The Old Fear

Posted on February 15, 2024 by thezman

One of the many oddities of this age is the way in which the political class talks about itself, something they do incessantly. For example, the Senate just passed a giant foreign aid bill to give your money to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the military industrial complex. This is a more bloated version of the “bipartisan” deal that included a few pennies for the border patrol and enshrined open borders. This time they stripped out the border money and expanded the foreign aid.

Now, normal people could be forgiven for wondering if the senators have had some sort of collective mental breakdown. The reason the “bipartisan” deal on immigration failed was not that it was too tough on immigration, but that it did nothing to address the issues causing the flood of migrants. In fact, it promised to make the situation worse by limiting what could be done by future presidents. In other words, the answer was to fix the border provision by making it much tougher.

Again, this is the way a normal person thinks. The Senate drew an entirely different conclusion from the storm of protest. They concluded that what the people really wanted was more of the same on the border and even more of their money going to foreign actors and the war machine. Imagine someone makes you an offer on your car and you say the offer is too low. They come back with an even lower offer. That is what we are getting with the Senate at the moment.

Putting that aside for second, look at how the senators supporting this ridiculous bill are talking about it. They are not talking about the bill at all. Instead, they are talking about their heroism in passing the bill. Mitch McConnell went to the floor to say that history would remember his historic vote in favor of the bill. Chuck Schumer talked about himself as if he was Leonidas. By getting this massive giveaway passed in the Senate he was saving the free world from disaster.

The same sort of thing happened in the first round. What little they said about the immigration portion of the bill was easily disputed by looking at the text of the bill they foolishly released to the public. Most of time was spent talking about their personal heroism in crafting the bill. Schumer did the media rounds tell the various stooges about how he labored like Hercules to overcome one obstacle after another in order to get this bill to the Senate for a vote.

There is nothing normal about how these people talk. Politicians in all times exaggerate their roles in things when times are good. They also exaggerate the role of opponents when times are bad. We expect politicians to do this. What is novel today is how they celebrate themselves like heroes for failing to do basic things. Every Washington pol is now his own hagiographer. At this rate, Schumer will be crafting a bill to have his face added to Mount Rushmore.

One possible reason for doing this is the same reason a failing company ramps up its marketing with promises of the product being new and improved. The theory is if you say it enough times people will believe it. The Senate is a clown show so they are heaping praise on themselves thinking that maybe people will not notice that these guys arrive at work in a Volkswagen Beatle done up as a giant mouse. The consultants are telling the senators they need to build their brand.

On the other hand, it is possible they believe it. These are the same people who thought people yelling at them about the terrible immigration bill were angry that it could possibly slow the flood of migrants. They were the same guys who thought using Senator Howdy Doody as the point man in immigration was brilliant. When you are making these errors, anything is possible, so it is quite probable that these senators view themselves as world historical figures.

Another possibility is that these senators are so insulated from our reality that they are now operating in the realm of fantasy. When was the last time Chuck Schumer talked to anyone who lived among the Dirt People? All of his social interactions are with the Israel lobby and Wall Street. The overlap here is immense. They certainly do think Schumer is a hero to his people, just not our people. You can go through the roster of long-serving politicians and see a similar degree of insularity.

Listening to these feeble old men sing their own praises, one cannot help but think of the Politburo in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Like Washington, Soviet politics had come to be controlled by a class of geezers. Their primary concern for a long time had been keeping their spot. The result was they surrounded themselves with sycophants good only for praising their bosses. The result was the political system was incapable of responding to the brewing crisis.

This is what we see with immigration. The solution is not complicated and most of the tools are available to bring the crisis under control. The old bulls in Washington, however, are primarily concerned with Speaker Johnson, who has come to represent a generational threat to them. The media stooges have acknowledged as much, saying that the Senate is hoping to box Johnson in with this bill. In other words, it is geezers thinking they need to fend off the youngster.

This would explain the self-praise. The geriatric ruling class fears the next generation more than they fear death. They have plenty of younger flunkies around to help guard their position and tell them they are the best. The old party hands have now reached that point many old men in the business world reach and that is to claim their experience trumps the talent and vigor of their young challenger. The result is Mitch McConnel now thinks he is Cicero.

The comparison to the Soviet Union brings with it a warning. Decades of insularity did not just result in an ossified ruling class. It also retarded the development of a succeeding generation of party men. When the icy hand of death started to thin the leadership ranks, what replaced them were men good at currying favor but not good at anything else, so the result was disaster. If Speaker Johnson is our Gorbachev, the next decade promises to be quite grim.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com

.

Following Orders

Posted on February 14, 2024 by thezman

I was up before the sun today so I could head out to the new house and avoid sitting in a traffic jam for hours. In the Baltimore – Washington area, traffic starts around seven in certain areas and is a mess everywhere by eight. The same people who tell us they know why Gaia is angry with us also designed the road system that results in millions of cars idling for hours every day, making Gaia angry. Regardless, I avoided being one of those cars be getting outside the wire by six this morning.

An hour into the drive, a sedan came up behind me so I moved over to the travel lane to let him pass. I was probably doing eighty but he wanted to go faster. The road is straight and wide so you can drive as fast as you like for the most part. The only real hazard is the dumb people who camp out in the hammer lane doing the posted speed limit, which is a well-known problem in these parts. These rolling roadblocks are the result of extensive use of lead paint in Baltimore.

A few miles down the road I see that car pulled over by a state trooper, no doubt getting a ticket for speeding. The maps app on my phone warned of a speed trap, but presumably that guy does not use that app. That driver will now get a big fine and spend the next three years paying higher insurance premiums, because the duty officer assign Barny Fife to traffic duty today. He did this because they have quotas to meet every month, despite their claims to the contrary.

If the driver bothered to ask the state trooper why he is pulling people over for speeding on a quiet stretch of highway, the trooper would probably say it is not safe to exceed the posted speed limit. He would say this knowing it is a lie, but that is what he says because it is what allows him to think the job has a purpose beyond raising revenue for the government and providing him with an income. A big part of policing is convincing the cops that they stand between civilization and anarchy.

If the driver called bullshit on it, the trooper would fall back on the line every cop learns after a few weeks on the job. He is just doing his job. This is the most factually true thing any cop ever says in any setting. That trooper is told to write tickets and he knows how many he needs to write before he can finish his shift. If the trooper wants to keep his job, he does what he is told and never questions it. If he is told to randomly shoot people on the highway, he is going to do it.

This is not to pick on the police. They are just the most egregious example of the “I’m just following orders” mentality of this age. If you want to keep your job at Mega Corp, you better not be the first guy to stop cheering at the pep rally. Do not let the boss hear you making sport of his new initiatives. Much of what people do is what they feel they have to do in order to avoid negative consequences. To some degree, everyone is just following orders, because that is the least bad option.

This is much more novel than it seems. Not that long ago the line, “I am just following orders” had very negative connotations. The “Nuremberg defense” was treated as worse than the alleged crime. The argument was that if you follow immoral orders then you are worse than someone who thinks the orders were moral. The latter could be rehabilitated, while the former is someone without scruples and therefore can never be trusted to do the right thing.

We no longer hear anyone condemn the Nuremberg defense. In fact, it has been flipped on its head now. When the cops beat up people exercising their rights in order to defend Antifa rioters, the so-called conservatives rush in to remind us that the real victims are the cops who are just following orders. The people in charge, the people we call the left, love the idea of people following orders. They really love seeing the cops unquestioningly following orders.

It is one of life’s many ironies that in this age where everyone is supposed to search their heart every day for fascism, we can gain some insight into why the German people went along with the Nazi program. In the total state, survival depends upon not questioning the system. If you can put yourself in jeopardy by questioning the orders, then naturally you will take care to never be suspected of questioning the orders, which means enthusiastically following orders.

For those who get the sads when the Nazis are cast in a negative light, the same dynamic came to dominate communist Russia. This set in before Stalin decided he needed to purge the people who might not follow orders. The Bolsheviks, like the fascists after them, figured out that you cannot get to the promised land if you are endlessly explaining yourself to the people who refuse to follow the rules, so the expedient solution was to remove those people.

Anarcho-tyranny is a feature of managerialism, not a bug, because it is what is necessary for managerialism to survive. The people at the top of the system must remain at the top of the system and the only way to ensure that is to make sure everyone is following their orders. The stated goals of the system are a means to an end and the end is to perpetuate the system. The reason you must follow orders may change, but you must always follow orders.

Eventually this advances to the point where the system becomes so conservative and brittle it is unable to adapt. We cannot know how fascism would have ended, but we saw how communism ended. In its final days it was old men desperately trying to hold onto power by enforcing rules that no longer made sense. Once people stopped following orders, the whole thing collapsed. It is something to think about the next time you are pulled over for speeding on a lonely highway.

Killer Drones

Posted on February 13, 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.

If you were alive a thousand years ago and decided you wanted to kill the local prince, it meant getting within reach of the prince. You would have to get close enough to stab him with a knife or poison his food. That meant getting past the guards and his retainers who were always with him. For anyone but those with regular access to the prince this was near impossible, which is why political assassinations were almost always a part of palace intrigue or a palace coup.

Ranged weapons changed this math a bit, but the bow was around a thousand years ago and was not a weapon for this type of activity. The reason is bows were primarily for hunting at close range or part of a system for war. The hunter would need to get close to his quarry as bows were not terribly accurate. In war, masses of archers operated a lot like a missile battery. They would fill the sky with arrows using volume to overcome the limited accuracy of the weapon.

The first real innovation in weapons that could be used for assassinations was the crossbow which arrived in the Middle Ages. We know the ancients had crossbows and used them in war, but they were not terribly accurate. The cost made them a weapon of war rather than a tool for private use. The crossbow disappeared from Europe for almost a thousand years, but then reappeared in the tenth century. Technology soon made them cheap and deadly accurate in the right hands.

This is why medieval leaders grew concerned with this weapon and tried to ban their private ownership in some cases. A weapon that a peasant could own and master that would allow him to strike the prince from a distance created a new problem for the ruling class of the time. A couple of angry peasants on the roof tops or even in the crowd could kill the prince. All of a sudden, having guards and a retinue was not enough, so the prince had to be more careful around the peasants.

Of course, we see the same thing happen with firearms. In the 18th century it was not a great weapon for assassinations. If you could get close enough you could kill the prince with a muzzle loader, but you would also be easy to spot. The first widely available firearms were not great for up close work. Pistols started to change this, and technology soon made it possible to conceal a deadly weapon on your person, thus making the assassin a real threat to authority.

Even though the problem was obvious, it took a while for rulers to figure out how to deal with firearms as political weapons. The same is true for things like roadside bombs and bombs delivered through the mail. A hundred years ago anarchists sent bombs to rich people through the mail. Of course, political actors were able to assassinate important people with the use of commonly available firearms. This is no longer an issue, as the ruling class has adapted to this threat.

This may be about to change. The use of FPV drones in the Ukraine war is doing to range weapons what war did for prior weapons. The FPV drone is a First Person Video drone that an operator uses to put an explosive on a target. The drone has a camera so the operator can look through that camera to guide the drone to the target where it explodes upon impact. Two years ago, these did not exist as a practical matter, but now the battlefield is littered with them.

The reason the skies are full of drones in Ukraine is they are cheap to produce and cheap to master. A team of two can become a highly effective weapon on the battlefield with a week of training on the drone. Training men to use million dollars tanks and artillery takes years. The drone is not a replacement for these weapon systems, but they are proving to be a cheap way to increase the combat effectiveness of troops that have the minimum amount of training.

A big part of the drone war is that the soldiers are learning to operate them and also repair them when needed. After the war, millions of men will go back to civilian life knowing how to make a cheap flying bomb they can guide to a target. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian men will come home angry at their politicians or the politicians of Europe about their conduct of the war. In other words, you do not have to be a genius to see the potential downstream consequences of the drone revolution.

For the last fifty years, the West has had to deal with terror attacks, which meant bombs, mass shootings and hijackings. Western elites had largely insulated themselves from assassination, so the only political violence was attacks on civilians. Now that is about to change as the terrorist can fly a bomb through the window of a rich person’s home or into the limousine of an important person. The math of political violence is about to change due to the drone.

History tells us that no one will notice this until a lunatic flies his homemade FPV drone into a government building. Then the security industrial complex will get the money to unriddle the problem. The battlefield will provide a lesson here as well because those soldiers using drones are working on defending against them. Reports suggest the Russians are way ahead on this, but it will not take long before the private sector in the West is working the problem of killer drones.

In the middle of the last century, it was still common to see politicians mixing it up with the people, but that no longer happens. Over time the threat of political violence, despite the rarity, has put the political class behind a wall. Drones will probably put them in a bunker, but it will also put the managerial elite in bunkers too. They will cease to be real people and instead be nothing more than images on our screens. The FPV drone cannot hunt what it cannot see in the wild.

It will also mean new rules to monitor the sale of components used to make drones, like we see with explosives and street drugs. You cannot go into a store and buy certain cold medicines without a note from the state. It will not be long before you must pass a background check to buy a drone. We may even see politicians try to ban assault drones on the grounds that they are weapons of war. It sounds ridiculous, but our rulers think this is a good ad, so nothing is too farfetched.

This thought experiment is a good reminder that war has downstream consequences that no one can foresee. Cheap crossbows were great for waging war, but lots of good crossbowmen in the crowd were not good for the king. The same proved true for other weapons of war. We are about to see the same thing with this war. In the fullness of time, it will be seen as an inflection point and maybe one that makes the economics of the Western ruling system unworkable.

The Big Show

Posted on February 12, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door are a couple movie reviews and the Sunday podcast which remains a morning edition for now. Subscribe here or here.

One of the novel things about this age is the role played by carnival acts in reinforcing public morality and shaping public opinion. With the exception of ancient Athens, human societies assigned entertainers a low status. After all, we still have the expression, “run away to the circus”, even though we no longer have the circus. The idea behind that expression is you reach such a degraded state that you literally leave decent society and join the low status world of the circus.

In modern America and the West in general, the circus not only plays a central role in society, but the circus performers also have enormous influence. So much so, in fact, the most powerful people want to be friends with the popular carnies. Every president has a stream of carnies coming through the White House, often attending state dinners with important foreign leaders. Carnies have even turned up in Ukraine, getting a special welcome by the Ukrainian dictator.

Of course, we have just had the biggest circus event on the American calendar, which is the Super Bowl, the title game of the NFL. According to the people in charge, almost all Americans stop what they are doing to watch the spectacle. The Super Bowl party has become something of an industry. Americans spend over $15 billion on parties that host three quarters of all adults. Naturally, all the important carnies seek a way to be part of what is the biggest carnie act of the year.

It is popular to compare the Super Bowl to the Roman games, maybe even dusting off Juvenal’s line about bread and circuses. There is some truth to that, but the Roman games were nothing compared to American entertainment. The games were a distraction for the masses and important people, but the performers were never treated like the modern celebrity or athlete. The performers in the arena were low status and important people made sure they remained so.

This is the great innovation of America. Entertainment has become a church at which the morality of the day is preached to the audience. It is easy to see at the Super Bowl, where moral messaging is everywhere. In the end zones there was a message about ending racism, a hobgoblin of the modern elites. There were ads about other hobgoblins like antisemitism, bullying and Gaia. They have your attention, so they make sure to let you know what you ought and ought not be doing.

Then you have the appeals to unity, by which they mean conformity. At the start of the game, you get patriotic songs. They even have something called the “The Black National Anthem” which is supposed to shame whites and remind them they can never be forgiven for the sin of whiteness. In a prior age, parishioners were told they were at the mercy of an angry God. Today they are told they are at the mercy of angry minorities, which is far more terrifying than an angry god.

When these songs are played at the start of the game, the players, who should only care about winning, make themselves cry and look moved by the program. This is where you see the supremacy of carny life. The star players know this game is really an audition for them to join the media circus or possibly get a brand going so they can be a celebrity past their playing career. Everyone wants to run away to the circus, even people already in the circus.

You see the warping power of the circus with the public romance of Chiefs player Kelce Travis and middle-aged warbler Taylor Swift. She is a super famous pop star, but she can always be more famous, so dating a famous sports star, especially one who gets to perform in the big circus, is good business. The NFL loves it and makes sure to feature this totally authentic romance in their shows. Any bets on whether these two love birds manage to build a life together?

All of this is the product of democracy. In theory, democracy is about convincing fifty percent plus one. In order to do that, you need to get the attention of the public, which is why celebrity becomes the coin of the democratic realm. The only way you can have a chance to influence anyone is by getting on the stage and you do that by getting everyone’s attention. Carnies live to get attention, so it does not take long before they take center stage in the democratic process.

It is why our politicians are mostly actors playing a role. The producers of the political shows are no different from the people who make movies, television shows or produce extravaganzas like the Super Bowl. They select people who can play the role, which often means picking people who will not question the script. Oklahoma senator James Lankford was picked because he is not smart enough to question things. He looks the part, and he reads his lines. That is why he is in the Senate.

It is easy to be critical of mass democracy, but the Super Bowl shows how powerful it is at controlling the masses. More people care about why Travis Kelce wore a suit made from garbage bags than the fact Joe Biden is non compos mentis. More important, it encourages the masses to empty their wallets in order to see the next show that the ruling elite will stage for them. Mass democracy is where the ruling elite charge the masses to be the masses.

For most of human history, carnies were relegated to the fringes of society because the running of society was too important to do otherwise. Today the running of society is over on the fringes, in the shadows where no one looks, because the carnies are now at the center of society. Maybe this is how the great experiment with participatory government is supposed to end. The masses think their voice matters, but in reality, no one cares, just as long as they pay full price for their ticket.

Living Outside The Law

Posted on February 9, 2024 by thezman

A recurring theme in the parade of madness that passes for the public life of late empire America is the lawlessness. Every week we get some new outrageous subversion of the law from the courts or from the government. These are the institutions charged with defending the law because it is the law that ultimately defends the people. The reason we have government is to defend the law.

The Steyn case is the latest example, but hardly a surprising one. Slowly people are coming to understand that if you go into a courtroom it is a lottery and that assumes they cannot accuse you of heresy. Even under ideal conditions you could be faced with a deranged lunatic as a judge or a jury full of morons. Trial by combat is now a preferable option than the American court system.

We also got word from the government that Joe Biden cannot and will not be charged with mishandling government secrets because he is non compos mentis, but he can be president, while Trump can be charged because he is not insane or demented, but he cannot be president. You have to wonder if we are in a simulation and the people running it have been dropping acid.

It would be funny except that real harm is being done to people. Men are being sent away to dungeons for being white or holding the wrong opinions. Steyn now has to raise a million dollars because he sinned against Gaia. The real harm, however, is to the law itself which is what makes civilization possible. The crazies are making everyone an outlaw by destroying the idea of the law.

If you create enough outlaws, eventually you create some people who feel they have nothing to lose as an outlaw. Right now the outlaws are still coming to terms with being made outlaws. They still hope to come back inside the law, but in time some will simply decide the price is not worth it. Get enough people who like being outlaws and you end up with a war of all against all.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Lawlessness
Proud Boys
The Palin Case
The Steyn Case
Douglas Mackey
VDare
Criminal Trials
Trump Trials
Common Themes
Living Lawless

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

The Heart of Blandness

Posted on February 9, 2024 by thezman

Note: The podcast is delayed. The day job sucked up all of my time the last two days, even most of last night, so I need to take a nap and then I will put the show together later today and get it posted. This is a green door post from earlier in the week that should hold everyone over until the show is posted.

One of the things about mass popular culture that is taken for granted, but is genuinely novel, is that pop culture artifacts come to symbolize certain eras. The Great Gatsby, which is a middling novel, is on the list of great novels because it seems to capture our popular conception of the roaring twenties. You read that novel in school because it helps understand the era from a pop culture perspective.

We do not have this for the time before mass popular culture. What is the song that defines the 1890’s? Funny you should ask as there are people who compile such things, but do any on this list make you think of the 1890’s? The songs we can hear from the early days of music recording just remind us of the time when recorded sound was just getting started, not any particular cultural era.

Era defining songs, movies or even television shows are products of mass popular culture, especially electronic media. When I hear All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix, I think about the late 1960’s. Leave it To Beaver is the defining television show of the 1950’s, despite not being very popular. Similarly, Apocalypse Now, which was released in 1979, is considered one the defining movies of the Vietnam era.

Oddly, the film is not about Vietnam or the war. John Milius wrote an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novella The Heart of Darkness and set it in the Vietnam war, as that was a popular topic at the time. This allowed Francis Ford Coppola to play on baby boomer nostalgia and use a bunch of popular music from the period. It is also why it has become a defining film of the Vietnam era.

Whether or not Apocalypse Now is the best Vietnam war film is debatable. Many people think Platoon is the best of the Vietnam films. Full Metal Jacket is another iconic film about the era. The Deer Hunter is another candidate. Interestingly, all of the films on the list of best Vietnam war films were made long after the war. The worst Vietnam film was The Green Berets, produced at the height of the war.

As far as Apocalypse Now, which is the next film on the AFI top-100, it is hard to call it a great film without the cultural context. If it had been based in the Korean war, it is possible that no one would know about it. Much of its fame and popularity stems from the history in which it is set and the period in which it was made. The late 1970’s and early 1980’s was a time of reconciliation for the country.

The big problem with the film is nothing really happens. Benjamin L. Willard, played by Martin Sheen, is sent into the jungle to find renegade Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, and then kill him. In theory he is going on a journey on which he will either learn something about himself or learn something about the human condition. Instead, he is the same guy at the end as he was at the beginning.

The Conrad story, in contrast, is about how a similar journey changed the man telling the story in ways he was never able to fully appreciate. He was changed by going to the deepest, darkest parts of Africa, but by the end he is still struggling to fully understand what he witnessed. He saw the great horror of the human condition, but he does not know what to do with what he learned.

In this film, we know nothing about Willard, other than he is a deeply cynical person, presumably from having served in the war for a long time. His experiences along the journey do not make him question anything about himself. He was sent to kill Kurtz and he never wavers from his mission. In the end he kills Kurtz, but not for some new reason he discovers as part of his journey of self-discovery.

At the risk of engaging in generational politics, this film is quintessential baby boomer high culture in that it operates at a superficial level. Everyone in the film is just what they are, experiencing things that never seem to have any impact on them. Like the intended audience, Willard just collects a bunch of new experiences. He did stuff. He did not live his life in any way that anyone would find interesting.

This film reminds me of the sketch concept in writing. The point is to create a character by putting him into situations in which his reactions to those situations tell us about the character. There is no character development. The situation matters only as a way to describe the character. It is a good way to record the present moment or establish the start to a story, but otherwise meaningless.

That is why this film probably belongs on the list of great films. Again, at the risk of engaging in generational politics, this film captures the essence of a generation even though it does not set out to do so. The generation for which this film was made set out, to some degree, to discover the essence of life, to taste the marrow, but instead indulged in meaningless gestures and pointless activities.

That is what the makers of this film ended up doing. It started with great ambition to bring the Conrad story to film, but in the end, it was just lots of impressive scenes and performances, but totally devoid of meaning. The viewer has no reason to think about Kurtz or Willard after their story ends. The film, like the lives of the characters, and perhaps the intended audience, leaves no impression.

The Madame’s Shadow

Posted on February 8, 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.

One of the underappreciated aspects of the French Revolution is how the ruling class system became detached from the overall social system. The people in the ruling class were ignorant of what was happening in the country and not just the social unrest, but the economic changes that were coming. The people were just as ignorant about why their rulers were doing the things they were doing. Pre-revolutionary France was two black boxes left to guess about the contents of the other.

The United States is entering a similar period. Much of what makes up internet political content is either a reaction to some new emission from the managerial elite or an effort to contextualize those emissions. No one can be sure why the ruling class is doing the things they are doing, as it is not tied to anything normal people experience, so the Dirt People are left to produce their own explanations. Dirt People political culture is a debate about what in the hell is going on in the clouds.

The people in charge could very well be holographic projections from an alien world as far as anyone knows. Their actions and statements rarely correspond to their stated interests or the social interests. You see it in this big drama they are staging for themselves over the failed Senate bill on immigration. Somehow, official Washington convinced themselves that bundling Israel money, Ukraine money and open borders money was a winning formular with the Dirt People.

The reason they bundle these things together is one faction decides to make a trade with another faction in what is called log rolling. Congressman X wants money for a project and Congressman Y wants money for a different project, so they agree to support each other’s projects, even if they should be opposed to them. In this case, neocons go along with some sort of border reform, so they get more money for their efforts to start a nuclear war with Russia.

That is the theory, but in reality, the bill both parties in the senate thought was a winning compromise was something entirely different. It was the open borders crazies getting support from the blow up the world crazies so they could both get billions to fling open the borders and blow up the world. There was nothing in the bill that the voting factions of either party would want or even care about. No one wants open borders, and no one cares about Ukraine or Israel for that matter.

As soon as the senate bill failed, the demon known as Chuck Schumer told the world that he will be working with Mitch McConnell to come up with a way to give money to the blow up the world faction. This gives us a clue about what was really going on with that senate bill. We already have open borders, so that faction was not getting much from any deal, so the real issue was smuggling in the Ukraine money. Israel has check writing privileges at the Fed, so they get their money automatically.

That explains what was really going on here, but it raises a question. Why are these people so obsessed with Ukraine? We know the Kagan cult has enormous sway in Washington, probably due to their work with Epstein. We know that Ukraine is a money laundering operation and much of the money ends up in the pockets of connected people in Washington. That all makes sense, but we also know that this project is doomed, so why are they still obsessed with it?

The writing has been on the wall with regards to the Ukraine war for a long time, especially after the NATO planned offensive failed last summer. The reason General Miley is fishing now is he promised a smashing success. Instead, he delivered scenes of NATO armor on fire in the fields outside the Russian lines. Self-interest should have told Washington that it was time to find a way out of this mess. Instead, they remain singularly obsessed with this project.

People will be tempted to say it is money and power, as those are simple answers that let you stop thinking, but these people have the money and power. If Mitch McConnell wanted more power, he would never have gone along with this ridiculous bill and instead railed against the Ukraine project. That is good politics, especially in an election year when he could see his party return to the majority. Money and power say the republicans should be doing the opposite of what they do.

That brings us back to those black boxes of the French Revolution. A healthy society has a feedback loop between the people and their rulers. The practical interests of the people feed the rulers through various mechanisms like the media, voting, public protests, and economic behavior. The moral claims of the rulers, the things you ought and ought not do, flow down those same channels to the people so that the behavior beneficial to the elite becomes a habit of mind.

In pre-revolutionary France, this loop was broken. The economic interests of the elite were still based on a feudal understanding of the world, so they could not read the economic activity of the masses, which were shifting from that model. Similarly, elites were blind to what was happening in the newly emerging bourgeois class that was arguing about liberal ideas in salons and public houses. The feedback loop had broken and that left those two black boxes.

We have a similar problem in modern America. The media used to provide signals to the Cloud People about what was happening with the Dirt People. Now the media is poorly tuned repeaters of things said by the Cloud People. For example, they are all chanting the word “chaos” now, as if they received a memo instructing them to weave the word into their public performances. This makes the Cloud People feel good, but it also blinds them to what is happening with the Dirt People.

Similarly, Dirt People continue to get bizarre instructions through the economic and media channels about the constantly changing moral code. For no reason at all the Clouds begin to rumble and some weird new idea rains down on people. One day it is men in dresses falling from the sky. The next day it is Jewish dwarf in a green jump suit demanding money to fight the Russians. When the Dirt People look into the clouds, they now see a funhouse mirror.

There are two ways this can end. One is some people in the Clouds realize what is happening and organize a revolt against the other side. This is mostly what happened in the late-1960’s and 1970’s. One group of Cloud People revolted and ushered in a period of reform. The other way it ends is the Cloud People rally in defense of their position against what they perceive to be a peasant revolt. This inevitably leads to a peasant revolt and the collapse of the system.

What that senate bill suggests is that there is no one in the managerial class aware of the problem, much less interested in solving it. James Lankford, the Oklahoma senator who negotiated the deal with Schumer, should not even be in the senate much less brokering such a deal with an arch demon like Schumer. Lankford should be back organizing swim lessons at Bible camp. If there were any reformers in the system, they would have stopped this before this point.

The question that remains is whether or not the American system is past the point where reform is possible. There are libraries of books describing such inflection points in the French Revolution. The past is always uncertain, so there are lots of debates about when things became inevitable in revolutionary France. In the moment, however, no one seemed to know because no one could know. In other words, we will know it is too late when Madame Guillotine is set up across from the Capitol.

Plotting The Collapse

Posted on February 7, 2024 by thezman

On 24 February 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin went on television to announce the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Russia is a legalistic society, so Putin did not declare war or even say it was an invasion, as those terms carry meaning within Russian law that would trigger other parts of the law. We are now fast approaching the two-year anniversary of what everyone involved thought was going to be a quick and largely bloodless path to a negotiated settlement.

For the last eighteen months Russian leaders have talked about the conflict lasting years, as it is now a proxy war between Russia and its partners and the United States and the vassal states of the West. Some have suggested this war is like the Thirty Years War in that it will radically change the moral and political order in Europe, eventually seeing the United States exit Europe entirely. Others see this as another sign that the West is in crisis and headed for dark times.

Putting aside the big picture aspects of the war, things may be running ahead of schedule, at least from the Russian perspective. The first big item to start the year is the stalemate in Washington over Ukraine funding. To the shock and horror of the neocons and their fellow travelers, the public is not interested in the issue, which means there is no risk to opposing more money for Ukraine. The result is money for Ukraine is probably a dead issue for 2024.

That will have enormous implications for Ukraine. The billions flowing from Washington to Kiev do three important things. First, Zelensky uses the money to buy loyalty, as he is Washington’s bagman. This allows him to buy off the various factions in Ukraine and make sure pro-Washington people are in the government. It is why he has faced little opposition to cancelling the elections. Those inclined to speak out against this have either been bribed or jailed by those being bribed.

That brings up the second thing the money does for Ukraine. Those dollars are not just dumped on Ukraine. Instead, the dollars are converted into Ukrainian hryvnia, which are then deposited into the Ukraine banking system. Of course, Ukraine also gets euros from selling energy products and agricultural products to the EU on special deals and those are converted to hryvnia. This is what allows Kiev to pay government employees and mask the money printing to pay the soldiers.

The final piece of the puzzle is the corruption around converting dollars and euros into weapons that can be used in the war. Even regime media has been forced to admit that a lot of the weapons have ended up on the black market. No one knows how much has been stolen or who is doing the stealing, but Ukraine is a pirate’s cove now, with privateers, official and unofficial, stealing everything they can. Even Kiev is getting worried about the degree of theft.

If the flow of dollars stops or even significantly declines, all three legs of the Ukrainian side of the racket will snap. We may be seeing the first signs of this in the drama between President Zelensky and General Zaluzhny. It has been known for months that Zelensky wants to fire Zaluzhny, but so far, he has not been able to do it. Zaluzhny simply refuses to cooperate by resigning or taking another position. Instead he posts pics of himself with the leader of the ultra-nationalist faction.

When the president of a country wants to fire his top military officer, the officer usually resigns in order to save some face. In some cases, the civilian leader will fire the man in order to make a point. Truman fired MacArthur in order to send a message and underscore the subordination of the military to the civilian government. When the civilian leader cannot fire the top military commander and that commander is openly challenging the civilian leadership, there is a crisis.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the head of the Wagner organization repeatedly challenged the authority of the Russian government. He even went so far as to stage a ceremonial march on Moscow. The Russians foolishly thought they could tolerate the behavior of Prigozhin until that point. They realized their error and it was not long before Prigozhin’s plane was falling out of the air in pieces.

You also have to add in the fact that Ukraine is a lawless, corrupt kleptocracy now flooded with weapons and soldiers. Last year, one of Zaluzhny’s lieutenants was blown up by a grenade hidden in a gift intended for Zaluzhny. Someone tried to poison the head of the secret police, Kyrylo Budanov, but missed and poisoned his wife and some of his staff instead. Of course, the Russians mysteriously got the coordinates of Budanov’s location and tried to take him out with a missile.

In such conditions, it is not hard to see how the end of dollars from Washington could set off a political crisis. If that is not enough, the war is going poorly for Ukraine as the Russians slowly ramp up the pressure on all fronts. According to Ukraine, they need thirty thousand new recruits a month to keep up their numbers, which means they are losing a thousand men a day in this war. Many of those men are trained, experienced soldiers who cannot be replaced with raw recruits.

As of this writing, the Russians have broken through one of the biggest strongholds in Ukraine, a place called Avdiivka, or often spelled Avdeevka. Since 2014 the Ukrainians have been building this place up with tunnels, bunkers, mine fields and heavy weapons, to be an anchor point of the front line. Reports from Ukraine say the Russians have entered the city and have trapped Ukrainian forces. That would mean a starving out operation will be followed by a surrender.

There are similar stories around smaller fortifications along the front and all of it is due to the shortage of men and material. According to Ukraine, they have mobilized close to a million men so far and they have plans to mobilize half a million more. Those kinds of losses are added pressure on a political system that has major cracks. If the money runs out, it is not long before some factorions think about what sort of deal they can cut with the Russians to end the war.

Collapse is like the famous Hemingway line about bankruptcy. It happens a little at a time and then all of a sudden. Armies collapse slowly over time then they begin to surrender in great waves. Governments collapse over a period of time, punctuated by crises until the principles either flee or end up dead in a final crisis. The current crisis in Ukraine could be just one chapter, but not the final chapter. Maybe the Republicans will produce the money and save the day.

Regardless, all of this points to a catastrophe down the road and probably right around the November presidential elections, which will make for great drama. Eventually the reality of Ukraine will come home to Washington, no matter how hard they try to pretend it does not exist. Like all bankruptcies, the failure of imperial foreign policy proceeds a little here and a little there, all leading to a point when the whole project collapses, maybe taking the empire with it.

The Witch Hunters

Posted on February 6, 2024 by thezman

In 1692, nineteen people were hanged for the crime of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts, the first of whom was Bridget Bishop, a woman who had been married three or four times and previously accused of bewitching one of her husbands, leading to his death. She was hanged after the court determined that she was a witch because she was a promiscuous liar. There was also the claim that she had a third nipple that mysteriously disappeared upon examination.

Witch trials were not unique to the colonies or to the Puritans. Witch hunting became a thing in Europe during the 15th century and lasted into the 18th century. It corresponded with the great upheavals that occurred with the breakup of the Catholic Church and the wars that followed it. It was a terrifying time in Europe and people naturally looked for reasons as to why it was happening. Naturally, they assumed it was the result of supernatural forces unleashed by the religious convulsions.

We like to think we have moved past this sort of superstitious madness, but superstitious panic is part of the human condition. In the 20th century America experienced the satanic panic. This was when over ten thousand people were accused of participating in satanic rituals in which children were abused. The panic was set off by a Canadian psychiatrist not named Jordan Peterson and his patient who claimed to have recovered memories of satanic abuse.

Eventually this led to wild claims about the sexual abuse of children at daycare centers around America. There was the McMartin preschool case where the operators were charged with all sorts of heinous crimes. There was no physical evidence, and the charges were eventually dropped after thirteen years of court cases. There was the Fells Acres case in Massachusetts, not far from Salem, oddly enough, where the owners were jailed for the satanic abuse of children.

The point here is that superstition is still with us. You can see it in posts like this one from what amounts to a modern witch hunting operation. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism could just as easily be called the Global Project Against Witchcraft and Sorcery and make more sense. The words “witchcraft” and “sorcery” have an agreed upon meaning while “hate” and “extremism” are reduced to nonsense words by the modern-day witch hunters.

Instead of Old Scratch tempting the morally weak into doing his bidding, the modern witch hunter tells us it is white kids using magical incantations to introduce evil spirits into the gaming community. You see, exposure to certain ideas can cause you to build a death camp, so Old Scratch has his minions use special magic words and phrases in the chat rooms of video games. Exposure to these words and phrases can cause the morally vulnerable to succumb to the charms of Old Scratch.

This may sound like an exaggeration, but it is right at the top of that post. They have a warning to readers that reads, “Warning: This analysis contains highly offensive and potentially triggering language and imagery.” They literally assert that words and images can have a physical effect on some people. The assumption is the effect must always be bad, which explains the warning. The only thing missing here is a reminder that the reader should make sure to wear her special amulet.

The entirety of the hate hunter industry rests on the assertion that certain opinions must lead to certain actions, not only by the person holding the taboo opinion, but by those who are exposed to the opinion. At no point will you see these people argue that the opinions are inaccurate, beyond some chanting of abracadabra phrases like “race science” which is supposed to protect the chanter from the opinion. They never explain how opinion must lead to action.

The closest you get is what amounts to the modern version of spectral evidence which they call “stochastic terrorism.” This is a novel concept that claims, “the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” In other words, get enough bad words into circulation and people will do bad things in response to the bad words, but there is no way to know who will do the bad things.

Since there is no way to know who will do the bad things in response to the bad words, the only remedy is to eliminate the bad words. Oddly, the witch hunters cannot know who will be triggered by the bad words, but they know exactly which words will do the triggering and who possesses those bad words. We are right back to examining women for third nipples by self-declared experts in a field that has no rational basis, only moral certainty about their own righteousness.

The graybeards will talk about something they call the great interregnum, a time when interested intellectuals and commentators could speak openly about subjects like race, intelligence, sex, demographics, and immigration. This was in the 1980’s and 1990’s when America was feeling confident. The ruling elite was talking about the end of history, by which they meant their final triumph of all mankind. The Cold War was over, and they would lead humanity to the promised land.

The great interregnum ended as Western elites began to sense they were not leading humanity into the golden age. The rest of the world was stubbornly refusing to go along with this end of history stuff and Western critics began to question the sanity of the end of history business. In other words, just as witch hunting in the late Middle Ages was a response to the collapse of the old moral order, the modern witch hunting is a response to the collapse of elite moral order.

The Reformation was the result of an institution that had evolved down a dead end because it evolved for a world that was beginning to recede. The social and economic relations that made the Church possible were giving way to new social and economic relations, so a new moral order rose up to challenge the old moral order. American liberalism is facing the same crisis. It evolved for a world that no longer exists and has unleashed the witch hunters to find the cause.

That is why efforts with grandiose names like the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism attract money from the elites. They promise to find those responsible for challenging the moral order and suppressing them. The gaggle of petty Torquemada’s that have been unleashed are a rearguard action by an elite that sees itself in crisis and is terrified by the prospect of an alternative moral order. The modern witch hunters are part of the death throes of a dying system.

Political Onanism

Posted on February 5, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a film I did not like, a post about code-switching and the Sunday podcast which remains a morning edition for now. Subscribe here or here.

Carl Schmitt famously said that “the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy.” The shorthand you hear in dissident circles is that politics is about friends and enemies. You can see this in your own life when it comes to some issue with which you have been on the opposite side of a friend. That person may now be a former friend if the issue was important at the time. It is why families often avoid talking about politics during the holidays.

A practical aspect of this reality is that political activism should always seek to harm the opponent and boost your side. An action that makes the other side look bad is good activism and it is even better activism if it also makes you look good. Of course, bad activism is that which boosts the enemy and harms you. The Charlottesville rally in 2018 turned out to be disastrous activism for the alt-right. It rallied their enemies and gutted their support in the broader community.

Life is not always so cut and dried. Generational politics, for example, often feels like good politics to the people doing it. Whether it is young people moaning about old people having had it easy or old people moaning about young people having it easy, the people doing it always feel good about it. A Nick Fuentes feels like a hero when he makes fun of adults for being adults. He thinks it is good politics because it brings in money and gets his young fans excited.

Of course, this goes both ways. Matt Walsh from the Daily Wire often makes fun of Zoomers for being whiny and soft. Recently, a young girl posted a video of herself crying about having to work forty hours a week and still not having money to live like she did in college so Matt Walsh made sport of her. The young people who always complain about the boomers then piled in to tell him he was a horrible person for not empathizing with the young girls in the video.

At a personal level, generational politics is good as it makes money for the people doing it, but at another level it is bad for their overall political mission. The only people engaged in generational politics are white people who are either in white identity politics or aligned with it. Nick Fuentes casts himself as a white identitarian, but he spends a lot of time mocking white people. Matt Walsh opposes antiwhite politics, but like Nick Fuentes, he spends most of his time attacking white people.

You will note that the people who control the culture are fine with this sort of politics, despite it coming from people they hate. In popular culture you will never see a young black guy calling his grandfather a boomer. You will not see an old Jewish guy laughing at his grandson’s student loan debt. For the people who control the centers of cultural production, generational politics is only for white people. It is one part of their antiwhite pogroms that have come to define popular culture.

Generational politics is not politics at all but a form of political onanism. It is not only a fruitless activity, but it also discourages the sort of politics that could bear fruit. It is no different from the war of the sexes business, where feminists and anti-feminists seek to pit white males against white females. Whatever the truth of the mutual critiques, it is not an activity that can lead to anything other than temporary ecstasy. It is a form of politics that can never lead to good activism or any activism.

For example, look at the recent trend of attacking Reagan. Critics correctly note that he signed off on immigration reform. He also ushered in economic reforms that now feel like bad ideas, especially for young people. This critique of Regan usually ends with angry shouting at boomers for having enjoyed the good times that followed the reforms of that period. The boomers are bad people for having enjoyed a good stock market and low interest rates over the last forty years.

Let us assume that Reagan and his supporters were evil people who knew what they were doing would harm their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Let us also pretend that the boomers all agreed it would wreck the country for their children and grandchildren who they would live to see. Even if you could prove this, what would be the point of doing it? The most you get from it is the momentary satisfaction of shaking your first at an imaginary version of the past.

The reason to care about the past is to understand how you reached the present and to have some sense of what comes next. Understanding the politics around the Reagan era immigration policies is about understanding the nature of the people behind the just proposed immigration reform bill in the senate. Chuck Schumer put that together because he hates you and he has always hated you. There is no talking him and his allies out of hating you. He is the forever enemy.

There you see the problem with generational politics. The young people trembling with anger over the thought of Ronald Reagan are focusing on their grandparents rather than the people who finked on their grandparents, the same people who are now trying to close the door on America, by opening up the borders. It is a politics that turns old friends into imaginary enemies and enemies into fans cheering the people attacking one another in the arena of generational politics.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Monthly Archives: February 2024