False Choices

Posted on January 17, 2024 by thezman

The false dilemma is an informal fallacy which is based on the false premise that there are only two options in a particular situation. The fallacy is not in the logic, as with other fallacies, but in the premise. It is a useful rhetorical trick, so it turns up in political debates and propaganda. “We must do X or Y will happen” with Y being something everyone assumes to be bad. The idea is to limit the choices to one that is preferred and one that no one would willingly choose.

It is such a highly effective rhetorical strategy that what we call conservatism rests on a foundation of false choices. No matter what the left proposes, the right opposes by offering an option that is doomed to fail versus what the left proposes. A good example was the homosexual marriage debate. The left proposed redefining marriage to mean sharing rent and a bed. Instead of rejecting this out of hand, the right proposes civil unions, thus leaving us with two degenerate options.

We are seeing this again with the war over the antiwhite pogroms labeled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is not an accident that the acronym DEI could easily be DIE, as the people behind this do not hide their intensions. When they say they want to eliminate whiteness, there is only one way this can happen. If one were to call for eliminating Jewishness, you get compared to Hitler. Therefore, logic dictates that when they say they want to eliminate whiteness, they mean white people.

Under normal circumstance, when someone makes a credible threat on your life, the response is not to offer a compromise or pretend the threat is not real, but that is exactly what conservatives are doing in the face of these pogroms. Christopher Rufo says the only option to these antiwhite pogroms is for white people to embrace a colorblind morality. In other words, white people should put all their energy into a fantasy program rather than defend themselves.

The vision of a colorblind society may be appealing, but the fact that it does not exist and has never existed is called a clue. Whites have displayed some capacity to live under such a regime, but nonwhites clearly cannot exist this way. Outside of European lands, the skins game is the rule. We will never see non-European societies fling open their doors and invite the world into their lands. As we see every day, when these people enter European lands, they bring the skins game with them.

What Rufu is offering up is a false choice. You can put all your energy into this fantasy of a colorblind, multi-racial, multi-ethnic society or you can succumb to the antiwhite pogroms that are raging right now. The point of framing it this way is to eliminate other options, like whites joining the skins game. Not only does this framing sideline other more reasonable options, but it also subtly endorses the moral claim by the left that there is something immoral about whiteness.

Another example is this Elon Musk post in which he says, “Discrimination on the basis of anything other than merit is wrong.” The natural response should be, “who says?” but that is not what you see in the replies. Instead, everyone accepts the false choice that you can either allow nonwhites to play the skins game unopposed or you dream of a day when no one plays the skins game. Again, whites joining in on the skins game and maybe winning at it is off the table.

As an aside, his comment should make everyone’s skin crawl. He is saying that having personal preferences is immoral. Since all humans have tastes and preferences, a feature that makes up a large part of our nature, he is hoping to anathematize most of what makes us human. For Musk, the ideal human is a moist robot. This is the thinking that lies behind the culture war. With the right amount of force, people can be re-coded into what society needs or simply eliminated from the population.

Regardless, the point of his post is to foreclose the parsimonious option which is to let people discriminate for any reason they like. Free association was the foundation of America into the last century. The settlers to the New World literally acted on their belief that people should live where they want and with whom they want, which is why they got on boats and came to the wilderness. The immigrants of the 19th and 20th century acted on the same premise.

Of course, the ultimate false choice, the very heart of American conservatism, is the assertion that they cannot use the same tactics as their opponent or exact revenge when they have power, because that would make them as bad as the left. In other words, the choice presented as conservatism is to adhere to a set of rules that guarantee failure or succumb to some abstract conception of moral turpitude that is somehow worse than losing.

In the end, the culture war is not a clash of visions, but rather a struggle among white people about how best to avoid the fight. The winning side in this fight has always relied on some form of the false choice in order to prevent engaging the people called the left in the culture war. This means the path to victory in this civilizational struggle starts with overthrowing conservatism and its spiderweb of false choices. In its place is a new form of identity politics to counter the current identity politics.

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About Last Night

Posted on January 16, 2024 by thezman

In the old days, people used to preserve food by “putting it up” in various ways, which meant storing it in a way that prevented spoiling. It also meant storing it in such a way that rats and mice could not get to it. In modern times homeowners make sure their house is safe from mice and squirrels. In both cases, there is a lot of time to think about the strategy of rodents. This is the same sort of thinking we must use when looking at the results of the Iowa caucuses last night.

None of the players in the drama were operating entirely on the level. Trump was the big winner; however, his game is not about the conventional winning of delegates, but of outflanking the lawfare system. The bigger the wins, the more difficult it will be for the system to remove him. At least that is the thinking. He assumes, perhaps foolishly, that a runaway win in the primaries will force the party to abandon its scheme to remove him from the ballot and appoint someone as the nominee.

Similarly, the minor candidates were using the six-month run up to this event for reasons that had nothing to do with winning. Christie ran to earn some good will from the party by saying mean things about Trump in the debates. Hutchinson ran so they will mention it in his obituary. Ramaswamy is playing the long game, hoping to become the heir to Trump. He is hoping to be the burnt orange version of Charlie Kirk so he can run in the future or have a media career.

These sorts of rodents scurry around every presidential primary, but we have some unusual vermin this time. Nikki Haley is running as a standard issue regime Democrat in the Republican primary. The base assumptions of her campaign are that Trump will be removed from the ticket and the party is ready to throw in the towel and merge with the Democrats like you see in most Democrat states. In those states, the Republicans run lighter versions of the Democrats in statewide elections.

What she hoped for in Iowa was a clear second place finish. This would have knocked DeSantis out of the race. She would then be the sole anti-Trump option for the next few months, establishing herself as the logical alternative for when the party removes Trump from the ballot. Instead, she came in third place, with her support coming mostly from Democrats crossing over to vote for the most virulent anti-Trump option. She was close enough to DeSantis, however, to stay in the race.

Her strategy is to look for a big night in New Hampshire next week. The way to look at this New Hampshire primary is as a general election. It is an open primary so anyone can vote on the Republican side. The Democrats and Republicans have been running massive get out the vote drives in order to have as many far left crackpots from Massachusetts take a GOP ballot. That is another thing about the state. People from Massachusetts regularly drive over and vote in the primary.

DeSantis has all but abandoned New Hampshire, as in a general election style format there is no room for a candidate trying to stake out the middle ground. Instead, he is now focused on South Carolina and Nevada. He has no chance to win either contest, but his people think he can beat Haley in both. If he bests her in her own state, then he can argue that he is the better choice for when Trump is removed. Currently he is behind Haley by a factor of four in South Carolina.

The more likely path for DeSantis is to do well enough in South Carolina to argue that Haley is unelectable and then conserve money to run a minimum campaign into Super Tuesday when things get interesting on the lawfare side. It is the longest of longshots, but it is what he has at the moment. The party and its financiers prefer Haley as their Trump alternative and Trump voters have come to despise DeSantis. That leaves him with few voters to collect in these primaries.

Of course, one of the biggest rats gnawing away at things is the media. Clearly, the word has gone forth that they are to invest in Nikki Haley. The reason they called the race so soon was so the campaigns could have a coping strategy and therefore a narrative to use in the media. This will help Haley as she can plausibly claim that she barely lost to DeSantis due to the early call. She did win one county, which is something DeSantis did not accomplish.

Through the media, we can see that the regime has determined that Haley is a good replacement for Biden, even if she is in the wrong party. In a way, they are trying to engineer the primary into a version of Hillary versus Trump in 2016. This may be why Haley is running around praising Hillary Clinton. This is the narrative framing that the regime is conjuring, so Haley is leaning into it. After all, from her perspective, the real nominating process is in Washington.

The biggest rat in the room is the regime. It is an open secret that they want Trump removed from the ballot, but even a regime as evil and sterile as this one has some fear of the peasant revolt. If Trump is plowing through these primaries and people are wise to Haley being a Democrat catspaw, executing their scheme could turn out to be their Samson option, so there may be some hesitance in some circles. Last night’s result was another setback in their scheme.

Much will depend on what happens in the courts. The first shoe to drop will be the 14th amendment case. The court has agreed to take this on an expedited basis, which means a decision may come in February. If the court comes down hard in favor of Trump, which is a possibility, then it could signal to the rest of the legal system that lawfare will face an uphill battle. If the court is open to the claim, then it will be read by the lower court judges that they can do their worst.

All of the study of rat behavior obscures the fact that the only reason any of this is happening is Trump dared to speak for normal white people in 2016. Whites are about seventy percent of the voters right now. Twenty percent of them are insane, leaving about half the voters with no representation in the system. The Democrats explicitly hate these voters, and the Republicans implicitly hate them. Elections are about who gets to spit in these people’s faces first.

That is the subtext of this election. The regime is debating with itself whether now is the time to close the door entirely on the white voter. They believe the time is near when national elections will be like we see in Democrat controlled states. There is a permanent majority called Democrats, a ceremonial opposition called Republican and the goal is to prevent the majority of citizens from getting any say. The results last night suggest they still have some work to do.

Managerial End

Posted on January 15, 2024 by thezman

Note: The Sunday podcast is back!. It will be an evening performance until I get settled in the new place. There is a post about the cost of groceries and a post about driving the Jeep Gladiator for a week. Subscribe here or here.

Last week someone posted a video of herself getting fired by Cloudflare via a zoom call and the video went viral. It has nine million views at this point. The reason the video caused such a stir is it touches on many of the things that people find unpleasant about the current age, but either lack the language to discuss or feel they should not be discussing out in the open. That last part turns up in the resulting thread as people naturally turn it into a black hat versus white hat issue.

That last part is the most obvious, but the least interesting. Whenever these sorts of topics arise on social media, conservatives begin rhythmically chanting phrases like “toughen up snowflake” or “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” What they are instinctively doing is rallying to the defense of the giant corporation as they have been trained to do by conservatism. When challenged, the retort is some form of “The world does not owe you anything”, which is complete nonsense.

The basis of all human societies is reciprocal obligations. Social contract theory rests on this assumption. Monarchy rests on a collection of reciprocal vertical relationships that bind the king to the lowest peasant. The social club assumes the members will be loyal to the club and its members. In return, the members get benefits from the club and fellow members exclusive to them. A club that has no duties to the members is not a club, but a random collection of strangers.

This is the central defect of conservatism. When the people we call the left claim society has some new moral duty, conservatives never challenge the moral duty, but instead fall into a form of bourgeois anarchism. Terrified of challenging the left on moral grounds, they instead argue that society has no duties at all. In the case of the mega-corp screwing its employees, they say the company has no duties to them. Conservatism is always an answer to a question no one asked.

Putting that aside, you see the horrors of managerialism in that video. Clearly, senior management screwed up and hired too many new people. Instead of admitting this and reducing their staff, they send out flunkies from middle-management to chant nonsensical gibberish at people via Zoom call. Odds are neither of these two zombies could name a single metric they reference or what it means. For them these are abracadabra words that make the employee go away.

The woman getting let go has a reasonable expectation. She was hired under a set of conditions, and she met her end of the bargain. At one point she concedes that the company has a right to change the bargain. They over-hired and now need to trim the staff and her name was picked from the hat. If they were honest with her the video probably never gets posted. It is clear that the woman is not offended by the firing so much as by the lying about it.

This is one corrosive effect of managerialism. It turns everyone into a sociopath by forcing them to lie even when the truth makes more sense. The two zombies chanting corporate catchphrases are doing it so as to avoid being on the other end of one of these zoom calls. Like the Nazi camp guards given a choice of being a guard or being one of the guarded, millions of Americans are forced to be terrible people in middle-management positions, doing the bidding of management.

This is why we get the weird language. It is a way for the people at the top to manipulate their flunkies into doing this stuff. Instead of cutting jobs they are enthusiastically reducing newly discovered redundancies. They are not eliminating a department and the people in it, they are efficiently implementing a new compelling initiative in furtherance of corporate goals. No one can be upset at these words because they are stripped of anything meaningful to humans.

Managerialism, whether on the small scale like at a corporation, or at the large scale as in a society, is a system that seeks to socialize the cost of decision making while subtly privatizing the benefits. Senior managers enjoy the bulk of the benefits but spread the cost of failure across the organization. It does this by distributing the decision making across senior management. No one person at the top gets the blame when things fail, because it is always a group decision.

We see this in politics. The banks fail and the Fed has to print up trillions to bail them out and no one gets fired, much less jailed. Instead, all the top people agree that the system failed in some way. Top men are tasked with addressing this system failure, which of course pays them handsomely. After the banks get bailed out and things return to normal, the bankers congratulate themselves with bonuses. Managerialism is an aristocracy with none of the social benefits.

This is not without consequences, and we see it in politics. When no one in the managerial elite is ever held accountable, the selection pressure for membership in the elite shifts from aptitude to obsequiousness. You see this in every established corporation and in the government. The people at the top are increasingly incompetent while increasingly obsequious. Politics is packed to the gills with oleaginous grifters because the system selects for such people.

While it is true that the Pareto principle works in the elite as it does everywhere, eventually that smart fraction within the elite is overwhelmed by the growing number of sociopathic grifters slithering into the elite. Again, we see this writ large in politics where incompetence and failure seem to be the goal. The logical end of managerialism is a committee room stuffed with narcistic simpletons waving their credentials at one another as the riots rage outside the committee room.

This may be one bit of subtext to the statue toppling. “No one builds statues honoring committees” is an old truth that haunts managerialism. Statues to great men offend the managerial elite not just because those men were white. It offends because it is a reminder that it is great men that make the world, not the boring mediocrities who come to dominate managerialism. The latest thing is just a convenient excuse to remove the shadow of the great men that haunt the mind of the manager.

Sermon On The Who

Posted on January 12, 2024 by thezman

Watching the tunneling Hebrews scurrying out of their warrens the other day, my first thought was why did the government let these people into the country. The original cult members came over during the war, so maybe no one noticed, but since then they keep coming and there is no excuse for not noticing the weirdness. No offense to these people, but we have our own weirdos. We are full up.

Of course, no one is allowed to notice such things or notice anything about people unless it furthers the goal of eliminating “who” from our reality. We can notice blacks in the context of them being the victims of whiteness and we can notice whites as oppressors, but this in furtherance of dismantling the “how” of things so that these identities are no longer a part of contextual reality.

Otherwise, talking about who is doing anything is increasingly off limits, to the point where police sketches will soon be stick figures. Most normies looked away from the images of those Jewish guys crawling out of the sewer grates because the only way to understand it was to think about who these people are what makes them so different from what we consider normal in America.

This aversion to who and the preference for how is not new. This is part of the Western intellectual tradition and is now reaching a peak. Transgenderism is the logical endpoint of universalism, which strips the who from the moral debate. If anyone can be inside the Western moral framework, then people no longer have fixed identities. If a man can be anything he wants, then logically he can even be a girl.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Tunneling Hebrews
Why Are They Here
Who Versus How
Our Priors
Who not How

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Abyss Road

Posted on January 11, 2024 by thezman

The entirely authentic and on the level Republican Party primary is about to kick off for real next week with the Iowa Caucus. The totally legitimate and sincere debates came to an end with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley declared the finalists. They booted Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy from the debates because no one cared about Christie and Ramaswamy was too normal. Despite both having no chance to win next week, the party had DeSantis and Haley debate last night.

Of course, none of this is on the level. The reason there are debates at all is everyone knows the party will remove Trump from the ballot if the court does not go along with the crackpot scheme to use the 14th amendment. Regime media is holding these debates thinking they will get to pick the replacement. They are probably right about that, given the ridiculousness of the Republican Party. Even the candidates admit they are running to be the party’s regime approved booby prize.

Politics has always been theater, but now it is the theater of the absurd where everyone pretends that this is all on the level, while knowing that it is not on the level and that everyone in the country knows it is not on the level. The Solzhenitsyn line captures this farce of a primary campaign perfectly. We know that they are lying and they know they are lying. They know that we know they are lying. We also know that they know we know they are lying, but they keep lying.

The only drama at this point is who the Democrats tell the Republicans to pick for their nominee once Trump is booted from the campaign. Haley is the darling of the regime because she is a soulless automaton who will do what she is told. DeSantis has some friends in the regime, but he has two brain cells so there is always the risk he decides to think for himself. The party could always look for someone else, like Glenn Younkin, if they think they need to grease the rubes some more.

What goes unnoticed in all of this is the collapse of the GOP. They handed these fake debates to cranks of lunatics. The big final showdown that is supposed to sell one or the other zombies to the voters was held by a collection of far left nutters on CNN, a network that remains an epithet among Republican voters. The only way it could be more obvious that they are controlled by the other party is if the debate were held in the White House and moderated by Kamala Harris.

The reason the media is pushing Haley so hard is she holds all of the same positions as Joe Biden, except she can string a sentence together and is not drooling oat meal all over herself in public. Haley is running around telling voters that Hillary Clinton is her idol and was her inspiration to run for office. DeSantis is running as George Bush and many members of the media still remember hating George Bush. That and he is a click away from climbing out of a tunnel in Crown Heights.

What we are seeing here is the consolidation of the center that has been the pattern all across Europe for over a decade. Unwilling or unable to address the issues most concerning to voters, the main parties consolidate as a unified front against any opposition to the status quo. Parties that are supposed to be ideologically incompatible suddenly find a way to cooperate. The Republicans and Democrats are now effectively in a coalition government to defend the regime.

The one saving grace is that the regime has proven itself to be increasingly incompetent, so this scheme to rig the 2024 election could end in disaster. Current polling says Trump wins handily in Iowa. The game is to make it look like Haley is viable as an alternative, so if she bombs then that is a problem. On the other hand, DeSantis is as popular as colon cancer in New Hampshire, so in a few weeks the party could be left with two corpses running as the not-Trump option.

That will make picking one of them difficult. Even if they find an alternative, they still face the prospect of a riot at the convention. The people who show up at these things are the committed supporters and they wear red hats these days. Unless the party closes the convention entirely, they could be facing a modern version of the 1968 Democratic convention, which ended up in street battles. A lot of things can wrong when morons are plotting the shenanigans.

Then you have the fact that the universe has a sense of humor. Smart schemers always ask “what happens if the plan fails?” Our ruling schemers never ask this and the universe always throws a wrench in their plans. The brewing disaster that is Project Ukraine is a good example. The schemers all assumed the plan would work and when things went wrong, they were left with nothing. The same thing could happen with their scheme to rig the 2024 presidential election.

In the end, the normal person is left wondering to wonder if it is time to take the old advice from the hippies and turn off, tune out, drop out of the system. If voting is not a complete farce and the regime is committed to rigging the results even if the votes are counted honestly, then what is the point? The right answer may be to deny them the thing they desire most, which is your consent. If you drop out of the system, then they cannot manufacture your consent.

This being the modern age, tuning out is near impossible, so the more likely result is the disconnect between the official truth about our system and the reality of our system grows wider and the people grow angrier. This is the road to ruin where the regime reacts to discontent with shenanigans, which leads to further discontent and then more shenanigans from the regime. Those two zombies on stage last night were just mile markers on the road the national abyss.

Tunneling Into The Clouds

Posted on January 10, 2024 by thezman

By now everyone has seen the videos of weird looking Jewish men popping up from sewer grates in New York City. The men were popping out of underground tunnels built by the Chabad cult in Crown Heights. The city discovered them in December and was attempting to fill them with cement, when the Chabad members rioted in an effort to thwart the city’s efforts. The cops were forced to arrest many of the members and physically clear the facility of Chabadists.

Needless to say it was the best day ever for the antisemites, who naturally looked at the scenes as confirmation of their claims. It was also a great day on social media as the jokesters had some of the best material ever. The images of soiled mattresses being pulled from the tunnels reminded many that this subculture has long been accused of hiding terrible things. Of course, the scolds were out wagging their bony fingers at the world for noticing what was happening.

Lost in all of this are the questions about who these people are and why are they allowed to operate in this country. Most news sites just called the facility a synagogue but it is the world headquarters of the Chabad cult, which is an international movement that aims to influence government through the conversion of secular Jews back into what the cult thinks is the authentic Judaism. This group has centers in every Western capital and many major cities.

Imagine if white nationalists bought a building in New York City and declared it their international headquarters. Imagine they imported men from around the world to live in and around it. The videos online of the riot tell us that many of these men at this location are foreigners. Instead of white nationalists, imagine it was supporters of Palestine doing this. It is a good reminder that providing special status to groups of people comes with downstream consequences.

The more important question, however, is why has the ruling class allowed this bizarre international cult to setup shop in the United States? This cult formed in the 18th century in what is now Poland. They remained there until the Second World War when the head of the cult relocated to New York City. The circumstances at the time probably prevented careful scrutiny, but since then the ruling class has had plenty of time to figure out whether these people should be allowed to remain.

Immigration is always a tool of the ruling elite. This was true in the Roman Empire and it is true in the American empire. Outside of some very narrow exceptions, immigration is a tool of the ruling class to weaken domestic opposition. In the 19th century it was used to suppress wages and prevent unionization. In the current age it is used to maintain the power of the managerial class by diluting the demographics of the country and disrupting the formation of natural community.

How does Chabad fit into this scheme? They do not work in the normal sense which means they are useless in suppressing wages. This cult operates within the Hasidic community, so they are like an economy within an economy. They self-segregate, outside of their recruitment of secular Jews, so they are not showing up in your suburban subdivision to create problems with the neighbors. What they mostly due is recruit secular Jews with access to power in order to influence the elite.

Again, this cult has centers in every Western capital. They operate near the centers of power in the West, so that means they have facilities in cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a member of the Chabad cult. Given the scrutiny on Trump, one has to wonder why the media never did a deep dive on why and how this cult was able to place a member at the center of global power.

None of this should suggest that Chabad is evil or at the center of an international conspiracy to destroy the world. The point is that this extremely bizarre and alien religious movement is allowed to operate unfettered in a time when Western ruling elites are increasing paranoid about internal threats. One would think a cult digging secret tunnels under New York City streets would produce more concern than some grannies wandering around the capital waving Trump flags.

What all this points to is two things. One is the dynamic of American society, especially within the managerial class, is a non-linear system. It is not a top-down system where a small group engineers everything from the shadows. Instead, there are a lot of players jostling with one another seeking advantage. The paranoia we see from the ruling elite is not due to fear of a peasant revolt, but genuine fear of a palace coup that uses a peasant revolt as a pretext.

The other thing this Chabad business tells us is the ruling class is not thinking far beyond one move on the board. A strong ruling class would have packed the Chabad guys off hours after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not that Chabad is evil, but that no smart ruling class tolerates a cult it cannot control. Instead, the managerial elite seems to be blind to this weird movement. It helps explain why foreign governments find it so easy to manipulate the political class.

All of this is a good reminder that America has never been a country in the conventional sense, but rather something like a large distributed network. The nodes on this network are the power centers that wield influence in certain areas. These nodes are often networks themselves, like the news media. The New York Times is the major node within the news media, which itself is a node on the ruling network. These nodes influence one another and jockey for power with one another.

As a result, no one is ever really in charge, like we see in Russia or China, where the state is the dominant power and controls all the power centers. We saw this with Trump when he was thwarted by the various nodes within government. When he overcame those problems, he was stymied by the judicial and corporate nodes operating within the general network of the managerial class. The ruling elite of America is a mesh network that operates atop society.

The Chabad people understand this, which is why they recruit members who can infiltrate these nodes. Most Chabad members do not look like those guys scurrying out of underground tunnels. They look like anyone else in society. Foreign governments see this is well, which is why Israel can have so much influence. China, despite enormous wealth and willingness to buy politicians has less influence than Saudi Arabia because the Saudis understand how America really works.

Chipping Away At The Old Order

Posted on January 9, 2024 by thezman

Modern dissidents argue that the chain of causality starts with biology, which bounds the culture of a people. That culture grows the institutions which define the politics and economics of society. Replace half the population of Haiti with Japanese people and you end up with a vastly different society. The Japanese would seize control of the country, impose their will and the result would be a political-economy that is nothing like anything that could exist in an African run society.

While this is a good rule of thumb for general politics, it falls apart when there is a revolution in technology. The Industrial Revolution started in England and spread to the European continent. It quickly resulted in massive cultural changes as people moved from the countryside to the cities to work in factories. It is a great example of how revolutionary technological changes can reverse the flow of the great chain of causality as the new technology is absorbed by the society.

Of course, the Industrial Revolution did not start in England by luck. The slow transformation of the people, resulting in lots of smart people looking to solve old problems, is the counter to this claim. The Industrial Revolution was the result of the changes in the European population that started in the Middle Ages. It was biology that brought about the technological revolution, so one can argue that the great chain of causality holds up even in revolutionary moments.

Putting that aside, the West is at the end of one of those revolutions, which is the microprocessor revolution. The way we live today is very different from how we lived fifty years ago, at least when it comes to how we interact with one another and how individuals interact with society. Fifty years ago, this post would not be written because there would be no way to see it even if it was written. Fifty years ago, information was relatively scarce, while today it is unlimited.

This is what makes the present plagiarism panic in the academy something more than just a tempest in a teapot. Fifty years ago, it was hard to copy and paste the work of others because copy and paste did not exist. Written words were typed with a typewriter, which meant typing out what it was you were stealing. Before publishing, many hands edited and retyped those words. The whole process moved much slower, so getting caught was also much easier.

That changed with technology, but the editing and fact checking process did not change with the new technology. Instead, it atrophied. The new technology turned the flow of written material into a firehose and those old processes were not able to keep up with the volume. Not only that, the bottlenecks were blown open like a raging river blasting through a damn. Today written content flows without restriction and without any serious scrutiny in the modern academy.

There is another issue here. Technology has created a new conception of the public domain that was unimaginable fifty years ago. Wikipedia, for example, is technically not a publisher and it has no authors. It is a crowdsourced repository of information that is explicitly intended to be in the public domain. The internet itself is the repository of all human knowledge now. Again, most of it is intended to be freely available to whoever is interested, because it is the public domain.

Can you plagiarize the internet? How about Wikipedia? The concept of plagiarism is tied to property rights. You produce a written work using your labor so you have an ownership claim to it. If on the other hand, you give it away freely on the internet or post it on a site like Wikipedia, do you still own it? Can it be stolen when your clear intent is to share it with the world, perhaps anonymously? Throw in the fact that these sources change over time and the issue gets quite murky.

Then you have the fact that there are only so many ways to state things, especially those that are part of a contextual reality. Claudine Gay got in trouble for repeating what amounts to echolalic babbling that defines her field of study. There are only so many ways to preach against whiteness, so by now every way to state the simplistic ideas within that field have been done many times. No matter how you say something in grievance studies, you sound like everyone else.

That is what will be revealed by these efforts to scan the works of academics for plagiarism using modern tools. The rigid conformity in most of these fields has led to a narrowing of what is safe to write in a paper. If everyone was fastidious about siting the work of others, all new papers would be so littered with citations that the index would be longer than the paper. The plagiarism hunters will find they are overwhelmed with examples to the point where it becomes meaningless.

This brings up another issue. The culture of the internet from the very beginning was to be open and communal. Long before the scolds were allowed online, the culture of the internet was anarchic. If you posted something online it was fair game. Anyone could use it and modify it to their purposes. Post a pic of yourself on vacation and it could end up being used by someone posting about that vacation spot. No one thought or thinks about who owns a pic, a meme or anything that is online.

In other words, the culture of the internet has changed the culture in general as people spend so much time online. Someone using a picture of your house, for example, only matters if their intent is to cause you harm or they unintentionally create a problem for you, like having a mob show up at your door. No one contacts the real estate sites demanding that old images of their house be taken down. Can you even do this, even if you had the desire? Would a court side with you?

Bill Ackman’s wife allegedly copied from Wikipedia. How can we know this when it is possible the Wiki contributor copied from Mx. Ackman? Maybe she cribbed from some third source that the Wiki author also used. Is this even copying when the whole point of the site is to collect up information for public consumption? Again, can you steal something that is made freely available? Plagiarism assumes intent and the lack of consent, which is missing in this example.

On top of all this, the biggest players in the technology space rely on ambiguous definitions of what constitutes property. They capture all sorts of things about you and your behavior and sell it to corporations and governments. They argue it is theirs to sell because you do not technically own your habits and tastes. An emerging quality of the ruling elite is an abandonment of the old concepts of ownership. You no longer own you, at least not in the traditional sense of it.

Much is said about the ideological nature of the managerial elite, but it may be that their fanaticism is simply a defense mechanism. As technology continues to erode the old rules, their ideological fervor fills the void. The free flow of information is not opening and democratizing society, but instead leading to an authoritarian reaction by the managerial elite to the threats technology brings to the old rules. Like the steam engine, the microprocessor promises to overthrow the old order.

DIE Another Day

Posted on January 8, 2024 by thezman

Note: There was no Sunday podcast this week. I got back from the new house and was simply too tired to do it. I may put the Sunday show on ice until I get the house finished, which means doing something else in its place. Behind the green door, there were two written items this week. A post about my trip to the witchdoctor and post about the aesthetics of modern cars. Subscribe here or here.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the massive food fight that erupted among the worst people over how the allegedly best people cheat like crazy. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard, was supposed to be a proof of concept for the egalitarian blank slate religion of the Cloud People. In reality she was as synthetic as their empathy for people of color. Claudine Gay was a modern lawn jockey. Instead of standing on their lawn with a lantern, she held up her diplomas.

Then we have Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund guy who started this when Gay made unpleasant noises about Israel. He first threatened to withdraw funding and when that did not work, he went after her credentials. In a world of credentialism this was a declaration of war on the system. Soon the internet dug into Gay’s background and found examples of alleged plagiarism. Harvard then demoted her to being a million dollar a year political science instructor.

In response, MIT decided to get into the fight, and they leaked dirt to Business Insider about Ackman’s wife, who supposedly had a cut and paste problem too. It is ironic that people who are immune to the charge of hypocrisy thought they could use the charge of hypocrisy against people famously immune from the charge of hypocrisy. It is an example of how the hive mind operates. Once Ackman was declared outside the hive, he was no different from Trump or Hitler to the hive.

For his part, Ackman has declared a jihad against MIT. He is asking for volunteers to scan the academic work of everyone at MIT. He has also offered to fund the use of technology to expedite the process. Interestingly, the MIT president said all the same things as the Harvard and Penn presidents about Israel, but she has been immune from criticism to this point. Perhaps she thought the force field was not enough to protect her, so she launched this preemptive strike.

Again, it is hard not to enjoy this poo-flinging contest, but it obscures a reality at the heart of the whole thing. That is the logic of the egalitarian religion must lead them to these self-destructive ends. The reason for that is there is no way to reach the stated goals of this new religion without dismantling the standards and practices of the Western society that made the modern university possible. In other words, to dismantle whiteness they must dispense with the rules of whiteness.

The only reason Claudine Gay can exist is if the rules of the academy are changed to make it possible for her to exist. All along the way her mostly white advisors cut corners for her so she could move along through the system. They do this because it was the path of least resistance, but also for self-interest. They could subtly mention how they were once the advisor of this shining example of the new religion. This is social capital an academic can use for status seeking.

Systemic rule breaking is not confined to the grievance studies areas. The need to acquire totems of the new religion is everywhere on campus. The chemistry department at Rice University, for example, spends scarce resources on thirty different diversity and inclusion programs. The department now offers a for-credit course in Afrochemistry, which is taught by this woman. She will no doubt be lifted up on the shoulders of academics and socially promoted into a leadership role.

This all sounds fine except that when you populate your new system with people who are both incompetent and entitled, the results of that system will reflect this. The long running discussion about the decline of elite universities is centered around the fact the graduates are often astoundingly incompetent. The truth is, they may be incompetent at traditional things, but they are stars at the rules of the new system. The products of dismantling whiteness are good at dismantling whiteness.

The reason we have a crisis of competence in America is the managerial system is slowly being taken over by people who are only good at gaming the system to produce diverse, equitable and inclusive results. The managerial system is slowly being bent to the goal of denying its own existence. No one would dare hire Brooke Johnson to do chemistry, but she plays a role in who gets hired to do chemistry. Get enough Brooke Johnsons and Claudine Gays and the system begins to fail.

All of this was inevitable as soon as the moralizers of the mid-twentieth century declared a fatwa against nature. Once it was immoral to notice natural inequality and the fixed nature of people, the old system was doomed. The only permissible explanation for the persistent inequality was to blame the system and that meant destroying the system was the only moral path forward. The social promotion system is about maintaining the myth of egalitarianism.

That also means there is no way out for these elite colleges. Bill Ackman can expose all of them as plagiarists, cheats, and fools, but nothing will change because nothing can change as long as the core tenets of the faith remain. Unless Bill Ackman has a new religion for these people to embrace, they will burn the whole system to the ground before abandoning diversity, equity, and inclusion. This means the collapse of the university system is inevitable.

Un-Political Thinking

Posted on January 5, 2024 by thezman

From time to time, I have mentioned that when it comes to politics, most people use their stupid brain rather than their everyday brain. You see it with the Harvard case where conservatives are celebrating over the ouster of the plagiarizing president, as if this will make any difference to them. Harvard will just replace one antiwhite bigot with another antiwhite bigot, probably one even more nasty than Gay.

It is not that conservatives are stupid, although many of them are quite stupid, it is that they slip into political brain when they look at this issue, rather than use their normal brain that they use everywhere else in their life. Even the people protesting pornography in the schools figured out that it was not just the books, it was the people on the school board that was the problem.

Dissidents like to quote Carl Schmitt about politics being about friends and enemies, but in many respects, this is bad for dissidents. Inside conventional politics it is fine to play Cowboys and Indians, but for dissidents this is a danger. It is how weirdos and lunatics turn up in the ranks and how otherwise useless people make themselves into influencers until they are revealed to be nuts.

That is the show this week. It is about cases where we should put aside our pollical brain and use our normal brain to avoid problems. The tool that helps us navigate the world and avoid dealing with crackpots or getting sucked into to a terrible idea can also help us filter out the same things in politics. We just have to stop thinking politically and instead think like a normal person when it comes to politics.

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Fifth Column State

Posted on January 4, 2024 by thezman

No one knows for sure who coined the term “fifth column” but it seems to have originated in Spain during the civil war. Legend has it that Franco said in a telegram that there were four Nationalist columns approaching Madrid, and a fifth column waiting to attack from the inside. Given that the telegram was discovered long after the phrase was in use suggests another source, but maybe Franco used this phrasing in other formats and that is how it got into circulation.

A fifth column is a group of people that conspire to undermine a larger group from within by disguising themselves as supporters. It is not just random individuals who disagree with official policy, like protestors. The members of the fifth column coordinate their efforts with an outside group, usually an enemy of the group. Unlike spies, who are usually motivated by greed or resentment, the members of the fifth column have a primary loyalty to the outside group for whom they work.

This is all relevant today as the client list of Jeffrey Epstein makes the rounds and is used by partisans in the usual partisan way. Lost in the usual bellowing is the fact that Epstein was an agent of a foreign state. The most likely explanation for his existence is that he was paid to get dirt on prominent Americans. He was running what people in the wilderness of mirrors call a honey trap. He used girls and boys to play on the sexual weaknesses of his targets on his island in the Caribbean.

Of course, the foreign state for whom Epstein worked was Israel. His long-time paramour was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Ian Robert Maxwell, whose real name was Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch. Maxwell was a high-level intelligence officer for Mossad his entire life. So high level, in fact, that when he died, all of the living leaders of Israel showed up at his burial. More important, six former heads of Mossad were there, and Maxwell was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

It could very well be a one in six million coincidence that Epstein was hooked up with the daughter of the most prominent spy in Israeli history, but the law of parsimony says that this was not a coincidence. It does not take long to see gaps in Epstein’s official biography, so we know he was not a middling school teacher who suddenly discovered he was an investment genius. Someone was underwriting his operation, and the most likely culprit is the state of Israel.

Espionage is as old as nations, so it should come as no surprise that Israel spies on America and Americans. It relies on American stupidity and generosity to underwrite the Zionist project, so informational asymmetry is important to them. It is why Israel stole nuclear material from a United States company, even though it resulted in a massive contamination of an area around Pittsburgh. The Apollo Affair was just part of a program to use America to further the Zionist project.

The Epstein case and the Apollo affair have another link. Unlike most espionage cases, the people doing the treachery were not motivated by greed. The oldest and most successful way of turning someone into a spy is to give them money. As George Washington said, no man is so virtuous as to refuse the highest bidder. Most men with secrets to sell are not particularly virtuous. In the case of Israeli spying, money was not the primary motivation for these crimes.

This is where the fifth column concept comes into the picture. One of the most aggressive and powerful lobbies in Washington is the Israel lobby. This is something everyone knows, but most people are afraid to discuss. Pat Buchanan was anathematized for pointing out the obvious. The Israel lobby does not limit itself to bribing politicians. It is everywhere in America. These documentaries (here, here) done by Al Jazeera a few years ago are a good primer.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, is one of the wealthiest and most powerful lobbying groups in America. Their primary reason to exist is to convince Americans, especially politicians, that the interests of Israel are the primary interest of America, and therefore can never be questioned. It is right there on their website, so it is not as if they are hiding it. Prominent Zionist like Joel Pollak and Ben Shapiro make this precise argument every day.

Up until now, no one has cared about this as the cost of underwriting Israel was small and times were generally good. Times have changed and people are naturally wondering if a luxury item like money to Israel is a good idea. Billions in Israel funding is jammed up in Congress because the line of foreigners demanding billions is getting long and the needs of Americans are not being met. Millions of foreigners are flooding over the border and Biden is worried about Israel and Ukraine.

What all of this points to is a defect of democracy. The American concept of democracy is a continent sized town hall meeting. It is a marketplace of ideas where competing interests hash it out with one another. Since it is a marketplace, it means everything, and everyone is for sale. This is how foreign interests like the Israel lobby are able to turn the instrument of American democracy to their favor at our expense. It is also how economic elites can undermine public will.

Imagine you are the king of a country and one of your advisors, a fellow with unusual headgear, is constantly lobbying you on behalf of a principality. At first you think he just favors that prince but then you learn he is related to that prince. Not only that, but he is also part of a network that is loyal to that prince. You will have that advisor sent to the tower because that person has misrepresented himself and he has worked to undermine you to the benefit of a potential rival.

In American style democracy, this logic is flipped on its head. The people’s representatives all come with a price tag on their chest. Anyone, foreign or domestic, can buy their loyalty. The reason the Israel lobby exists at all is the system rewards those who lavish politicians with money. It is the reason that every congressman quickly moves from representative of his people to Washington to Washington’s representative to the people of his district.

It is why America is a fifth column state, because it is defined by the players who operate like fifth columns. Israel is just one of the best at the game, but every country has a similar operation going in Washington. People forget that the Chinese bankrolled the Clinton operation. Charlie Trie was just a good ol’ boy from Arkansas, when he was not a bagman for the Chinese government. When everything has a price, nothing has any value and that is what we get from our political system.

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