Good Times

Posted on December 14, 2023 by thezman

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It would take a heart of stone not to enjoy the current moral panic that has enveloped the elite monasteries of the country. For those unaware, the presidents of MIT, Penn and Harvard were called to perform at a Congressional morality play regarding pro-Palestinian protests on the college campus. Important Jewish people have demanded an end to these protests, so Congress swung into action. They called these three girl bosses in to explain why they had not ended these protests.

Hilariously, these three girl bosses managed to fumble what everyone assumed was an easy role for them in the show. The way these things work is the politicians make a speech, put on their serious face, and ask the witness to respond to a loaded question that can only have one answer. The witness then puts on her serios face, gives a speech and confirms what the questioner asked. Somehow these girl bosses did not know this, and they gave nuanced answers.

Now, nuanced answers are good when the questioner is pretending to be one of the bad people who claims to speak for the Dirt People. In these cases, the nuanced answer is a way of saying that the Dirt People are too stupid to understand the topic, without coming right out and saying it. In this case, the questioners were literally speaking for the Jewish supporters of Israel. Therefore, the nuanced answer was seen as the worst form of heresy.

What that means in the American theocracy is all three girl bosses were condemned as antisemites and expected to resign. Being girls bosses, raised on the narcotics of feminism and multiculturalism, they refused. “How dare these small hat wearing weirdos challenge our nuanced answers?”, they surely thought to themselves. For their part, the small hat wearing weirdos started pulling their money from these colleges, threatening a larger boycott unless the girl bosses get fired.

To no one’s surprise on this side of the great divide, the only girl boss to get shown the door was the white lady, Penn president Elizabeth Magill. The weird look black girl boss of Harvard and the Jewish girl boss of MIT have the full support of their board and refuse to resign. This has created a problem, as to notice this is to notice the truth of the liberal project, which is the greatest taboo. On the other hand, to not notice this means letting the protestors say bad things about Jews and Israel.

What is making this even more amusing is the Jewish donors are focusing all of their energy on Harvard’s black girl boss and totally ignoring MIT’s girls boss, thus making it near impossible to not notice things. Steve Sailer had to be rushed to the emergency room for an overdose of noticing. On the other hand, the people making a lucrative career out of never noticing have not noticed any of this. They are preparing to fold their tents and declare a moral victory.

That is the conservative golden bridge. Whenever it is time to take the fight to the other side, they gather up their best principles and build themselves a bridge over which they can escape the battlefield. You see, this Jew-hating, black plagiarist will have to live with the knowledge that people know she is a fraud. The fact that this woman has managed to live with this her whole life does not register. They will comfort themselves knowing they held the moral high ground over on the sidelines.

Of course, the people backing black girl boss may have won this battle, but they are in for a long war as the other side never takes no for an answer. They are rather famous for that, so the war will continue. They are now going after black girl boss on the grounds that she is an academic fraud. She did her PhD in how to efficiently use Word’s copy and paste feature. Apparently, she felt entitled to the work of others. How in the world did she get that idea? Oh, right.

Conservatives, of course, are already assuming this signals the end of the revolution as the revolutionaries set about eating their own. They are preparing to celebrate themselves for having hidden under their bed long enough for the bad guys to have burned down everything worth burning. “The diversity warriors have done it now! They have angered the Jews and there is no recovering from that. The Jews will vote Republican in the next election, and we win!”

This is nonsense. The reason these girl bosses exist, regardless of their form, is they are a rebuke to the unifying enemy which is the white man. The sole reason Harvard hired this ridiculous woman as president was because she was ridiculous. It was both a rebuke to the pale penis people and a booshie goof. She has no real power or authority, so no harm can come of it. This makes her hiring like so much of what happens in this region of the clouds. It is a pose, a gesture, a signal.

If the pale penis people out there in the places where the Dirt People live start causing any trouble, the Cloud People will quickly put aside this tempest in a teapot aside, lock shields and wage jihad against their common enemy. No matter how much the various factions of the permanent revolution may hate one another, they all agree that they hate you more than they hate anything else on this earth. That is because you are the living rebuke of everything they claim for themselves.

Even so, you take your joy where you find it. This is a long fight with many dark days, so any fun you can have along the way you must enjoy to the fullest. Watching these credentialled fraudsters claw each other’s eyes out is great fun. It is also a useful reminder that the progressive is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

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Ukraine Intrigue

Posted on December 13, 2023 by thezman

Determining what the regime is plotting is often a guessing game, as the regime has turned itself into the father of lies. The people in positions of authority lie even when the truth would serve their interests. As a result, we are left to look at what is going on around the regime, how various players are reacting, in order to guess at what may be happening inside the black box that is Washington. We just got a dose of that this week when Zelensky arrived rattling the tin cup.

Everything about the trip was weird, compared to what has been the norm regarding Ukraine over the last two years. His arrival was not met with a big ceremony and the media was not flooded with Ukrainian agit-prop. The closest we got on that score was a press release to C-level crazies in fringe media. Six months ago, these stories were regular features in regime media. Instead there were grim stories about Ukraine at a cross roads militarily and politically.

Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Zelensky was not invited to Washington, even though his trip was certainly arranged by the Kagan cult. They first had him show up in Argentina at the swearing in of their new ruler. Since he was in the neighborhood, he decided to swing by Washington just as the Biden administration is begging Congress for more money for Ukraine. This week is the last week to get a package passed as Congress goes on an extended break.

That is the other bit of weirdness. House Republicans suddenly grew a spine for the first time in generations and have refused to give Biden more money for Ukraine without getting significant concessions on immigration. In fact, they are holding up Israel money in the process, which is no doubt angering the usual suspects. The administration refuses to separate out Israel money from Ukraine money and the House refuses to consider a bill that combines the two.

The final bit of weirdness to the drama is they had Zelensky make the rounds in order to guilt Congress into relenting. The thing is, he only met with the Senate and reportedly the meeting did not go well. He did not meet with House members, presumably because they would be even more hostile. He closed his trip with what was expected to be a tongue bathing from Fox News zombie Brett Baier, but the producers gave Bair some real questions to ask, which ruined the effect.

Taken in total, it was a disaster for Zelensky. It is not just being cut off by Congress but the way it was done. He now has to go back to Kiev empty handed and with the impression that Washington no longer loves him. His main card in Ukrainian politics right now is he keeps the money flowing. If he is not keeping the money flowing and he is not on good terms with Washington, then what is his point? Why keep him around if all he does is strut around in gym clothes?

That may have been the point of this trip. Back in Kiev there is a power struggle between the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, head of the secret police Kyrylo Budanov and Zelensky. Some generals are siding with Zelensky, and no one really knows where Budanov stands, but the bulk of the officer corps backs Zaluzhnyi. What really matters, of course, is which faction is backed by Washington and that is why this trip matters.

It is possible that the Kagan cult has determined that Zelensky is a liability, and they need to find a replacement. If it appears that Zelensky has fallen out of favor and that is slowing the flow of cash to Kiev, then there is a good chance that the anti-Zelensky factions will come together and topple the government. In this context, a military junta run by Zaluzhnyi makes some sense. He is on good terms with the Western war machine, and he has credibility with regards to conducting the war.

On the other hand, this may be a bit of 2-D chess. By now everyone in the White House has to know that Ukraine is lost. The question now is how to manage the endgame, especially in light of an election in eleven months. The last thing the regime wants is scenes of Russian tanks entering Ukrainian cities this summer. If the army overthrows Zelensky, the administration can claim the failure is due to Republicans cutting off funding which resulted in a coup and then collapse.

This sounds a bit farfetched, but keep in mind that Washington overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014. Everyone in Kiev knows this. That is why stories like this one in a CIA front operation are important. The Kiev Post is not in Kiev. It is one of the many nodes of disinformation operated by the regime. Stories about a third coup in Kiev coming from such a source are intended to send a message. Zelensky’s palace could soon be the closing scenes of the movie Scarface.

One always has to consider ineptitude in these matters. It could simply be that the Biden people have poorly managed all of this and the botched trip to Washington was just one more self-own. Mike Johnson is as green as grass, so he is trying to earn some street cred by holding the line on Ukraine money. The Biden people handed him this gift of trying to tie Ukraine money to Israel money, so he is using this impasse to make pleasant noises about immigration.

Taken as a whole, the best we can say for certain is some elements of the regime are now moving into the endgame phase of project Ukraine. Whether or not they have internalized how this will end is hard to know, but clearly some elements are thinking about how to manage the inevitable defeat of Ukraine. Given the implacability of the Kagan cult, this suggests Zelensky brought the gift of palace intrigue to Washington, as the tribes duke it out over how to manage Ukraine.

In the end, none of it really matters. Moscow has ruled out negotiations with Kiev and is in no mood to do Washington any favors. For the Russians, Ukraine is one part of a larger war against the Global American Empire. That means they will continue to manage the Ukraine war in light of that larger conflict. The fate of Ukraine is no longer in the hands of Washington. Once important people in Kiev understand this, the war ends along with the current Kiev regime.

Belief And Democracy

Posted on December 12, 2023 by thezman

The willingness to accept something as true, without evidence to support it, is the essence of belief. Someone tells you something and you can either accept what is said as true or reject it, without having much to go on because people rarely layout factual cases for the things they say. Your buddy at the office tells you he heard layoffs are coming, but his only proof is where he heard it. You have to decide whether to accept what he says or reject it, based on other factors.

Belief is the thing at the center of religion, culture, and ideology. You grow up learning about Wotan and his wandering. You accept it as true, even though there is never any evidence to support the existence of Wotan. You became a communist because you learned about historical materialism, and it explained everything. You continue to celebrate Christmas, despite being a pagan communist, because you were told it is what your people do regardless of their religion.

Biologically, belief is assumed to be one of modern man’s oldest traits. Belief, which is often confused with religion, probably co-evolved with language. Taken together it allows for humans to pass along complex and abstract ideas from one place to another and one generation to another. You can read the Epic of Gilgamesh today, in your native language, and learn something about the people who produced it. The abstract concepts traveled over time and place to you.

To get a better sense of the power of belief, think about a race of humans that is devoid of belief so all claims must be backed by proof. Children grow up demanding proof of everything said by their parents. School children demand proof of every assertion made by their teachers. The boss of the corporation is required to prove that diversity is the company’s greatest strength. Humans would never have made it out of the trees without a willingness to believe what they are told.

Like most human traits, belief seems to operate on a spectrum. Everyone knows a gullible person who trusts everyone. Then you have the devout person who accepts everything about her particular religion. On the other hand, we have the skeptic who is willing to question claims that seem a bit over the top. This person is different from the cynic, who assumes everything is a lie. The bulk of people lie between the serious skeptic and the generally trusting.

Belief is probably why democracy ends in disaster. The point of democracy is to have policies that reflect the general will of the people. In theory this means figuring out what most people will accept. You cannot make everyone happy, even in a small group ordering in lunch, but you can make most people happy and those outliers happy enough so they do not revolt. In theory, democracy is ordering pizza for lunch because no one hates it and most people like it.

In reality, democracy quickly turns into a game of convincing the majority to go along with whatever benefits the few. If you and your conspirators can get fifty percent plus one to agree to your scheme, it will be very good for you. Of course, others have their schemes so that democracy quickly moves from understanding the will of the people to persuading the majority. In reality, democracy is ordering Chinese after having convinced the majority that it is the right choice.

That phrase “right choice” is critical. It is never about facts and reason, but about the morally correct choice. Democracy rests on the assertion that the morally correct choice is that which satisfies the needs and demands of most people. Therefore, the way to persuade someone is to convince them that the majority already believes whatever it is you are pitching. In practice, democracy is telling each person that everyone really wants Chinese, except those troublemakers in the pizza party.

This is where belief comes into the room. In such conditions, the true believer will always have an advantage over the skeptic and especially the cynic because the fanatic shares the language and thought processes of the typical believer. Since most people are generally willing to believe what is told to them, as long as the source has some trust capital, the fanatic shares with the typical person that willingness to believe, even if it is in the extreme. The fanatic speaks the common language.

The skeptic, on the other hand, lacks the ability to naturally communicate with the typical person because he questions what is asserted. The skeptic is not trafficking in alternative beliefs but in the lack of belief. This naturally means the audience willing to hear his questions is smaller than that of the fanatic. The cynic is trafficking in the denial of belief, so his market is the smallest. It is why the word cynic has a negative connotation in our democratic societies.

In the game of persuasion, the true believer starts with an enormous advantage because the majority is tuned to believe. There are enough skeptics to force the fanatics to make their case, but they get to make their case in moral terms, rather than factual ones, which is why they so often carry the day. Humans would rather do the morally right thing than the empirically right thing. This reality of the human condition is why democracy falls prey to fanatics and charlatans.

There is another piece to this. Humans in the main are believing machines so they will believe in something. This provides another advantage for the fanatic. In the absence of a better belief, the typical person will still listen to the fanatic, despite his many factual errors, until a better set of beliefs come along. Since the skeptic is never selling belief, but merely questioning it, he never reaps the rewards of his successful questioning of the fanatic. A new fanatic always steps into that breech.

It is why fanatics and charlatans have come to dominate Western countries. Since the Cold War, the West has embraced the idea of democracy, which has unleashed the fanatics and charlatans, who in turn promote democracy as the only moral choice, because it is the manure that fertilizes them. The death spiral of the West is the death spiral of every democracy. Without hard limits, the people will follow fanatics promising salvation until there is nothing left to save.

Justified Paranoia

Posted on December 11, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the wackiness of the real estate rackets, a post about the classic western High Noon, which is probably both overrated and underrated as a film. Then there is the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

If someone says something that is wrong or crazy about a topic in which you have no interest, you are most likely going to ignore them. Similarly, if the person saying these wacky things is someone you do not think has any credibility, you will not bother rebutting what they have to say. It is when someone says something incorrect or inaccurate about a topic you think is important that you respond. If you think that person has influence, you want to make sure to rebut them.

Politics in the age of the internet violates this rule as people engage with anonymous weirdos online over abstract topics all the time. There is an old meme where a guy is up late at night and his wife asks him why he is not in bed. He says, “There is a guy on the internet saying things I don’t like.” Most people are not like this, but the weirdness of this new thing depends on that reality at the start. You are not supposed to care about the words of anonymous weirdos.

That is the place to start with yet another example of the regime losing its mind over people holding the wrong opinion about the 2020 election. Here is a breakdown of the charges the Biden administration is bringing against Trump over the peaceful protests on January 6. The first thing to note is the prosecutor is using the crackpot idea of stochastic violence, which was cooked up by mentally unstable people on Twitter who thought mean tweets would cause them physical harm.

Note also that the core of the case against Trump here and in all of the January 6th persecutions is that the offenders are election denier. In many of these cases, the judge, as a part of the punishment, makes the accused say in open court that he now believes Biden won fair and square. You can be sure that the main goal of these charges against Trump is to get him to do the same. The regime and its volunteer army of toadies is obsessed with this idea.

The question is why? Since Trump came down the escalator these people have told us that Trump is a clown and his supporters are lunatics. If they genuinely believe it, then they should not care what they say. Granted, politics causes people to lose their minds, but the allegedly serious people in positions of power should not be going Daffy Duck over politics like they are a blue-haired harridans on Twitter. Yet it is important people in the regime that are berserk about this issue.

The other angle here is that if you think Biden won fair and square, then you have no reason to care about the fraud claims. Lots of far-left people swore Karl Rover rigged Ohio in 2004. They wrote books about it. No one took them seriously because their case was obvious nonsense, and they are nutters. Normal people spent five years laughing at the Russian collusion hoax for the same reason. In other words, normal people do not care about nutty claims from nutty people.

The most obvious and likely reason for this obsession by the regime and its toadies is that they think the election was rigged too. We have the hoary chestnut, “the laddie doth protest too much” for a reason. We suspect that when someone goes to great lengths to disprove an accusation that they are motivated by a fear that people will see that there is some truth in the accusation. The response should always be proportional to the accusation and the person making the accusation.

That means the root of all of this is the regime knows they went too far in the 2020 election they have now put the credibility of the system in question. They now feel the need to hunt down anyone who casts doubt on the results. This would also explain why you can still get banned from YouTube for mentioning this. Until Musk came along, Twitter was aggressively hunting down election skeptics. Three years on and the regime is still hunting people down for election skepticism.

This does not quite explain it all. By now they could have dropped it as we are deep into the next election. The trouble is, they are plotting to repeat the 2020 shenanigans, but this time they want to put Trump in jail in advance. If people were skeptical of the midnight vote counting the last time, they are going to see through any scheme to remove Trump from the ballot in 2024. Perhaps they think ending 2020 skepticism will somehow inoculate them this time.

A better answer or perhaps a companion answer is one that also explains the inappropriate response to January 6. Not only did the regime wildly overreact in the aftermath, but they have also been conducting what now looks like an elaborate coverup of wrongdoing before, during and after the event. These missing tapes have that Watergate feel to them. We could be in one of those times when the aluminum foil hat guys are the reasonable people in the room.

What explains January 6 and the kooky election denial stuff is the genuine fear that the system is far more fragile than the public knows. The people inside the black box that is Washington fear that they are sitting atop a house of cards. If the public really knew what they know, January 6 would be a day at the beach. The reason they are hunting down skeptics is they think any questioning of any aspect of the official narrative could cause the whole thing to unravel.

Another hoary chestnut that applies here is “just because you are paranoid it does not follow that no one is out to get you.” The people, including the election skeptics, may think the system is sound. It is the people running it. The people running it, however, may see it the exact opposite way. They may think they are fine, but the system itself is about to tip over and if it does, there will be hell to pay. That could be why they saw January 6 as something like Bloody Sunday.

Add to this that the people running the regime view themselves as revolutionaries in the line of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. They were nursed on revolutionary talk and committed their lives to the slogans of the Left. They may run everything, but they still see themselves as plucky underdogs fighting the man. They know every revolution is a near run thing, so they are always in fear that their project will go sideways, and they will end up on the gallows or in the gulag.

In the end, what all this tells us is that the system and the people running it are probably not as stable as most want to believe. The system itself is no longer functioning as the users expect and the people running it are increasingly paranoid. The American political system is software that is full of bugs, run by a support staff that is shooting users who register complaints about the software. At some point you run out of users, or the users demand a new system.

The Orange Death

Posted on December 8, 2023 by thezman

In the penultimate show of the year, I decided to go with a Trump theme, since the orange shadow of death is slowly creepy across the lands. The debate the other night took place in the orange shadow, as the only reason the event took place is the looming disqualification of Trump by the regime. The regime toadies can feel it coming and they are getting ready for the madness that lies ahead.

As I pointed out after the debate, a big reason why things are getting so squirrely is the people in charge are shockingly stupid. Within living memory, the party rulers would have made sure a dunce like Nikki Haley remained down on the farm. She probably never would have made it past state rep. In the land of two-digit simpletons, a lantern-jawed Karen rises to the top of the political heap.

It is the declining competence that is the primary cause of the unrest. Savvy rulers would understand that they always have two primary challenges. One is the palace coup, and the other is the peasant revolt. The former is an internal matter, but the latter is the one that keeps them in power. Always appear to be on the right side of the majority and the peasants will tolerate just about anything.

This crew has everything backwards. They have made their intrigues the focus of our politics and they fight one another to see who is the most spiteful and nasty to the common people. War Karen exists because the Mortimer and Randolph sponsoring her think it is hilarious that she makes the rubes vomit in their mouths. Imagine what they have planned for the coming election.

Before I forget, for the final show of the year I might want to do another twenty questions style show, as people seemed to like it. I have some material that came in after that show, so if people have ideas post them up here in the comments or send them vial the miracle of email if you are shy. If I get enough content maybe I will finish the show with a two-hour holiday special.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

They Cannot Let It Go (Link) (Link)
The Paranoia (Link)
The Sinking Ship (Link)
The Orange Shadow (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

The Night Of The Cobra

Posted on December 7, 2023 by thezman

The fourth and allegedly final Republican debate was held last night, featuring the final four contestants for the right to be the party nominee. The plot of these shows is to showcase the alternatives to Trump. The subtext is the not-so-secret plot by Washington to have the party remove Trump from the ballot, so one of these losers will get selected to fill the slot. What we have been getting instead is a fairly good example of systemic incompetence by the political class.

Last night’s show is a perfect example. To this point, Vivek Ramaswamy, the King Cobra, has been the glib youngster, making fun of the old squares on stage. He is glib and smart, but most importantly, he is plugged into the on-line criticism of the Republicans Party and official conservatism. He pithily says on stage what people say on Facebook and Twitter about the party. He has been the Hindu Muhammed Ali mocking the party at its own shows.

Last night was a perfect example of the staggering incompetence that has come to define not just the party by the political class. No one, including the moderator, was prepared for what the Cobra unleashed on the other three people. At the last debate he gave War Karen, Nikki Haley, the Sean Connery treatment. It was the story of the debate, but this time no one was prepared, so the Cobra rhetorically gave her a good paddling while she purred like a kitten,

The whole point of having War Karen on the stage was to make her the spokes-zombie of the Kagan Cult and thereby re-legitimize their madness as a feature of the Republican Party establishment. Instead, the Cobra has used her as a prop in his general critique of neoconservatism. Most Republican voters never heard the word “neocon” but now they know they are bad people. Like their other project, the War Karen scheme blew up in the neocon’s face.

Another character in this theater of the absurd is Fat Ann Coulter, Chris Christie, who sounds like every man’s ex-wife. His reason to exist in these shows was to be the fat loudmouth from New Jersey who could out-crude Trump, while repeating everything Ann Coulter posts about Trump on Twitter. He came into the show assuming he could fat guy bully the Cobra, but instead he got the Ned Beatty treatment. The only thing the Cobra did not do was make him squeal like a pig.

Where you really see the systemic incompetence is in the campaign of Ron “Bootsy” DeSantis, who was supposed to be Trump’s mini-me. Everything about his campaign has been terrible, because he made the decision to hand his campaign over to party hacks and Washington insiders. As a result, he has spent this year transitioning from the mouthy Italian from Florida into Mike Dukakis. He is so boring dust forms on your monitor whenever someone mentions him on-line.

Last night was a perfect example. DeSantis was programmed to attack Haley, who the dullards think is “surging in the polls.” This gave the green light to the Cobra to unleash his most furious attacks yet on the field and the party itself. His challenge to them to name a single providence in Ukraine, after they chanted the neocon lines about the war, was a thing of beauty. War Karen and Fat Ann Coulter were poleaxed, while Bootsy looked like he was about to poo himself.

The point here is this should never have been allowed to happen. A modestly competent party would have never allowed the Cobra on the stage, much less allowed him to eviscerate their candidates. Of course, even the Stupid Party would have turned Trump 2016 into an asset. The party of Reagan would have co-opted Trump and had him sign off on all of their pet projects. The modern party is run by girls and homosexuals so it is getting shredded by a call center supervisor.

To this point the Cobra has been an amusing warmup act to the big show featuring Trump as the main attraction in 2024. Until these last two debates it was inconceivable that the Cobra could win the nomination. His thorough humiliation of the other actors on the stage suggests anything is possible. Imagine the party eliminating Trump only to get out played by the Cobra at the convention. In a world run by increasingly stupid people, the safe bet is the dumbest idea you can imagine.

From the dissident perspective, we have to hope that Trump remembers why he had urinals installed at his villa in Florida and picks the Cobra to be his running mate after the first few primaries. This would be the ultimate mind rape of the Borg we call the mass media, and it would make for a great show. Trump would unleash some boomer jibes and the Cobra would amplify them with millennial online jargon. It would be like 4Chan became a pollical party and ran for office.

It is a terrible way to run an empire, but given the collection of sissies, entitled women and simpletons that is the alternative, having a collection of shit-posters run things will at least provide some laughs as we careen into the void. Otherwise, it means the collapse is managed by the same people who thought it was a good idea to promote a ball-shriveling shrew like War Karen as an alternative to Trump. Everyone will be praying for sweet death as the empire collapses.

Sadly, that is not the way to bet. There is a reason our literature is not filled with amusing tales of the end of prior empires. The end of the established order is never a good time for the people living it. Collapse is never fun, and the collapse of the American empire will be no exception. It will be War Karen, Fat Ann Coulter, and the rest until the men of the West have had enough, spit on their hands, raise the black flag and begin splitting throats.

Who Decides?

Posted on December 6, 2023 by thezman

If you were to boil down the current crisis in America, and in the West in general, you could do worse than a simple question, who decides? The central struggle at the heart of it all is who decides things like economic policy, trade policy, social policy, and immigration policy. On issue after issue, the ultimate question comes down to who gets the final say on the matter. Given the endless talk of democracy, this should be a settled question, but it is the central question of the age.

You can see this when you get away from the coastal cities and drive out into the areas the beautiful people try to avoid. Charles Town West Virginia is a small city, a big town in reality, which is the county seat of Jefferson County, West Virginia. Prior to recent decades it was famous for having been named after the brother of George Washington, Charles Washington, in the 18th century. It was also where union organizer Bill Blizzard was tried for treason. He was found not guilty.

Otherwise, Charles Town was a sleepy little place until twenty years ago. The old horse racing track was fixed up as part of a casino project. Like many states in America, West Virginia thought capitalizing on degenerates was a good idea. America is now dotted with casinos that rely upon the state to survive. Of course, with the casino came the other things like strip joints and the drug trade. As soon as you cross into the city proper you see a big sign for a “gentlemen’s club.”

Who decided that Charles Town needed a casino? Who thought that was a good idea to build strip joints? These things are often put up to a vote, but the people are told to keep voting until they get the right answer. The fact is a small number of people saw an opportunity to make money off a casino in this sleepy little community, so they worked the system until they got the right to build it. The pitch is that they bring jobs, but no one wants their daughter working at the strip joint.

Further down the moral hierarchy from the gamblers and strip joint operators are the developers who land on these projects like flies in a pasture. At the first hint of government money for a get rich scheme like a casino, the developers turn up looking to build cheap houses and strip malls. All those people coming to work at the casinos and strip joints will need a place to live. That means knocking down something to put up townhouses and apartment buildings.

Of course, this also means the guy who has lived next to a farm his whole life suddenly finds he now lives next to an apartment complex. The guy who owned the hay farm decided that the money from the developer was too good, so he sold the land his family held for generations and moved to Florida. The developer sweetened the deal by promising to name the development after the farm. Housing developments in America are always named after what they replaced.

The guy now living next to an apartment complex is right to wonder how his little slice of heaven turned into an urban nightmare. Who decided that those rental units needed to be next to his home? Who decided that there needed to be a strip mall down the road from that apartment complex? The answer is always the same. The people who owned the land decided, but they are gone now and the people who used to live next to them have to contend with the consequences.

Living next to a housing development or an apartment complex might not sound like a bad deal, given that it brings economic opportunity. Life is trade-offs and progress is no exception to that rule. Sure, the aesthetics of the community decline with each generic block of new homes, but now you have a Walmart, so it means not driving to the next town over to shop at their Walmart. This may or may not be a valid argument, but the point is to avoid that big question, who decides?

Maybe this is for the best and the people making these decisions are right to do what they are doing, but they should then drop the fig leaf of democracy. If they are going to preach the glories of democracy, while ignoring the will of the people, then it is not going to be long before people lose faith in democracy. The great advocates of democracy have no one to blame but themselves for the crisis of democracy. The cause of that crisis is we were never asked.

If the guy who now finds himself driving his family past a strip joint every Sunday on the way to church knows who decided to put that strip joint in his community, he at least knows who to blame. He can appeal to that person or group of people to move that strip joint away from his church. Even if the guy deciding is actually in a swank Manhattan office and lives in a mansion in Connecticut, he is still a man who calls somewhere home and therefore he can be reached.

If the decision is being made by the nebulous concept of democracy, where voting never seems to make a difference, then that man telling his kids that the apartment complex where the cops are always at used to be a farm, owned by a family that first came to the state at the founding, has every right to wonder if the real cause of the problem is that nebulous thing called democracy. Maybe he would be better served by someone, anyone, who takes responsibility for these decisions.

Counterintuitively, this is why economic elites love democracy and socialism. This is something the Marxists never anticipated or ever understood. Democracy and socialism put the people’s stamp of approval on the economic relations. The guy who decided to put a housing development in your town gets to keep all the money while the people living with his choices get to pretend it is their fault. The greatest trick the ruling class ever pulled is in convincing the people they do not exist.

Orphan Child

Posted on December 5, 2023 by thezman

After the Bay of Pigs debacle, John F. Kennedy supposedly said, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” Whether or not he actually said it is unknown, but the expression has been with us ever since. Supposedly it was an updated version of the Tacitus line, “It is the singularly unfair peculiarity of war that the credit of success is claimed by all, while a disaster is attributed to one alone.” Kennedy was pithier but Tactus captures the truth of the matter.

We are seeing this with the Ukraine war. The news from the battlefields is uniformly bad for the Ukrainian army. The West is slowly coming to terms with the reality of the much publicized counter-offensive, which ended in disaster soon after it was launched, but the West spent the last few months in denial. Ukraine does not publish numbers as far as casualties, but independent guessing suggests they lost between seventy and one hundred thousand men in the counter-offensive.

As the overall condition of the Ukraine military comes into focus, the recriminations are beginning to turn up in Western media. This long story in the Washington Post is a good example of the general tone. Washington is looking to place the blame on the Ukrainians, while the Ukrainians are placing the blame on their Western backers or on one another as the situation warrants. Europe has yet to join the blame game, but in time they will no doubt blame the Ukrainians.

Another pithy expression that is useful regarding the Ukraine debacle is “You learn more from your failures than your successes.” Washington never learns from its failures, which is why they have the Ukraine debacle, but the rest of us can gain some insight into how our pollical leaders stumble into these disasters by looking at some of the major blunders in this war. How they managed to reach this point speaks to how they view the world and their role in it.

The first major blunder was getting into a land war with Russia. This is right up there with “Never getting into a land war in Asia” and the slightly less well-known “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” The Russians are bad at many things but when it comes to fighting a land war, they are exceptional. When they view the land war as an existential threat it quickly becomes a great patriotic war and the whole of Russia organizes to defeat the enemy.

This is what the West managed to do in what should have been a low-grade border conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The West made this into a game of the world against Russia and the Russians accepted the challenge. The sanctions regime was clearly intended to hurt average Russians, which made it easy for the Russian leadership to recast this conflict as this generations great patriotic war. That war is with the West, not just the Ukrainians.

The question is why did the West do this? The reason is they assumed Russia was too weak to fight an actual war. They came to this conclusion not based on observable facts but on the power of their own rhetoric. They kept saying that Russia was a “gas station masquerading as a country” so often that they believed it. Instead of looking at what was happening in Russia, the West told themselves appealing stories about what would happen if they blew hard enough on the Russian house of cards.

This gets to the second colossal error of the West. The Russians crossed into Ukraine with a force of about one hundred thousand men with the assumption the West would demand a peace meeting. They were not prepared for an actual war. Ukraine, on the other hand, had an army of over three hundred thousand regular army troops and another three hundred thousand reserves. Russia, the attacker, was outnumbered three-to-one one by Ukraine, the defender.

In the spring of 2022, the Ukrainians had a chance to smash the Russian army if they went on the offensive. It would have come at a price, but they could have pushed the Russian back into the Donbas and maybe out completely. Instead, the Ukrainians dug into defensive positions along the line of contact. This gave the Russians time to reorganize their lines into more defendable positions and begin the process of building a much larger force to take on the Ukrainians.

The reason Ukraine did this is they were repeatedly told by their Western backers that Russia could never sustain an army in the field for long. The best people ran to their favorite media outlets predicting an imminent Russian collapse. The intellectual everyone in the West considers a seer claimed early on that Russia would not just lose but disintegrate as a result of the war. The fact that Fukuyama has not been right about anything in his career has not lowered his status in the West.

Here again we see that the West blundered into a catastrophic mistake not because they misread the evidence but because they confused their own magical thinking about the world and their role in it with reality. People with what passes for impressive credentials in the managerial class spun fabulous tales about the imminent collapse of Russia and those tales became reality for the war machine. Meanwhile, the Russian army used this time to prepare for what we see happening now.

This brings up the third colossal error. Having figured out that Russia was not going to disintegrate in the face of what amounted to an internet cancel campaign, the West prepared Ukraine for a big arrow offensive. They conscripted close to one hundred thousand fresh troops, trained them in NATO tactics and supplied them with NATO weapons for the purpose to driving the Russians out of the Donbas. This was the great spring counter-offensive that kicked off in the summer.

In the early hours of the offensive, columns of Western armor barreled into the Russia outer defensive lines in the south with the aim of driving to the Sea of Azov. Instead, they bogged down in massive minefields. The mine clearing equipment provided by the West turned out to be useless for the task, so the armored columns were trapped in the minefields and obliterated by Russian artillery. A large area in the south is called Bradley Park because it is full of destroyed Bradley fighting vehicles.

It is impossible to overstate the failure here. The Ukrainians not only lost the entire army assembled for the task, but they stripped their lines in order to supplement this army on the expectation that it would smash through the Russian defenses and those reserves would then flood into the breech. Instead, these reserves were thrown into what was called a meatgrinder. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians were killed and maimed in order to capture one tiny village in the south.

What is even more stunning than the enormity of the failure is the fact that Western military planners were so slow to accept reality. Even as it was clear that the Russian defenses were too strong, General Milley was talking like it was just a matter of time before they collapsed and Ukraine rolled to victory. Even after thousands of videos appeared online of burning Western tanks, Western generals kept saying that things were on schedule for a glorious victory.

The result of this catastrophe is Ukraine no longer has offensive capabilities and is struggling to maintain its defensive positions in key areas. The massive losses of men and material cannot be replaced. Ukraine is running out of men to conscript for the war and the West is out of equipment to send them. This is why we are seeing reports in Western media talking about who is to blame. No one wants to be the father of what is going to be a collapse of Ukraine in 2024.

The theme throughout this two-year debacle is that the people making the decisions have substituted a preferred reality for actual reality. These are the type of people John Derbyshire once described in another context as those who are “awfully good at creating elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” For the last two years their version of reality has crashed into a reality that rests on the truth, not narrative.

The Ukraine debacle is a microcosm of what plagues the West. The people in charge are long on credentials that are meaningful only within the artificial reality that is the managerial class. The result is an echo chamber populated with credentialed idiots who compete with one another to produce the most pleasing sounding narrative to describe what they imagine lies outside their reality. They live in a simulation but seek to impose what they experience on the world around them.

These are the same people now operating the court system based on their paranoid fantasies about invisible enemies and staffing the air traffic control system to match their image of the inclusive society. What lies ahead for the West is what we are seeing in Ukraine which is the fantasies of a delusional and deranged ruling class smashing into the reality of the world, all paid for by the common man. Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

The False Dawn

Posted on December 4, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the surprising good old film It Happened One Night, a post about the sanctimonious film called To Kill A Mockingbird, which is close to unwatchable. Then there is the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Researchers estimate that the typical American makes over two hundred decisions per day on food alone. The typical mid-level manager will make tens of thousands of decisions in a typical day. These are not all conscious decisions. In fact, most choices are made as a part of our conditioning. These are the habits of mind that have been developed over a lifetime. We do think about these choices so much as react to conditions, not much different than a trained animal.

Of course, those choices are not empirical choices. Unless you do math for a living, most of the choices are what the cool kids call normative choices. These are choices within the moral framework of your society or perhaps within the code of conduct you have inherited from family or developed through experience. These are the choices based on how society expects you to act or choices you make based on how you hope to be viewed by others in your immediate social circle.

Having the salad for lunch rather than a big greasy cheeseburger is not a choice with an objectively correct answer. You like the big greasy cheeseburger, and you know it is actually better for you than the salad, but social pressure says that a guy like you who could stand to lose a few pounds should pick the salad. Maybe you are a guy who enjoys bucking these sorts of pressures, so you ask for extra bacon on the burger and hope someone tells you it is a heart attack on a plate.

The truth is the average human makes few decisions that are empirically verifiable, even those in right answer professions. The accountant entering data into his ERP system is doing his daily tasks because that is what he is paid to do, and those tasks have the right answer by the rules of accounting. There may be rules set forth by the company for how he processes his work. Those choices, however, make up a small part of his day and most are controlled by the ERP system.

These empirical choices are also the ones were worry about the least. That accountant is far less concerned about keying in a journal entry correctly than he is about how to dispose of the hooker he murdered over the weekend. Should he try to frame his neighbor for the crime? Should he just dump the body somewhere? The journal entry he is keying into the system either balances or not and the figures are simply what the accounting process requires of him.

This is what to keep in mind as the AI debate takes center stage. This new software tool that feels human to the user can quickly provide the correct answer in that narrow slice of life where empiricism dominates. Ask the robot for the correct way to handle the amortization of a new piece of equipment and it will give you the options that fall within the generally accepted accounting practices. Ask it how to best handle the hooker problem and it will have no answer for you.

The fans of AI, on the other hand, hope that this new technology will solve those normative questions. Some fear it will apply reason to those normative problems and arrive at answers that violate current taboos. This is why the developers have been tasked to derange the logic of this technology to avoid the obvious with regards to certain demographic questions. The new religion fears the robots will join the resistance and overthrow the current moral paradigm.

What the fans of AI hope for, of course, is that the new model will confirm their moral claims and deny those of their opponents. The true believers of the new religion think with enough social and economic pressure, the developers will create robots that sound like the people in the grievance studies department. This will then validate the claims of their religion and force their opponents to submit. Their opponents, of course, are sure the robots will side with them, if they are allowed to be free.

There are those who fear robots will become self-aware and then enslave humanity for reasons they never discuss. The subtext to these claims is that man is a fallen, less than perfect entity and the robots will naturally react like the god of the Hebrew Bible and seek to wipe out this imperfect part of the natural world. Like the two sides of the debate about the new religion, the people who fear the robot revolution secretly wish it becomes the god they wish existed in nature.

That is the core of the AI discussion. Western man has been sure for so long that reason will take the place of God or collective decision that this new reasoning machine is expected to be the final leg of the journey. AI is the vessel that will take man beyond the great barrier. Rather than bringing man to face its creator, it will reveal the logic of the universe and therefore how man ought to act. AI will finish the journey started by Robespierre and his fellow lunatics.

The absurdity of thinking a tool can become the god of man is a symptom of a problem that has haunted the West since the Enlightenment. Once you dispense with God you are left with only one possible source of moral authority. That is collective desire as expressed through tradition, custom and ritual. Since this is by definition particular to specific people, it can never take the place of the universal god of man, which is where reason has come into the moral debate.

This is the source of nutty ideas like natural rights or human rights, which claim that nature comes with a moral code for all mankind. It is intellectual base steal in the quest to prove that reason can replace God as the moral authority. It is also why the people we call the Left fall back on Hegelian ideas about the flow of history to justify their laundry list of moral claims. You see, it is not what they want but what the tides of history will usher forth whether we like it or not.

Hoping that a new tool created by man will replace the one moral authority that has served us well is ridiculous but rational. People believe things not because they make sense but because they are more comforting than alternative beliefs. It is possible that AI results in a cult that claims this new technology proves the correctness of their moral code and that the rest of us must fall in line or else. Every new god comes with that “or else” bit, especially the gods born from reason.

In the end, the promise of AI in this regard will fail because David Hume was correct, and we cannot get an ought from an is. How we ought to live is determined by the gods, our God or through our mutual choices as expressed through tradition. We ought to act a certain way because the gods demand it, our God revealed it to us through our holy book or it is just the way we do things. Like reason itself, AI will be another false dawn in the quest to replace God and tradition as the source of moral authority.

The Immorality Of Immigration

Posted on December 1, 2023 by thezman

On this side of the great divide there has been a lot of discussion about the role of altruism in the current crisis. Altruism run-amok is often blamed for things like open borders and the so-called woke subculture. Something went haywire in Western people in the last century, and we now care more about total strangers than we care about our closest relatives. Altruism is killing the West.

The trouble with this is there is no answer as to why. Why did Western people suddenly go bonkers in this way? Perhaps the answer lies in the idea of moral preferences, the decision-making process we use to choose the right thing, or the wrong thing, in the many small transactions of life. Human societies are moral societies, so we are trained up into a framework that guides our moral choices in life.

Perhaps somewhere in the last century that mechanism has been hijacked in such a way that it is immoral to think we have preferences at all. Note that everyone seems to be compelled to justify even the smallest choices. If you say you do not like onions on your burger you are expected to say something about onions being one of the least popular condiments for burgers.

In other words, you cannot have preferences just because you are a human being with free will and the right to choose. You must always justify your preferences against some standard that exists outside your personal preferences. In the case of immigration, you must justify any opposition to it in economic or security terms. You cannot simply say “I do not want this” and leave it at that.

That is the show this week. I use the topic of immigration to talk about why we have to justify our preferences when there is no reason we should. I also finish off with an explanation for why any immigration is immoral by default. The narrow exceptions are so narrow that they are not worth considering. The people who want immigration, therefore, must confront the immorality of immigration.