The God Of The Clouds

Posted on February 29, 2024 by thezman

One of the things about the current age that gets little attention is the contradiction we see every day in the political system. On the one hand, most people think the political system is captured by minority interests like corporations, the military industrial complex, ideological fanatics and so on. At the same time, the political class puts an enormous amount of time and energy into convincing the public. If public opinion plays little role in policy, why do the politicians care what we think?

First off, there is the question of whether public opinion matters. Paradoxically, many of the people who claim government is controlled by minority interests put a lot of time into convincing people of this theory. They also make claims about the nature of the minority interests that are absurd. For example, white men are claimed to have special access to power, when this is clearly not true. For this class of critic, “minority interests” are whatever bogeyman haunts their fevered dreams of utopia.

Ten years ago there was a big study to determine if public opinion matters when it comes to the making of public policy. By the standards of social science, the data set was massive and comprehensive. The result was that economic elites control public policy, not majority will. If rich people want something from government, they tend to get it barring overwhelming public opposition. If the people want something but rich people oppose it, then the politicians are happy to ignore the people.

To the realists, this makes perfect sense. In every area of life, rich people have far more influence than regular people. This has been true since the first guy drew a line around some land and declared sole ownership of it. Wealth is power because it can be used to buy influence, but also because people tend to respect money. It is a sign that the person is successful and therefore has qualities we should respect. Even the most radical leftists respects rich people. Just as George Soros.

This answers the question as to who really controls the political system in the general sense, but it does not cover everything. Do the economic elites of the West want a long war in Ukraine? Maybe in the United States the war profiteers see it as a good thing, but European industry has been getting killed by the war. Similarly, environmentalism benefits some profiteers, like Elon Musk, but it harms many others. Clearly, rich people can be cajoled into supporting things that harm their interests.

That starts to get at the question as to why the ruling class puts so much time and effort into tricking the public. If you look at lists of the richest people, the one thing lacking in the vast display of wealth is diversity of opinion. You do not find immigration opponents, for example, in the Fortune 1000. There are no zealous Christian Nationalist or even serious opponents of Zionism. There are degrees of enthusiasm for the latest thing among the elites, but everyone supports the latest thing.

No one, not even the sociopaths who populate the economic elite, wants to think of themselves as the bad guy. They may embrace a mock version of being the devilish figure in the drama of life, but no one thinks of himself as the devil. No matter your station in life, you are the hero of your story. What supports this is others taking your side in some moral cause. It is why people like sympathy and forgiveness when they do something stupid or get harmed. It means they are the good guy.

The reason our elites chant about democracy so much now is they not only believe what they are saying, but they have to believe what they are saying. In order for them to maintain their sense of being the hero, they need some moral authority to bestow upon them the blessings that are reserved for the righteous. The support of their fellow elites is not enough. In this age, the righteous have the support of the masses, so that is why our elites invest so much in winning public approval.

The god of democracy is not the god of the people. It is a process that turns the people into a fickle god that must be cajoled and bullied in order to give its blessing. In order for our rulers to see themselves as heroically leading mankind to the next phase of human existence, they need the people to be cheering them. Like the deranged rulers of Rome who staged games to win public acclaim, our rulers stage mass media events, public festivals like elections and public relations campaigns.

In a way, our rulers are acting the same way as the people who go door to door handing out information about their cult. On the one hand, these people think they are giving away something beneficial. They are offering people a way into their cult. On the other hand, they are looking for confirmation. If even a few people show some interest, it confirms to them that their beliefs have some merit. The conversion process in all religions is for the benefit of the converted.

Unlike a religious cult, our rulers resent this relationship. It is a weird aspect of the morality of democracy that it corrupts the soul of the believer. They begin to hate the god they are forced to worship. Our elites hate the marketplace, whether it is the economic market or the political one. It is why they seek monopoly. If they can so dominate the market that they always get majority support, they have tamed their god into always being a loving and approving god.

Of course, nature abhors a monopoly, so that means our elites are always in a contest with the Old Scratch of democracy, which is dissent. As long as there is one person out there who disagrees it remains possible that the opinion of the elites is invalid or even immoral, despite the level of support. Much of the venom directed at the public by our elites is the result of this reality. Final confirmation can only come when the final dissident is wiped from the scene.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe famously picked “Democracy: The God That Failed” for the title of his book promoting private government. It contains many of the themes in this post, but it misses one essential point. Democracy is not a god that fails the people or even society, but a god that can never satisfy the ruling elite. Every ruling needs a god, as they must stand on a moral framework. All societies start from a moral basis and it must feel permanent. Democracy is simply too fickle for the task.

In the end, that is why our rulers and their servants in politics and the media so frantically chase after public opinion. It is why vast amounts of capital are invested into tricking the people. Like the rabbis looking for loopholes in the Talmud, our rulers are always looking for some way to get justification from the public for their actions and their position, but they always find dissidents. For them, democracy is a god that always brings the devil with him to undermine their efforts.

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Failure Management

Posted on February 28, 2024 by thezman

Note To SubscribeStar Users: I was told that their payment processor made some changes, so that screwed up some of the renewals. The usual suspects continue to harass credit card processors who do business with normal people. It is a hassle, for sure, but a reality of life these days.

The term “deep state” has been overused and abused to the point where it is meaningless, but the concept behind it remains useful. Conceptually, it simply means the permanent state, the individuals and institutions that lie behind the facade of our democratic processes and institutions. Politicians come and go but there is a permanent managerial elite that runs the important institutions. The C.I.A., for example, does not change after a presidential election brings in a new president.

That is what makes this long piece in the New York Times about the C.I.A. operating in Ukraine an interesting bit for regime-ology. There is not a single punctuation mark in that piece that was not vetted by the C.I.A. Senior people in the agency wanted that piece in the “newspaper of record” so they made sure the senior people at the paper put reliable stenographers on the job. It is why it reads like a marketing piece extolling the accomplishments and capabilities of the agency.

The part that is getting the most attention is that the agency has been operating secret bases in Ukraine since the U.S. led coup in 2014. The newly installed spy chief of Ukraine was in contact with British and American spy agencies on day one, which is a strange thing to make public. On the one hand, the agency wants the world to know that they have been trying to undermine Russia from bases in Ukraine for a decade, but at the same time they were invited into to do the work.

One way to read this is as a signal to Russian intelligence that when the war is over there will be no hard feelings. It is just the old game. While the agency did the task assigned to it by the political side of Washington, the agency bears no ill-will to the Russians with regards to Ukraine. In the article there are several examples of how the agency supposedly told the Ukrainians that they were not so conduct assassinations or terrorist operations inside of Russia.

That sounds like something out of a John le Carré novel, but like the rest of permanent Washington, the C.I.A. is still stuck in the Cold War. This is not the first time that stories planted by the agency have made the point that the Ukrainians have been operating outside the parameters set by the C.I.A., so it is fair to assume that this is a point that is important to the agency for some reason. It could have to do with internal politics between factions in Washington.

Another way to read this is as a way to prepare the ground for the very bad news that is coming out of Ukraine this year. Again, that Times piece reads like marketing material for the agency, which may be intended to shield it from criticism when Project Ukraine falls apart this summer. They can tell the politicians that they did what they could to help Ukraine, but the warmongers in the State Department, along with their puppets in Ukraine, screwed it up.

This interpretation is supported by the panic we are seeing in the political class over the last couple of weeks. Chuck Schumer is now threatening House Speaker Mike Johnson over the Ukraine money. The people controlling Joe Biden are putting on a full court press to get that money, even threatening a government shutdown. In Europe, French president Emanual Macron held an emergency meeting of EU countries to discuss sending troops from EU countries to Ukraine.

The reason for the panic is the war has taken a bad turn. The Russians broke through a key stronghold called Avdeevka. This was a fortified city that secured a key part of the front in the Donbass. This has opened up a hole in the Ukrainian defenses and has the Ukrainians scrambling to build new defensive lines further West. In the north and the south, the Russians are slowly taking ground and inflicting heavier and heavier damage to the Ukrainian army, which is showing signs of breaking.

While no one expects the Ukrainian army to collapse anytime soon, it is clear that it is no longer about if the army will break but when it will break. They are running out of men to fight, as the losses have been staggering over the last year. They also have critical shortages of essential materials like artillery shells. This is why Macron is floating the idea of sending troops to Ukraine. It is also why NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg wants Ukraine to target Russian cities with missiles.

Meanwhile, the public face of the Kagan cult that controls the State Department is making the rounds, threatening to kill Valdimir Putin. Victoria Nuland is doing what these people always do and that is double down on failure. As far as Nuland is concerned, the deteriorating situation in Ukraine is proof that the West must pour even more resources into the Ukraine project. If it means nuclear war with Russia, that is just the price that must be paid to finish the job in Ukraine.

What all of this suggests is that the people operating behind the curtain are deeply worried about project Ukraine. Things may be worse than what the general public can see through social media and local reports. That New York Times piece extolling the glories of the C.I.A. is a glimpse of the jockeying that is going on behind the scenes to see who takes the blame for the failure. More precisely, to see who gets to blame which politicians for the failure of Project Ukraine.

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The Losers Morality

Posted on February 27, 2024 by thezman

Note: For those looking for a good book to read, check out this new novel Faction: With the Crusaders, which is the follow on of the writer’s first novel called Faction.

On Sunday, a US Air Force member named Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israel embassy to protest the war in Gaza. This being the modern age, he live steamed the act on Twitch. According to the BBC, he had e-mailed a message to the Antifa media operators with whom he was associated. “Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the email read, warning it would be “highly disturbing”.

The video is disturbing for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which it shows a man burning to death, which is one of the most horrific ways to die. It also shows uniformed police doing nothing but pointing their guns at the man as he burned to death, because that is the only thing they know how to do now. Finally, someone rushed up with a fire extinguisher to put out the flames, but the cops still stood there ready to shoot the poor man if they could find a reason to do it.

The point of this act was to get attention to the cause, which is the Israeli war on the Palestinian settlements in Gaza. Antifa, with whom Mr. Bushnell was associated, is anti-Israel, so they have taken up the cause of Gaza. Despite claiming to be antifascist, the anarchist subculture is surprisingly antisemitic, something that gets left out of the reporting by the media. It is a good example of how the Washington regime will align with anyone, no matter how bizarre, if it suits their needs.

The logic behind this protest is that it so shocks the sensibilities that no one can ignore it, thus attention is brought to the cause. There is no disputing this. Before Aaron Bushnell self-immolated, no one other than his family and friends had any reason to know his name, but now he is global news. To a lesser degree, his reasons for doing what he did are also global news. For the anti-Israel movement around the world, Aaron Bushnell is now a martyr and hero for the cause.

That is where things get complicated. For those already in the pro-Gaza camp, Mr. Bushnell’s actions are noble because they elicit pity. Michael Tracy tried unsuccessfully to make this point on Twitter. You are supposed to see the act, feel pity for the man suffering and then think about his reasoning. Presumably, once you understand his reasoning, you will not only embrace his reasoning, but embrace the moral claims that he is making with regards to Israel.

Of course, you could just as easily look at his act, feel pity for the man and then conclude he must be insane. After all, reason tells us that all living creators seek to preserve their lives by any means necessary. This we can observe in nature and within ourselves as living things. Therefore, a human seeking to die is probably suffering from mental defect and needs protection from himself. Perhaps his cause is just as crazy as the man killing himself in the name of the cause.

There is something else. Why should the moral claims of a loser, a failure, a maniac, have greater appeal than the moral claims of the people supporting the stronger party in the Gaza conflict? In other words, why do the losers have a claim on our sympathy rather than the winners? Why should our sympathy have any role in determining the morality of the two parties in the conflict? Why are both sides appealing to our pity and sympathy rather than some other emotion?

In no other area of life is this logic applied. In a war the winners are celebrated and the losers are punished, usually by their own people. When the Ukraine army falls apart, the political leaders of Ukraine will flee for their lives. The leaders of NATO countries will be mocked and scorned by their own people. We see the same in sports competition, where the winners are feted and the losers and excoriated. Why in this case should the morality be turned on its head?

The truth is, it is not turned on its head. The reason this sort of protest, and most protests, fail to sway the public is they appeal to a loser’s morality. The protestors are saying, in effect, that they cannot win the debate with the public and they cannot win the argument with the rulers. They are powerless, so no one addresses their concerns, which leaves them with nothing by an appeal to your sympathy. This always fails as people naturally support the winner and reject the loser.

This is why most of the commentary online about the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell was mocking and joking. Even in that Michael Tracey thread the replies are sarcastic, despite his obvious appeal to pity. It turns out that appeals to pity only work on those who see themselves as pitiful. To everyone else, they just reinforce the notion that the losers deserve to lose, which is why they act like losers. For most people, Bushnell’s act proves his cause is not worth considering.

It is an important point about politics. Democratic politics are theater and self-pity makes for bad box office. Successful political movements project strength and confidence, not weakness and self-pity. That means all public displays, including protests, should project strength and confidence. Aaron Bushnell would have served his cause better if he went about punching Israelis in the nose. At least then he would have been seen as a threat and people will respect a man who is a threat.

Their Huey Long Crisis

Posted on February 26, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the realities of antifascism and the people attracted to it and a post about the furniture rackets. The Sunday podcast was a no go as I was tied up on some projects. Subscribe here or here.

Former President Trump won the South Carolina primary on Saturday, clobbering Nikki Haley by twenty points. Haley, of course, was the governor of the state and pitched herself as the local favorite. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the anti-Trump elements in the Republican ecosystem thought Haley had a chance to upset Trump in her home state and thus bring about the collapse of Trump. Instead, Saturday should be the end of the Haley campaign.

Whether or not Haley drops out of the race is an open question. The Koch network announced they would stop funding this ridiculous project in order to focus on other ridiculous projects. Typically, this sort of announcement is a signal to the rest of the donors and the media that the project is finished. The usual suspects, however, never abandon a project. They still think we should have troops in Iraq in order to spread democracy, so they will stick with Haley.

Nevertheless, the attention will now shift from Haley to the prospect of Trump securing the nomination and what can be done to stop it. That last part is the important part, as the usual suspects never accept defeat. Paul Ramsey has a short video up explaining the various lawfare shenanigans they have ready to stop Trump. What lies ahead now is not the normal progress toward the candidate securing the nomination, but a series a political witch trials intended to jail an opposition candidate.

Because the courts are thoroughly politicized now and controlled by the regime, there is no question about the results. Trump will be convicted in all of them, probably before the end of the year. Some convictions will come before the November elections, as the regime thinks this will sink Trump in the polls. Alternatively, it will force the Republican party to remove Trump from the ballot. Nothing says democracy like removing the opposition candidate from the ballot.

As an aside, you have to admire the cynicism of the people who think these cases will erode Trump’s support. Their starting point is the assumption that Trump voters respect the system and have high enough moral standards that they would not support a man convicted by the system. Therefore, if the usual suspects can rig a few court cases against Trump, these decent people will be tricked into dropping their support for the enemy of the tricksters and go along with the trickster option.

Putting that aside, as Paul Ramsey notes in his video, we are heading toward a crisis that is without parallel in our history. Trump will be facing prison time, but either have the nomination or have the delegates to secure the nomination. That and he will be the favorite to win the general election, assuming the general election is not as corrupt as it was the last time. What we have seen thus far is Trump will not quit and his support will not drop due to the lawfare shenanigans.

A systemic crisis is when the options available within the system to the people in charge of the system are all viewed as unacceptable. In this case, the Republican Party can be forced to break its rules and remove Trump. This is not just the death of the party, but the death of the Potemkin opposition the regime requires. They can put Trump in jail and hope he loses, but that makes him a martyr. They can call off the dogs, but that means admitting it was all a lie from the start.

The thing that political insiders see that regime media is not allowed to admit is that Trump is probably gaining in popularity. South Carolina is an open system, so Democrats were free to vote in the Republican primary. The regime spent millions to get the black vote out to vote for Haley. In other words, like New Hampshire this was closer to a general election voting pool. Trump still crushed Haley, which suggests the TDS card is no longer working as it did in 2020.

The closest we have in our past to what we see happening with Trump is Eugene V. Debs, who was a socialist agitator a century ago. The Wilson administration put him in jail for heresy, which they called “sedition” at the time. Today they call it insurrection, but it is the same idea. The obvious difference here is that Debs was not a popular national figure like Donald Trump. Debs was a fringe character without much sympathy from the public, even before his antiwar activities.

The irony here is the people rubbing their hands together and salivating at the prospect of Trump behind bars just spent the last week carrying on over the death of Alexi Navalny, as if he was the Gandhi of Russia. In other words, they dream of doing to Trump what they accuse the Russians of doing to Navalny. In fact, they accuse lots of enemy governments of acting this way. It is a good reminder that these people have no souls and therefore no conscience, so no sense of shame.

An important thing to keep in mind with all of this is that the people leading the revolution at the top have drawn one lesson from the past. That lesson is they can never relent until they reach their goal. They see the failures of their past subversions as the result of a failure to go all in on the project. It is why they never accept defeat and continue to push forward against all evidence. We are seeing this with Ukraine, where their response to failure is to double down.

What this tells us is the brewing crisis over the Trump nomination will not frighten the people responsible for it into finding a way out of it. Instead, they will no doubt see it as an opportunity for even more lawless shenanigans. The New Hampshire results had them double down on South Carolina. The South Carolina failure will have them go all in on the lawfare schemes. If those fail then one can only imagine what comes next, but they no doubt have something ready just in case.

From Russia With Love

Posted on February 23, 2024 by thezman

Since Russophobia will be with us for the time being, it is probably a good idea for dissidents to think about Russia. The presentation of Russia in our media, like everything else, is not connected with reality. Instead, it is intended to promote managerial elite schemes, like project Ukraine. The real Russia is not much like the media portrayal and much more interesting to dissidents.

The funny thing about Russia is that they face similar problems that we face in North America, except the Russian rulers have not sought to make them worse with suicidal immigration policies. The Russian Federation is about eighty percent Russian, demographically similar to America in the 1980’s. That means Russia has a significant minority population it must manage in order to keep the peace.

Unlike America, Russia has never been at war with itself over its minority populations and how they are treated. It has not always been a happy relationship, especially during the Stalin years, but Russians are not racked with guilt by how they have treated their minority populations in the past. Instead, it is either ignored or part of the greater Russian identity that includes these minority groups.

There are a lot of differences between Russia and America, but both are continent sized countries with lots of demographic diversity. How Russia has evolved its own identity in order to manage its diversity versus the lunacy we see in America offers an opening to think about what could come next for America. North America needs a new ideology, and a new identity and Russia offers some clues to that.

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Waiting Out The Weirdness

Posted on February 22, 2024 by thezman

Note: The site performance should be better today. Last night I drained the fluids and replaced the filters. The canoodling valve was stuck. I cleaned it up and recalibrated it, so things should be working fine now.

There is an old fable about how if you throw a frog into boiling water he will immediately leap out of the pot, but if you put him in room temperature water and slowly bring the heat up to boiling, he will not notice. The central claim about frogs is false, but the point of the fable is that humans often do not notice gradual change, even when the results of that change are bizarre or dangerous. Often this point is made to explain some new weirdness that people did not see coming.

This is not an expression we see used much anymore, mostly because this age has become so bizarre that the frog metaphor no longer works. Everyday some new weirdness pops from nowhere, as if the people running the simulation wanted to see what would happen if you threw a frog into boiling water. Finding the idea too cruel, they instead hurl modern Americans into a world where men in dresses demand you use their made-up pronouns and pretend they are a third sex.

The weirdness yesterday was the release of Google’s new image AI tool that was programmed to never create images of white people. The director of the project had to go to the media and lie about it being a mistake after people got the thing to create images of Nazis that were Asian and African. It was fine when it was race-swapping people from medieval Western history, but making Nazis anything other than white is a violation of the invisible law of this age.

The salient point here is it was done on purpose. Thirty years ago, it was impossible to imagine people so deranged and degenerate gaining control of the culture and then using their power to create bizarre images of the past. This is not something that you can say happened gradually then all of a sudden. Sure, it fits a general pattern of ethnic hatred, but the weirdness of it falls outside of even the most cynical expectations, despite being part of a growing pattern.

People often want to think their age is a wacky time compared to prior ages, but objectively the culture tends to move slowly. Maybe there are fits of upheaval, like the civil rights movement in the middle of the last century, but even that was the climax of a process that started generations earlier. You could draw a line from Gettysburg to white children being marched at gun point into black schools. You cannot draw a line from the present black Nazi AI to anything in the past.

If you are middle-aged or older, this election is shaping up to be so outside of anything you have experienced that space aliens could staging it. For decades both sides of the political consensus warned about authoritarianism. All of a sudden, both sides are perfectly fine with it. One side wants to round up dissidents and put them in jail while the other side pretends it is not happening. Notice that no senior Republicans have had much to say about the Trump case in New York.

Of course, the election itself is from bizzarro world. Joe Biden is so feeble and mentally infirmed that he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial, but he can possess the nuclear football and run for reelection. Donald Trump, a man known to us for his outlandish real estate mogul lifestyle and television ventures has transformed in the Gracchi brothers and Lucius Junius Brutus. An entertainment personality has now become the most courageous man in American politics.

It is impossible to overstate the weirdness of this, but it is not the weirdest thing about the coming presidential election. In all probability, the states that were fortified for democracy in 2020 will be fortified for democracy in 2024. The result will be four more years of man who is unable to count to four. Go back to 1984 and tell people Joe Biden will be alive in 2024 and they would be shocked. Tell them he will be president and they would laugh in your face.

The thing is though, this is not the weirdest thing happening right now. Here is a story about parents in Indiana who had their child snatched from them by the state because they did not subscribe the pronoun business. Not long-ago, people who even the most cynical thought were exaggerating warned about this stuff. “They are coming from your kids” was over-the-top rhetoric. Today is just a thing that no one finds all that shocking as it is just another deranged item on the list.

Again, it all feels like the people running the simulation are in a competition to see who can produce the most insane thing to foist upon us. It is not entirely wrong as all of this originates from the people who control the centers of cultural power. The people running the Google AI platform deliberately chose to race swap all the images and prevent any images of white people. The people stealing children in the name of pronouns know what they are doing. The question is why?

That is the weirdest part of this age. There is no good answer for why the people in charge are doing these things. You can say money and power, but they have all the money and power. People who blame it on money and power are simply trying not to think about it too much. You cannot blame them. The other answers can get you hurled into the void as a heretic or cast you as some sort of nutter. We are all left to hope the fever breaks, even though it clearly it is not breaking.

In the end, everyone is left to wait it out, like a bad storm. Instead of huddling in the basement, hoping the house does not come free of the foundation, most people do their best to avert their eyes. Maybe that is the appeal of VR goggles. You can venture into the world and not see the weirdness. You will not see the bus coming at you, but at least the end will be quick and free of bearded men in frocks, but how long before the weirdness is injected into that realm?

The only good news in all of this is that reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it. No matter how infuriating or terrifying things get, reality will not yield to the dreams of the crazies. This was the lesson of the French revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and every ideological movement. It will be the lesson of whatever this cultural revolution is called when it finally ends. The other lesson is the crazies always meet a fate worse than they inflict on their victims.

Preference Collapse

Posted on February 21, 2024 by thezman

Note: For those looking for a good book to read, check out this new novel Faction: With the Crusaders, which is the follow on of the writer’s first novel called Faction.

Liberalism comes in for a lot of abuse recently, mostly due to the abuses done by the current ruling class in the name of liberalism. People are hauled away and thrown into dungeons in defense of democracy, international rules are violated in defense of the rules-based order and all of it is accompanied by endless lying. It is no surprise that a growing number of people inside and outside the West are starting to think that maybe the problem with liberalism is liberalism itself.

Of course, the place to start is the meaning of liberalism. If you tap the word into a search engine you get the stock definition. “Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law.” Note that the only part that the current ruling elites in the West mention is political equality, but they have a different view of equality from the rest of us.

Another way of thinking about liberalism is the idea of permission. Despite claims by some, liberalism is a peculiarity of Western European people. It grew out of the medieval experience where permission was the rule. Up and down the social order, every was required to seek permission from those they served, even for personal issues like marriage and property transfers. Your preferences were controlled by the range of freedoms granted to you by your superiors.

Liberalism, in contrast, seeks to broaden that range of freedom so the individual can make decisions based on his preferences. A man does not have seek permission from his lord to give some of his land to his brother or a total stranger. As long as the new owner abides by the rules applied to all land owners, he is free to take possession of the land if he so chooses or not take possession of the land. His refusal or acceptance is based on his preferences, which he does not have to explain.

Liberalism is often framed as increased choices and therefore an increase in your freedom to choose, but that is not quite right. If you go into the cereal aisle and select an item from the dozens of choices, but must prove to the cashier that your selection is the best one for you, that is a vastly different world from one in which you pick whatever you like for any reason you like. The ability to not choose at all, for any reason at all, is vastly different from a world where you must choose.

In other words, the core of liberal order is not the proliferation of choices or even the right to make a choice, but the right to make a choice or not make a choice without seeking permission or having to explain your decision. You get to live your life by your own lights and you do not have to explain yourself to the authorities. It is only when you violate the law that your motivations come under review and even there is only as a mean of establishing your guilt or innocence.

This is important for understanding the current age. Everywhere you turn now you are expected to explain your preferences and subject those preferences to what the prevailing orthodoxy pretends is the crucible of reason. Even trivial things, like what you choose to eat, often require an explanation. Everyone feels to need to explain their preferences, as if they fear operating outside of official permission. Outside of a narrowing list of personal choices, your preferences are not your own.

One reason for this is the moralization of American society. Since the end of the Cold War, everything and everyone is subject to the proselytizing of the high priests of the new religion who are always increasing the scope of their work. The reason the vegan makes sure to tell the world she is a vegan is she thinks this safely puts her on the side of the righteous. The mask wearing during the Covid hoax was another example of how trivial things can become holy sacraments.

Another reason for the collapse of preferences is the collapse of the liberal order since the alleged triumph of liberalism in the Cold War. Some as yet understood restraint on managerialism during the Cold War broke down with the end of the Cold War and ever since the managerial class has sought to increase it supervision of the people, thus collapsing the individual domain of preference. In retrospect, the end of the Cold War was not the end of communism, but the end of liberalism.

This collapse of the domain of preference is changing the people. Look at an issue as simple as immigration. The choices should range from no borders, as is current policy, to firm absolute borders with no immigration. You as a citizen should pick your preferred option and feel free to advocate for it. Further, you should be free to say you oppose immigration because you prefer not to live with foreigners and have no need to explain your preference, but that is not the case today.

Listen to anyone you know talk about a topic like immigration and you can see them first struggle for why they prefer whatever it is they claim to prefer. On the one hand they want to be seen as preferring the moral option and on the other hand they feel the need to explain themselves when no explanation should be required. It is hard to know what anyone truly prefers when it comes to public policy, because everyone feels they need permission for their preferences.

One reason we seem to heading toward the abyss is that the range of choices keeps narrowing and the consequences for falling outside those narrow options becomes more draconian. The reason for this is preference has been all but eliminated from the collective consciousness of the people. The land of the free is a pasture where the people herd closer and closer to one another, and anyone who strays from the flock is quickly consumed by the wolves guarding our democracy.

What this suggests is that managerialism, left to run its natural course, becomes something like the what we see with insecure managers in corporation. Fearful of their own position, they proliferate rules and enforcement, locking everything down until no one in the company has any range of motion. The company becomes increasing brittle as it sheds talent and begins to fail. The collapse of individual preference in modern society is a sign of distress in our corporatized society.

Gradually, Then Suddenly

Posted on February 20, 2024 by thezman

The Hemingway line about bankruptcy happening gradually then suddenly is a great line because it applies to many things. The suddenly part is what everyone can see and what everyone remembers. It is the gradually part that is overlooked. It is the important part of the dynamic because it explains why the event occurred. Landslides are not random events but the accumulation of many small, unobserved events that eventually reach a tipping point and we get the big event.

That is something to keep in mind as the military struggles to both meet its recruitment numbers and maintain the human capital needed for its operations. Fifty years ago, after the Vietnam war, the military put an emphasis on quality over quantity in both its arms and the men using those arms. The lesson of the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era, the so-called Stripes period, was that the modern military needed to be smarter, relying on intelligence rather than just brute force.

There is a lot more to the renaissance of the American military that began fifty years ago, but the salient factor today is the emphasis on intelligence. The reason for that is the military is suffering from a brain-drain. The overall intelligence of the military is in decline and it is most acute among the officer class. According to that linked report from National Defense Press, “Two-thirds of the new officers commissioned in 2014 would be in the bottom one-third of the class of 1980.”

As one would expect in this age of censorship, certain factors are left out of the discussion, but they hover over it like a fog. In fact, this reality hangs over everything in American society, despite the rules against acknowledging it. The highly complex machine that is the modern high tech American society is in a race. Will the robots reach the point where they can run things for us before the general intelligence of the population declines below a sustainable threshold?

Of course, a big driver is simply declining intelligence. All the research tells us that intelligence among European people has been in decline for a long time. The debate is how long it has been happening and why. The generally accepted estimate is that European people are losing one point per generation at the minimum. That study about the modern officer class suggests the decline is much more rapid, but that does not adjust for demographic factors.

Talk to anyone willing to be honest about the state of the American military and they will tell you that it would not fare well in a war against a peer. This is a lesson of the Ukraine war that is being ignored by the best people. Not only is this war more violent than anything the American military has experienced in fifty years, it is making demands on the officer class that the American military cannot meet. The American planned offensive last summer is a case in point. It was a disaster.

There is another factor to all of this, the thing that hangs over everything like a fog, and that is the thing no one is supposed to mention, which is demographics. That linked report mentions the collapse in the value of a college diploma, but it skips over why this has happened, which is the important bit. In response to demographic change and demographic reality, the modern levelers are forced to destroy the credentialing system so that it is no longer a measure of anything useful.

The military is finding out what every employer in American already knows and that is a college diploma is meaningless. In fact, it could be an indicator that the person will be a nuisance in the work place, making demands around social causes. The reason for this is the college system is more concerned with training young people for those causes than for preparing them to be productive citizens in the practical economy. College is no longer a reliable type of intelligence test.

Another aspect of the demographic crisis is the white out. This is the evolving process whereby white Americans exit the system by choice. The military, for example, is struggling to recruit white people, especially white men. The main reason for this is the social causes launched by the levelers inside the military to fix the reality of race within the military and make it a new model army for society. The immediate consequence of this is the military is getting dumber at a faster rate.

What is happening is white people are voting with their feet. Anyone who has seen a once popular restaurant or entertainment area go bust can understand what is happening across American society. It declines a little here and a little there without much notice, then all of a sudden everyone notices. In the case of a restaurant, this means the regulars stop being regular. In the case of an entertainment district, it often becomes a free fire zone for local youth.

To bring us back to that Hemingway line, in various areas we are about to see the suddenly part of the process. The military is a good example. The antiwhite pogroms launched inside the military under Biden were a long time in the making. Gradually they got going and then suddenly they were everywhere. The response from white people was to gradually avoid the military and now suddenly it is a thing. This is a pattern turning up all over American society.

The salient point here is that the cracks we see opening up in American society are the consequence of long processes. The levelers have been gnawing away at the support ropes for a long time. These problems that seem to have suddenly appeared, like the military intelligence crisis or the corruption of the court system are the result of decades of the gradual undermining of standards. Like bankruptcy, societal collapse happens gradually and then all of a sudden.

A Price For Everything

Posted on February 19, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about being a jerk, old people sniffing deli meat at the grocery story and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

A tenet of the old right was that some things are too important to a society to be subjected to the crucible of reason. Traditions, for example, not only bind people to their ancestors, but to one another in the shared understanding of the past. Treating traditions as mere superstition inevitably leads to their abandonment and the loss of their associated social capital. A society without tradition and history is a temporary, ad hoc collection of deracinated individuals.

Reason is not just questioning and demanding proof. The marketplace is a manifestation of reason in the exchange of goods and services. Sellers compete with one another to attract buyers. Buyers compete with one another through the mechanism of price in order to determine the best good or service. Reason states that if you have a competitive and open market, you end up with the best products and services winning over those of lesser quality or higher price.

The old right would agree to the theory behind open market economies but point out that some things are too important to subject to the market. The moral claims of a society, for example, should not be up for bid. The marketplace would no doubt decide that slavery in certain areas is the superior option, as it has for all of human history, but we have decided that owning other humans is immoral. Therefore, we do not make this moral claim subject to the crucible of the marketplace.

We are getting a real-world glimpse of this with regards to the war in Ukraine which the Western managerial elite insist is a moral crusade. Helping Ukraine, they say, is proof that we worship the god called democracy. The Munich Security Conference just ended and speaker after speaker insisted that the god of democracy demands we empty our wallets to help Ukraine. The Danish prime minister went so far as to say that the West must give all of its weapons to Ukraine.

No one really knows, because the cause is too important to waste time on accounting, but the West has supplied Ukraine with weapons and money in amounts many times more than Russia is committing to the war. Hundreds of billions have been given to Ukraine with hundreds more lent though various contrivances. The sorts of people who perform at events like the Munich Security Conference are fond of talking about how the arsenal of democracy is going to save Ukraine.

The trouble is the weapons supplied to Ukraine have not made much of a difference and in many cases have been worthless. French supplied armored vehicles are nothing more than expensive death traps. British Challenger tanks are great on the parade route but unsuitable for actual combat. The German Leopard tanks were sitting ducks against Russian artillery in the summer offensive. Despite the economic advantages, Western weapons have not made much of a difference.

The reason gets back to the tenet of the old right. There is a story in the German tabloid Bild that takes a look at how Germany is supplying armored vehicles. Instead of producing or selecting vehicles best suited for the war, it is an elaborate financial scam that profits the arms dealers and their foreign suppliers but results in expensive and poorly suited vehicles to Ukraine. The German taxpayer is paying three- and four-times retail for equipment that is useless in the war.

To give some perspective, the Russians probably spend the equivalent of one hundred thousand dollars for an armored vehicle. The Germans are paying six hundred thousand dollars, but for the wrong sort of vehicle. This is a pattern that repeats across the Western supply chain to Ukraine. Either suppliers see a chance to unload useless junk at inflated prices or their top-line equipment, in the case of Western tanks, is proving to be ill-suited for the actual fighting.

The Russians, meanwhile, work from that old right tenet. Some things, like fighting land wars on their border, are too important to be subjected to the marketplace. There is competition within the Russian military industrial base, but the winners are not picked by the invisible hand of the marketplace. They are picked by the demands of the military for the situations they are facing. One reason Russian arms tend to be simple compared to American arms, is the military doctrine of the Russians.

It is tempting to think this old right idea applies only to something narrow like war fighting, but war fighting is a consequence of other factors. After the Cold War, the Russians did not embark on a process to ship their manufacturing base to low-cost countries as happened in the West. One reason for that is the Russians do not make profit the singular goal of their society. They set about modernizing their manufacturing base and now they are reaping the rewards.

This is a pattern we see all over the West. Open borders, like slavery in the ancient world, are profitable for society, but it erodes the social capital. It attacks the customs and habits of the people, the things that bind them together as a people. Once you have monetized the social capital of the people and carried it off to vaults in New York, it is no longer available when the crisis comes. It turns out that national borders should not be subject to the crucible of reason.

The crisis surrounding Ukraine, and make no mistake that crisis is spilling over into the West now, is a microcosm for what awaits the West. The reason for that is Western managerial elites turned their societies into for-profit enterprises. The decision point in every matter is whether it profits the managerial elite. Even the abrogation of ancient rights is merely a defense of the bottom line. It turns out that when everything has a price, nothing has value, not even your society.

The New Priesthood

Posted on February 16, 2024 by thezman

A unique feature of this age is the fact that our societies are largely controlled by what we call the media. It was not that long ago when the term “the media” did not exist as a commonly understood concept. There were newspapers, books, and pamphlets, but they were called newspapers, books, and pamphlets. The concept of “the media” is a product of the 20th century.

These days, the media is not a collection of discreet communication entities but more of a subculture that hangs over society like smog. There are thousands of people who call themselves journalists, for example, who do not work for a journal or even have full-time employment at a newspaper. They are part of the media and speak of themselves as if they are in a righteous subculture or mass movement.

That is the way to think of it. The people in this thing we call the media operate like people in a religious cult or movement. This is why there is so little diversity of opinion in the media now, compared to just a generation ago. In a holy cause, there is no tolerance for those who question the cause. The people in this thing called the media are a priestly class who see their role as moral enforcers.

That is the show this week. It is a rumination on the media that came to mind as I was driving home late last night. The show covers why people join the media and why they are unable to square their activism with reality. Of course, I also talk about who really controls the media. This is the surprise ending. It turns out that the media is a consequence of a different process in our society.