What Is Possible

Posted on September 29, 2023 by thezman

It is fair to say that political philosophy, as we currently think it, is the search for the ideal or best form of government. Even now, at the end of history, when all of the best people are sure we have figure out that “our democracy” is the ideal form of government, there are heretics thinking about what could be better. It is hard to image what could be better than “our democracy” but they are imagining it.

Of course, even the best people must concede that there must be something better as otherwise there could be no progress. The only way we stop progress is by reaching the end of time which is the perfection human society. Once we reach that point, no one will imagine there can be anything better, so there is no longer a need for political science, political philosophy or even politics.

While we are progressing toward something, it very clearly is not the perfection of mankind and human society. Instead we are ruled by lunatics and simpletons hellbent on smashing what is left of Western society. The more likely answer to what comes next is chaos and then some effort to impose order. Therefore the question of political science will be what sort of order is possible.

What form of government is possible with the demographics we have and will have in the not too distant future? Will it be possible to have a general answer to that question for all regions of North America. Lilly white Vermont will have very different answers than highly diverse Georgia. Mexifornia cannot have the same answers as New England or states in the black belt.

One answer is that there is no system that can provide order, at least with the ingredients that we have in terms of people, history, geography and so on, so those will have to change. This is the recipe for civil war. The result of that process will then frame what is possible with what remains. The political questions then become, what is possible and what must happen to have tolerable options.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

The Debate Over Rights Versus Tradition
What Is Possible
Monarchy – Tyranny
Aristocracy – Oligarchy
Democracy – Polity
Managerial Polyarchy
The Reality Of America

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The Bleep Show Goes On

Posted on September 28, 2023 by thezman

The regime held another audition last night for the role of token opposition candidate in the presidential election tentatively scheduled for next year. This time they held the audition at the Reagan library, which was appropriate given that all of the actors sounded like exhibits from the 1980’s museum. They even used some clips of Reagan as prompts so the performers could spit out their favorite lines. It gave the whole thing the desired retro feel.

Fox News produced the event, as they did the prior event, but this time they used the B-team to put on the show. In the first event they treated it like one of the phony talent shows that are a staple of broadcast television. They had a drone flying around the auditorium and they introduced the performers like a wrestling show. It was vulgar and crude, but appropriate given the reality of things. The whole thing is just another chapter in an ongoing big lie.

Perhaps having been too obvious the first time, they were more subdued this time, running a standard debate style show. They also used their B-team actors to play at moderating the thing. They had a chirpy little blond woman who was disorganized and flustered the entire night. They had some old guy who must have missed his flight to Heathrow at LAX, so they made him a moderator. The third wheel was a Spanish woman with a spray on tan that was starting to peel.

Most of the night was the performers saying the prepared and rehearsed zingers while everyone else talked over them. It was clear that everyone was instructed to talk over Ramaswamy so that is what they did, often just mouthing what appeared to be gibberish, or vamping as they say in the business. The result was a cacophony of voices while the chirpy little blond hopped up and down in her seat trying to get the performers to stop talking over one another.

Why anyone thinks people will sit through this is a mystery. They could easily solve this problem with the use of shock collars. If a performer talks over another performer, he gets enough voltage to disable him for a few minutes. Maybe employ trap doors under their feet as a sort of timeout. If the performer keeps breaking the rules, the door opens, and he falls into a garbage pit. He then has to climb the stairs back to the stage, covered in garbage, and retake his spot.

Of course, the fact that this would be an improvement over what they are doing is an indictment of the system. If the ruling class treated elections seriously and they cared about public’s opinion, these vulgar displays would never happen. The performers, who would be actual candidates with real agency, would refuse to participate. That is not our reality, so we get these vulgar displays. If you were trying to humiliate the voters, you would not do anything different as far as these shows.

There is some value in watching these things. You get a sense of the narrative from which the regime is operating. It is clear they still think Trump gets put in jail, exiled, or bankrupted so he cannot run. They just had a judge steal his company the other day, so that part of the script is still operative. That means the midget wrestling shows they are putting on are for picking the lucky loser of next year’s election show. One of these losers will get the golden ticket at the convention.

Last night it was clear they have soured on Noble Black Guy. Tim Scott got little action and was pushed off to one side. They could be sidelining him to keep him fresh or they could be moving onto another actor. Neocon Nikki got the star treatment most of the night and the regime produced a bunch of fake polls for her. They have been planting stories in regime media claiming that she is the “insurgent” candidate. Imagine calling the consummate insider an insurgent.

You have to respect the neocons. They may be evil, but they never abandon their project, and they always plan ahead. Despite the results in Ukraine, they still dream the dream of thermonuclear war, so they keep reaching their tentacles into the process to promote those who share their dream of extinguishing humanity. Even though they have publicly abandoned the Republican Party, they see an opening to get one of their sock puppets the nomination and they are seizing it.

The trouble for them and the regime is that the people are coming to understand that there are people with the impudence to distort the truth so infamously as to put forth a shriveled hag like Nikki Haley. She and her scaly backers are not the solution to the political and cultural crisis. They are symbols of it. Only in a morally bankrupt system can degenerates like this flourish. If a meteor struck the Reagan Library last night during the show, the world would be a better place.

Sadly, it will not come to that just yet. Instead, it was merely another reminder to Republican voters that their party hates them. All of the actors were handed lines to say mean things about Trump, who is now the face of the party’s voters. The only thing they did not do is take turns spitting on a picture of Trump. The star of this portion was a fat slob they trucked in to repeat Borsht Belt zingers about Trump. The usual suspects still think this stuff is hilarious, which is a topic all its own.

In the end politics is always about the desires of the ruling class. No matter what the people think, the people in charge want what they want. They will never be talked out of being the ruling class. On the other hand, if what they want makes it impossible for society to operate, then we get a new ruling class. At this point, all of the trust is gone so they have to keep Netflix running, sportball playing and the grillers grilling, so no one notices the cracks spreading all around us.

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A Haunting In Canada

Posted on September 27, 2023 by thezman

“There is a specter haunting the West, the specter of fascism” could be the opening line to a manifesto from just about any group in the modern West. Three generations after fascism ceased to exist as a real political and intellectual movement, it hangs over the Western mind like a terrifying fog. Every issue in the political debate is there because it relates to fascism in some way. It either defines who is and who is not a fascist, or it is assumed to be a precursor to fascism.

In every political debate, the people we continue to call conservatives are defined by their fear of being called fascists or an equivalent label. Racism, for example, is nothing more than a crude synonym for fascism. The people we call the Left have a deep sack full of terms that essentially mean fascist. If they call you an extreme right-wing extremist, they really mean you are a fascist. Of course, fascist now simply means “outside the moral consensus” as defined by the Left.

It is not just a rhetorical game. Western liberalism is now just a reactionary, but still revolutionary, cause that has evolved around fear of fascism. All of the weird cultural fads are driven mostly by a desire to strike out at the people the culture warriors assume to be fascists. These are the white people who are trying to live normal lives in middle-class suburbs. Woke is not for anything. It is against fascism and all of its manifestations, which can be anything.

Eric Hoffer famously wrote that “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This is clear when you look at what has happened to Western liberalism. Long stripped of its Christian moral foundation, it staggers on in opposition to one devil after another. The devil can take many forms but strip away the covering and what lies beneath is always an Austrian painter in the imagination of the Western mind.

This is a purely negative identity. Western liberalism no longer has an internal, independent definition for itself. Those concepts still linger in the past, occasionally referenced by the people we continue to call conservatives, but only as a way of trying to slither out from under the boulder labeled “fascism” that has been hurled at them by the people we call the Left. Both sides agree that everything they do not like is Hitler and Hitler is their forever enemy.

You see it in the recent scandal in Canada where all the best people were seen cheering a guy who turned out to be a former Nazi. Yaroslav Hunka, who is 98, got a standing ovation after House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota called him a hero during a Friday visit by Zelensky. Rota called him a hero because he was told that Hunka fought the Soviets in the war. Since Western liberals now think Putin is Hitler, Russians are Nazis, so Hunka must be a hero.

The haunting of the Western mind by the specter of fascism is right there in that ridiculous performance. Because Putin is Hitler, it means Russia is the new Third Reich, which makes Ukraine the symbol of the West. Zelensky has been transformed into Churchill, but not the drunken degenerate version. He is the lion of the West version who rallied the forces of good against fascism. To the dullards who put the event together, Hunka connected the present to the past.

In reality, Hunka was and remains a Banderan, a follower of Stepan Bandera, who was a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist in the middle of the last century. Bandera collaborated with the Nazis because he hated Russians. Ukrainian nationalism is and remains, like Western liberalism, a negative identity. It is haunted by fascism because they see fascism as the great enemy of Russia, which they hate as much as the Western liberal thinks he hates fascism.

Of course, the question is how did this Ukrainian fascist end up in Canada after the war and remain undetected? He is wanted by Poland for war crimes. It turns out that the West welcomed a lot of these guys after the war. John Demjanjuk was a famous example from the 1980’s. He was the center of a moral panic, mostly over the prospect of running out of real Nazis due to the actuarial tables. All the best people turned up to point their bony fingers at Demjanjuk.

That gets to the reality of fascism and why it haunts the West. Fascism is impossible to define, in part, because it is the universal bogeyman. Both communists and liberals have spent generations heaping every sin imaginable on fascism. Those sins, of course, are the things these ideological camps fear most about themselves. With communism in the ash heap of history, fascism is now just the warted, gnarled face of Western liberalism’s worst fears about itself.

Another reason fascism is impossible to define is it was never really a standalone ideology, but a reaction to ideology. Fascism would never have existed if not for the apparent failure of liberalism and the very real threat of communism, especially the Bolshevik variety. Fascism was an ad hoc defense against cultural and spiritual genocide by people who saw both Western liberalism and communism in their raw form as they evolved in the 19th century.

This is why modern liberalism looks strikingly like fascism. We live in an age where the lines between the state and capitalism are impossible to see. Corporate America and the apparatus of the state are two heads of the same hydra. The media, the academy and entertainment are the other heads. The body that controls them is managerialism, which looks a lot like fascism. If James Burnham were alive today, he would easily make the connection between the two.

For a long time, people have wondered what would happen when the last real Nazi or alleged victim of the Nazis is no more. In the next decade that whole generation will be gone, leaving no more devils for liberalism to chase. Similarly, people have wondered what comes after liberalism reaches its end point. Both questions seem to have the same answer in that one cannot live without the other. When both are gone, the long nightmare of the West will finally come to an end.

The How And Why Of Things

Posted on September 26, 2023 by thezman

Those over a certain age in the dreaded private sector will have noticed a change in how the workplace operates with regards to managerial relations. The days of hands-on management and management by walking around are done. Instead, it is management from beyond the veil. Managers, no matter how junior their rank, seek to avoid anything that looks like confrontation with their direct reports, so they avoid as much personal interaction as possible, preferring things like e-mail.

This is how we get things like firing people by e-mail or even text message. The people making the decisions not only seek to avoid firing the employee in person, but they also remove the person from the equation entirely. Instead, it is a robot controlled by the company that informs the digital expression of the employee. Someone in human resources then discontinues the character from the simulation. The point is to avoid anything the resembles human interaction.

Look a little closer and what you see in the workplace is a technological layer forming up between management and the staff. The people in positions with impressive titles fear anything resembling pushback so what is forming up between them is a technological and organizational callus. It shields both sides from the human necessity of management and staff interaction, replacing it with a technological interface that allows both sides to interact with that interface.

When Rachel from the training department is putting together the latest sermon on diversity, she will never have to stand in front of a room full of humans and deliver the sermon and see the faces of the people receiving it. She uses a piece of software her company purchased for qualitatively managing the diversity initiative. One combination of commands produces reports for management. Another result is some black guy with an X in his name running a workshop in the breakroom.

One result of this is that the presumed common morality is baked into a system, often a software system, rather than the heads and hearts of people. The latest lecture about the importance of safety is not based on collective agreement but the dashboards from the safety software and the posters that decorate the breakroom. No one asks why we need to make sure our coworkers feel safe from heteronormative body shaming as there is no one to ask. The claim comes from the ether.

This is not just a private sector phenomenon. This disease of the impersonal has infected all parts of the managerial system. Politicians used to have townhall meetings with their constituents where they would field questions. If they bother doing this at all these days, it is a rigged room with plants asking fake questions. Instead, politicians have someone interact with their voters through social media. Their Twitter is an avatar of a person who is now just an avatar.

The media has been sucked into this as well. On the one hand, no one in the media dares ask a party member a tough question. That could put the media person in bad odor with the party. Of course, the party member is not interested in confrontation either, so she avoids anyone who might ask tough questions. The exception is those on the outs with the party, but even there the fear of confrontation is keeping all but the dullest media hacks from interacting with people like Trump.

Another driver of this depersonalization of the managerial class is the feminization that we see throughout society. Males expect confrontation, then some sort of agreement with a clear winner, typically the man in charge. Women prefer consensus, especially if it facilitates endless gossip and intrigue. This is why homosexual males decorate the upper reaches of the management class. They love drama. Combined with male intellect, they thrive in the new girl powered world.

Logically, you cannot have consensus if people are disagreeing with one another so the goal is to avoid situations where people can disagree. This is the benefit of that technological callus between management and staff. There can be no disagreement because the morality of every situation has been decided by the system. If you are unhappy with the result you need to reconcile yourself with the system, not take it up with your boss, who would prefer to never see you.

In a large company, the result is a vast disconnect between what the people in charge think about the company and what the staff thinks about the company. A very modern phenomenon is management asking for systems that can help them monitor the “wellness” of their staff as they use other software systems. Imagine the accounting system doing a wellness check before you can enter invoices. This is only possible in a world stripped of anything resembling humanity.

At scale, you end up with a culture that looks like what space aliens imagine culture is like among the humans they detected with their scanners. How is it possible that a real human created an account on Twitter called “safety” from which they post about the magical and imaginary world of online safety? What is an “open, accurate, and safe political discourse”? The answer is it is approved content transmitted and enforced through the interface of technology.

That is the final driver of the depersonalization process. Marx observed that once the moral questions are resolved, politics no longer exist. The trouble is the only way to settle the moral questions is through debate and conflict. By removing normal human interaction, you remove all avenues of debate and conflict. That leaves management to slip their moral claims into the systems they now use to run the world. Again, who can argue with the software that controls your life?

In this way, the censorship we are seeing is part of a larger process of baking managerial morality into the system. The people on the “safety” committee are not banning you personally from the platform. They are just following the rules of the system and you broke the rules. It is all right there in the terms of service, which change as frequently as the constitution on Manor Farm. If you think there was an error, click the link in your suspension notice and fill out an appeal.

The problem, something you see in the dreaded private sector, is that someone has to be in charge and the rules have to make sense. The reason the “good boss” spends time talking with staff is he wants to make sure the rules make sense, but also make sure the rules make sense. The former is about the staff understanding why the rules exist and the latter is about the rules coordinating the combined efforts of the staff toward the goals of the company.

In a world where everyone deals with every through the interface, this is not only impossible, but it would undermine the system. Software and management systems can never be viewed as moral agents. No matter how high management stacks these things between themselves and their direct reports, they will still hear those questions that are integral to human organization. Why are we doing this? Who says we have to do what we are doing this way? Who made this decision?

The how and the why are the only things that matter in human organization, with the former resting on the answer to the latter. Managerialism seeks to elide this reality by slipping the why into the how via process. The process becomes an interface to prevent anyone from asking someone in charge the why questions. That could lead to the scariest question of all, the “who decided this” question. Managerialism is all about avoiding the answer to that question.

Thoughts On Christian Nationalism

Posted on September 25, 2023 by thezman

Note #1: I was on with Mike Farris to talk about stuff. You can find the resulting product on Rumble and iTunes.

Note #2: Behind the green door I have a post about the struggle to find joy in the dissident life, a post about ide cream and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Over the last decade the usual suspects have directed a great deal of resources into anathematizing the term “Christian Nationalism.” One reason is the long war against Christianity in general that dates to the start of the last century. Since these people assume nationalism is a bad word, whatever they can attach it to becomes bad as a result of the linkage. This sort of linguistic guilt by association has been a popular tactic with the usual suspects for a long time.

Another attack is from the establishment churches and affiliated political operations, who worry that their people are getting wise to the grift. Like conservatism in general, social conservatism has been a massive failure. Since so-called Christian organizations have been at the forefront of the culture war, the rank and file are now looking around for an alternative way forward. The people who got rich off losing the culture war see Christian nationalism as a threat to their grift.

The idea behind Christian Nationalism is to provide an alternative moral authority that is in direct contradiction of the one used by the ruling class. No one talks about the moral authority of the ruling elite, especially the ruling elite, but it is assumed that they have some reason for promoting things like diversity and the sexual fads. Maybe it all boils down to bourgeois spite or maybe they think the cause of justice requires them to annihilate society, but whatever the authority, Christian Nationalists reject it.

That is where things get complicated. Within the Christian Nationalist subculture, you see Catholics and Protestants, which raises an obvious issue. You also see many within this space migrating to Eastern Orthodoxy. The reason for the latter is the people in the former are disgusted by the direction of their churches. Of course, you also have the churchless who rely only on their reading of Scripture. They tend to be the most vocal in the public square about their political intensions.

Putting aside the theological differences that exist within this subculture, the bigger question is how to square the Christian with the nationalism. The one thing all of these people would agree upon is Christ died for all mankind, so all men, regardless of race or ethnicity, can accept Jesus Christ and thus become a Christian. If your church is open to everyone, then it stands to reasons that your community is open to everyone, which contradicts the logic of nationalism.

This is where we bump into the elephant in the room. The big exception to the open-door policy is non-Christians. This is where the usual suspects come back into the story, as they claim Christianity is just a fig leaf for the nationalism. When they hiss the word “nationalism” they mean “fascism”, of course. In fairness to the usual suspects, the Christian Identity Movement was exactly this approach. Many of the most vocal Christian Nationalists today are hostile to Jews.

This is especially dangerous from the point of view of the usual suspects because this line of reasoning applies to the very idea of nations. If you want a nation, one with a single language, culture, and people, then you are seeking an exclusive society, rather than an open one. Just as a Christian society must be intolerant of non-Christians, a nationalist society must be intolerant of minorities. Otherwise, you open the foundations of society up to challenges from those minorities.

This brings us back to the eternal question. For Jews to maximize their opportunities in a society, it must not be exclusive of them or their activity. This is the Karl Popper – George Soros argument for the open society. The moral foundation must not be exclusive in any way, which eliminates both nationalism and Christianity from the moral foundation of the open society. Obviously, this logic benefits all minorities, not just Jews, but it also comes at the expense of the majority.

The logic of Christian nationalism puts them at odds with the bulk of modern Christians who are no longer Christian in the theological sense. Most are Judeo-Christian, a weird modern phenomenon that defines Christianity in terms of Israel. It is not unusual for ads like this one to appear on platforms that cater to modern Christians. Much of what modern Christians do is undisguisable from Zionism. That presents and an obvious problem for the people promoting Christian Nationalism.

That brings us back to the theological issue. The Christian Nationalists have a problem in that they think they must operate within the tradition of Christianity. That does not leave them a lot of room to operate. Even those who think Scripture is the only source of truth are faced with the fact that Scripture is a man-made thing. There are lots of lost and excluded books of the Bible. Someone decided to exclude things from Scripture, maybe even things lost to us entirely.

By accepting the framing of the past, they are limiting what they can do as both Christian and nationalists. There is no getting around the fact that the arc of Christianity has led to this point. The universalism is one problem, but the inherent individualism is another big challenge. if all men have an individual relationship with God and are judges as individuals, there is not much room for collective virtue. The virtue of the community will always came second to individual virtue.

What the Christian Nationalists face is a bigger task than reasserting or defending the idea of a Christian nation. They first need to revolutionize both terms. Their Christianity needs to break free of the traditional framing in order to avoid being trapped in a mode of thought that precludes nationalism. At the same time, they have to rethink the idea of nationalism so that it comports with and promotes the compassion that must lie at the heart of their new Christianity.

That sounds like an impossible task, especially given the makeup of the Christian nationalist subculture. These are people with homes and families, hardly the sort to overthrow the current order. On the other hand, Christianity was a revolutionary movement from the start. Nationalism, despite what the usual suspects claim, has also been a revolutionary cause. In other words, the Christian Nationalists are working with material that has always been dangerous to the status quo.

What makes it possible for them to think in these terms is the fact that the old forms are no longer working. The old regime is in crisis because the old systems and old moral claims are no longer working. The last time a world bestriding empire fell into crisis it gave birth to a new religious movement that eventually swept the world. Whether or not there is a theologian or even a charismatic leader ready to accept the challenge is unknown, but the ground is fertile for such a thing.

Dissident Happiness

Posted on September 22, 2023 by thezman

This week is one of those shows where I just turn on the mic and talk for an hour off the top of my head without knowing where I am going with it. Some people think these are the best shows, but I am skeptical. The inspiration for the show is a post I did earlier in the week behind the green door. The topic of that post was the difficulty enjoying old movies and television as a dissident.

Once you are aware of why Jake from State Farm is a black guy now, you see the tentacles of the people behind it in all sorts of things. Those old movies you enjoyed a million years ago suddenly look different to you. You notice the little bits of subversion in them that has led to where we are now. You cannot enjoy them as you once did because you see what you did not see the first time.

Thinking about it, this extends to other things. Once your eyes are opened to certain things, you turn into Roddy Randy Piper from They Live. You keep putting on the dissident classes, seeing things that maybe you wished you had not seen, but you cannot stop doing it. In the show I used the example of Ronald Reagan, who many here no doubt grew up thinking of as a great president.

This may not sound too bad, but it does bring the risk of turning the dissident into someone incapable of feeling joy. You cannot watch a movie or television show without getting angry about the subversion. A mindless thing like a sporting event turns into another arena of the great struggle. If you are not careful, you cut yourself off from your fellow citizens with regards to the popular culture.

More important, you can find yourself at war with the past. For left-wing radicals, this is a good thing as they want to be free of the past. Normie, of course, wants to return to some mythical place in the past. Dissidents do not want to be free of the past, but have an honest relationship with it, in order to figure out what comes next. This is a unique challenge to the modern dissident.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Free Expression Foundation
The Green Door Post
Hating Pop Culture
Coloring The Past
The Dissident Dilemma

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Election Narrative Update

Posted on September 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: If you are looking for a way to do some good within the parameters of the system, then take a look at the Free Expression Foundation. This is what civil liberties groups are supposed to be doing, which is defending the rights of citizens. The organization is run by a stand-up guy who believes in the mission. They have volunteers, but fighting cases in court requires money, so consider a donation.

The next Republican debate is scheduled for this coming Thursday at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley California. According to state media, the same cast of characters is expected to perform at this event, with the exception of Asa Hutchinson and Doug Burgum, who they forgot to invite. Why this is being held in California is a mystery, as there is no chance a Republican will every win the state. For all anyone knows or cares, there is no Republican Party in California.

Putting that aside, the pre-coverage of this debate shows us that the narrative for the 2024 election is running into serious trouble on the GOP side. The script said that at this point, Trump would be out of the race due to the indictments. The party would have swung behind one of the zombies to stop Ron DeSantis, who would be desperately swimming to the “middle” in order to maintain donor support. Instead, Trump now looms over the whole thing like Godzilla attacking Tokyo.

The main flaw in the narrative was assuming that Trump’s support would collapse after the string of indictments. Because the people behind this stuff are lizard people from an alien planet, they have no way to read public sentiment. They are left to imagine how humans would react under certain conditions. Apparently one of their texts on humans said that humans naturally flee when the bad guys attack their champion for the crime of fighting back against the bad guys.

Regime media is now floating stories like this one in which various toadies wonder why their great plan failed to work. One of the lessons of the Ukraine war is that these sorts of stories appear when the regime finally comes to realize that their current narrative is no longer operational. It is something like the stages of grief. They are now in the acceptance phase of narrative collapse. Next is the bargaining phase where they search for something positive from the situation.

Another problem with the narrative is that Ron DeSantis was not able to play his role as the acceptable alternative to Trump. You may hate Trump with the intensity of a thousand suns, but it does not change the fact that he is the best street fighter the Republican Party has seen since Lee Atwater. He saw right away that DeSantis was a stalking horse, so he unleashed his supporters on him. As a result DeSantis has been dying a death of a thousand cuts.

One part of the narrative has held together. The script called for the great zombie army that is Conservative Inc. to rally to the banner of an approved option. After some fits and starts, they have managed to get this right. The one thing that you can always count on is for conservatives to do what the Left tells them to do. Nikki Haley is now the regime option in the race. She has broken double digits in Iowa, which is probably her high water mark, but that will be enough to make her the favorite.

That is the reason to watch the Thursday debate. Since Neocon Nikki has been anointed as the regime favorite, it means DeSantis has to go after her in order to revive interest in his campaign. Given how poorly he has done to this point, it is a lock that he does not do this and instead attacks Ramaswamy again. For his part, the King Cobra should be ready for Neocon Nikki to use him as a foil. Expect him to arrive wearing garlic as that is how you keep the neocon at bay.

Ramaswamy has turned out to be an enormous problem for the regime as he is a black swan in this story. According to official dogma, it is impossible for a brown person with an elite education to sound like Trump. Not only does Ramaswamy sound like Trump, he makes better arguments than Trump and he is willing to stake out positions that Trump is afraid to take, which are popular with normal people. They do not know what to do with him, so they will fling their poo at him.

Of course, they are falling for one of the classic blunders. The most famous is to never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this; never get involved in a poo flinging contest with an Indian. Ramaswamy has figured out that the race issue is losing its effectiveness with voters. That and it strikes people as ridiculous to call him a white supremacist. This gives him room to be the explicitly pro-white candidate while not being white.

With the narrative collapsing, the question shifts to what is next. The polling shows Trump is locked in as the overwhelming favorite in the early contests. What we know from 2016 is that Trump always does better than the polls, so it is fair to assume he will win handily if nothing changes. The script calls for the removal of Trump from the ballot, for the good of the country, so they can always play that card. Otherwise, they have to craft a new narrative to prevent the apocalypse.

The natural fallback position would be to put a pillow of Biden’s face and find a younger more plausible option for the other side. Gavin Newsom was the obvious choice, but he has removed himself from consideration. Presumably they threatened to charge him with raping people decades ago. That leaves no one. Given Biden’s declining ability to speak in public, we could end up with a general election where Trump campaigns in front of huge rallies and Biden does not campaign at all.

The ultimate fallback position, of course, is a rerun of 2020. This time Biden will top his eighty million votes in Pennsylvania alone. They have gone to a system of automatic voting that lets you avoid the hassle of filling out your ballot. This is a great benefit to the dead, who find this to be a big challenge. All joking aside, the lesson of 2020 is they can rig the election and get away with it, so the ultimate solution to narrative collapse is not who votes but who counts the votes.

Universally Left And Right

Posted on September 20, 2023 by thezman

One of the many problems that plague this time is the poverty of language when it comes to our politics. We remain stuck with the language of the past, even though the political and ideological structures of the past are no longer relevant. The use of antiquated language forces people to use those old mental structures, which in turn means jamming the present into the molds of the past. The most obvious example is Left and Right, which have lost any real meaning.

Is Ben Shapiro a conservative? He calls himself a conservative, but Steve Sailer calls himself a conservative too. While they may agree on many practical things, it should be clear that they have different motivations. Ben Shapiro’s conservatism is driven by a desire for what is good for his people, while Steve Sailer thinks his positions are good for the country of his birth. They get lumped in with many other people on the Right, but they clearly have different political goals.

Therein lies the main problem with the most basic of political labels. Steve Sailer and Ben Shapiro assume that the rules of morality are rational. If they are rational, then we can reason our way to the correct morality. If we can do that then there is no reason that everyone cannot do the same thing. This is also the position of people like Karl Marx and John Rawls. It is the view of the current Left. They think they have found the right moral system and you just need to realize it.

Right there is the central problem of this age. We hold onto terms like Left and Right but have forgotten why they exist. The Left used to be those who said that the rules of morality must be rational, because the natural world is rational. The Right said morality is based in Scripture and the will of God but shaped by tradition. Scripture does not cover everything, so history, tradition, and custom fill the gaps. Those items are central to understanding the central morality of Christianity.

This is the fundamental difference between Left and Right that has been lost, resulting in the incoherent use of the terms today. Both the modern Left and the modern Right assume that there is one universal moral code that is rooted in reason. Because morality is rational, it applies to everyone, just as the rules of math apply to everyone, so it means it is the duty of those who know to educate those who do not know in the same way we spread other knowledge.

This is what Paul Gottfried and others have been trying, unsuccessfully, to explain to Michael Anton over the last year. His “natural rights” argument must lead to that which he claims to reject, because it relies on the same assumptions and logic as that used by left-wing radicals for centuries. Once you assume morality is based in reason, you must assume there is one universal morality. The next steps from there do not matter as they all lead to the same place, death camps.

Of course, this must lead to the end of tradition. If morality is based in reason, then it means past practice is a form of trial and error, mostly error. The way we used to understand morality, say basing it in local custom, must be wrong because reason has brought us to a new and better understanding of morality. Tradition, history and custom, if they have any value at all, are a warning. Those who cling to antiquated moral claims based in tradition are rejecting reason.

This explains another bit of incoherent vocabulary. The people celebrating diversity are the least tolerant of diversity. The reason for that is diversity for them is a narrow tool, a wedge to be used to separate people from their history, traditions, and customs so that they can more easily be herded into the new moral framework. Diversity is a means to an end, not an end in itself, even if they claim otherwise, because there can be no diversity within a settled moral order.

The biggest problem that arises from universal morality based in reason is that it must come with a duty to impose that morality on others. This is the central insight of Nietzsche, who argued that once you conclude that morality is rational, you must accept it is universal and therefore binding on everyone. This divides the world into moral and immoral actors, where the moral actors are judged not on their individual compliance with moral reason but their willingness to enforce it.

If reason tells us that everyone can and must have the same morality, then there is no room for things like national borders. Borders are about dividing people based on how they think they ought to live. People over there live the way they do because they think that is how they ought to live, while the people over here live as we do because it is how we ought to live. The border dividing the two people is to preserve these moral differences, which flies in the face of reasoned morality.

Similarly, free association is about separating people, which rests on the assumption that people may be different not just in their superficial characteristics but in how they think they ought to live. The men’s club exists because men do not think like women and therefore must have a different moral outlook. Logically, it means they must have different roles in determining how we ought to live. If the moral questions have been settled, then this form of association is unacceptable.

What all this leads to is a way of sorting people in the modern age. If you are sure morality is based in reason, then you are in one camp, along with Locke, Rousseau, Karl Marx, and John Rawls. If you think morality lies outside the domain of reason and is instead based in the supernatural or tradition, then you are in another camp along with people like de Maistre, Burke and even many of the Framers. One camp is on the Left and the other is the Right.

War With Russia

Posted on September 19, 2023 by thezman

Until recent, few people outside of the Kagan cult and the Pentagon thought about fighting a war with Russia. The former has thought of nothing but such a war since the Roman legions crossed the Alps, while the latter is tasked with wargaming every imaginable scenario, no matter how unlikely. Otherwise, war with Russia stopped being a concern with the end of the Cold War. The only wars anyone needed to think about were the wars against pipsqueak countries in the Middle East.

Of course, the West now finds itself in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine which could easily tip into a direct war. Former Vice President and current 2024 candidate Mike Pence is promoting the idea of sending American troops to Ukraine. Other than Trump and Ramaswamy, all of the candidates for 2024 want a hot war. The Kagan cult, which runs Biden’s Ukraine policy, is doing all it can to provoke the Russians into something they can use to trigger Article 5.

Assuming war happens, could the West actually win such a war? Until this year, no one thought about this question, outside of the Pentagon. The United States had the world’s best military by far. It has been assumed that a war with Russia would mean certain defeat for the Russian army. The real question was whether the United States could beat both Russia and China at the same time. After eighteen months of war, the answer to the question of war with Russia is not so simple.

For starters you have to deal with the nuclear issue. Russia has 6,257 nuclear warheads and the United States has 5,550. Both sides have more than enough to obliterate the other side. Given the performance of the Russian missile fleet in Ukraine, we can assume that their ICBM’s are in good working order. This means that any conflict that reached the nuclear level would end in both sides being reduced to a premodern state at best.

Both sides know this and both sides know the other side’s process for readying a nuclear launch. Both sides have short-range nukes, but the real county killers are the ICBM’s, so as long as both sides maintain current protocols, neither side would have a reason to pull the trigger on total nuclear war. That leaves some room for using tactical nukes on the battlefield without triggering the end of the world. In fact, both sides would assume all aircraft are nuclear capable.

This is the issue with putting F-16’s into Ukraine. The Russians would have to assume they are flown by NATO crews because they would have to be flown from NATO bases and use NATO communications networks. Further, the F-16 is capable of carrying nuclear weapons, so their appearance over Ukraine will be assumed by the Russians to be NATO seeking to deliver nuclear weapons to the battlefield. The Russians would then be allowed to do the same thing.

If we assume both sides understand the risks of nuclear weapons, a big assumption given the behavior of the Kagan cult, it is possible for NATO to send troops into Ukraine to directly confront the Russian army. Both sides managed many proxy wars and some direct wars with the other side’s proxies during the Cold War, so it is not unthinkable that they could have a direct war without it going nuclear. Both sides could see an advantage in agreeing to such terms.

If we put the nuclear issue to one side for now, we are back to that original question about beating the Russian army. What the last eighteen months has proven is that the Russian army is not the Iraqi army. Washington spent close to ten years training and equipping the Ukrainian army for this war. They have poured untold billions into Ukraine over the course of the war. The West has levied massive sanctions on Russia and yet it is becoming clear that the Russians are winning the war.

One reason for this is the way in which the American military wants to fight is not how this war is being fought. This is a land war between peer armies. NATO would run into the same problems that Ukraine has experienced. They would be sucked into a war of attrition that is conducted from entrenched positions. This is the lesson the US Army War College has drawn from the war. In this paper released last week, they explain some of the realities of a war with Russia in the Ukraine.

The first thing the authors note is the human cost to the American army would be nothing like it has ever experienced. According to their analysis, the United States would suffer more losses in two weeks than it has suffered in twenty years of war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. They estimate at least three thousand dead and wounded per day. Note they are using Ukraine as an example, which gives a hint as to the real losses Ukraine has suffered in this war.

They also note that NATO would quickly have to tap into its reserves, but this is a bit of a problem as those reserves do not exist. They estimate that NATO would need a reserve force of about 450-thousand men to start the war. The current number is less than 100-thousand men. Attrition war need lots of men, but modern armies need lots of trained men, so the West would need time to build their reserves. Of course, Russia has been doing this for over a year now.

Then you get into material factors. The West has run out of weapons to send to the Ukrainians after eighteen months of war. Granted, the United States still has lots of tanks and fighting vehicles in its inventory for use in a war with Russia, but the lesson so far is those stocks are not enough. Ukraine has burned through thousands of tanks and fighting vehicles. They have used millions of artillery rounds and lost hundreds of Western supplied artillery pieces.

This article in the New York Times gets to the heart of the issue. The economic sanctions have done nothing to limit Russia’s ability to wage this war. More important is the fact that Russian has a greater military industrial capacity than the West. She also has unused capacity that can be quickly converted to making weapons. Russia can make more of the stuff she needs to fight than the West can make, which means the West will have to ramp up production.

Therein lies the problem. There are no factories that can be quickly converted to military use like the Second World War. That means building new, but that also means massive new costs to the West. In that Times article it notes that it costs the West $5,000 to $6,000 to make a 155-millimeter artillery round, but it costs Russia about $600 to produce a comparable 152-millimeter artillery shell. Now apply this math to tanks, and fighting vehicles and you see the problem.

Obviously, war with Russia would mean the West would have to reorganize to fight a war of this scale, but is it possible? Would the populations tolerate the necessary changes to the economy and society? Reorganizing America for total war when most of the country hates the rest of the country is a tall order. Is such a scheme even possible in Europe? Even if we brush aside the internal problems, could the West manage to pull it off in time to avoid defeat?

Thirty years ago, Pat Buchanan ran for president, campaigning, in part, against the de-industrialization of America. One of his points was that nations win wars on their industrial capacity, not their service industry. The same people demanding war with Russia today were gleefully auctioning off the industrial base thirty years ago, telling the working men that they needed to flip burgers. Now that the warmongers need those working men, they are in China, not Pittsburgh.

This is the reality dawning on the world as the Global American Empire flounders in its war against Russia. The Global American Empire is now in decline and the rest of the world is seeing what the Army War College is trying to tell the ruling class. The empire no longer has the capacity to maintain the empire. This is why the endless bluffs from Washington now fall on deaf ears. The question now is not what happens in a war with Russia, but what happens after this war with Russia.

Politics After Principle

Posted on September 18, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a series of posts about my recent journey into the heart of darkness, which is a sad way of saying the future. If you want to see the future too, fly a discount airline to Baltimore or Atlanta. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

For as long as anyone can remember there have been two competing views of how to engage in politics against the people we call the Left. One camp says that opposition must come from a principled group that does not engage in the same tactics as the opponent, in order to provide an alternative to the Left. Their vision of politics is the means justifies the ends, in contrast with the Left, who takes the view that the ends justify the means, or any means necessary to win.

The other camp points out that the Left always wins, so the “principle above politics” business is pointless. The point of politics is to win, which means gaining power, so any strategy that lacks that as its goal is a waste of time. Further, this camp notes that the first principles crowd spends all of their time policing their ranks rather than fighting the Left, which means endless purges. The people being purged are usually the most effective fighters against the Left.

The critique of the “first principles” crowd is an easy one as they stand in front of an empty trophy case with pockets stuffed with cash. Individually they do very well in terms of salary and social status, but collectively they have managed to do so little with so much that it is easy to conclude that it is a long con. Billions of dollars have flowed into Conservative Inc., but they accomplish nothing. The two conservative wins, abortion, and guns, we accomplished by outsiders.

This should be an easy case. If the means justify the ends approach is an utter failure, then we are left with the ends justify the means approach. People on the right tend to favor “no enemies to the right” as a slogan, but fundamentally it is the same thing the Left has preached for generations. When the goal is winning, you do what you must in order to win, even align with low-character people. The point of politics is to gain power and once you gain power you can have principles.

There are a number of problems with this approach, specific to right-wing movements in the modern age. The first is the Boebert problem. For those unfamiliar, Lauren Boebert is a ditzy female congressman from Colorado, who was recently seen getting felt up by a man not her husband at a movie theater. The usual carbuncles of Conservative Inc. were quick to denounce Boebert, who they see as lacking principles. Her behavior violates their principles, so she has to go.

The dilemma for the “no enemies to the right” camp is that no decent man wants to defend this airhead. Whatever utility she has politically is cancelled out by the fact that she is a dingbat and an attention whore. Even remaining silent on her is tough because the absurdity of it makes for easy jokes. Can you expect people to not make Boebert jokes in the name of politics? Can you expect people to defend this ridiculous woman when lefty friends make fun of her?

That gets to the other problem for “no enemies to the right”. The bad guys control the media, so they control the popular narrative. That means they can hold their opponents to a high standard. In other words, they can make their opponents defend all of their members and alleged members. On the other hand, any attacks on their members can simply be ignored. If you are in the game of winning the crowd against the Left, you have to accept this asymmetry.

Dingbats like Boebert are the easy problems. The really tough problem for the “no enemies to the right” camp are guys like Russell Brand and Andrew Tate. The former is a far-left comic turned populist gadfly and the latter is a pimp and pornographer, who attacks the feminist industrial complex. Both have big audiences and often voice positions popular on the dissident right. Tucker Carlson has been seen paling around with them and promoting them to his fans.

Coincidentally, both have been accused by the authorities of rape. Tate was arrested in Romania on sex trafficking claims. He admits to being a pimp and pornographer but claims to operate within the law. Brand has just been accused of being a serial rapist decades ago. He denies the claims. The usual carbuncles of Conservative Inc. were quick to accept the claims at face value and denounce Brand. Their instinct is to always trust the people they claim to oppose.

The trouble here for the “no enemies to the right” side is that both Brand and Tate are horrible people, even if you exclude the claims against them. Tate brags about things that will get him hanged if the Right is ever in charge. If there is a revolution from the Right, Andrew Tate will not live to see its second day. Russel Brand is a sociopath who will attack anyone to get attention. Not so long ago he was happy to attack the enemies of Left if it made him famous.

How can the “no enemies to the right” side defend Russell Brand when it is clear he would savage them if he saw a profit in it? How can they defend Andrew Tate when he should be swinging from a tree branch? The answer is two-fold. The first part is that while all politics is personal, it is also situational. The Brand case offers an opportunity to focus on the abuse of the law against political opponents. It is not about the odious Russell brand, but the grotesque abuse of the legal system.

In this way the “no enemies to the right” side can wear the clothes of the “principled conservatives” to both undermine their claims by holding them to their own standards and attack the behavior of the Left. This leads to the second part which is that a part of dissident politics is reminding dissidents that the point of politics is to win and gain power, not be the most high-minded loser. Sometimes winning means defending people like Russell Brand in order to damage the enemy.

The lesson here in all of this, especially for the “no enemies to the right” side who are new to dissident politics, is that principles of any kind assume a common end. This is why conservatism was a failure. They assumed the other side wanted what they wanted, but through different means. This was never true outside of the neocons who never relinquished their radical ends. In a world of conflicting moral visions, there is no place for the principled stand.

Carl Schmitt wrote, “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” In other words, the question central to politics is who is on my side and who is not on my side. There is nothing about the answer that should imply eternity. If Russel Brand is a useful ally, then he is a useful ally. When he stops being a useful ally, then he stops being a useful ally. In politics, allies are a bus you ride to the next stop.

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