The Argentine Question

Posted on November 30, 2023 by thezman

The subtext to the improbable election of Javier Milei revolves around a question that has haunted Argentina for generations. Why is this country such a mess? For as long as anyone can recall, Argentina has been synonymous with South American disfunction, to the point where the name of the country is often used as an epithet to criticize first world countries. There was even a Broadway play based on the life of a famous Argentine lunatic named Eva Perón.

The first place to start is the ruling elite. If you do an image search of “Argentine leaders” you get a collection of images that would answers the same question if you replaced Argentina with Italy or Spain. Like most South American countries, the ruling elite looks like the colonial elite that founded these countries. In some of these countries, they have been ruled by a small set of families since the 16th century when their ancestors arrived from Spain.

In other words, you do not see the Venezuela problem. In some of the more dysfunctional countries in the region, you have indigenous leaders rising up to claim some power, which always ends in disaster. They tend to be Marxists, but the illiterate sort that just understand the theft and violence parts. Venezuela is a rich country in terms of natural resources and location, but the smart fraction was chased off long ago by indigenous lunatics, so it is a basket case.

On the surface, Argentina does not have this problem. The most notorious ruler of the place was the Latin fascist Juan Perón. Anyone who has been around international organizations like the IMF or World Bank knows the sort. Perón was a populist and demagogue, but he was also highly educated and sophisticated. His politics were a populist suit her wore to garner support, but he was a man of the European elite that has run the country since forever.

The point is the ruling class of Argentina is not a lot different from the ruling elites you see in better functioning countries. Perón is typical of the ruling class in that his family tree has Spanish, French and English ancestry. Go through the long list of Argentine rulers and all of them trace their roots to the old country. You never see any references to Africans or Amerindian ancestry. The rulers always look like the sort of people who spend their career at places like the UN or now the EU.

In other words, Argentina is a country rich in natural resources, has a prime location on global trade routes and has an educated and sophisticated ruling class. On paper, it should be one of the more prosperous countries in the New World. Instead, it has been defined by government incompetence, corruption, and some of the most outlandishly terrible economic policies on the planet. Argentina has become synonymous with every failed economic policy to come out of the academy.

One clue as to why Argentina is a mess is the people. The average IQ of the population is 87 according to the most recent data. People will quibble about this score, but it is best to think of these numbers comparatively. Japan clocks in at 106, so that means the Japanese are more than a full standard deviation smarter than Argentines. Even if the measures themselves are not precise, which is surely the case, the margin of error will be similar for every country.

To give this gap some clarity, imagine a population full of people who could test into law school or business school. Assume they have not actually attended college or graduate school, but their test scores indicate they could do it. Now take a population of high school dropouts whose test scores indicate they are going to struggle getting their GED while in prison. That sounds a bit extreme, but the typical prisoner in the United States is going to have an IQ similar to the typical Argentine.

Now, take that collection of smart people and make them the talented two percent of the population and the collection of dumb guys is the population. For starters, the average IQ of the population will not change much. The average IQ of the population jumps about one point with this new smart fraction. Make it the talented ten percent and the average IQ jumps three points. In other words, in our experiment, that smart fraction is not going to change things very much.

The way to think of every human organization is to imagine a man carrying a sack full of ro9cks up an incline. The steeper the incline, the slower his pace. The more rocks in the sack, the slower the pace. The smaller the man, the slower the pace. The man is the smart fraction, while the sack in society. The incline will be the natural resources available to that society. The greater the resources, the softer the incline, while fewer resources gets a steeper incline.

Japan is a big man with a small sack, but facing a relatively steep incline due to Japan being an island nation. Even so, Japan is a rich and modern place due to the large smart fraction and the relatively small dumb fraction. On the other hand, Somalia is a tiny man dragging a boulder up a cliff wall. The smart fraction, such as it was, now lives in Minnesota leaving the rest to make what they can from very little. No amount of clever political theory is fixing Somalia.

This explains why Argentina remains an ungovernable mess. Of course, the good times in the country have often been under non-democratic rule. When you combine democracy with a low-IQ voting base, the result is populist demagogues who promise to use their power to overcome nature. The pattern in Argentina is authoritarianism, followed by democracy, followed by populism, which leads to collapse and the return of the authoritarian to restore order.

Javier Milei is toward the collapse portion of the cycle. This enigmatic weirdo, whose first act after winning election was to convert to Judaism and make a pilgrimage to the Hassidic community of New York, is in the populist tradition. He has decorated his populism with libertarian slogans, but what the voters heard was that he will take from the elites and give to the people. Given the IQ of the population, most could probably not be able to tell a libertarian from a rhinoceros.

Given his backers, there is a good chance that Milei will succeed in pushing through his changes, as they have been done before. He will put the economy on the dollar, and this will stabilize prices for a spell. Then the shortage of dollars will lead to borrowing from his backers in dollars. Those bonds will then be passed off onto American pension funds and other institutional investors. This will continue until the Argentine government can no longer make its interest payments.

What Argentina tells us is what every ball coach knows. It is not about the X’s and O’s, but the Jimmy’s and Joe’s. In the realm of sport, a great coach can only do so much with bad players. His great coaching and brilliant strategy will always run into the limits of his players. In the realm of human society, the political and economic systems will always be limited by the available human capital. it is why the Nordic countries made socialism work, while Argentina cannot make anything work.

There is another useful lesson here for people in the West. The people running Argentina have always known the math of their human capital. This is a truth that is spoken about openly in the homes and offices of the ruling class. Despite the limits it puts on their ambitions, this gap between them and the masses is what keeps them in the elite, ruling over those masses. It turns out that being a smart fish in dumb pond is a pretty good path to the good life.

This is one reason Western elites love low-IQ immigration. It is like an acid on the middle-class, diluting the layer just below them. Sure, mass migration means the subways are unusable and much of the cities are too dangerous for cafe life, but it beats having to compete with smart strivers from the middle ranks. Western elites look at Argentina and envy their rulers. No matter how stupid they are, they never have to worry about being displaced by people with genuine talent.

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The God’s Three Questions

Posted on November 29, 2023 by thezman

Fundamental to all human organizations are three questions that must be answered in order for the organization to survive. A group of people who come together by chance with no reason to be together will go on their way. A mob at a sporting event is there for the game, but once the game is ended, they disperse. The only point of them gathering in the stadium was to see the game. Even that reason, however, was temporary and was never intended to bind the fans together.

The first question for every human organization is “Who are we?” This is the most basic and if not the most important question. The answer could be something mundane and temporary like a sporting event, but this is an answer that assumes the gathering of people is intended to be for the mundane and temporary. A more lasting answer is one that provides the members with a reason to continue working together. A fraternal organization, for example, has an answer that is timeless.

That answer will then be linked to the second question, “To what end?” The people at a ball game come together to see the game and to cheer on the team. Since the founding answer is expected to be short-lived, the second answer is as well. The group that assembles near the old railway station with the password “sic semper tyrannis” for the purpose of organizing a rebellion has a longer-term point of their organizations, so the answers to these two big questions have a longer view.

The final and most important question that all human organizations must answer is the one of authority, “Who says?” The answer to this question is usually assumed, but rarely considered in the open. The people at the ball game do not talk about who says it is a good idea for them to come together and cheer for the team. Similarly, when the civil authority banned public gatherings during Covid, everyone just accepted that they had the authority to do so. The state is usually the answer here.

Those guys meeting near the old railway station to plot the overthrow of the government, however, cannot just assume the question has been answered, because ultimately the purpose of their group is to provide the answer. Maybe they think the civil authority has offended the gods or is violating the traditions of their people. The answer to “Who says? for them is those gods or traditions. There is some moral authority that provides them with the justification to rebel against the civil authority.

At a more mundane level, the people who assemble in the park on the third Saturday of every month for the purpose of cleaning the park also have an answer. They are getting together because they are the Third Saturdays Park guys, and the point of their organization is to keep the park clean. Their moral authority for doing so, the answer to “Who says they can do this” is their understanding of their civic duty. By the morals of their society, they feel a duty to clean the park.

To see how this works in American society, think about the civil rights movement, which has come under renewed scrutiny of late. As if by magic, America went from a rights-based society in which the citizens were sovereign to one ruled by a self-perpetuating elite charged with enforcing a regime of equity and diversity. The words on the original paper, which is supposed to be the moral authority, are still there in the museum but as if by magic new words on new papers now prevail.

This is the reality of civil rights legislation, particularly the founding court case of the movement, Brown v. Board of Education. A group of men came together in the name of what they called civil rights, with the purpose of overturning the rights based moral structure of American society, so they could insert a new answer to that fundamental question of society. The answer now is the law requires that all public policy bend toward the goals of diversity and equity.

It is an amazing trick, but it shows how powerful even a small group can be when they have answered the three big questions. That power only grows when they are able to undermine the majority confidence in the traditional answers. The new moral regime of civil rights looked attractive to people who had slowly been disabused of their long-held answers to the three big questions. Once Americans stopped believing in their rights as Americans, they were ready to believe in anything.

From a different angle, you can see how the three big questions can vex a movement before it gets started. Christian nationalism is largely a reaction to the moral degeneracy of the current age, but it seeks to be a positive alternative to the prevailing order, which it struggles to define. You can see that here in this post in the American Mind, which tries to flesh out what is meant by Christian nationalism. Another take is this post that addresses some of the points of the first post.

Christian nationalism fails the first test as it is unable to provide a coherent answer to the question, “Who are we?” As you can see in those posts, they are not even sure what they mean by Christian, much less nationalist. The plan seems to be that they will rally a majority around some vague criticism of the present condition in order to gain political power, which they will then use to order society to their liking. Their answer to that third question will presumably be the ballot box.

For a human organization to live past its initial enthusiasm of the moment it must answer the three big questions. Who are we? What is our purpose? By what authority have we come together to act in concert? This is why reactionary movements always fail to rollback what they oppose. The object of their efforts either evolves to evade their critique or it evolves a moral authority based in itself, like we see with the civil rights movement, that the reactionary cannot defeat.

If there is to be a revolt against the modern age, the people doing the revolting will first have to tackle the three big questions. In other words, the opponents of the present order must learn from the creators of the present order, the people behind the civil rights movement, and fashion a new moral framework that rests on a moral authority that the movement will defend to the last man. In other words, to defeat the old gods, one must build a movement around a new god.

The End Of Human War

Posted on November 28, 2023 by thezman

Recently, Russian troops approached what they assumed to be a bunker with a Ukrainian machine guy crew. They thought this because they took machine gun fire from the location. They responded with mortars and drones, but when they approached again, they came under heavy machine gun fire. The Russians then struck the spot with thermobaric munitions, but the Ukrainian machine guy kept firing. Eventually, they were able to outflank the sight and destroy it.

What they found upon closer inspection was not a heavily armored machine gun nest full of dead Ukrainians, but instead it was a robotic machine gun. The gun itself was in a concrete bunker, but it was operated by computer. It is unclear if it was operated remotely or if the accompanying laptop was autonomous. There are two versions of the story on Russian channels. Regardless, this autonomous machine gun nest is the latest example of how cheap electronics are revolutionizing the battlefield.

The Russians think that this autonomous machine gun was a prototype created by a NATO country and provided to the Ukrainians for testing. That is possible as the war in Ukraine has become a giant military testing center. NATO contractors are using the conflict as an opportunity to evaluate new and old technology. The Russians, of course, have also been experimenting with new ideas. This war will be viewed in time as the first war of the autonomous munitions era.

One reason for the revolution on the battlefield is the proliferation of cheap electronics that can solve battlefield problems. A five-hundred-dollar quadcopter can be rigged up to drop grenades on enemy trenches. The user can be a girl or even a wounded soldier who operates it from the rear. It also allows for a better understanding of the enemy’s defensive positions and their troop strength. Instead of artillery barrages, men in trenches now attack one another with cheap drones.

There is another innovation that has turned up in Ukraine. Both sides have now started to deploy small ground-based drones. They look like the RC cars you would give to a child, except these are packed with explosives. The Ukrainians have been driving these into Russian trenches and then driving them near troops and supplies. The Russians, on the other hand, are programming their ground drones to operate without an operator and simply search out targets on their own.

This is the big leap forward that has occurred recently. The Russians have taken the next step in remote weapons. They now have drones that operate on their own, programmed to find a target and then attack it. More important, they are now equipping these drones with night vision cameras. These drones are flying around and crawling around the battlespace at night hunting for Ukrainian equipment. Now, there is no hiding from the robot warriors in the sky and on the ground.

What the Ukraine war has ushered in is not so much the rise of the robot warrior but the rise of the cheap robot warrior. The point of these innovations is to change the math of the battlefield by weaponizing cheap electronics. If a two-thousand-dollar drone can take out multimillion dollar armor and artillery, the material advantage of the side with the armor and artillery flips on its head. All of a sudden one side sees its cost spiraling upward in the face of cheap counter measures.

This is another revolution on the Ukraine battlefield. The Russians have always been the best at electronic warfare. Their defensive strategy has always assumed they would be attacked by high-tech NATO warplanes and missiles. In Ukraine, they have had to quickly adapt these concepts to the very real threat of NATO cruise missiles, ATACM missiles and guided artillery. The last two years the Russians have had to race to figure out how to defeat these advanced weapons systems.

The result is the Russians have slowly revolutionized electronic warfare. The vaunted Storm Shadow missile from Britain had some initial success, penetrating Russian air defenses and hitting targets in the rear. At some point, the Russians solved this puzzle like they solved the HIMARS problems, and these missiles now fly into the ground soon after they are launched. The Russians are doing this with relatively cheap, ground-based mobile electronic warfare systems.

Notice a word that keeps turning up. The word “cheap.” This has been the main driver of innovation on the Ukraine battlefield. NATO has outspent the Russians close to ten-to-one in terms of weapons and technology. The United States has given to Ukraine in two years about ten times what Russia spends annually. In addition, the West has provided mountains of technical and intelligence support. There is simply no way Russia could match NATO dollar for dollar.

In fairness, the Ukrainians have faced a similar problem. Much of what has been supplied to them has not been suited for the task. America war planners have always assumed they would be facing an under-armed opponent trying to defend perfectly flat ground on a clear sunny day. That is not Ukraine. As a result, the Ukrainians have had to do like the Russians and improvise on the cheap. The Ukrainians are probably the second best in the world using cheap drones.

Probably the most terrifying development to date is the one just unleashed. The Russians have reengineered the Iranian drones they have been using so they are stealthy, autonomous, and work together. They recently unleashed a swarm of these drones that could avoid Ukrainian radar, seek out targets on their own and coordinate with the rest of the drone swarm. These drones cost maybe twenty thousand a piece and can take out expensive things like Patriot missile systems.

The West will no doubt learn and adapt to what is happening in Ukraine and begin to create autonomous robot weapons. Artificial intelligence is mostly hype at the moment, but automated decision making within the narrow parameters of the battlefield is now a reality, so the day of the killer robot is upon us. It is not going to take long before weapons production moves from multimillion dollar tanks that are no match for a flying killer robot to building better killer robots.

As was the case in the Great War when military technology lapped the thinking of the men tasked with using the technology, the result in Ukraine has been a weird form of trench warfare. The Ukrainians built massive, fortified locations to use as strong points along the line of contact. The Russians built complex defensive structures designed to minimize their losses while attacking Ukrainian positions. The result has been a slow grinding war of attrition now fought with robots.

That brings up another change brought about by technology. The NATO form of war with big arrow offenses and combined arms warfare is now obsolete. That was made clear in the Ukrainian offensive last summer. A NATO trained and equipped army was sent into to bash through the Russian lines using NATO tactics and it was instead blown to pieces in cheap, high-tech minefields. Remotely placed and activated mines are now a dominant feature of the modern battlefield.

What is coming out of the Ukraine war are big questions. If big expensive items like tanks and fighting vehicles are being turned to death traps by cheap robots, then what is the point of building them? Similarly, if manned aircraft are made obsolete by air defense systems and drones, what is the point of building them? What is the point of having an aircraft carrier if aircraft are no longer viable? Trillions of weapons systems are now becoming white elephants thanks to cheap robots.

It is always assumed that the desire to kill our fellow man will lead us to overcome these technological cul-de-sacs. The shield blocked the spear, but waves of cheap arrows defeated the shield wall. The machine gun forced men into trenches, but the tank forced the men back out of the trenches. It is assumed that the robots will force some new counter so that rich men and can get richer by sending poor men to their deaths, but there has to be some end point to this process.

More important, every weapons systems has behind it an army of men who believe in fighting war a certain way. The NATO trained Ukraine army, that was obliterated by the Russians this summer, was the result of old men determined to stick with the old ways of fighting a war, despite battlefield reality. On the other hand, the defeat of weapons systems leads to the defeat of the ideas behind them. Right now, the American military’s notions of war are dying on the Ukrainian steppe.

It is hard to say if we have reached the end point, but the end of manned war seems to be coming into focus. Robots will only get cheaper and smarter. Soon, sending men to clear a building will seem as antiquated as the cavalry charge. The skies will be full of robotic killing machines and the ground crawling with their brothers, hooked together by electronic communications and artificial intelligence. The automation revolution will mean the end of war, at least for the human participants.

The Baby Shortage

Posted on November 27, 2023 by thezman

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People tend to look for linear explanations for the problems they see in the world, as they are the easiest to solve. If X is causing Y then you just have to do something about X and Y solves itself. If on the other hand, a combination of things is responsible for the undesired result, then things get more complicated. It is no longer a matter of fixing one thing, but of untangling a set of things, which may have their own set of causes, thus making the problem feel intractable.

An example of a multivariate problem that is the collapsing fertility rates that threaten the existence of the West. For example, Italy has a total fertility rate of just over one, which is below half of replacement. A people cannot sustain themselves very long if they are not having children. In fact, it only takes a generation of not having babies to overturn the population. In time, Italians will have only a vague idea of what it means to have a brother or a sister.

The first-place people look to understand the collapse in fertility is the soft, intangible things like culture and morality. In the middle of the last century birth rates started to fall and Western societies embraced materialism. In truth, birth rates started falling in the 19th century as the West industrialized. Having lots of children no longer made economic sense like it did on the farm. Among the wealthy, lots of kids stopped being a status symbol, so they lowered their reproduction.

Even so, family formation was still the norm. It was just that people had three or four children rather than seven and eight. There was no push to remain childless or avoid even basic family formation. It is fair to say that the trend away from marriage and family formation got going after the Second World War. There was the post-war baby boom in America and later booms in Europe, but by the time the West had become fully post-modern and materialistic, fertility was collapsing.

That is where most people look for an answer. Starting in the middle of the last century, the role of women started to change. First, they were encouraged to work outside the home, in addition to being a wife and mother. Then they were encouraged to work in lieu of becoming a wife and mother. The final leg on the transformation of the female role in society was the career woman. The point of her life was to compete with men and go home to a home full of everything but children.

The changing role of women is one big contributor to the baby crisis. If you want to destroy a people, put their women to work. If the ovens are being used for things other than making bread, the bakers can be put to other uses as well. The revolution in the female role has also revolutionized the male role. The pattern of normal family formation has been disrupted by putting men and women into the workforce for the sole purpose of serving the economic needs of society.

This is the most popular answer to the problem because it points to a spiritual sickness that confirms our bias. The hedonistic lifestyle of the present age comes with a punishment as it is morally wrong to have a materialistic society. Western people worship the golden calf, and the price is childlessness. The trouble with this answer is it does not explain why societies made this shift. It does not explain why people have so easily overcome the biological imperative.

That leads to the environmental answer. One version of this is the proliferation of birth control and abortion. Women trained to be men were handed unlimited supplies of contraceptives so they could have as much sex as they like, in fact they have been encouraged to have lots of indiscriminate sex, while not getting pregnant. Easy access to birth control along with strong social pressure on women to avoid having children has short-circuited the normal biological process.

This is where things get tricky again. Males should still want to find wives and have children, so what happened there? Clearly, the collapse in family formation and fertility is more than just a female problem. While women have been trained to be boys while gobbling down birth control to keep from getting pregnant, men have lost interest in doing what men have always done, which is find a mate. Simple observation says that men have become vastly less masculine over the generations.

In other words, both buyers and sellers in the sexual marketplace have changed in ways that discourage fertility. The females seek to be anything but wives and mothers, while males look for females that have no interest in motherhood. Of course, females reward this disinterest with casual, noncommittal sex. Even if a male wants children he enters a sexual marketplace as baren as the wombs of the women. The same is true of females who want to live the traditional female role.

Unlike the female problem, this is not easily explained by pointing to social conditioning or the introduction of birth control. One answer is that as society has made women less interested in being women, this has reduced the supply of females that males imagine as a potential mate. Men look for certain qualities in females that indicate they will be sexually loyal and committed mothers. Raise up a generation of wine guzzling whores and males will simply stop looking mates in that group.

There may be an environmental issue here that works on both sides of the sexual revolution in similar ways. An underappreciated truth of modern materialistic societies is they are awash in chemicals. Industrial society poured smoke into the air and trash into the water. You could see it. Post-industrial society fills the environment with tiny little bits of feel-good intended to make life easier. It is in the food, the water, personal products, and our physical goods. We are awash in alien chemicals.

Take for example, those birth control pills. Monkeying around with the most fundamental of life’s processes has been done without much thought. There have been no serious longitudinal studies on the impact of these drugs. Yet it is possible that they cast a shadow long past their initial purpose. This study suggests that oral contraceptives damages the fear circuitry of women. The female assessment of risk is an essential part of the female role in traditional societies.

Of course, lots of females with unbalanced emotional responses to the normal social stimuli is not going to go unnoticed. The same people making contraceptives are going to be right there to make drugs to treat the downstream consequences, which is why young females are gobbling down antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. We have also seen a spike in female binge drinking. A society full of paranoid and neurotic females is not going to promote family formation.

This may also be working the male side of things. Boys are routinely pumped full of drugs to keep them mellow in school. The ADHD crisis started just as fertility rates began to decline in the West. Pumping boys full of powerful chemicals is a lot like handing out birth control to females. All of the long-term studies on these drugs have been funded by the makers of the drugs, so we have no way of knowing if there is a long-term impact, but it is factor to consider.

Then you have the massive chemical bath that is daily life. Modern people eat food full of things they cannot pronounce. They douse themselves with personal products that are also loaded with alien chemicals. Individually and in the short term, these chemicals are all deemed to be safe, but what about mixing them into a long-term cocktail that is life in the modern age? No one knows and no one cares to know. It could very well be one more bit of pressure against our biological circuitry.

That is what makes changing the direction of Western fertility a challenge. The old Greek expression about a happy society being one where old men plant trees in whose shade they will never rest applies here. Children are the trees men plant in their youth, because they expect to be that old man, planting trees for generations they will never see, but they know will exist. The West does not plant trees or have children because Western people have no purpose.

In the end, there are certainly other factors that may be contributing to the collapse of fertility rates in the West. The environmental and economic factors are rarely discussed, because the cultural and social factors preclude any serious discussion of the fertility problem in the West. That means the first mover is the prevailing bias against families, family formation and the production of children. What drives it all is a dominant, top-down bias against reproduction, especially among Western people.

Twenty Questions

Posted on November 24, 2023 by thezman

In years past, whenever I have put out the call for questions, there would be questions about specific people in politics and questions about a particular question. This time there were no such questions. The former questions have gone away along with the drama, which was a defining feature of outsider politics. The days of various e-celebs warring with one another seem to have passed.

The other question has also changed. You see it with the reaction to the Israel – Gaza cheerleading from conservatives. Ten years ago, the only negative responses to Shapiro or Pollack would have been the old school JQ stuff. These days it is much more nuanced and matter of fact. A large swath of people seem to have internalized many of these arguments into a casual acceptance of ethnic reality.

I did not get a single Ukraine question. A good question is how the general public will respond when the inevitable happens in Ukraine in 2024. The war is not on anyone’s list of concerns at the moment, not even for those on this side of the divide. Will that change when things fall apart next year? Team Biden never recovered from the Afghanistan debacle, even though it had been off the radar for years.

It is a small sample size, but it got me thinking that much of the action on this side of the divide has moved away from practical politics to thinking about the systemic and philosophic issues at the heart of the current crisis. The number of people who have quietly thrown in the towel on conventional politics continues to rise. If there is no solution at the ballot box, what is the point of talking about it?

Trump is gearing up for his 2024 campaign and you can sense that it is going to be very different from 2016 because the people are different. Relative to many people in the crowd, Trump will sound like a calming voice, rather than the sarcastic bomb thrower scandalizing the squares in Washington. Trump is now a moderate voice, a compromise for the ruling class to buy some time.

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Happy Thanksgiving

Posted on November 23, 2023 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Israel Problem

Posted on November 22, 2023 by thezman

The founding of Israel seventy-five years ago brought with it a problem that has never been resolved, one that is at the heart of the current troubles. In fact, times of trouble operate as a reprieve from the hard work of ignoring that central issue. Israeli leaders can stimulate Western leaders into worrying about what Israel means to them, rather than what it is. The current war in Gaza lets the American Right forget its troubles and cheer blindly for its favorite country.

That central problem at the heart of it all is the definition of Israel itself. The “Jewish state” is a label used by Israelis, especially those on the Zionist side, and one that should raise some question. No one uses the term “Irish state” or the “German state” when describing those countries. No one would dare call Germany the home of the German people, but Western commentators disposed to Israel comfortably say that Israel is the home of the Jewish people.

Israel is by design, an ethnostate. It is the only self-declared and self-defined ethnostate in the modern world. From the very beginning, the point of Israel was to be the homeland of ethnic Jews. This is the central problem for Israel. To be a citizen of an ethnostate requires one to be accepted into as a member of that ethnicity. You cannot just one day decide to be a Jew and emigrate to Israel. Unlike Western countries, Israel is not an idea. It is a genetic threshold.

This is the problem Israel faced on day one. At its founding, the newly minted Israelites found themselves with lots of non-Jews in their lands. Those non-Jews could never be citizens, as that would violate the logic of the ethnostate. Those non-Jews were not going to voluntarily evacuate for new lands, so it meant Israel had a population of aliens in its midst that could never be assimilated. Like a pebble in your shoe, this non-Jewish population would be an irritant to the Jewish state.

Israel could extend most of the rights and privileges of citizenship to this non-Jewish population in an effort to pacify them, but they could never extend all of the rights and privileges to them. The non-Jews are not citizens and can never be citizens, so therefore they must always be suspect. In any two-tiered status system one class must be superior and the other inferior and this must lead to conflict. From the start, Israel was saddled with a hostile alien population.

Of course, the logic of the ethnostate demands that Israel do what it must to expel this non-Jewish population from its midst. Again, the whole point of the ethnostate is to create a homeland exclusive to your people. The reason Israel exists is to clear and hold the land of Israel for the Jews and only the Jews. Add in the natural hostility of the dispossessed minority population and conflict was inevitable. By definition, Jews can never be at peace with the minority population.

If that minority population were Mongols or Bantus, people with no natural connection to anyone in the region, this would have been an easily solved problem. Obviously, that was never the case, so this inevitable and necessary conflict with the non-Jewish population has defined Israel’s relationship with the Arab world. If Israel were, as Ben Shapiro is fond of saying, a nation of ideas, this would not be the case, but Israel is an ethnostate which sets it apart from all other nations.

This would be true even if the surrounding nations were ethnostates. The logic of the ethnostate starts with the assumption that the people of the proposed ethnostate are superior to other people. A people cannot demand a land of their own unless they think they deserve it. That can only come if those people, at some level, see themselves as superior to others, at least with regards to their claims for a homeland. Exclusivity begins with the claim of superiority in some critical respect.

Compounding things for Israel is the fact that their definition of a homeland includes territories now currently occupied by others. This has been true from the founding of Israel in 1948. Just look at old maps and it is easy to see. Israel is the only country in the modern era to expand its borders at the expense of its neighbors. It does this because the logic of its existence requires it. It is why the first response to the Hamas attack was the call to expel the people from Gaza.

This is the crux of the “Israel’s right to exist” debate. The Arabs understand the logic of the Israeli ethnostate and what that must mean for them. Israel’s right to exist means her right to expel non-Jews from the lands claimed by Israel. It also means using whatever means necessary against those defending those non-Jews. The non-Jews living in those lands can never agree to those terms. Therefore, they can never accept Israel’s right to exists, at least not as an ethnostate.

This also explains the ruthlessness of Israel’s response to Hamas. The unspoken truth of the Israeli – Gaza relationship is the people in Gaza must go away to that this land can be absorbed into greater Israel. Any resistance to that is viewed as a threat to the very idea of Israel, which warrants a maximum response. From the perspective of the Zionists, genocide of the Palestinians is a proportional response to the terrorist raid perpetrated by Gaza last month.

Obviously, this flies in the face of Western political morality, but money can buy a lot of political blinders. That and there is a strong Christian Zionist subculture in the United States that provides easy cover for the political class. Washington can pretend they are catering to public support for Israel, while cashing checks from the Israel lobby on the condition they never mention the reality of the Israel ethnostate. Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees prepare to emigrate to your town.

Send In The Clowns

Posted on November 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: Thinking about doing a mailbag show for Friday. If anyone has an interesting question, post it up here or on Gab.

President Harry S. Truman famously said is a speech at the end of his career that if it is a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article. He was giving a pre-election pep talk to his fellow Democrats who were downcast at their prospects in 1952. His point was that if you proudly give the voters an alternative to the other option, they will at least consider what you have to say and may even vote for you.

It is interesting to note that the two parties were having a uniparty problem way back in the middle of the last century, but it is the nature of democratic systems. Like all markets, they eventually converge on one dominant market player. It is why we have one operating system maker, two mobile phone makers and so on. In the marketplace, people seek safety, which is a form of protection. As Robert Nozick noted, protection must always lead to a monopoly or something close to it.

Like consumers in a grocery store staring at rows of the same product, people will flock to novelty, even if the market prefers predictability. We are seeing this in Argentina where the voters elected what can best be described as an autistic Austin Powers character as their next president. Javier Milei won Sunday’s run-off against Peronist former Minister of Economy Sergio Massa. It was a stunning victory for a man who promises to radically change the Argentine economy.

Javier Milei is the next in line in what has become a tradition that started with Beppe Grillo a dozen years ago in Italy. He was the former television comic who formed a joke party to run for office, which quickly turned into a social phenomenon. Getting back to what Truman said, given the choice between people acting like clowns, the voters in democracies have repeatedly picked the genuine clowns. Trump, Bolsonaro, Meloni and now Milei have come to power this way.

That is not to say that these eccentric candidates have not come with a real platform and a genuine list of issues. It is that their primary appeal is their eccentricity. A more traditional presentation would have failed, even if the issues were popular, because part of the problem for voters is the dreadful sameness of the candidates. One of the ironies of “our democracy” is it produces gold-plated phonies. The least relatable people on the planet are popular political figures.

Of course, it goes deeper than just a desire for authenticity. The unspoken truth of politics for the last thirty years is the sense that something is deeply wrong, despite the relative material prosperity. One reason so many were so quick to embrace the Covid madness is the sense that we were about to get what we deserved. Mother Nature was about to balance the scales with a great plague. These eccentric candidates are something of a search for absolution by the voters.

There is also an end of time issue with many of them. Italy has been convulsed with populism since Beppe Grillo because no one is able to answer the big question that hangs over every human society. Why does it exist? Italians no longer have a reason to exist, which is why they have stopped having children. People like Grillo and now Meloni offer some hope for a purpose. Their anger and eccentricity are a little bit of light in the gathering darkness of their civilization.

This may be the case in Argentina where they have been ruled by a combination of kleptocrats and maniacs for generations. One party steals the nation’s resources on behalf of international interests in the name of fiscal discipline until the people grow weary of it and replace them with the maniacs. These are the socialists who then start printing money to buy happiness until inflation gets out of control and the banks stop lending them money or accepting pesos for debts.

This is where Argentina is now. They currently have inflation at 120%, a swelling debt crisis and a stagnant economy. In addition to being an entertaining weirdo during the campaign, Milei promised to dollarize the economy, de-unionize the private sector, cut taxes, and restore private property rights. He calls himself a libertarian, but he has not promised to give free weed and porn to children or convert to Bitcoin. Perhaps he is saving that for his second act.

This is where Milei will turn out to be like the other eccentrics that have paraded across the stage of democracies over the last decade. There is little chance he will get any of his agenda implemented. The two main parties still control all of the important institutions, so they will collude to block his initiatives. Another feature of democracy is the controlling parties are incentivized to not address genuine problems. The metastasizing social ills are the systems’ defense mechanism.

In the end, that may be the function of these eccentric populist characters that are turning up in democratic politics. They gain support mostly because they are a break from the dreary reality of the system. If voting is not going to lead to good public policy, then at least it can lead to amusing failure. If food prices rise faster than you can count pesos, then maybe having autistic Austin Powers staring back at you through the television will take your mind off things.

So far that has been the result. Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement accomplished nothing, other than helping the EU sidetrack genuine reform. Trump and Bolsonaro, of course, were stymied by the system. Meloni’s angry housewife act remains popular, but her administration is the same as her predecessor. What all of these eccentric characters are, in the end, is proof that there is no voting your way out of the problems of liberal democracy.

Winter In Kiev

Posted on November 20, 2023 by thezman

The war in Ukraine is heading into the winter with the great counter-offensive all but officially declared a great failure. After six months of attacks, the Ukrainians gained a small sliver of ground in the south and lost a large swath of territory in the north, along with billions in Western equipment. Outside of small ventures to keep up appearances, Ukraine is no longer conducting offensive operations. The big question that looms over all of it is what comes next for Ukraine?

The place to start is the battlefield. The Russians have the initiative everywhere now and they seem to be preparing the battlefield for winter. They are about to take the fortress city of Avdeevka in Donetsk and there are reports that they have fire control of the key logistics hub in the north called Kupyansk. There are also increasing reports of desertions on the Ukrainian side as the Russians press them nonstop. Right now, the Ukraine army is doing what it can to hold its positions.

This is an untenable position for Ukraine as the politics of this war are such that they must always be looking like they have the initiative. This is why so much time and money were invested in the public relations system. Ukraine needed to look like it was winning the war and that meant flooding Western media with stories about Ukrainian success on the battlefield. Stories about Ukrainians desperately clinging to bombed out fortress cities is poison for the public relations system.

There are three angles to the politics. One is the internal politics of Ukraine, which at this point is the struggle between the military, Zelensky and the secret police, all of whom have friends in Washington. It is assumed they need to be showing progress on the battlefield in order to keep the money flowing. The fallback plan in these cases is always the same and that is find a scapegoat. You blame that guy for the failures and buy another round of funding the operation.

Rumors out of Kiev suggest Zelensky wants to fire his top general, Zaluzhnyi, and the head of operations in the south, Oleksandr Syrskyi. Last week there were rumors that both had been arrested then there were rumors that they were in hiding. Officially, nothing has happened, but Zelensky no longer uses their names in public, instead referring to their titles. That is the only hard evidence that something is happening, but it confirms that there is a rift of some sort.

For his part, Zaluzhnyi has made no bones about telling Western media that the offensive failed and the situation is dire. The reason to do this is to publicly undermine Zelensky who always insists that things are going great in the war. The result here is you have Zelensky trying to pin the blame on Zaluzhnyi, while Zaluzhnyi tries to undermine the credibility of Zelensky. You do not have to be a political genius to see where this is heading if things deteriorate much further.

This is why CIA director William Burns was sent to Kiev last week. One school of thought says he was sent to calm the situation, while another school of thought says he was sent to get a frank assessment of what is happening. This seems strange, given that the whole war is a Washington operation, but it is clear that the Ukrainians have not been entirely forthright with Washington. This is most likely at the behest of the State Department, which has been running things on the side.

That brings up the second political angle. Washington has been poached in a warm bath of public relations nonsense for two years, so the reality of the war is now just starting to appear in the media. With an election on the horizon and Biden in serious trouble, mentally and politically, bad news from Ukraine is very bad news. That is probably part of what Burns is up to in Kiev. If the White House needs to abandon the Ukraine project, they need a plan to do it.

The third political angle is the money. The Ukraine project is and has been a very lucrative money laundering operation. This means it has a very large lobbying effort behind it, so cutting off the money will be difficult. On the other hand, sending unknown billions through a failing operation, one that could be overrun by the Russian army very soon, is a tough sell even for Washington. Therefore, pressure is on to produce a new winning narrative to keep the money flowing.

This is why the Republicans are going to move heaven and earth to get fresh cash into the money laundering system. If the cash runs out, not only does the money laundering end, but it also means the end of Ukraine in a hurry. Ukraine no longer has a functioning economy and it is no longer able to pay for its own government services. If money from Washington and Brussels stops flowing, Ukraine will collapse in weeks. This kills project Ukraine for future money laundering.

The result of all this is all the players now see the status quo as the only workable option, even if the battlefield reality says otherwise. Zelensky knows he cannot kill Russians with dollar bills, but dollar bills keep him alive. At the same time, Washington thinks they can pretend it is a stalemate as long as Zelensky remains in charge, so giving him money works for them. Of course, the money laundering machine wants the cash to keep flowing for its own sake.

The trouble is the reality on the battlefield. The Ukrainians officially mobilized three quarters of a million men. They have less than half that number remaining. There are pictures of girls and old men turning up dead in trenches now. There is only so much damage an army can take before it begins to crack. The politics of the war point to maintaining the status quo, but the reality of it is pointing to collapse. That is what lies ahead for Ukraine in 2024.

Back On Monday

Posted on November 17, 2023 by thezman

The Phoenix Must First Burn to Emerge — Phoenix Businesses, Phoenix Life | by Aidan McCullen | The Thursday Thought | Medium

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