Looking Back At 2023

Posted on December 29, 2023 by thezman

It is that time of year again when I look back at all of the things I got wrong and promise to do better next year. Well, not all the things I did wrong, just the things I got wrong in last year’s prediction post. Everyone loves making predictions, because everyone forgets about them, but few take the time to revisit their predictions. An iron law of the universe is that you learn more from your mistakes than your successes, so it is a good time to take a look at those mistakes.

As far as the effects of the sanctions on Russia and what it will do to Europe, I was amazingly on target. Gasoline in Germany is about ten dollars per gallon and is expected to go higher in 2024. On the other hand, India and China are experiencing an unprecedented boom in cheap energy. On top of that, the Indians are reselling their refined crude to Europe at a premium. The European economy is in recession now and it is all due to waging war on its energy supplier.

As far as America, I was wrong about how inflation would play out. It seems we got a pause and now it is picking back up again, just as the Fed signals it is ready to start cutting rates in 2024. I still think we end up in the Arthur Burns trap, but the timing of it may be a bit different. I was wrong about interest rates, and I was wrong about the economy as a whole. At least on paper, we have not gone into recession, which seems to be due to relatively cheap energy.

I nailed the Trump story from the start. The lawfare against him has played out as I have been saying since 2021. The party did try to rally around the sacred black man, but he turned out to be too ridiculous even for the Republicans. Instead, they have gone all in on the brown woman. They are trying to fake poll her into contention or at least make her a credible looking loser. War Karen is at 25% in New Hampshire, so they can pretend she is the winner when Trump is gone.

On the Democratic side, I was all wrong. If you want proof we live in a simulation run by sadists, look no further than Joe Biden. The mere fact that this deranged simpleton is president is proof enough. The fact that the party has not removed him from office and found a better actor for the role suggests the simulation is broken. Unless something wild happens in early 2024, it looks like Joe Biden will be on the ballot. The robot historians will never be able to sort this one.

I got the Kanye West stuff mostly right. He is not in bankruptcy, but he must be running out of money as he is now groveling to the usual suspects in Hebrew. You just know that he will be seen in front of a pile of shoes soon. I was wrong about Cozy getting nuked, but they have no traffic now, so close enough. Ethan Ralph was the last guy on there with an audience and he is now on Rumble. Maybe my 2024 prediction will be Cozy shuts down for good.

I did not finish my book. I learned a good lesson on this front. Writing a book is like any other project in that you have to see it through to the end. If you take a break there is a good chance you will never come back from break. I got about three quarters through it and realized I wanted to revisit some of it. I thought maybe I was rushing things, so I took a break and before long other things filled that time slot. One thing I am doing now is setting aside time in the schedule to finish it in 2024.

My Ukraine predictions were a mixed bag. I was wrong about Ukraine pulling back to more defensible positions, even though that was the sensible thing. I was also wrong about NATO escalating by introducing “advisors” into Ukraine. Washington has sent a three-star general to take over planning and there are rumors of NATO people operating in country, but nothing has been confirmed. Putin mentioned Poland maybe taking parts of Western Ukraine, but the Poles have not mentioned it.

It is too soon to tell how all of this will play out in Europe, but the landscape looks bleak for the pro-America parties, so this is an incomplete. The West did try to regime change Serbia this month, so I can take a win on that one, but otherwise I was ahead of my skis on how this plays out politically. I will take the win on the failure of American weapons and what it does to the reputation of the MIC. Western wonder weapons were a colossal failure in Ukraine last summer.

I was joking about human sacrifice being the next social fad, but boy did I hit it out of the park on the Alex Jones stuff. The guy is now facing over a billion in fines for offending some degenerates in Connecticut. That case is a great example of how managerialism and mass media converge create an alternative reality. The mass media has ignored this case, so few people are aware of it, even though it is the most egregious corruption of the law this country has ever seen.

On a positive note, I nailed my escape from Lagos prediction. It was a close call as I closed in December, but it still counts as a win. I have a bunch of things to do before I can live in the house fulltime, but those are progressing. As is always the case, every small project turns out to be more involved than expected. Given that what comes next will be the 2024 predictions, I may write those up in the new place. If you are going to make predictions, do it from atop a mountain lair.

The lesson every year when I look at these predictions from the past year is that the safe bet is that current trends will continue. Something unexpected has to happen for a trend to stop or change direction. Those “black swan” events are rare, which is why we have the expression. Of course, it is all about perception. Many people saw the mortgage crisis coming, but the bankers did not and they were the driving force behind that trend so we got a crisis.

The things that are nearly impossible to predict are the stupid things that take on a life of their own, like the Ukraine war or Covid. The people responsible for these things passed dozens of warning signs and ignored the obvious choices in order to find the worst choice possible. It is not in our nature to think people can be this willfully stupid and destructive, so we cannot imagine such things. Yet, these are the people who rule over us, so they will determine what happens in 2024.

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Ungovernable Costs

Posted on December 28, 2023 by thezman

Over Christmas, when people are not paying attention, the oligarchs have been busy updating their terms of services. These are “agreements” you must accept in order to use their service, which in most cases is a monopoly. In those rare cases when there is more than one supplier of the service, they work together in order to have identical terms of service agreements. The terms of service agreement is slowly becoming the constitutional order of the country.

One of the noteworthy changes comes from Amazon, which announced they would start packing ads into their video content. Until now, subscribers to their service did not get ads in video and audio content as they paid an annual fee. Now Amazon Prime users will get to pay the annual fee and get to see ads in their content. No doubt that for this additional service, Amazon plans to raise their annual fee in 2024. After all, it costs money to pack those ads in your content.

This is a familiar pattern. Cable television came with the promise that in exchange for a monthly fee you would not get ads. That remains somewhat true for premium services, like HBO, but with the end of over-the-air television, all of the ad-based channels are on a pay-for-view services now with their ads. If you want video content you pay for a service like Hulu or Apple TV so you can watch the content you used to have on your cable service, with all of the ads.

Sporting events are now ad platforms where a small portion of the presentation is the game you are trying to watch. An American football game is officially one hour, but with stoppages it lasts about ninety minutes. With ads and long breaks for proselytizing about the latest thing, the games take over three hours. Even the calling of the games is now packed with ads and lectures. “This description of what just happened is brought to you by our good friends at Pfizer” is a real thing now.

It is not just video content where we see this. It used to be that stadiums were named after a local famous person or the place where they were built. Maybe the owner of the thing named it for himself. Now they all have stupid names for fly-by-night companies that disappear once the suckers get wise. Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh is now something called Acrisure Stadium. According to the company, “Acrisure is a fast-growing fintech leader that operates a global insurance broker.”

This tendency to tax you this way, and it is a tax, will soon be into every nook and cranny of your life if you let it. Agree to a lease on a new car and the entertainment system will soon require you to watch a video ad or take some sort of survey before you can start the car. When the car makers transition to options as a service, they will come with ads you must endure to use them. Turn on the heated seats in winter and you will be hit with ads for the latest sexual dysfunction drugs.

The people on the other end defend this dynamic on the grounds that their costs go up, so they have to find new ways to generate revenue. Amazon could keep it honest and raise their annual fee or separate it from the bundle of services they call Prime, but that would risk information symmetry. Their users could then decide if the fee is worth the content, rather than thinking about the free shipping or other stuff. Packing in ads muddies the waters and thus makes the user easier to fleece.

That is why it is best to think of the service economy as a tax economy, rather than a traditional marketplace. Like the government, these firms are deliberately entangling you in their service so they can take a little here and little there. Government is a protection service that is always adding fees, levies, and new taxes to the cost of the service in the same way we see with technology services. Like government, these services always first seek to be a monopoly.

Of course, this is why governments are supposed to prevent monopolies and oligopolies like we see today. Part of the protection racket that is government is to prevent privateers from preying on the people. It used to be that these terms of service agreements were limited by the courts. The one-way contract was always assumed to be the powerful preying on the weak, so the courts stepped in on the side of the weak to make sure the deal was fair. That no longer happens in America.

Putting all of that aside and just thinking about this process as a form of taxation, the question is why are these taxes rising? Inflation is one possible answer, but this process predates the rise in inflation. For a long time, they said we had low inflation, under two percent most years, yet the system is flooded with new taxes and new ways to tax people through new methods. Fifty years ago, ads were easily avoided, but today it is nearly impossible to live an ad-free life.

One way to start thinking about this is to look at the government in terms of per capita spending in constant dollars. Fifty years ago, the federal government accounted for about $4,500 per person. Today it is $20,000. Again, this is in constant dollars, so expansion of the money supply is included. That extra government comes with secondary and tertiary costs. It means millions of pages in new rules, which means millions of new expenses for complying with those rules.

Then you have the cultural effects. All of these new fads that are religiously enforced by these massive corporations are not free. It cost money to rearrange all of the video services to promote black content during the George Floyd campaign. It cost InBev real money to associate their brand with pedophiles. In other words, the cultural revolution as currently fought by the managerial system is packed with hidden costs and those hidden costs and paid for by thousands of hidden taxes.

When you start to think of these small changes cumulatively, they point to an inherent defect of the managerial system. The point of the system is to expand control of society which means ever expanding costs. This starts to crowd out other things, productive things like making stuff in factories. This requires new ways of raising revenue, which brings its own costs. Most importantly, the raison d’être of the system needs constant maintenance, which explains the culture war.

In other words, managerialism slowly crowds out the productive elements of society in favor of those that serve the system. This means the cost of the system grows while the effective tax base shrinks. Before long you end up with a society in which everyone is spending their productive hours either watching ads for penis pills or producing new ways to force people to watch ads for penis pills. At some point it must reach a crisis where the costs exceed the ability to tax.

In the small scale this happened in many American cities in the middle of the last century with the first waves of the cultural revolution. Progressive governments shifted from providing protection to social experimentation. This led to chaos, so business and taxpayers moved out of the cities. The shrinking tax base meant the only choices were to roll back the experiments or raise tax rates. They always chose the latter, so taxpayers continued to feel until many cities were insolvent.

What we are seeing now is those city experiments conducted on a continent sized country, enlisting the oligarchical power of corporations. The result must be the same as you cannot have an economy based on people lecturing one another on the latest thing any more than you can have an economy based on protecting people from muggers and drug dealers unleashed by the state. Just like the cities, the country will reach a point at which everyone agrees it is ungovernable.

Unfrozen Caveman Conservatives

Posted on December 27, 2023 by thezman

The remarkable thing thus far about the 2024 presidential election is that the so-called conservatives, and therefore the Republican Party, have gone into this process without having prepared for it. They have experienced two presidential cycles that went entirely against their interests, yet they have not done anything over the last eight years to prepare for this cycle. Their plan, if you want to call it a plan, is to pray the other party eliminates Trump for them via lawfare.

We know with a fair bit of certainty that the party told the collection of munchkins showing up at debates that they expected Trump to be disqualified. In the first debate, the zombie-like Asa Hutchinson blurted this out during the questioning. In the last debate, Ron DeSantis said something along the lines that the option for voters is what was onstage due to Trump’s legal troubles. It was long rumored that he decided to run based on the assurance that Trump would be eliminated.

Now, that is a plan, of sorts, but only if you think the only problem you have as a party is this one man wrecking your fun. Get rid of the bad man and the party, along with the so-called conservative movement, can go back to the old times. They are even bringing back the neocon nutters to promote a dingbat. It is as if they think they are just one more court ruling from going back to 2000 when they could pass off a simpleton to their voters as the updated version of The Gipper.

Of course, Trump is not an isolated phenomenon. He exists because of what the so-called conservatives did in 2000 with George Bush. The populist revolt within the Republican Party is the response to the bait and switch, along with massive amounts of lying, by the party and so-called conservatives. The reason millions continue to support Trump, despite all of his well-documented flaws, is that the “party of Lincoln” thought they could fool all of the people all of the time.

The reason the party is unprepared for 2024 is their intellectual engine ran out of fuel back in the Reagan years. In retrospect, the 1980’s were the last gasp of the old bourgeois liberalism that defined America into the 20th century. Buckley style conservatism was a bug fix, a cumulative patch, to the progressive software of the 20th century and once that work was done, conservatism had nothing left. It was a room full of people trained to fix something that was about to be replaced.

It is why conservatism looks like a collection of unfrozen cavemen unaware of the time that has passed while they were frozen. National Review still puts out nonsense about how progressive cultural production is actually conservative. That is when they are not swearing that blacks will start voting Republican any day now. The reason that so-called conservatives are locked into the 1980’s is they evolved for the moment and once the moment passed, they no longer had a purpose.

In retrospect, conservatism of the Buckley sort was a reaction to one narrow set of claims made by progressives in the 20th century. Put another way, it was a delayed response to the reforms of the FDR generation, who were sure that government could right the wrongs of American society. Through force they could fix race, poverty, inequality and the trade-offs of the marketplace. Conservatism was a response to the failure of this project to achieve its aims.

With the end of the Cold War and the arrival of the Clinton machine, the old left of government reformers was replaced by a new generation of reformers. These were the sons and daughters of the managerial elite who were marinated in the ideas of post-Marx culturalism, once called political correctness but now called woke. It is the totalitarian project to cleanse the world of whiteness by harnessing the power of the institutions, like a team of horses pulling the reformers.

Conservatism has no answer to this because conservatism was evolved to fix the bugs of the old progressive software. As a result, the Bush years were not spent addressing the cancer unleashed by the Clinton machine, but instead poured trillions of new dollars on federal agencies as they ramped up the cultural revolution. White people sensed things were getting worse as a result of the Bush presidency. The Obama years confirmed this and thus the populist revolt began with the 2010 election.

What white people in America faced in the 1970’s was a government that was terrible at the basics of government, but focused on righting the wrongs of the world. The antidote was conservatism that promised to reverse this. What white people face today is an army of antiwhite bigots running the centers of cultural production and protected by the federal government. They need a movement and party that promises to reverse all of this, but instead they get unfrozen caveman conservatives.

That is what you see on the debate stage at these debate shows. With the exception of Vivek Ramaswamy, who is a Trump catspaw, the rest are some versions of what you can see at the Reagan Museum. They skim over some of the cultural issues, but refuse to address the racial issues. If any of them noticed that there are no more white people in television ads, he would rocket up the polls. None of them mention these things because for all of them, the present is a foreign country.

Nature abhors a vacuum, which is why Trump exists. The system is lucky in that Trump is not very good at politics. A more skillful political animal with Trump’s instincts would be the Red Caesar the system fears. The inevitable failure of Trump to scratch the itch that has needed scratching for decades will not make the itch go away. It will simply lay the groundwork for a more skillful and more cynical version, because in the end no political system can survive making war on itself.

Liberal Intolerance

Posted on December 26, 2023 by thezman

There are certain assumptions about the world that modern people take for granted, without thinking about in any detail. These assumptions are about how things ought to be arranged in a modern society. Things like the rule of law and freedom of speech are just assumed to be social positives. Deliberate violations of these liberal principles are a sign that a society is in trouble or corrupt. No one ever wonders why this is the case as it is just part of the shared reality of modern life.

You see this in this essay by Paul Gottfried, which is a response to Canadian historian Ricardo Duchesne, who has taken Gottfried to task for his defense of the old bourgeois liberalism of the past. It is a good essay on the general topic of liberalism and whether or not it is to blame for the current crisis, but of interest here is the assertion that things like religious inclusiveness, individual freedom, and constitutional government are in of themselves good things and signs of progress.

Gottfried does not spend any time arguing these points, as he just assumes them to be good things that a good society ought to seek. This is not peculiar to Gottfried, as most everyone assumes the same thing. Go around a public area in the West and ask people if they favor more or less freedom and they will always pick the former. The same is true for the rest of the principles we associate with liberalism. The moral framework of the West is just assumed to be right and reasonable.

Now, we do not wonder about gravity or the sun rising in the east and setting in the west because these are settled. Few people know why objects fall to the earth when dropped and even fewer know that they accelerate toward the earth at thirty-two feet per second squared, but they know about gravity. Like the sun rising in the east, gravity is a settled matter, so there is no need to debate it. The same is generally assumed about the basic principles of liberal democracy.

What would go unnoticed is the inclusion of religious tolerance in there with reasonable things like individual liberty. Most of the liberal project can be justified, as much as possible, by reason. We can make logical arguments in favor of a rights-based society and limited government. You can make a rational argument in favor of parliamentary rule over a king or dictator. The same cannot be said for religious tolerance, which is something taken for granted, but never examined.

Western societies are moral societies. Instead of being bound together by kinship or force, as we see with most of the world, what holds Western people into political entitles is a common morality. Sure, blood, soil and history play a big role, but every European pollical entity has included significant minority populations. At the dawn of the French Revolution, most people in France did not share the same language. They spoke various local dialects, and in some areas, deferent languages.

This is even more true today as the elites of the West preach open borders, pluralism, and democracy as the holy trinity. The only way this can work is if all the new people agree to the old moral code or the moral code is adjusted to accommodate the new people coming into these old societies. The new speech and thought laws are all about policing the new moral code which prohibits the old stock from thinking anything but happy thoughts about the newcomers.

This is the basis for pluralism. Anyone can be an American if they embrace the American creed, which is a secular way of saying they can be an American if they embrace the religion of Americanism. Vivek Ramaswamy and Ben Shapiro have based their lives on this assertion. They are just as American as the descendants of Quakers or 19th century German immigrants. They say this because they embrace the religion of America and therefore meet the moral criteria to be American.

The problem here should be obvious. If Americanism is the moral code of America and by extension the West in general, and it insists on a general universality, then there can be no tolerance for alterative moral codes. Not only can American liberalism not tolerate alternative moral codes internally, but it must be intolerant of alternative moral codes external to the West. If you want to know why the West has waged war on Islam and now Eurasia, there is the answer.

The reason that Western societies now function like secular theocracies is liberalism has evolved into a religion. It has crowded out Christianity from the public square because no society can have more than one moral framework. Just as science replaced religious explanations for the natural world, liberalism has displaced the explicitly supernatural basis for societal morality with an esoteric moral code based vaguely on things like equality and openness.

What this means is that the assumption that religious tolerance is a liberal principle or could ever have been a liberal principle is false. The opposite is true. Liberalism must drive out or suppress any alternative moral framework, because it is the moral framework that evolved to replace the old moral order. That means it is not just intolerant or Christianity, but any morale framework that places itself above the morality of the liberal order. Everything must submit to the liberal faith.

The question, of course, is why has the liberal project that started at the end of the Middle Ages evolved into something like a secular Gnosticism? Gottfried looks for things outside of liberalism, like Protestantism, while Duchesne looks for things within the liberal tradition like pluralism. In both cases and in most critiques of liberalism the assumption is there is a worm in the apple. The apple being the liberal project and the worm being some sort of corruption.

In reality, the problem may simply lie in the fact that you cannot have a moral order based on reason. Reason cannot be the authority for how people ought to treat one another or how government should be organized. Reason can only take us to the point where the people need to sort these issues for themselves, because the great diversity of man means there is no universally right answer to these questions. How we ought to act is up to us or our gods.

When the gods are removed and tradition is discarded, something that must happen when all things are subjected to the acid wash of reason, there are no standards against which to measure moral claims. That leaves force as the determining factor, which means the moral order is decided by people who see it as their purpose to impose their sense of the moral order. Liberalism must end with a ruling class of secular clerics engaged in a never ending sermon.

The Tool Makers

Posted on December 22, 2023 by thezman

Note: I did not fall off the roof or plunge to my death falling off a ladder. I simply got busy this morning and forgot to hit the post button. I must admit, I miss working with my hands, so this is a the best days for me right now. I hope everyone has a great Christmas and I will be back next week.

A feature of politics is listing all of the things that are worse than they used to be at some point in the past. The people are dumber. The economy is worse. The politicians are somehow dumber than in the past. That is because politics is about morality, what we ought to be doing or ought not to be doing. You engage in politics because you think we ought not to be doing whatever it is we are doing or we should be doing something that we are not doing and that is going to be trouble.

Marx observed that if we get the morality right, as in we all agree on what ought to be done, then there is no need for politics. Imagine if all of our politicians agreed on what needs doing, the priority of those things and everyone agreed with them. We would no longer have politics or politicians. Instead, we would have bureaucrats busy doing what they are charged with doing. That is not the way of things, so we have halfwits and lunatics yelling at one another and we call it politics.

There are lots of things that are wrong in this world, not the least of which is politics, but there is a lot going right too. I thought about that while on a ladder last night fixing something that needed fixing. I noticed that the top deck of the ladder had a nice tray for holding small bits. There were holes for holding screw drivers and a larger hole for holding a drill. The little tray has a magnet baked into the bottom so the little metal bits you place there will not easily fall to the floor.

The ladder maker rightly assumed that these things would be useful to the sort of person using the ladder. Odds are, most step ladders are used by HVAC guys and electricians, but that is a guess. These are the sorts of people who need drills, screwdrivers and little metal bits with them at the top of the ladder. Perhaps this is standard on all ladders now, but it is new to me. My tall ladder is from a different maker and has a slightly different take on this idea.

When I was a young man working construction, you had step ladders made of wood for electrical work and aluminum ladders for other work. The reason you used wood ladders of electrical work is to avoid being fried to a crisp if you made a mistake and grabbed hold of a live wire. I once cut into a 220 line I thought was cold and it was an electrifying experience. These days most ladders are made of fiberglass which is better, lighter and does not conduct electricity.

Thinking about this at the top of the ladder, it occurred to be that just about all of the tools I am using are better than when I was a young man. I have a cordless drill that has variable speeds and does not require a chuck key. Most importantly, it does not require a nine-mile-long extension cord. As a teenager working construction, I probably wrapped up six million feet of extension cord. The house is full of tools right now and I do not see an extension cord.

The point is that there are lots of things getting better, despite the best efforts of halfwits and lunatics who run our politics. These small improvements in things like ladders and hand tools exist outside of the domain of halfwits and lunatic. The guy who came up with a new top set on a ladder was thinking about how to make a better ladder and thus make life a bit easier for the ladder user. There are millions of people out there who spend their days finding ways to make things better.

Of course, the people thinking about how to make a better ladder are not the people you now see in TV ads. The smart guy in the movies is nothing like the genuinely smart guys finding small improvements in life. The guy in the TV ad is a figment of the imagination of people who hate the guy who made a better ladder. That is the most important fact in the word right now. No matter how hard the bad guys try to make the TV guy real, he is not real, while the ladder guy is real.

That is something to keep in mind, especially in what has always been called the season of hope in the Western world. Joe Sobran was right. The guy making a better ladder, a better drill, a better way to patch a hole in the wall, that guy towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. The people responsible for those TV ads are motivated by envy, because the guy making a better ladder, the guy who invented the ladder, is the image of superiority.

The lesson of history is that human capital is what wins out in the end. That is the iron law of the universe. It has held for ten thousand years and will hold for ten thousand years into the future. The halfwits and lunatics, the guys mocking you through TV ads and movies, will eventually submit to this iron law of history. Eventually, the guys using those better tools put down those tools and set about solving the problem of those people behind the problems of our politics.

Merry Christmas.

Green Door Content: Annie Hall

Posted on December 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: By the time this posts, I will be on the roof of the new place with the chimney man getting things ready for the new woodstove. I had the flue inspected and that is fine, but the cap needs attention and I am having the flue cleaned just to be sure. The following is a post from behind the green door to hold everyone over until I return, assuming I do not fall off the roof. If there is no Friday post, it has been fun.

If I were tasked with writing a summary of the classic Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall, I would be hard pressed to get past a paragraph. It is film starring a neurotic Jewish man, played by Woody Allen, and a mentally unstable woman, played by Diane Keeton, who wander around New York for ninety minutes speaking to one another as if they swallowed a 1970’s pop-psychology textbook.

The movie reminds me of the old quip about the James Joyce novel Ulysses. “A Jewish man who wanders around Dublin and nothing happens.” That is not a criticism. In fact, it is the best thing I can think of to say about the film. There is a chance that Allen was inspired by the Joyce novel and was attempting to recreate it for a New York audience, from an entirely Jewish perspective. Joyce is mentioned in this scene.

I did some digging around to see if maybe that was what Allen was doing with this film, but I found nothing to suggest it. Despite its status as a classic film and one of Allen’s best works, there is not much in the way of critical analysis. That is because there is not much to examine when it comes to things you expect in a story. It is just two neurotic Manhattanites wandering around for ninety minutes.

The film is classed as a romantic comedy, but it is probably better to call it a character study or perhaps an anthropological study. It is primarily about two people, presented as representative of the cultural elite of the time, as they struggle with their various insecurities and disconnectedness. Comedian Alvy Singer, (Allen) and Annie Hall (Keaton) are struggling with alienation in the modern age.

Alienation is the subtext of the film, but it is not entirely clear that Allen had the self-awareness to know this. Alvy Singer is the typical Jewish character struggling with his otherness in a world dominated by non-Jews. Allen hams it up quite a bit to the point where Alvy Singer is a satire of the Jewish guy who is sure that around every corner there could be a gang of Nazis ready to haul him away to the camps.

Once you get past the hyperbole, you get to the essential reality of the Jewish condition, at least as Jews see it, which is that they are always a people who dwell alone, regardless of where they find themselves. Who they are is defined by their outsider status so they must remain as outsiders or risk losing their identity. It is the essential contradiction at the heart of Jewish identity in the diaspora.

Alienation takes on a different form with Annie. She is presented as from a standard issue white middle-class family. At one point, Alvy jokes that she grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting. She is the modern atomized female, a creature of both feminism and the modern economy, who sees a therapist and spends most of her time dwelling on trivialities to escape from the loneliness of her life.

The two of them sort of fall in love, but their relationship does not work because of the self-absorption rooted in their alienation. Alvy only thinks about sex, while Annie has no interest in sex. In both cases, this leads to endless self-examination that is entirely superficial and pointless. These are two people who are alienated from themselves, so it is why they cannot have a normal human relationship.

Sadly, that analysis is far more interesting than the film version. Both characters are boring and self-indulgent. There is no reason to care about them because you have met these stock figures loads of times in film and real life. Annie is a neurotic dingbat who every man over thirty has met a thousand times. Allen is the classic Jewish guy who thinks his endless complaining makes him seem interesting.

That is the main problem with the film. It wants to be a social commentary, but it has nothing to say about the things featured in the film. You get some pithy commentary from Alvie who breaks the fourth wall throughout the film, but those are just gag lines that Allen used in his stand-up. Otherwise, you have no reason to care about the people, so you have no reason to think about their dilemma.

In this regard it is like other movies of this decade in that they were made by people who held themselves in high regard, so they just assumed anything they did or said was important by itself. They made films that were supposed to lead the horse to water, but it was hard to care about the horse, so the water never came into focus. Whatever Allen was trying to say about his time and place in this film remained unsaid.

That said, the film is visually interesting. Even after fifty years it feels like you are there in Manhattan with Alvy and Annie. You often think you can smell the stench of the urine-soaked hobos, which were a feature of the city at the time. This may be why the film shows up on the top-100 list, rather than other Woody Allen films which were graded higher at the time in terms of artistic merit.

In the end, Annie Hall feels like a professionally made film school project in that it is self-indulgent and the person doing the self-indulging is not that interesting. Woody Allen’s hang-ups and insecurities are interesting to no one but Woody Allen. A film about them, not matter how well done, is still just a film about a boring Jewish man who spends ninety minutes walking around Manhattan with an equally boring shiksa.

Divorce Court

Posted on December 20, 2023 by thezman

Anyone who has been through a breakup, whether it was a personal or professional relationship, can probably think back and recall the moment when it felt like something changed in the relationship. Your mind went from one mode of thinking about the other party to another way of thinking about them. Maybe the change happened on the other side, and you noticed it, but could not quite explain it. Eventually this realization led to a change in how you viewed the relationship.

It is one of those weird things where you go from not thinking about some potential future, like a divorce or a business breakup, to contemplating it and then all of a sudden it feels like an inevitability. People who quit their jobs always quit in their mind before they quit the actual job. There is a period where you can tell they are no longer committed to their work, even though they go about it as usual. That person is going through that shift from one normal to another normal.

Such a thing happened to the American people in the 2020 elections when the results miraculously changed in the late hours. Millions of people went from thinking that such a thing could never happen in America to realizing that it was actually happening, to now accepting it as a part of the new normal. In a way, those people went through a divorce and on the other side was their idea of old America. They are now in an apartment, perhaps dating new America, while old America got the house.

The same sort of thing may be happening with this election. For a long time now, a few weirdos have been predicting a new round of shenanigans. This time the regime’s schemers would keep Trump off the ballot, rather than risk him overcoming the election schemes to win the general. Some even suggested that the GOP would collude with their friends across the aisle to get Trump jammed up legally to the point where the party would have no choice but to disqualify him.

Your typical middle-class white person, the real core of the Trump voting bloc, dismissed these claims, but now they watch as the system slowly wraps itself around Trump like an anaconda. He was just removed from the ballot in Colorado on the grounds that the judges think Hitler is under their beds. The ruling is a blend of bourgeois hysteria and ideological madness. There are cases like this in other states that will surely end the same way.

Spend time on social media and the MAGA crowd is sure that the Supreme Court will knock these cases down. After all, this is still America. The courts removing parties and candidates is something that happens in the third world or Russia. Like the man who still thinks things can be patched up with his wife, these people are not ready to contemplate the reality of the situation. Old America just moved in a black guy, while Trump supporters keep hope alive in the apartment.

As this process rolls along and the walls close in on Trump, the people still lighting candles for old America will slowly reach that inflexion point where they go from one phase to the next phase. Just as they have come to accept mass election fraud as a feature of the “system” they will come to accept that the system is itself a grotesque mockery of self-government. You get to vote for the regime stooge you like, as long as the permanent ruling party approves her.

This transition in the American divorce will depend upon who the regime decides will “win” the Republican nomination. The biggest of big liars are trying to sell the big lie that voters like Nikki Haley. You would think that these people would have learned by now that the big lie strategy ends poorly, but they persist. It is safe to assume that the majority of the people the GOP expects to vote in November despise Haley, so declaring her the winner will be interesting.

Alternatively, the party could “recruit” Glenn Youngkin, the Gomer Pyle-like governor of Virginia who got some positive media last year when he made pleasing noises about the rage heads peddling pornography in the schools. He is Mitt Romney without the magic underwear problem. The regime loves him. The neocons would get to run his foreign policy and his aw-shucks presentation would fool enough old white people to convince the regime it could work.

Regardless of who the party selects to be the figurehead, the people who vote Republican, especially those Trump loyalist, will enter into that phase where they come to terms with that which they thought was impossible. Not only do the Democrats play fast and loose with election laws, but the Republicans coordinate with them to rig their own nominating process. The last holdouts of old America will suddenly have to accept that old America is gone, and divorce is inevitable.

The phase change one experiences in a breakup happens both fast and slow, in that it feels like a switch has been thrown, but then there is a long slow aftermath. Once you realize the relationship cannot be repaired, there is the process of unwinding it, which is often quite ugly. A terrible truth of the human condition is that it feels good to hate, especially when you need someone to blame. White America’s divorce from old America will be as acrimonious and eventful as any divorce.

The difference here is that half the country is not going to pack up and move to another part of town. Instead, the number of people who accept that it is who is in charge is what matters, rather than how they rule, will continue to grow. The amount of noticing we see online is a great indicator of what is happening. There are things on social media that would not have been uttered in private a decade ago. Again, another sign that old America is never coming back.

Predicting the future is a mug’s game, but it is reasonable to think that in the long run 2024 will be thought of as the year when national divorce became real. An idea that kicked around the fringe suddenly entered the mainstream. One side, the people who want to live in orderly societies, will come to accept that there is no living with the people on the other side. Even if it is possible, they do not want to live with people who think this is normal. They want a divorce.

White Authority

Posted on December 19, 2023 by thezman

Was the founding generation of America full of white nationalists? This is a claim popular with some white nationalists. They argue that North America was settled by white people who set out to create a new society for white people and once they achieved independence from England, they created a white society. They will point to statements and actions that suggest that early Americans consciously and deliberately planned a society exclusively for white people.

Oddly, this is the exact same claim made by anti-whites in support of the demands for reparations and what they call “restorative justice.” The starting point for understanding the anti-white argument is their take on the social contract. They claim that because civilization was created by white men, it must have been created to serve the interest of white men, which must have come at the expense of non-whites. In other words, they agree with the white nationalists on this point.

Putting aside the claims by the anti-whites, which are all ex post facto arguments to support their current thirst for vengeance, are the white nationalist correct when they claim the Framers as their own? There is no disputing the fact that the European people of the 17th and 18th century had little interest in other races. They certainly did not think the races should mingle. They thought it perfectly normal to own human beings, so their views on equality were, at best, narrow and rhetorical.

The best argument in favor of the white nationalist claim about the intention of the Framers is the preamble to the constitution. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The word “posterity” is critical. Then as now, this word means future generations of the current people and the people who chose that word were white. They chose to capitalize it, which in that age was a form of emphasis. They were making clear to the people of the states that the point of the new government was to protect and promote the people and their descendants. The Naturalization Act of 1790, one of the first acts passed by the new government, drives home this point.

The problem here is that Congress repealed this five years later in favor of the Naturalization Act of 1795. They kept much of the original bill, but then three years later they modified it again with the Naturalization Act of 1798. More changes followed as Congress wrestled with how best to solve the main problem, which was the lack of human capital to exploit the country’s natural resources. 18th century America was rich in natural resources, but short of people.

In other words, the point of these acts was not to protect white people or keep out non-whites, but to manage the problem of how to bring in new settlers – and that is what was needed – but to do so without undermining the current population. Race and ethnicity were not the primary reason for these acts. In fact, the people of this age could not image what we think of as a multi-racial society. Such a thing not only did not exist, but at the time it could not exist. It was simply not a consideration.

That brings us to the main problem with this line of reasoning. The people of this time had different conceptions of race. This is not to say race is a social construct, but that the meaning of words change over time. For 18th century man, words like “white”, and “race” were used differently from today. For the Framers, white often meant English, while race meant ethnicity. Our modern idea of “white”, meaning broadly European, would have seemed strange to Thomas Jefferson.

Further, the concept of white nationalism would have puzzled the people of this age because it is a solution to a problem they could not imagine. If you went back in time and told them that millions of non-whites would be flowing into the country every year, they would have thought you were insane. The movement of millions of people, regardless of race, was inconceivable. There were only four million people in America when the Constitution was being debated.

Now, the white nationalist would no doubt argue that if the Framers could understand the problems that modern Americans face, they would certainly embrace the concept of white nationalism as a solution. There is no way to prove or disprove it, so it is merely a gratuitous assertion. It is fair to assume that the Framers assumed and expected, therefore would have wanted, the country to look like them in terms of race and religion, long after they were gone. They wanted this for their posterity.

There is a deeper issue at work here. Like the anti-whites who claim original sin as justification for their present behavior, the white nationalists pointing to the Framers are looking for a moral authority. They think that the Framers are unassailable, in moral terms, so if the Framers were white nationalists, then it follows that white nationalism is a moral good. What are you going to do? Take down the statues of the Framers and strike their names from the history books?

That aside, the mistake is to assume a person can be a moral authority. The Framers were not gods or God’s representatives. They were just men sorting through the challenges of their age with the knowledge of their age. They were not moral authorities then and they cannot be moral authorities now. The challenges of this age will need to be sorted by the men of this age. Their moral authority is simply their collective will to create a safe and prosperous society for their posterity.

Maybe white nationalism, however it is defined, is the right answer. Pinning white nationalist down on what the term means is not always easy, but maybe in there is the right answer for the plight of white people in North America. That will be determined as all such things are determined. Can it actually meet the challenge and are the trade-offs acceptable to the people adopting it? This is not a question for the dead, but for the white people living in the here and now.

The Long Collapse

Posted on December 18, 2023 by thezman

Note: Our good friend Ed Dutton has a new book titled, The Naked Classroom: The Evolutionary Psychology of Your Time at School. While watching paint dry I intend to read it and post up a review this week. Please but two copies, one for yourself and one for a friend or family member.

Note: Behind the green door I have a post titled Eloi, Morlocks and the Cable Guy, a post titled Missing The Executioner, and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Societal collapse is a topic that has always had a following, especially on this side of the great divide, despite the fact that there are no signs of it. You can point to current trends and say they could one day lead to collapse, something like the systemic abuse of the money supply or the degradation of the American military. On the other hand, liberal democracies have shown an ability to self-correct. The money supply and the military were a mess in the 1970’s until they were fixed.

The closest we have come to witnessing the collapse of a complex society was the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Over a thirty-year period, the member nations of the communist bloc had slowly integrated their economies and military, under the umbrella the communist world, so when these countries broke free, what followed was a period of chaos that eventually spread to Russia itself. The 1990’s were a dark time in Russia, marked by lawlessness and social chaos.

Even so, these countries that made up the the communist world did not disintegrate after the fall of the Soviet Union. The captive nations quickly reoriented themselves economically and politically toward the West. Russia had a dark period of chaos and confusion, but eventually regained itself. In other words, these societies did not collapse, even though the political-economy collapsed. They simply had to refashion their economics and politics, which they did.

Another example might be Iraq after the United States toppled Saddam. The main reason Iraq fell into chaos and the American military had to fight a guerilla war to gain control of the country was the old system collapsed. Of course, that would not have happened if not for the thousands of tons of explosive dropped on the country by the American military. It was more of a self-controlled demolition more than a collapse of a complex society in the Joseph Tainter sense of the phrase.

The coming year may provide some examples that are not quite what Tainter described, but not quite like the recent examples either. Ukraine, for example, seems to be on the cusp of collapse after two long years of war. The political class is in turmoil, leading many to predict a coup against Zelensky. The army is running out of men and material to hold back the Russians. Both Europe and Washington are now slow-walking future aid due to the growing problems in the country.

It is possible that we see something like Iraq, where a guerilla army forms up after the regular army collapses. The Bandera elements could try to seize power, leading to a civil war between them and other factions. The minority groups in the West could see this as a chance to gain their freedom. The term Carpatho-Ruthenian could start appearing in Western media. There could also be a general collapse of civil order, including the operation of the infrastructure.

Unlike Iraq, there is a sidecar to this that bears watching. For two years much of the political class in the West has been convinced that Ukraine just needs to hold the line, as the Russians will eventually collapse. This was the prediction made at the start by the neocons who control Western foreign policy. We are seeing some glimpses of politicians waking up to reality. No one knows what will happen when reality comes rushing in like a winter wind blowing open the door.

It is not just a credibility issue here. Hundreds of billions of booty have been promised by those politicians to powerful interests. For example, Blackrock has been buying up land rights in Ukraine, expecting a Ukraine victory. What happens when the new Ukraine government repudiates these deals? No one really knows how much money has changed hands on the assumption that Western oligarchs will get to plunder the place after the Ukrainians defeat the Russians.

It is easy to forget that the imaginary world in which our rulers operate is their reality, so when that reality slams into genuine reality, there will be consequences. We tend to think of collapse in terms of practical things not working but collapse also applies to narrative frameworks and beliefs. For over thirty years the Global American Empire has rested on the assumptions that arise from being an invisible force. When that premise is no longer valid, there will be consequences.

Of course, there are important elections coming in the next year. The most significant of which is un the United States. The only Ukraine skeptic is Donald Trump, who could be forced off the ticket for that reason. People forget that Trump’s primary crime against the regime, as far as the regime is concerned, is his opposition to the neocons. They slimed him with the Russian collusion hoax and then impeached him over Ukraine. A collapse of Ukraine will add some spice to this already spicy stew.

If they do force Trump off the ballot, that means the candidates in the general election will be Ukraine fanatics controlled by the neocons. Imagine the 2008 election was between John McCain and John Bolton, against the backdrop of the Iraq fiasco and you have a glimpse of a possible future. If on the other hand Trump is on the ballot, imagine him pounding away at this every day until election day. It is possible that 2024 makes 2016 look like a debate at the philatelic society.

Closer to home, in the dissident sphere, a weird subculture has developed around Ukraine and the war. This debate provides a nice summary of their beliefs. It is as if the people in that pro-Ukraine subculture were given a potion by the neocons that causes them to repeat all of their most absurd claims, without realizing they are parroting the people they claim to oppose. If Ukraine collapses, we could witness something similar to what happened with the Seekers in this famous study.

Failure has consequences and collapse is a form of failure. Unlike a typo or a math error, collapse takes with it whole systems of thought and belief because it is the result of those systems and beliefs. Maybe all of this is avoided, and Ukraine bumps along to some new arrangements that avoids a catastrophe. That is something Tainter observed about the modern age. Collapse is much more difficult because all human systems are interconnected, so they have external support.

Ukraine will provide a test of that in 2024. Russia does not want collapse, as that just makes their task more difficult. The Poles do not want millions more Ukrainian refugees, so they do not want collapse. There are forces withing Ukraine that would like a soft landing, even if it means capitulating to Russia. Maybe Tainter is right, and the structure of the West will prevent collapse. On the other hand, the failure of Project Ukraine is just one step in the collapse of the West.

Ten Topics

Posted on December 15, 2023 by thezman

The final show of the year is a scramble of topics that turned up in the e-mail either by nature or upon request. There were others that were either not interesting to me, or they were of a more personal nature. I do not want to go down the road of offering advice to people, so I tend to avoid those topics. There is never an upside to giving advice, especially personal advice, so it is best to avoid it.

The one topic I could have gone on longer about is the Covid stuff, which I have not done in a long time. It is a good example of how the media’s real power is the power to ignore a subject or person. They flipped the switch on Covid and slowly people just forgot about the whole thing. The only people who want to talk about it are the people who were right about it or have a complaint about it.

This is especially powerful when the regime makes an error. The vaccine stuff was a terrible blunder, but the media ignore it, so it does not get discussed. Poor Ron DeSantis thought Covid would be a great card to play, but in these debates, he never gets asked about it and he has stopped mentioning it. That means if Trump remains on the ballot for 2024, he will not be asked about his role in the fiasco.

The thing is the media does not do this consciously. They exist in a small, isolated world unaware of the outer world. What is important to them is assumed to be important to everyone and vice versa. Once Covid stopped being a big deal to them, the dogs barked, and the media caravan moved on. We are seeing the same thing with Biden impeachment, which is of no interest to them at the moment.

An amusing example is the Cobra holding a town hall meeting moderated by a carny on CNN the other day. The carny demanded proof that the FBI was involved in January 6, as if this was a crazy suggestion. The carny was unaware of the mountain of stories about the FBI role in the event, because in her world there is only one version of that day, and no one ever thinks to question it.

That is what will make the Ukraine story interesting in 2024. Few in the media are aware of what has really been happening. That means over the next six months they will have to be brought up to speed by the few people who have some clue and will be allowed to talk about reality. It will be like seeing a colony of mole people see the sunshine for the first time. Good times will be had by all.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Best Western
Vivek Ramaswamy
Why Do You Hate Hitchcock
Electric Cars
My DeSantis Problem
Trump -> Youngkin
Covid Vaccines
Greg Johnson On Ukraine
Nick Fuentes & Richard Spencer
Christopher Caldwell

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