Anemoia And Hauntology

Posted on July 17, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the singularity of war, a review of the classic film, From Here to Eternity and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

One of the oddities of the Obama administration was that it seemed as if they were working from a list of wrongs they were determined to right. Those wrongs were what the Left counted as their failures over the decades. A part of Obama being viewed as Black Jesus was his ability to heal the past. This was necessary as those old harms were what tied us to the present. It was only by righting those past wrongs that we could break free and enter the glorious future.

The most obvious example was the health care stuff. This proved to be a disaster for the Clinton administration, but that is not how the Left saw it. They viewed it as a betrayal and a defeat that had to be addressed. This is why the eventual policy was nothing like they promised or anything anyone would call reform. That was never the point of the exercise. The point was to have a redo of that old defeat and this time the good guys would win and erase that loss from memory.

This active revisionism turned up in all sorts of places. They had Hillary Clinton pose with Sergey Lavrov holding a red button. This was part of the Russian reset initiative designed to restart relations with Russia. In reality it was about soothing the wounds from the Reagan years when the Left lost the Cold War debate. The same vibe permeated their Iran initiative. Like the Russian reset, the Iran reproachment had no utility in the present. It was all about the past.

This backward-looking politics is plain now. The retreat into the past has jumped from the establishment Left to the establishment Right. This is not surprising, given the conservative habit of following the Left from one fad to the next. Here you have a collection of flunkies from Conservative Inc. doing cosplay. Instead of dressing up as characters from Japanese cartoons, they are pretending to be their favorite characters from the conservative movement.

Someone on Twitter referred to these people as Reagan Van Winkles. They went to sleep in the 1980’s and just awoke in the present, unaware of all that has happened over the last forty years. It is a clever line and there is certainly some truth to it, but these people are aware of the present. What they want is to go back to sleep and wake up in the 1980’s, as if the present is a terrible nightmare. They are live action role playing in order to take a timeout from the present.

Note the flavorless language. Sixty years ago, when the founders of the Buckley cult were getting started, they used language designed to inflame the passions of the great white middle-class, which they sensed was quietly seething at the cultural changes that had been unleashed by the Left. The language in that statement is so devoid of human passion that is could have been written by software. The point is not to excite the reader, but to put him asleep so he can dream of better times.

What makes this stuff weirder is that most of the people doing it are not old people trying to relive their youth. Nostalgia is understandable for old people, especially those nearing the end of their career. These people are experiencing anemoia, a nostalgic sense of longing for a past they have never lived. None of the “signatories” of that goofy list of principles were alive when Buckley started his cult. Many of them were barely aware of the world during the Reagan years.

On the other side of the old political consensus is hauntolgy, a sense that unfinished business from the past is haunting the present. Like Banquo’s ghost, the old failures in the old causes torment the neoliberal. It is not as if they learned from the old failures, but that they must find some way to make it right. The backwardness of left-wing politics is akin to the people in a horror movie putting an ancient cemetery back in its original state so the dead can finally rest.

In fairness, it is not just conventional politics that is backward looking. Most of the race realists want to go back to the past. They imagine a world similar to the 1950’s, except everyone knows the failures of trying to integrate blacks and whites. The harder core imagine they can go back to the interwar years and be their favorite uncle. Young Nick Fuentes is one click away from wearing a George Lincoln Rockwell costume while locking arms with the hip-hop community.

What all of this points to is the sense of dread than hangs over the American empire as it staggers through its end phase. Everything that it is, everything that defines the American identity is in the past. The only conception of the future is one that is somehow a repeat of the past, real, or imaginary. For a culture that has no future, the present represents the terrifying final step into the abyss, so the only option is to turn to the past and find comfort in reliving it.

Perhaps this weird backwardness is an essential step, and it will burn itself out as the present struggles become too much to ignore. On the other hand, maybe this is just the price of victory in the Cold War. The losers had to get on with the business of creating a new future, while the winners wanted to savor the victory. Our backward politics is the result of a victory party gone on for too long. Regardless, what comes next is not the past, but the future, and it will not include any of these people.

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The Closed Society

Posted on July 14, 2023 by thezman

To the Western ear, the phrase “closed society” brings to mind hermit kingdoms like North Korea or totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union. That is because the ideology of the American empire is the open society. The open society is tolerant and open to minorities while the closed society is intolerant. The former is always good while the latter is always bad, very very bad.

The open society is not the norm for human organization. In fact, the very idea of human organization requires both discrimination and intolerance. All human organizations must have rules to determine who is outside the group, who is inside the group and how this is enforced. An organization where anyone can come or go as they please is just an ad hoc mob, not an organization.

Therein lies the debilitating contradiction in the open society. If the goal is a society where all opinions are tolerated and given a fair hearing, it means tolerating ideas that run counter to the open society ideal. This is where Karl Popper’s famous phrase, “the paradox of tolerance”, comes into the conversation. In order to maintain the tolerant society, you must be intolerant of intolerance.

Of course, this is an unresolvable paradox, which is why our open and tolerant society increasing looks like a theocracy. It turns out that diversity is the bane of human organization because it multiplies the number of people who must be coerced in order to maintain the illusion of consensus. America is looking like a prison yard run by clerics because that is the only way to govern an open society.

It is a very big topic, but the show this week takes a swim in the shallow end of the pool, starting with George Soros and a little bit of Karl Popper. Soros deserves at least one show of his own, as he is one of the most consequential men of the late 20th century and now the first part of the 21st century. Perhaps a show on Yuri Slezkine’s book would be a good basis for exploring the life of George Soros.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

The Point of Society
The Open Society
- Soros Profile (Link)
- Soros Plan (Link)
The Limits Of Tolerance (Link)
The Problems With Open Society
The Closed Society

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The Gypsy Question

Posted on July 13, 2023 by thezman

If you go to certain parts of Europe, one of the things you will experience is this class of people who sort of exist and sort of not exist. They exist, as in they are part of non-contextual reality, but everyone tries to ignore them. You notice them when their children beg for money or try to sell you some useless trinkets. This is often just a way to distract you while they steal your wallet. These are, of course, Gypsies or what the cultural enforcers call the Roma people.

Gypsies are not everywhere. In Paris it feels like they are everywhere if you hang around the tourist areas. In Copenhagen there are no Gypsies, at least not in the main areas like you see in tourist traps. They exist in Denmark. Official statistics say there are about 5,000 Gypsies in the country, but the nature of Danish society makes the pick-pocket lifestyle impossible for them. Instead, they find other ways to sustain themselves that do not involve street crime.

In other parts of Europe, they will be in what amounts to Gypsy ghettos. This is most common in the old communist bloc. Ghettoization of minorities has been the habit in that part of the world for a long time. With lots of different people thrown together in artificially constructed kingdoms, the best solution to social conflict was peaceful separation, so minority troublesome populations ended up in ghettos. This persists today for universally despised populations like Gypsies.

That is one of the first puzzles about the Gypsies. Throughout Europe they are hated, and they have always been hated. Even the efforts to embrace the new American religion regarding diversity and inclusion has not extended to the Gypsies. No amount of hectoring can overcome centuries of hatred. That raises an obvious question as to why these people continue to exist as a population. Why have they not disappeared through assimilation and self-deportation?

This becomes even more of a puzzle when you see that the locals have not just treated these people as pariahs. Some people have probably heard about the organized murder of Jews in the Second World War, but the murder of the Gypsy population dwarfs the other persecutions. Half of the Gypsy population was killed in the war, mostly because it was an opportunity to kill them. The locals just took advantage of the opportunity to rid themselves of these people.

Logic says that if you are at risk of death living where you live, then you would be smart to find a new place to live. American suburbs exist because of this logic. Fearing black crime, white people moved from cities into the surrounding suburbs. The Jewish population in American swelled a century ago because Jews were under constant threat in the Russian empire. The great wave of Jewish immigrants at the end of the 19th century was mostl from the fringes of Tsarist Russia.

Despite facing “you’re not welcome” signs all over Europe, the Gypsy population remains a fixture. It says something about a people that they want to be somewhere that they are not wanted and will never be accepted. It could simply be that alienation reinforces their culture. They hang together because it is impossible for their members to assimilate into greater society. This results in their culture having a hostile and parasitic relationship with the host population.

This process operates for other subgroups. The Travelers in the English-speaking world are a lot like the Gypsies. They are not Gypsies. They are Irish, Scots, and English that probably came into existence in the 17th century. The people we are now supposed to call the Roma are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group that migrated out of the Indian subcontinent around 1000 AD. Despite having no biological, linguistic, or cultural connection to Gypsies, Travelers are remarkably similar.

The theory is that Travelers became landless people who learned to survive travelling around doing labor and stealing. That last part is what made them social pariahs and isolated them from the rest of society. Most likely, those who could integrate back into society and wanted to do it, were boiled off. The result was a selection process in favor of people with a strong desire for the lifestyle and the ability to serve the people inside their clans, resulting in an increase in Traveler-ness.

This turns up in genetic studies. Closed populations will tend to have specific genetic issues due to the founding population having those traits and the consequences of marriage only within the group. The Amish are another good example. What this means is that once a group is cut off from the main group, a process develops that reinforces this separation both culturally and biologically. In the case of the Gypsies, who they are depends in part on being despised by the host population.

Interestingly, Gypsies appear to be quite dull. Intelligence studies put their average IQ in the mid-70’s, which is what you see with Somalis. This may explain why they are most common in the duller parts of Europe, like the Balkans. A population of parasitic simpletons is not going to do well amongst the high-IQ Swedes, but they can survive among the atomized and tribal population in the Balkans. Even so, it is surprising that they have survived at all given their limitations.

As a comparison, Irish Travelers check in at around eighty-seven compared to the average for the Irish population of ninety-two. This makes sense. Their origin story suggests they were the losers in an economic game of musical chairs. Rather than end up in ghettos and trailer parks, which did not exist, they ended up as itinerant workers and thieves. In the modern age they are known for living in caravan parks, which are a rough equivalent to the American mobile home park.

The persistence of Gypsies raises another question. The open society that is being forced upon the West requires assimilation. It is assumed that minority populations wish to assimilate but are prevented from doing so because of whiteness. The Gypsies and the Travelers are two good examples of minority populations that refuse to assimilate because they know they would cease to exist if they did assimilate. The open society people have the same Gypsy problem as the fascists.

Of course, the question at the root of it all is what does the majority do about a minority population that cannot and will not fit into society? This is a problem that has vexed political philosophy since John Stuart Mill. You can force them to comply, but this comes at a cost, and it creates new problems like social unrest. You can remove them, but as we see with Gypsies, they just keep coming back. Even the mass murder of Gypsies in the last century did not remove them from Europe.

The irony is that the solution the world has arrived upon for dealing with this problem is the one which caused the problem in the first place. The isolation of unassimilable and incompatible people is what you see everywhere, not just with Gypsies. The “solution” to the Gypsy problem is to try to keep them bottled up on the fringes of society, which ensures that there will also be a steady supply of Gypsies. The solution to the problem makes sure the problem is never solved.

Contemplating The Numbers

Posted on July 12, 2023 by thezman

A genuinely novel feature of the modern age is numbers, as in statistics about all sorts of things regarding daily life. Every day some new set of numbers is announced and people who allegedly know about the subject will comment upon them. The government is about to release a fresh batch of inflation data and the volunteer army of economists will talk about them for the next week. The modern age is a game of numbers about everything including the numbers.

This was not always so. For most of human history people could only tell if there was food inflation by noticing that food was more expensive. The king did not send someone out to read the latest inflation figures. The main reason is the king did not know those figures and had no reason to know. That is the other thing about numbers. They only mean something to us in context. The official inflation rate matters only when you understand the concept behind those numbers.

Months after Bud Lite decided to associate their brand with child molesters, people are still tracking the numbers associated with the brand. They have lost X million in market value and X percent of market share. Bud Lite is no longer the most popular cheap beer and has lost X percent of sales year-over-year. To the people in the culture war, these numbers have meaning. It says that lots of people agree with them on the moral question at the center of those numbers.

Moral arithmetic is everywhere. Nick Fuentes went on a ghetto internet program the other day and his fans cannot stop talking about the numbers. They say that over one hundred thousand people got to see him use the N-word in front of a group of black people who look like they work at a strip club. What he said and did and where he did it is not what matters. It is how many people saw it that matters. The underlying logic is the bigger the number, the better the result.

The entertainment business is all about numbers. An artistically grotesque film that sells millions of tickets is better than a great film that only appeals to a niche audience or people with refined tastes. The reason is we do not have a moral metric to use to rate the artistic quality of films. We have ranking lists, but they often rely on the numbers related to popularity. The first Star Wars movies got high ratings from critics because they made a lot of money, despite being mediocre content.

One reason popular politics looks like a carnival is that we can measure popularity through polling and voting. If fifty percent plus one think candidate X is best, then he is the best, even if he is a brain damaged hobo. This is why political actors degrade themselves for attention. The math of politics says that X percentage of people who notice you will agree with you, so the goal is to always increase the number of people who take notice of you. That is the math of the circus.

Roger Scruton once described conservatism as the understanding that there are things too important to be subjected to the marketplace. This is essentially a rejection of the math of democracy. Just because one idea has a bigger number next to it than the other idea does not mean it is true or qualitatively better. Having a brain damaged hobo in the senate is not normatively better than having a Turkish carny in the senate, no matter what the numbers tell us.

This is the problem with conservatism. Who decides that something is too important to be subject to the numbers? There are only two choices. Either a supernatural force like God decides or the people through time and experience decide what is no longer subject to the numbers. The former requires a strong religious foundation for society and the latter is just democracy in slow motion. It turns out that Sir John Filmer was right, and John Locke was wrong.

Of course, we value the numbers of life in this age because we trust that the numbers are not just a reflection of some normative truth but that they are accurate. Low inflation is a good thing so when the government comes out with numbers that say it is at or near the target of two percent, the experts cheer the rulers. This only makes sense if you think the government numbers are correct. The math of this age rests on people trusting the numbers of this age.

Is inflation really near three percent now? Did Joe Biden really get more votes than any human in the history of elections? Do most Americans back Ukraine? Was last Thursday the hottest day in the history of the planet? Despite the lack of evidence to support most of the numbers, most people seem to trust them. At the same time, most people do not trust the people issuing the numbers. For most of human history people would know to never trust anything from untrustworthy people.

That is the other novel thing about this age. Christianity has faded for most people as a foundation for moral claims. Something has to fill the void, so we have been flooded with new numbers to function as the authority. This explains why people trust the numbers while distrusting the people issuing the numbers. People are believing machines so when they stop believing in God, they will find something else. In this age people have come to trust the numbers as a last resort.

In a way though, this is the metric of the liberal society. It works when people can trust the people in official positions. They can trust those people because they trust the institutions to police the people in the institutions. Even in times when the office holders are distrusted, the people can still trust the numbers because they are viewed as the product of the institutions. As long as people still trust the numbers, the rulers are safe, despite the fact they do nothing but lie to us.

The DeSantis Dud

Posted on July 11, 2023 by thezman

When Governor Ron DeSantis announced that he was running for the Republican Party nomination, it seemed like the predictions where true. He was going to be the antidote to Trump, if not Trumpism. For a few weeks everyone was talking about this guy as if he was a viral video. Then all of a sudden, he disappeared. The media stopped covering him, other than when he insulted their sacred cows. His social media influencers are desperate for attention but are mostly ignored.

There were two schools of thought on DeSantis. One school said he would run as Trump without Trumpism, meaning without the antics. He would make the case for the same issues but do so in a more conventional manner. The other school of thought said he would be the Ted Cruz of the race. He would stake out a position just inside Trump so he would not scare the sissies, but he would still get some respect from the more hardcore members of the party voting base.

Both options rested on an assumption that Trump eventually would be removed from the nomination process. Maybe the regime would put him jail. Maybe the weight of the many indictments would force him to quit. Perhaps the Republican Party would combine the two and change the rules to exclude Trump. Regardless of how, the underlying logic of the DeSantis campaign rested on Trump being eliminated. DeSantis was running as the guy who comes after that event.

Instead, DeSantis has staked out a third path, the boring path. Rather than being Trump-lite or being a kinder, gentler Trump, he is Ned Flanders. A look at his YouTube page explains why no one talks about DeSantis. His lead video is titled “America is Worth the Fight” which is what you expect from a white box consulting firm that creates generic videos for local politicians on a budget. It is the sort of ad Republicans in safe suburban districts run when a Democrat is in the White House.

After getting some heat from the usual suspects for the ad tying Trump to the pride campaigns, they deleted that ad and rolled out the “Mammas for DeSantis” ad campaign that some idiot consultants thinks are clever. They think it is clever because they think the people who vote in Republican primaries are morons. They also repeatedly use the bot-phrase “game changer” in their media campaign around these new videos, which is what you get from consultants.

What the campaign is telling us so far is they have no idea why DeSantis is running, and they have no idea who will be voting in the election. The campaign is being run by people who exist in the Potemkin village that serves as the imperial capital and all of them think if they wish hard enough, it will be 2012 again. That was the peak of the political class, where their manufactured man, Barak Obama, had won reelection over the least authentic human on earth, Mitt Romney.

The results are what you expect from such a dreary campaign. A state poll released yesterday is a good indication of what is happening. Trump now leads DeSantis in Florida by twenty points. Sure, Trump has a big presence in the state, but DeSantis is the sitting governor and he just won reelection in a landslide. The voters there like him and want to like him. What this suggests is they like him as their governor, but they do not like the idea of him being president.

This is the pattern everywhere. In state after state, DeSantis has seen his polling settle into the low-20% range. After people got to see him, they were not impressed, and his initial support has started to drain away. The main reason, of course, is he is not answering the only question that matters in this primary, “why should you vote for anyone other than Donald Trump?” If you cannot provide an answer, the answer is provided for you, and it is not a good answer.

What voters are seeing thus far is that DeSantis is not a risk taker. He is instinctively a cautious guy. Instead of roaring out of the gate with an affirmative campaign based on a set of key issues he thinks are important, he is rolling out a message that has been market-tested by the same people who get hired by fast food chains to market test their latest ad campaign. Inevitably, they lean toward avoiding controversy as no consultant ever gets fired for being too cautious.

The first debate is six weeks away, so the DeSantis people have time to retool the campaign in order to reintroduce their guy to the country. As it stands, the people on the stage will be Trump, DeSantis, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Pence and maybe Chris Christie. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum is trying to buy his way on stage through some sort of gift card scheme. Trump has hinted that he could skip this debate, or he might be in jail by then.

Assuming no changes, this is a one-shot deal for DeSantis. Ramaswamy will steal the show with his Kwiki Mart act. He will avoid attacking Trump and instead spend his time telling older white people that they are the best. Christie will be a fat loudmouth who will spend his time insulting Trump. The midgets will be boring extras. In other words, DeSantis is going to have to find a way to get attention, without sounding like a kook while also providing an affirmative case for himself.

What this will require is risk taking. Over the next six months his campaign should be rolling out ads that send the regime media into orbit, while his campaign refuses to talk to them about anything. Instead, DeSantis spends the time shaking hands, talking shop, and building relationships with the locals in Iowa and New Hampshire. This creates anticipation for the debate and will bait the moderators into focusing on him and his provocative ads, while he calmly answers their questions.

There are no signs that this will happen or could happen. Chance favors the bold and so far, his campaign has been everything but bold. Their campaign is based on something removing Trump from the ballot before people start voting. That is why DeSantis may not make it past New Hampshire. If your success depends on others acting in your interests, you are unlikely to succeed. Winners take risks because they are not afraid to lose. The DeSantis campaign is too afraid to win.

Thoughts On The New Gods

Posted on July 10, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about my trip top the doctor, a post about watching television in the rain 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.

Despite their many parallels in practice, we separate ideology from religion as two separate things that appeal to different aspect of man. Ideology is an integrated set of assertions, theories, and goals for achieving a social end, while religion is assumed to be a set of beliefs with a supernatural basis. The ideologue is focused on imposing changes in how we live as humans in a human society, while the believer is someone primarily focused on how the individual reaches the afterlife.

This distinction is entirely due to Christianity, which is a universal set of beliefs that apply to all individuals, even those unaware of it. Christians start with the belief that all people have an individual relationship with God. The point of life is to discover and embrace this relationship so that you can sit at the feet of God in the afterlife. As a result, we think of religion as a world-rejecting phenomenon. It is focused on what comes after this life, not how to improve this life.

This has not always been how religion works. What we used to call paganism was not particularly concerned with the afterlife. The religions of pre-Christian people were often world-affirming and specific to their people. A people had their gods to whom they could appeal for practical things like a good harvest or protection from the bad people on the other side of the valley. Their gods were tied to their identity as a people and their customs that gave meaning to their lives.

Some of the old religion still exists in this age. You cannot become a Druze, for example, even if you learn their religion. You have to be born into their faith in order to be accepted into their religion. Shintoism is not as strict, in terms of outsiders joining the religion, but for all practical purposes it is a Japanese faith. It is impossible to disentangle Shinto belief from Japanese identity. These are what people who study religion call folk religions.

Here is where you see the lines between religion and ideology blur. While Marxism does not possess a god or gods, it is not without its mystery. Marxist historiography is a central tenet of Marxism that must be accepted without proof. Then you have the assertion that this arc of history must bend toward communism. Of course, there is the assumption that all of mankind will eventually progress to the point where they join the rest of humanity in the communist paradise.

The similarities between religion and ideology have been noted many times, but always as a way to underscore the irrationality of the ideologue. The climate change people are compared to a cult, because they carry on as if they are worshipping Mother Earth and fear she is unhappy with mankind. Calling it a religion is a way to dismiss their claims to science and reason. Joe Sobran made the comparison between the Left and religion in his essay about the hive.

There may be another way of using this comparison. For example, the distinction made between universal religions like Christianity and folk religions like Shintoism provide an insight into why one triumphed over the other with some exceptions. Christianity pushed out paganism in Europe because it offered something that paganism either did not offer or did not address as well as the new religion. Similarly, Christianity has been a failure in Japan because it lacks something the native religion possesses.

A simple example is the Gaia worshippers. What is it about this doomsday cult that the believers find appealing? There is a money racket to it, for sure, but this is only possible because millions of people sense that the way we are living in the modern age is leading to some sort of supernatural doom. Is this belief appealing because it offers salvation from this world or is the appeal that it provides them with something to supplement their identity as a group?

If we take that last part a bit further and incorporate Gaia worship into the basket of things we call the Left, the result is a collection of beliefs that define a group of people and give them an elevated sense of status. Proof of their uniqueness is their membership in a group that holds these beliefs. They are on the right side of history because they carry their groceries in grimy canvas sacks and take their young children to drag shows at the local library.

Perhaps the appeal of what we call wokeness lies in the sense of identity it provides to people who live in highly conformist societies. The people who embrace these ideas are uniformly white, educated and upper-middle-class. They live in inorganic sterile suburban developments and work in fields with high levels of enforced conformity, like education, government, and corporate management. The folk nature of the new religion is what helps give their lives meaning.

On the other hand, it is possible that the new religion is the vestigial part of the old world-rejecting religion expressing through social fads. The gender stuff is a clear rejection of biological reality. Gaia worship is the rejection of human progress and civilization itself. The thread that runs through all of these social fads is their destructiveness to Western societies. The new religion of wrecking things appeals to people seeking an escape from this life.

The other appeal is that the destruction of the old order and the coming of the new world orders is full of uncertainty. The weirdness of these beliefs operates as a selection mechanism, filtering out anyone who questions the project. The new religion selects for those seeking the same shelter from the storm, but also those who think that when the storm passes, they will lead the way into the next phase of humanity. There is, after all, a whiff of Calvinism to all of this.

At this point, it is hard to know where the new religion will go or where it will end up on the folk-universal spectrum. What we can know is that new religions are like new ideologies in that they appeal to those unhappy with the present. Communism appealed to disaffected intellectuals and the urban industrial poor. Christianity appealed to provincials in the failing Roman empire. The reason this new religion appeals to the managerial class is they are unhappy with the present.

A Rant About Healthcare

Posted on July 7, 2023 by thezman

As I race toward decrepitude, my interaction with the healthcare system will increase, thus raising my awareness of its many faults. At this point, I am lucky to only have to see the doctor once a year for a physical. I have had occasional injuries in the past, but none of those required more than a single visit. Even so, the lunacy of the healthcare system is obvious even at this stage of my life.

The thing about the system is that it works to the interest of everyone except the patients, but we insist on calling it private healthcare. There is nothing private about it as every aspect is controlled by corporate interests, which both advance and direct government interests in the system. If you want to understand fascist economics, spend some time in the American healthcare system.

Something I did not mention in the show is that a sizable chunk of what passes for healthcare is either unnecessary or not healthcare. The legions of bureaucrats and functionaries that serve only the interest of the system are a great example of Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy. The system is an upside-down pyramid with the doctors and nurses at the bottom.

It is hard to see how this system survives the great wave of baby boomer retirement and the wave of demographic change. A highly complex system operated by low-IQ people is doomed due to that mismatch, but throw in the tens of millions of old people demanding services and collapse is the only possible outcome. The Covid response was a glimpse of how bad things will get in the next decade.

This Week’s Show

Contents

An Unhinged Rant About Healthcare

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Death By A Thousand Lies

Posted on July 6, 2023 by thezman

On July 4th, a Federal judge in Louisiana issued an injunction against the Federal government barring various departments from contacting social media companies with regards to censoring speech online. This is a practice that started in the Trump years but took off under the Biden administration. On a daily basis government actors contact the censors at these companies and tell them which posts to remove, users to ban and topics that are to be suppressed that day.

In the Trump years, this practice consisted mostly of government officials calling to complain about things that were obviously fake about the White House. Given the lunacy of the people running these companies, the complaints were ignored, but the complaints from fellow partisans were not ignored. A working relationship between the censors and the FBI, DHS and other agencies evolved. Under Biden it is one click away from being enshrined in government regulation.

Most people alive today remember when the media proudly refused to cooperate with the government on this stuff. They would make a big deal about not going along with government requests to suppress stories. It was all a lie, of course, but they felt the need to make a big show of it. The secret police had long ago infiltrated the major media companies to shape the news. Operation Shamrock and Operation Mockingbird we both used to control the media.

The response from the media was much different when the Twitter Files revealed the level of cooperation between Twitter censors and the government. The primary response was to ignore the whole thing. This is the real power of the media. They can simply ignore a story and let it be buried under a mountain of nonsense about carny folk or conspiracy theories about things like global warming. The second response was to trash the reputation of Matt Taibbi who did the reporting.

So far, the media response to this injunction is what you would expect. On the one hand, they are treating it as a partisan issue. You see, it is the nasty Republican states that are hassling Biden for no reason at all. On the other hand, this ruling is preventing the government from defending our democracy against election interference. The brave disinformation researchers are now prevented from doing their work to protect you from words and sounds that threaten our democracy.

Disinformation is information that is intended to deceive, usually from an official source, like the media or the government. This is an easily solved problem by having an adversarial relationship between the government and the media so both sides police each other. Instead, the media has teamed up with the state to battle this invisible fiend who is attacking our democracy. It is tempting to call this language Orwellian, but it is too ridiculous and insane to be Orwellian.

This is a feature of managerial polyarchy that does not get attention. An enormous amount of time is spent on imaginary things. The Russian collusion hoax probably cost over a billion dollars in the end. It was something that obviously did not exist, because it could not exist, but for the people in the hive it had to exist, so they treated it as if it were as real as a rose bush. Take a tour through the fever swamps of the hive and you will see plenty of people who still believe in it.

Then you have the innate need to credentialize everything. Since Grog sold a faulty wheel to Trog, humans have been trying to deceive other humans. In fact, the second oldest profession rests on this very idea. Of course, you cannot have public debate without people trying to convince others of things that are not true. The argument in favor of democracy starts with accepting this trade-off. You accept false opinions in order to encourage the free flow of ideas.

Suddenly, the people who used to claim to be the guardians of this idea are obsessed with disinformation. So much so they will help the government crush anyone who dares say anything that has not been approved. Of course, this means there must be disinformation researchers and disinformation experts. Colleges are now offering courses on the subject. How long before we see someone with the title “licensed disinformation researcher” on a cable chat show?

Notice no one ever asks what a disinformation expert does. The most likely reason for this is the people in this racket could not tell you. Here is the Wilson Center’s page on their disinformation project. Nina Jankowicz is listed a senior fellow. Read her bio and you will see that her only gainful employment has been as a professional liar, spreading government propaganda. Perhaps the theory here is the same as the government hiring former criminals to solve crimes.

If you put “disinformation expert” into a search engine you get millions of links to stories featuring them. If you search on how to become a disinformation expert, then you will see tumbleweeds on your screen. Everyone seems to accept that this profession is real, but no one has the slightest idea how you get the title. One would think that someone in the media would do a deep dive into the topic, but that would risk being accused of disinformation and who wants that?

What this reveals is the inherent decadence of managerialism. Since all authority lies with the expert, every opinion must have an expert behind it. The demand for experts is unlimited, so you end up with experts in things like disinformation. The same process unleashed the army of bigots known as antiracism experts. In place of a holy book or the word of the local shaman, moral authority lies with the expert, so the managerial system manufactures an expert for every normative claim.

There is a practical value to this for the system. These make-believe jobs provide work for the swelling army of credentialed mediocrities. There are now millions of people calling themselves “open-source intelligence researchers.” What this means is they spend all day on Google, going past the first couple of pages. This is the town busy body for the digital age. They work with the disinformation experts to get you banned from Twitter for noticing things.

It is tempting to focus on the un-American aspects of these censorship campaigns, but the fact is America stopped being a rights-based society long ago. The important issue is the vulnerability it reveals. The regime is employing armies of people to control information online and failing miserably. It turns out that the unguarded entrance to the Death Star is a well-formed meme. This probably explains why they are treating Douglas Mackey like his public enemy number one.

It is a sweet irony that a regime that is built on a foundation of lies thinks that its vulnerability is clever lies on Twitter. They are not wrong about this. The regime of lies was possible because people trusted the system. People living in a world of lies are not going to trust the system and they are certainly not going to trust the people who are responsible for the world of lies. They will seek out alternatives. It turns out that the answer to the Big Lie is millions of little lies.

The Russian Anaconda

Posted on July 5, 2023 by thezman

Wars are often described in the context of the diplomacy between the combatants and the battles that make up the war. Today is the anniversary of the launch of Operation Citadel by the Germans in the Second World War. This battle was part of the larger Battle of Kursk, which featured the largest tank battle in history. This battle, like the war itself, is described by its various operations. It was decided, however, by decisions made by both sides long before the battle took place.

It is those decisions made in advance of war that play the biggest role. The planning of both sides, their assumptions about the other side, as well as assumptions about the course of the war, are the major factors in a war. Once the fighting begins, both sides are often swept up in the action, which is the product of their plans and assumptions interacting with the plans and assumptions of the other side. Fighting becomes a machine with a mind of its own.

We see this with the Ukraine war. Before the actual fighting, both sides were busy preparing for what they assumed would come next. The Russians amassed about 150,000 men on the border of the Donbas. The Ukrainians had been preparing a summer attack on the Donbas but switched to preparing for a defense. Both sides were preparing based on the assumptions they were making about the other. In the case of Ukraine, their assumptions were NATO assumptions.

The Russians were the first to move their pieces on the board. They assumed that the Ukrainians would not want a war. They assumed Europe would jump in to broker some sort of peace deal based on the Minsk agreements in 2014. They crossed the border in Ukraine assuming they would not have to do much fighting. The sight of Russian tanks outside Kiev would conjure images of war, which would cause the Europeans to rush to the table offer a peace deal.

This plan was a total failure for the Russians because they were operating from assumptions about the West that were all wrong. Ukraine was not interested in a deal and the Europeans would not try to persuade them because Washington was not interested in a deal. Washington wanted regime change in Russia, which meant they wanted war with Russia in the Ukraine. Not only that but the Minsk agreements were a deliberate ruse to sucker the Russians.

In the spring of 2022, the Russians had to rethink everything. This meant new assumptions and new plans based on those assumptions. This is when they reorganized their command structure, called up hundreds of thousands of reserves and embarked on an entirely new strategy for dealing with the West. The Russians pulled out a blank piece of paper, wrote down what they knew, what they thought they knew and then built a war plan from what they had on the paper.

On the other side, the West had been preparing for this war since Washington overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014. Their base assumption was that Russia was too weak to either stop NATO from expanding into Ukraine or two weak to sustain the effort required to halt NATO expansion. They would either put nuclear missiles on Russian’s border or they would get war that would quickly exhaust the Russians, thus ushering in the planned breakup of Russia.

At the start of the war, the Ukrainians were faced with the same choices that faced the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War. When facing a more powerful opponent, you can either make a daring attack on their forces hoping to force a truce, fall back into defense hoping to sap their will to fight or you can look for some way to reduce their ability to conduct the war. This may mean using unconventional tactics to destroy their war production and logistics networks.

In the case of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis preferred the defensive strategy, assuming the North would quickly tire of the war. General Lee preferred to go on attack, largely based on the same assumption. The superior field commanders of the South would quickly drive up the cost of war for the North. Stonewall Jackson, on the other hand, saw the problem in both strategies. He preferred to attack the North’s industrial capacity and logistics. Lee won the argument and lost the war.

Like the Confederates, the West made the same assumptions about the other side’s willingness and ability to sustain the war. They chose two of the three options, by waging a sanctions war on Russia to reduce her capacity to fight and had the Ukrainian army dig in for a long siege. Even to this day, Western media is predicting that the Russians will collapse any minute. The long-promised summer offensive was predicated on this key assumption about the Russians.

In what may go down as one of history’s greatest ironies, the West has made the same mistake that was made by the Confederacy. It turns out that the Russians can wage war for as long as it takes to achieve their goals. Not only that, but Russia also has large untapped resources to supplement what she had on-hand. As some Western analysist have noted, the Russians are stronger now than at the start of the war. The key assumption of the West about Russia has proven to be wrong.

Once the Russians realized their blunder, they found themselves with the same choices as the North in the Civil War. They could sue for peace and accept whatever would come from it. They could ramp up for a massive offensive against the Ukrainians and accept sizable losses or they could prepare for a war of attrition aimed at sapping the ability of Ukraine to maintain her army in the field. The Russians settled on what amounts to a Slavic version of the Anaconda plan.

The Russians appear to have made three key assumptions. One is they assumed the West lacked the military industrial capacity to fight a war of attrition based on artillery and mine warfare. The second assumption was the West could not replace the Ukrainian air defense system once it was depleted. This would give Russia control of the skies over the battlefield. Finally, the Russians assumed that eventually the West would force the Ukrainians to go on offense using NATO tactics.

The first assumption has proven to be true. The West is running out of stocks to send Ukraine and has limited ability to produce more. The American military system is not built for this sort of war. Ukraine uses in a month what the West produces in a year in terms of artillery shells. This is a fraction of Russian production. Added to this is the fact that the Russians are simply better than the West at artillery war. They have better guns, better training, and better tactics.

The second assumption has also proven correct. At the start of the war, the Ukrainians had the second-best air defense systems in Europe. The reason is they were using the same systems as the country with the best systems, Russia. Again, this is not something in the Western toolkit. American strategy is to use air power to control the skies, not ground based missile systems. That missile barrage against power plants was meant to deplete Ukrainian stocks and it has succeeded.

Finally, the long-awaited offensive by Ukraine is looking like what the Russians prepared for over the last six months. Like the German army in the Battle of Kursk, the Ukrainians are running into complex defenses based on slowing them down so Russian artillery and air power can destroy them. That plus the extensive use of mines to entangle Ukrainian forces as they approach has led to scenes like this one during the early days of the long anticipated offensive.

NATO is set to meet this month to discuss where they go next with this war, so the Ukrainians are desperate to find a victory somewhere to show them. They are currently back to hurling infantry at Russian defenses around Bakhmut. Given the Russian understanding of the dynamics of this war, it is possible that Ukraine wins a battle for a village or two at some point along the front. The point is to keep driving up the cost to the Ukrainians in terms of men and material.

To bring us back to where we started, the long promised Ukrainian counter-offensive is looking a lot like the Battle of Kursk. The Russians were prepared and understood what they were facing. Like the Germans, the Ukrainians have misread things and continue to operate from false assumptions about their opponent. The result is the Russian anaconda plan is about turn this offensive into Gettysburg. It is a defeat from which Ukraine can never recover.

Antiracist Constitution

Posted on July 3, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the movie Amadeus, a post about Affirmative Action and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

When the typical person thinks about the law, he thinks about it as a list of behaviors that are prohibited. You cannot fish during certain months, for example. You are not allowed to drive over a certain velocity. The law is a list of limitations on what you can do as well as a list of things others cannot do to you. This is largely true as a practical matter, but the law is more than a list of prohibitions. It is a moral system that turns those limitations into a habit of mind for the citizenry.

Although the law often looks chaotic and self-contradictory, it is a system made of properties and methods. The properties are things like constitutional rights, precedents, and legislation. These are statements that are treated as facts. Your First Amendment right to assembly is assumed to be a fact of nature. The Court’s decision that the First Amendment does not permit you to yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire is now assumed to be a truth in the Constitution.

The methods are the rules that govern how the people inside the law interact with those properties as well as the other people inside the legal system. The courts have processes for adjudicating disputes between citizens, for example. The government has to meet certain conditions when they infringe on the rights of a citizen. All of us exist inside the legal framework, as it is the implementation of the moral framework of our society and the framework determines how we interact with one another.

This is the starting place for reading this new booklet titled How We Got Our Antiracist Constitution: Canonizing Brown v. Board of Education in Courts and Minds, which is part of the Claremont Provocations Monograph Series. The author is Jesse Merriam, who teaches government at Patrick Henry University. His focus is on the history of the famous Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which has transformed not just the law by the Constitution itself.

The author starts with a short history of the famous case. This is one of those things that will be a revelation for most readers. Even though the case was decided in 1954, the process started a generation earlier when a young communist radical received a million-dollar inheritance from his father. He was going to reject it, but the founder of the ACLU convinced him to use the money to fund left-wing causes. This was in 1922, long before normal Americans thought about civil rights.

This money was used to start the Garland Fund, which gave the NAACP $100,000 to begin the litigation that eventually led to the Brown decision. The author does not spend a lot of time on it, but the point is clear. The civil rights movement was not something organic and spontaneous. It was a long-term project organized and financed by wealthy and important individuals. They set out to change the moral framework of the country and committed their lives to the cause.

That brings us to the heart of the topic. The author walks the reader through the process by which a legal decision becomes canonical and then how that status in the law warps everything that comes after it. In the law, “canonization” is “the process by which a single Supreme Court decision comes to control constitutional theory, debate, and interpretation.” A case can become so important that it changes the methods by which the Court views the Constitution itself.

This is a three-step process that starts with the construction phase. This is when the new moral principles are introduced to the moral framework or old moral principles are challenged as antithetical to the core principles. Brown was the end point of the construction phase where two new principles were added. One is that diversity is a constitutional good. This is why diversity is a strength. The other new principle was that discrimination, private or public, is always unconstitutional.

The next phase is what the author calls submission, which is the process “whereby critics of the initial decision capitulate to the new paradigm.” The author provides data on how conservatives changed over this phase. He counted negative stories in National Review before and after Rehnquist was nominated to the Court. He also looks at opinions on Brown during this period and notes that they went from uniformly hostile to neutral and then accepting.

The submission phase with regards to Brown is a great primer on what lies behind the internet meme “the conservative case for…” These new moral claims are first embraced by the people with control of the institutions. That power is then used to select against critics, which has the desired effect of selecting for those willing to bend their knee to the new moral paradigm. What has shaped conservatism over the last several generations is this process of submission to the Left.

The final phase of canonization is weaponization. This begins “when the former critics marshal the decision and its values for their own legal and political agenda.” As the former critics incorporate the moral principles in their own arguments, the case then becomes a controlling moral authority. Those former critics of the new morality transform themselves into its champions, often trying to stake out positions that are more extreme than those of the original advocates.

Again, the author dives into the writings of conservatism to provide examples of how they now embrace the moral claims of Brown. This is the origin of another well-worn internet meme, “democrats are the real racists.” For a generation after Brown, opposition to this decision was central to conservative arguments. Over the last thirty years Brown has taken center stage in conservative arguments in favor of diversity and opposition to discrimination.

The final result of this process is that the original Constitution has been hollowed out and in place of the rights-based moral order we now have the twin moral demands that have come from the logic of the Brown decision. Not only are your enumerated rights subject to the “Brown test”, but the federal system established by the Constitution has collapsed in order to comply with the new moral paradigm, leaving us with what the author calls the antiracist Constitution.

The author does not get into this, as it falls outside the scope of the essay, but the new legal framework created by Brown reflects the new moral framework that has come to dominate the thinking of the ruling elite. Diversity as the primary good and discrimination as the primary bad haunt every aspect of modern life. Not only must you avoid discriminating against members in the league of the oppressed, but you must also swear allegiance to diversity.

This is fundamental to the new religion which imagines the end point of social progress as the open society. If all people are inherently equal, then the differences we see must be due to social structures, which means that people are infinitely malleable. This is the universal truth of mankind. Thus, we have the holy trinity of the new religion, equality, the blank slate, and universalism. The logic of Brown reflects this spiritual sensibility as well as the ultimate goal of the open society.

This is a topic of critical importance for dissidents, so this booklet on the Brown decision and its canonization in the law is an important entry point. As the author notes, the road forward is not in fighting the tentacles that have grown out of Brown, but to understand how we got to this point. In order to remove the tentacles of Brown v. Board of Education from the neck of society, the moral claims that lie behind the decision must be understood and then defeated.

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