angels. Right now, they are sure that black people around the country are gathering to celebrate their Independence Day with public readings of the Emancipation Proclamation. Maybe they cap off the day by singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing”.

Reality is probably closer to this, but that does not make this weekend any different from most weekends in the summer. In heavily black cities crime remains an immutable fact of life, no matter how many black holidays are created. Maybe if the energy put into these antiwhite pogroms was directed toward cleaning up the inner-city ghettos, more black people would live to see the absurdity of Juneteenth, but no one in charge cares about black people, so the point is moot.

It does, however, point to the limits of narrative control. They can bang on about Juneteenth as much as they like but it will remain an artificial holiday that most people ignore unless they work at a bank or the Post Office. Then they get a three-day weekend to enjoy while their neighbors are at work. Martin Luther King Day has fallen into the same pattern. No amount of narrative framing will change the fact that for most people it is a meaningless day on the calendar.

There is a parallel here to Kwanzaa. This was invented as black Christmas in the 1960’s and promoted by the beautiful people as an authentic black event. It was mostly a joke, even among black people. The lesson of that experience was to make Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday. That did not quite work, but you cannot roll back a federal holiday, so it was good enough. That is why they skipped the marketing campaign and went straight to the federal holiday for Juneteenth.

The limits of the narrative tool may explain the panic and paranoia that have become a defining feature of the managerial class. Enormous effort was put into making Martin Luther King Day into black Christmas and it largely fizzled. This effort to make Juneteenth into black Independence Day is following the same arc. If you cannot convince people to celebrate a free day off according to the narrative, then it does not bode well for other projects.

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