The End Is Nigh

Posted on April 16, 2024 by thezman

Since it became clear during the 2016 election cycle that Conservative Inc no longer had any influence on the Dirt People, there has been an effort to reconstitute a New Right that will fill the void left by the now Old Right. This being the mass media age, one part of that effort is to promote certain online personalities as spokesmen for a particular point of view. You see an example in this debate organized by a site called IM1776, which is “a magazine of cultural and sociopolitical analysis.”

It should be noted that IM1776 is the product of a not-for-profit called The Art & Literature Foundation, which appears to be the brainchild of an Italian guy named Mark Granza, who had his political awakening in 2016. You can read a lengthy interview of him in this English language Hungarian site. For the sake of clarity, IM1776 is financially supported by Claremont. It is always wise to know how someone pays his bills before assessing his political opinions.

That aside, what you see in this back and forth is the same specter that has haunted Western political thought since 1789. That is the specter of ideology. Both men are in their own way ideologues. They have an image of how society ought to be organized based on how they think men ought to act toward one another. While their ideal society is something of an end point, it is, in fact, the starting point for them. In other words, they begin with the end in mind.

For Curtis Yarvin, the end is a form of monarchy not because he thinks it is the best in the abstract sense of the best society, but that only through an absolute ruler can the things he likes about Western society be defended from the dark forces that seek to unsettle our cultural norms. Rufo, on the other hand, is a natural rights republican, who thinks the ideal society is based in individual rights. It is only through reaffirming our natural rights that we can restore the republic.

While there is a lot of overlap between what both see as the ideal society, they clearly have different visions for how to achieve it. Yarvin thinks we have to wait for the great man to emerge and topple the present order. Alternatively, the present orders collapses, and a great man emerges. Rufo thinks the way forward is to nibble away at the civil rights order by attacking it fruits. His current project is to hold the diversity hires in the academy to the alleged standards of the academy.

For most people this sounds logical. You start every project with the end in mind and you see that is the Yarvin – Rufo debate. In fact, that is the primary appeal of both Chris Rufo and Curtis Yarvin. They hold up this image of a possible future and if you like what you see, you support their program. This has been how political debate has been framed in the West since the French Revolution. You are presented with two images of the future and asked to pick one of them.

The problem with this, the reason that ideology must always fail, is that it never considers if the end is possible or even plausible. This is not because the ideologue is incapable of doubting the ideology. It is because ideology must always rest on the assumption that all societies are intentional societies. What we see is the product of human labor, therefore the goodness or badness of society reflects the goodness or badness of the people who made it.

Good people not only follow a certain code, but they must constitute the telos of the society of which they are a part. No ideology ever concludes that the ideologue must disengage with society, other than if it helps him engage with fellow ideologues in plotting to overthrow the present order. Ideology assumes you must be engage in the project of moving society toward the desired end. Otherwise, you are assumed to be working against those who are doing so.

To think that society is anything other than the fruit of human labor would be a nullification of ideology. If society is the product or random chance, for example, then what we ought to do to improve society is meaningless. It makes no difference what we think we ought to do, as the result is just a random walk. If what we see is the best we can muster from the material at hand, then the ideal, what we ought to seek, is actually a hindrance to creating a harmonious society.

As an aside, this explains the rejection of biological reality. The popularity of the trans business is one way of denying biological reality and the limits it must place on what is possible for human society. The New Right rejects biology as it undermines their claims about the nature of man. As soon as you accept biological reality, most arguments about how we ought to live become superstition. You are left with the question of what can we do with the material at hand.

Another thing you see with all of the participants in the New Right project is that none of them are looking forward in the sense that some novel vision of the future is leading them to question their own assumptions of the past. Their prize is something like what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida called hauntology. The New Right is sentimental for a promised future that never materialized. It is why they focus so much on the “wrong turns” of the past.

What all this leads to is the fact that we are seeing the end of ideology. It is easy to forget, but ideology is a relatively novel thing in the history of man. The Franks did not have a governing ideology. The Greeks were not ideologues. Rameses did not govern with a vision of the future in mind. For all of human history, how we ought to organize society was a practical question, not a moral one. Ideology is an invention of Western man, the weeds that grew out of the rubble of the Thirty Years War.

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Taxes & Conservatism

Posted on April 15, 2024 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about the classic comedy, Dr, Strangelove, in which I reveal that I am a humorless dullard, a post about how O. J. Simpson was framed by the Clintons and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Today is Tax Day in America, a day when millions of Americans drop tear-soaked checks into the mail, along with their many tax forms. Of course, for most Americans it is now just another day. Their taxes are simple, and their tax is paid by their employer throughout the year. The resulting decline of Tax Day and the tax issue is a good entry point for examining how our politics have changed over the last decade and a good place to start when thinking about the death of conservatism.

Half a century ago, the run-up to Tax Day was a big party for the people we call conservatives, as it gave them an excuse to go out into the streets, banging their pots and pans about the unfairness of the tax code. Taxes were not only too high, but they were also far too complicated. Rarely said, but often implied, was the claim that a complex tax code allowed special interests to game the system and avoid taxes or bribe their favorite politicians to get special tax breaks.

You never hear this sort of talk now. Taxes were the bread-and-butter issue of so-called conservatives since Barry Goldwater, but no more. One reason for that is tax simplification was passed under Trump. For most Americans taxes are a few clicks on the computer and that is it. Business owners, rich people and the self-employed still have to go through the game of guessing what the IRS says they owe, but the typical suburban peasant is now free of this burden.

Interestingly, a central theme of so-called conservatives in the 1970’s and 1980’s regarding taxes was that if people knew how much they really paid in taxes they would revolt against the welfare state. There were schemes back then to make taxes a quarterly affair, so everyone was always be aware of their tax burden. Instead, they went the other way and made taxes simpler, so that their voters no longer cared about the main issue for the so-called conservatives.

Of course, the main reason so-called conservatives have forgotten about the tax issue is they have done with it what they have done with so many other issues and that is embraced the position of the people they oppose. The fiscal conservative is like a guy wearing a denim leisure suit in Washington. It is so rare to hear anyone talk about the nation’s finances that when it happens it brings back memories of those halcyon days when the Gipper was shaking his fist at the Soviets.

This raises another truth about so-called conservatism. They were sure that if you starved the system of taxes, it would have to cut spending. Despite history saying otherwise, they were certain of it. Instead, they habituated their minds to ever growing deficits and an incomprehensible national debt. Per capita debt is about five times higher than under Reagan and about four times higher as a percentage of the GDP, so it is safe to say they were all wrong about this one.

There is a demographic aspect to this as well. When the baby boomers were in their prime working years, it was good politics to promise them lower taxes and greater returns from their investments. Now that they are retiring in droves, the tax ploy no longer works, so no one discusses it. Instead, it is good politics to create more money from thin air to pay for the entitlement programs. Like everything else about conservatism, taxes were nothing but a good marketing ploy.

This raises another tax-related issue. Tax collections are at record highs, but the deficit is also at all-time highs. The federal deficit in 2023 was $1.7 trillion. The rosiest of rosy scenarios says that federal budget deficits be $20 trillion over the next decade and federal debt held by the public will reach 116 percent of GDP. Given that these projections always turn out wrong, it is not hard to see why no one in Washington is talking about taxes or the state of the budget.

This is why so-called conservatism is headed to the dustbin of history. It was never really a conservative political movement, but more of a money laundering scheme masquerading as a political movement. The response to progressives promising to rob your neighbor and let you have a piece was so-called conservatives promising to rob the progressive and let you have a piece. Taken together we got a half century of systemic looting of their American economy.

For the last half century, the white middle-class has been the kid getting bullied at school for his lunch money. Progressives, representing the financial elites, threatened to shove the suburban peasant into a locker. So-called conservatives kept upping the lunch money they had to pay to avoid the wedgie. Now those suburban peasants are too old for school, so those financial elites are looking to prey on their children and grandchildren to keep the plates spinning.

Another legacy of the so-called conservatives with regards to tax policy is the sacralization of rich people. Part of their sales pitch for tax changes was the claim that our noble rich people were paying more than their fair share in taxes. This was always nonsense, but it convinced most white people that it is immoral to question the motives and behavior of the rich. One result is a perfidious and destructive ruling class that seems hellbent on pulling the roof down on all of us.

In the end, the disappearance of the tax issue from public debate is a good reminder that we are at the end of a long cycle. That means we are about to start on a new political cycle, so the past framing of things is of no use to us. The old ideas and arguments from the last century, things like tax fairness, need to be sent to the dustbin of history along with the people who championed them. In some future Tax Day, no one will have a reason to think of so-called conservatism.

Sympathy For The Devil

Posted on April 12, 2024 by thezman

On the Sunday show I said I was swearing off any Trump news until the summer, as there is only so much screeching and squealing, I can take. I needed to take a break in order to train for the coming election. I plan to stick to that for the most part but looking at the clips of Trump stopping into a Chick-fil-A and the reaction to it, I thought it may be a good time to talk about the meaning of Trump.

Almost ten years ago now Trump entered the political arena, and nothing has been the same since, which is a remarkable thing by itself. If upon the elevation of Barak Obama to the presidency you had said that the reaction to this event will be Donald Trump swinging a wrecking ball through Washington and our politics, people would have assumed you had lost your mind.

Nonetheless, here we are, and that wrecking ball is about to take what will probably be its last swing through the system. I remain skeptical about Trump’s chances of winning in November, but I did not think he would make it this long. The reason is our managerial class hates what the man represents to the point where they have come to define themselves by that hatred.

That is the point of the show this week. I pulled together the various points about this I have made over the years, as to why they hate Trump. When you realize that Trump is a symptom, this last decade becomes a useful way of understanding not only the hysteria around Trump but why things are such a mess in general. Trump is the scourge sent by the gods to punish the managerial class.

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There Is Worse Than Hitler

Posted on April 11, 2024 by thezman

If you have paid any attention to British politics, you will note that what passes for the political right in Britain is more feckless and ridiculous than what passes for the political right in the United States. It is one of those things that should be impossible, but once you look at the recent string of Prime Ministers, you have to accept it is reality, which means things will inevitably get worse in America. No matter how much you hate the Republicans, you will have reason to hate them more.

The Tories are facing what many predict could be a party ending election this year, as current polling has them winning just a handful of seats. The Tories currently have a 35% approval number, an all-time low. As a result, there is a movement afoot to wipe out the party entirely. The “zero seats” campaign started as a joke but as is often the case, this joke could turn out to be reality. Italy’s Five Star movement started as a gag and eventually overturned the political establishment.

Neema Parvini, also known as Academic Agent, has a post up explaining why the end of the Tory party would be a good result. His argument should be familiar, as it is the standard analysis you see in dissident circles. The system of competing parties that we call liberal democracy is just theater. Both parties are beholden to the same interests and most important, they agree on all of the big issues. In the case of Britain, Labour and the Tories are dance partners, not opponents.

Since voting for one team or the other ends up with the same result, there is no voting your way out of this problem. Sherlock Holmes famously said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” This is where the Brits and the Americans are regarding their parties. Getting positive results at the ballot box is impossible as things stand. That leaves the list of alternatives that may seem improbable, but they are at least possible.

One of those options is to crater the false opposition. If the supporters of the false opposition walk away, that party will collapse. This then leaves the regime exposed, as it cannot use the controlled opposition as a fig leaf. Their choice then is to nakedly rule as tyrants, thus exposing the system as a fraud or allowing a new opposition to form up among the masses. They would pick the former, maybe creating a new fake opposition, but at least we would have clarity.

The opposition to this argument is that things would be worse if the current theater of democracy is destroyed. Instead of slowly easing over the edge into the abyss, we would speed into the abyss. This is the argument you see from Paul Gottfried in response to Parvini’s post. Working to make things worse, in order to provoke some sort of reaction, could very well end up with things getting worse, without provoking a reaction or getting an unanticipated reaction.

Gottfied uses the example of the German communists working with the Nazis to bring down the liberal Weimar government, because it is impossible to discuss anything without mentioning you know who. Fukuyama’s end of history idea was nonsense, but you could argue that for the collective West, history ended in 1933 when the Nazis seized control of the German state. Since then, every event has been recast as a replay or reworking of those events.

Putting that aside, the argument from Gottfried is familiar. No matter how terrible the right-wing party, it would be worse if they did not exist. Therefore, the only acceptable solution is to try and fix that party. That means voting for the most right-wing option in every primary unless he is a meanie, of course. Then you hope to get enough of these people in office to take control of the party, before they get comfortable with the riches heaped on them by the establishment.

This brings us back to Sherlock Holmes. History makes clear that it is impossible to infiltrate and take over an organization and make it conservative. There are no examples of this ever happening because it is impossible. Integral to the radical mind is “what we have we keep” which means they make a priority of preventing reactionary forces infiltrating their organizations. It is why they create controlled opposition in order to police the right facing walls of the regime.

This is why Parvini gets the better of this debate. He does the rational thing and eliminates the impossible. In Britain, as in America, there is no voting your way out of the problems of liberal democracy and there is no way to co-opt any party of the liberal democratic regime. Once these impossible options are eliminated, the only goal remaining is to topple the regime entirely. Throwing sand in the gears becomes the only moral choice when facing an implacably immoral system.

That leaves us with the abracadabra phrase “worse is worse” that Gottfried thinks is a kill shot in this debate. Since his preferred course has been the default course and the result has been things getting worse, what he is doing is offering a false dichotomy between the worsening reality of his approach and the terrifying but theoretical outcome he tries to conjure with references to Hitler. While Hitler is one possible future, it is not the only possible future or even a probable one.

Western people are like a hockey team down late in the third period. You can pull your goalie and put an extra skater on the ice, or you can play it straight. Maybe the other team commits a penalty or has a mental lapse. If you pull the goalie, things could get worse, but a loss is a loss, no matter the score. If you play it safe, you will probably lose, but again, a loss is a loss. The reason teams always pull the goalie is the possible trade-offs favor that option.

In the context of our politics, abandoning the establishment right is the same as pulling the goalie in that it opens the door to more good outcomes. It could so terrify the economic elite that they impose reform on the system. It could send the system into crisis and open the door for a real opposition. It could end up with Hitler, but is the death of the West by Hitler really any worse than its death by bad management? After all, death is death, no matter the cause.

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A Very American Scam

Posted on April 10, 2024 by thezman

For fifty years abortion was a part of the national political debate due to the fight to overturn Roe v. Wade. Those who opposed abortion sought to overturn this court decision, thus returning the issue to the people. The pro-life side assumed they could win the argument and get laws passed to end most abortions. The pro-abortion people obviously fought to prevent this, even though they always claimed the vast majority of the people saw abortion as a holy sacrament.

Abortion was always a good money maker for Conservative Inc. because on the one hand, they only had to pay lip service to the moral issue. It was not as if they could pass legislation or change a regulation to meet the demands of their voters. The courts would just strike down those changes. On the other hand, the only path to victory was getting a majority of pro-life people in office, especially the White house, so the courts could be stocked with pro-life judges. That meant voting Republican.

The way the two party grift has worked since the middle of the last century was that the Democrats conjure novel ideas and find creative ways to normalize them with the progressive segment of the population. Once these ideas gain circulation, the Republicans pretend to oppose these new ideas. Both sides squabble over it, thus narrowing the options to their preferred positions. Then they aggressively fundraise off it as the novel ideas are slowly implemented.

The genius of this arrangement is the elites get what they want, while both parties protect themselves from outside threats by sucking all the oxygen out of the room in their endless media debates. With the oxygen comes the money, which keeps both camps in the lifestyle they think they deserve. Just as important, none of that money goes to anyone who has a third opinion. The political rackets rest on every issue being reduce to a binary choice.

Here is where you can see why the ruling class hates Trump. When he ran for office, he went to the pro-life crowd with a rational offer, rather than the old offer they have always got from conservatives. He told them he needed their vote and even though he was not one of them, he would deliver for them because he needed their vote. Social conservatives, outside of the professional ones, saw this as a rational offer and maybe better than what they have gotten for the last fifty years.

In office, Trump did what he saw as the rational thing and set about appointing pro-life judges up and down the system. From his point of view, this made perfect sense as he would need the support of these people in the next election. If he could show he delivered, then they would come out in droves. His good fortune was that things broke in such a way that the court finally overturned Roe. Both parties hate him because of things like this that disrupt the political rackets.

Putting that aside, the overturn of Roe was a disaster for Pro-Life Inc and the elite of the social conservativism rackets. They no longer had this issue to use in their fundraisers, other than to wage battles at the state level. Since the leaders of these rackets live in swanky homes around the imperial capital, heading out to the wilderness to help the Dirt People wage political fights is horrifying. This idea is equivalent to Pol Pot sending the intellectuals out to the rice fields.

Since the court sent the issue back to the states, the people running for national office no longer have a reason to primp and preen about abortion. If the national candidates stop talking about abortion, the associated money rackets no longer have a reason to raise money to help “their candidates.” That means the money givers no longer have a reason to give money to these guys. Suddenly, thanks to Trump, a billion-dollar industry is threatened with extinction. What to do?

This is why we now have the mass media claiming abortion is the most important issue on the minds of voters. If a Democrat wins a race for dog catcher in East Podunk Missouri, the Washington Post has a pic of young females standing in line to vote, with the claim they are there because of abortion. The political experts, who are always wrong about everything, rush in to explain how this is a threat to Trump as women too busy in their cubicles to have sex are furious about abortion.

It is all nonsense, but despite the fact the media is nothing but a firehose of lies, people still fall for these tricks, especially people who call themselves conservative. Integral to being a conservative is accepting without question the opinions of your enemies while endlessly tone policing your supporters. If the New York Times announces that the cool kids are now wearing flowerpots on their heads, conservatives will swear it is true and produce the conservative case for flowerpots.

This is where Conservative Inc. has swung into action on abortion. Their new scheme to re-nationalize the issue is to champion a national ban on abortion. You see, their big idea now that the courts sent the issue back to the states, something conservatives argued for since Roe, is to take it back from the states and pass a bill that bans all abortion at the federal level. Of course, they cannot do this without your support so make your check out to Conservative Inc.

The only way such a scheme could ever happen is if the Republicans had a huge majority in the House, a super-majority in the Senate and had a pro-life president in the White House. Thanks to Republican support for open borders and election rigging, this is now impossible. Even if it did happen, the Bush years tell us that they would fink on their voters anyway. Remember fake evangelical George Bush nominating pro-abortion Harriet Miers to the court?

Abortion is a good example of why moral issues cannot be decided through any sort of democratic process. Even if the process is legitimate and the participants come to the issue in good faith, you will not get universal agreement. If such an agreement were possible, it would have happened organically and then the only politics around the issue would be about the best policy to support the moral consensus. Otherwise, there is no debating someone out of their sense of right and wrong.

This is why the scam that is the American political system loves moral issues like abortion, because they can never be solved politically. This means they can frame it as two sides with neither side ever having a chance to fully win. Roe was manna from heaven for Conservative Inc., but now the overturning of Roe is manna from Gaia for the aging spinsters running the feminism rackets. They can finally stop talking about men in dresses waving their genitals at children.

If one is looking for a white pill in these dark times it is that the abortion issue has finally returned to its natural place. Like all moral issues, it is one that must be decided by the collective agreement of likeminded people. This means it is a local issue. States and localities can then treat abortion the same way they manage other thorny moral issues like the location of gentlemen’s clubs. In the end, sanity prevailed, and abortion has become something for communities to resolve on their own.

The Ukraine End Game

Posted on April 9, 2024 by thezman

One of the enduring truths about war is that the side that wins is usually the side that starts with a clear objective. That understanding of the goal allows for a strategy to accomplish the goal, which then becomes the framework for the tactics required to implement the strategy and win the war. Starting with the end in mind also allows for changes in strategy and tactics to account for the unknown unknowns that are always a part of a military conflict. No plan survives contact with the enemy.

We may be about to see this in the Ukraine war. From the start the Russians have had a very clear understanding of their interests in Ukraine. This predates the war by about a thousand years. Russia is a land power without natural barriers between itself and its neighbors, so the goal of Russian foreign policy since forever has been to maintain space between Russia and its neighbors. The Ukraine has always been part of that space controlled by the Russians.

This is why the Russians had clear demands at the start of the war. They wanted the Russian speaking areas liberated from Ukrainian control, they wanted Ukraine demilitarized and they wanted NATO out of Ukraine. When the war started, these goals did not have to change as they were the reason for the war. The Russians would simply have to do what was necessary to impose these ends. In other words, once the war started, the question was how not why.

This was not true on the other side. Ukraine did not want to go to war and was ready to take the deal on offer, until Washington sent Boris Johnson in to convince Zelensky to go to war in exchange for unlimited money and supplies. Ukraine started the war without any clear idea as to why they were fighting it because they had no clear objective, other than graft. Despite the rhetoric, “not losing” is not a goal that can lead to a successful and coherent war strategy.

The West has had a similar problem. Note that no one in the West is ever asked by the media why they are doing this. The reason for that is the answer would be incoherent jibber-jabber about abstract assertions. Defending a notorious kleptocracy in defense of democracy is obvious nonsense. The neocons, of course, have a real goal, but telling the world they want to bring about the end times is not good politics, so everyone just dances around the fact that there is no stated goal.

This is why the West is headed to a crisis over the war. Without a clear goal, there is no way to measure success. Without a way to measure success, there is no way to anticipate failure and adjust to it. The Russians avoided this my seeing early on that they had grossly miscalculated. They could see this because they had a clear understanding of what they wanted to achieve in the war. They set off on a yearlong process to revamp their strategy and tactics.

It is becoming clear even to the zombies in the Western media that Ukraine is going to lose the war on the battlefield. The Russians have been grinding away across the front and are now making increasingly swift advances. The reason for this is Ukraine is running out of men and material. Meanwhile, the Russian war machine continues to grow in size and lethality. There is growing speculation that the Russians are preparing a hammer blow this summer to break the Ukrainian army.

This is why we are seeing a growing panic in the West. They never imagined this as a possible outcome because they never thought about the end. They just assumed they could wish a loss on the Russians. It seems many in the West still think they can wish hard enough to change reality on the battlefield. The French actually initiated a call with the Russians, demanding the Russians quit and go home. Now the French want to send troops into Ukraine, which would be an act of madness.

Assuming the lunatics do not prevail and there is no nuclear war with Russia, the question now is what comes next? The one thing we know is the West will not have a lot of say in the outcome. This is not just because they are losing but primarily because they never imagined such a possibility. The reason for that is they have never been honest with themselves about why they are poking the bear. Like all the other pointless wars of choice, this one will end in adverse terms.

That is the question that will come to dominate this year. The Russians do have a plan and they have the means to implement it. While the Russians have not talked about what comes next, it is clear they will turn Ukraine into a demilitarized buffer zone with a government friendly to Moscow. This was the end they had in mind at the start of the war because it has been the Russian national interest for a millennium. How much of Ukraine remains in Ukraine at the end is unknown.

This is why the West is in a crisis. This war will make clear to everyone, especially Western citizens, that the West is in decline. France, Germany, and Britain are now on the same level as Denmark and Ecuador, as far as geopolitics. The real global powers will want to have friendly relations, but they will not consider them peers. In the new multipolar world, Europe is not one of the poles. Proof of that will be Russia dictating terms to the Europeans as to their future relations.

The psychological struggle that is about to unfold in the West is what is the great unknown in what is about to come. How will the typical Frenchman react when he realizes he is a citizen of a pipsqueak country? How will the typical flag-waving American feel when he realizes he no longer lives in a superpower, but in a regional power that is in steep decline? American exceptionalism takes on a whole new meaning when you are on the losing side of history.

The point is the end game in the Ukraine war will turn out to be much more than the final disposition of the country currently called Ukraine. The end game will be a reordering of the world and a necessary reordering of the Western view of itself and its role in the world. In other words, we are about to see a revolution in worldview, one no one anticipated in the West. Maybe this is why so many Western leaders seem to want a nuclear war. They cannot face what comes next.

Liar Land

Posted on April 8, 2024 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about Bonnie and Clyde, a post about narrative in the managerial class and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Note #2: Here is a roundup of the shows I was on last week, for those who love the sound my voice. Here is my appearance on the Killstream I was on with a show with a young YouTuber and another young YouTuber named J Burden.

If you were to go back in time, just a couple of generations, and snatch up some politically active people and bring them forward to this age, they would not only be disappointed that things did not turn out as they predicted, but they would be horrified by what has happened with the public square. They would wonder why there even is a public square when it is now so polluted with deception. How can you have a public debate when so many start with a lie?

This is one of those things that is hard to appreciate about this age as it has crept up on us like the fog and become the new normal. No one tunes into public affairs shows expecting a good faith effort to present the issues and the arguments in a fair and honest way or an effort to inform the viewer. It is not even an attempt to persuade in most cases, but something like a revival for a certain audience. The performers say the expected things and the viewers cheer.

It is not just in the narrow area of performative politics. Deception is now the coin of the realm, even where the truth would serve the parties better. For example, the ongoing feud between Candace Owens and The Daily Wire. None of this would have happened if the Daily Wire had been honest and said they dumped Owens because she is critical of Israel and the platform is pro-Israel. No one would have been surprised and it would have been a one-day affair, but instead they chose to lie.

This is not a peculiarity of the Daily Wire. Lying is now the new normal and truth telling is a good way to get hurled into the void. Whole subjects have been consigned to the shadows because you cannot speak candidly about them, and the lies are so absurd that even the performers cannot say them with a straight face. Crime is the most obvious example of a topic that no longer gets discussed by “serious analysts” because you are not allowed to speak honestly about it.

Crime is a great example of endemic lying. We can no longer trust the FBI crime data because everyone involved in reporting it now lies about it. It used to be that the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting was the gold standard for data, but now it is like everything else in that it is the product of perfidy. The police departments lie about their stats to please the politicians, who lie about the stats to hide the truth from the people they claim to represent. It is liars all the way down.

Every day, the White House sends out that goofy looking black women to address the media on the issues of the day. Everyone in the room knows she is a moron, and everyone knows she is just repeating obvious lies written down in her book that is provided to her by the White House. Everyone in the room then pretends that this is a sincere presentation of events. They refuse to ask obvious questions or address the obvious lies, but instead continue like it is normal.

That is the thing. It is normal. Karine Jean-Pierre is the most absurd and ridiculous example so far, but well within the trend. No reasonable person can accept anything from official sources at face value. The only way to read the news is to first start with the assumption that the truth is from the set of things not mentioned in the news. If you see your picture in the news with your name in the caption, you best check your birth certificate as it is a good chance you are not who you think.

What you see when you lay up a trivial internet drama alongside official pronouncements from the state is that lying is the new normal. Whether it is a small issue or a vitally important issue, the first instinct of everyone involved is to lie and often lie fantastically. It is as if there is a secret competition for who can generate the most outlandish lie each day. Here is a great example of a lie so outlandish that it is hard to imagine anyone doing it without being struck by lightning.

The question is whether this is the result of a corrupt and rotten ruling class or is it the inevitable result of democratic society. In favor of the latter is the observation by the Persians that the ancient Greeks habitualized lying to one another. The agora, the place where Greeks bought and sold things, debated issues of the day, and conducted public affairs was a riot of deception. Winning the argument and winning the sale were the product or clever deception and storytelling.

In the former case, it is clear that the ruling class started to change for the worse after the end of the Cold War. The Clinton’s brought a style of lying to Washington that sent our politics into the abyss of perpetual deception. The financialization of the economy shifted the focus away from building a better mousetrap to creating new and increasingly complex financing of the mouse trap business. These schemes were clever but devoid of any truth value.

As is often the case, it is a combination of these things and some others, but the result is what matters. We now live in a carnival of lies. It is tempting to think that this cannot last, but much of the world lives this way. The reason conspiracy theories are so popular around most of the world is they make more sense than official truth. They also let people think that at the heart of the whirlwind of official lies is a truth that is both rational and reasonable. It lets them sleep at night.

Can Western societies function this way? It is hard to know. A low-IQ, low-trust population can be manipulated by clever midwits, but a high-IQ, naturally trusting society may grow violently irritated by a perfidious midwit ruling class. The general unhappiness we see may be the result of living in a world where stupid people, who think they are clever, tell us obvious lies. One can tolerate someone like Karine Jean-Pierre for so long before something must be done.

Transcendental Ruminations

Posted on April 5, 2024 by thezman

An aspect of our increasingly ideological age is the things that used to be a part of the culture that have been removed by force or by neglect. The parts pried loose and discarded are easy to see, as they come with an angry mob of deranged lunatics there to do the damage. The bits that are just forgotten and fall out of the shared reality that is our culture are the things missed only by those who remember them.

The opening of the show today is one of those bits that has fallen out of shared reality mostly due to neglect. When I was a young person, you had to read Thoreau and Emerson, so you could learn about transcendentalism. Speaking with younger people recently it seems that stopped happening at some point. The old hippie teachers gave way to activists who have no interest in those old white men.

Transcendentalism is a peculiarity of America that not only influenced what became progressivism but also its traveling partner conservatism. You could probably draw a line from Thoreau and Emerson to the weird secular Gnosticism that emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War. Modern progressive rejects individualism, but they embrace the idea of society corrupting the natural goodness of man.

Another line you could draw is from the second wave transcendentalists, who were mostly bourgeois aesthetes, to the middle-class managerial elite of today. Rather than rejecting empiricism, like the first wave transcendentalist, the second wave embraced it but in the context of individual expression. In other words, they loved science as long as it supported their emotional claims.

As nutty as they were, the transcendentalists represented an aspect of American culture that remains with us today. There are hints of it in the parallel society movement and the trad-life stuff that is popular with some young right-wing people. The desire to break free of the corrupting aspects of modern society in order to have an authentic life is something that the transcendentalist would have understood.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Bennett’s Phylactery (Link)
Reality Of Rural Life
Bourgeois Life
It Takes a Village
Liberty Valance Issue
The Matrix
The Reality of Pioneers
Quiet Desperation

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Cuban Versus Rufo

Posted on April 4, 2024 by thezman

An interesting exchange took place this week on Twitter between Mark Cuban, former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and Christopher Rufo. The topic of their exchange was diversity, with Cuban claiming that diversity was our greatest strength and Rufo claiming that the diversity movement is un-American. Neither man put it exactly that way, but that is the simple summary. Cuban thinks diversity makes things better, while Rufo thinks the push to impose diversity makes everything worse.

The exchange was amusing for the simple reason that Cuban clearly does not understand the issue, beyond knowing the slogans which he spasmodically repeats when the topic is raised. At one point he seems to be saying that the three branches of government are the President, Congress, and the bureaucracy. Everyone had a good laugh at his expense, as it became clear in the thread that Mark Cuban is not the brightest bulb in the bunch, despite being a billionaire.

To some degree that is the point of these mini dramas. The hoi polloi gets to feel good seeing one of their champions best who they think is the enemy. Mark Cuban puts a lot of effort into insulting normal people, so normal people love it when he has his pants pulled down on Twitter or anywhere else. Rufo clearly understands the mechanics of the Diversity Industrial Complex, so he easily swats down the trite claims made by Cuban throughout the thread.

More important, these exchanges frame the debate in such a way that alternative points of view are systematically excluded. Strip away the drama and what we have here are two similar views on race. One side says that racial inequality is the result of racial exclusion by whites and therefore must be remedied by forcing whites to include nonwhites in their activities. The other side says it is immoral to notice race at all, so forcing people to be race-conscious in this way is immoral.

Despite appearing to be opposites, both sides are making the same moral claims with regards to race. Rufo thinks using race to make decisions is immoral, while Cuban thinks whites use race to make decisions, which is bad. In other words, both men agree that making general observations about race is immoral. The difference is that Cuban thinks whites do it all the time, while denying it, and Rufo thinks the diversity crowd is guilty of that which they accuse white people.

Both men are not disagreeing about ends, but about means. This is the model of politics that has prevailed in America since Gettysburg. Both sides agree on the ends but disagree on how best and how quickly to get there. As we see with the race issue, it is not always clear that they both agree on the ends, but once you strip away the rhetoric it is clear that at the minimum, they agree with one another as to the morality of each other’s goals with regards to race.

This is an important bit of conditioning that arises from the selection pressure within the American political dynamic. People approved to be on the stage are conditioned to first evaluate the goals of people seeking to get on stage. If their goals fall within the moral framework of the stage owners, they can debate them. Mark Cuban read portions of Rufo’s book, probably because people he knows read it. He knows Rufo is not advocating for things that are proscribed.

Of course, we know Rufo has put an enormous amount of effort into making it clear that he is not like those bad people who think race is a real thing. This is where you see the selection pressure. This is why he focuses on the goal of organizational success, rather than the details of race. He argues that diversity programs make colleges and corporations worse, by preventing them from hiring the best. You see, in a color-blind society we get a true meritocracy!

Interestingly, if both sides of this debate want to see organizations like Harvard maximize their potential, then they would have to support what is a subtle truth about how the sports world evaluates talent. If you are a white guy who plays cornerback in football, the evaluation of you will be much stricter than if you are black. Tall white guys find it much tougher to standout in basketball. Asian guys are assumed to be poor athletes, so they tend to be ignored.

What happens in sports is what the legendary quantitative blogger La Griffe du Lion described as the theory of differential cutoff. The extremely short version of that post is that those from groups that objectively underperform should be held to a higher standard than those from groups that objectively overperform. In other words, hiring a Jewish guy as your lawyer, even though he went to a state school, is a better bet than hiring the black guy from an elite law school.

Note that this reality lurks beneath the diversity arguments. Mark Cuban assumes people make these judgements about race, thus making it more difficult for qualified nonwhites to gain access to positions for which they are qualified. Put another way, an ancient truth is what haunts the diversity industry. They may not have the smarts to understand it, but they feel it. Note also that it haunts the arguments of people like Rufo, who also seek to banish this ancient truth.

The most important takeaway in all this is that both sides agree that you do not have the right of free association. Cuban thinks you should be required to hire a black guy to meet the demands of diversity, while Rufo thinks you should be required to hire the black guy as long as he meets the objective criteria for the job. Your subjective qualifications and individual preferences are not important. Both men wish to dictate your choice based on their version of reason.

Ultimately, that is the point of framing the debate this way. Nowhere in their exchange is a consideration of preference or free association. They are arguing about which version of reason should be imposed on you, when in reality they are debating whose clerics will decide your punishment for having unacceptable preferences. It is a good reminder that politics is never about facts and the reasonable conclusions from those facts, but about who will impose their morality on whom.

The Internet Of Reality

Posted on April 3, 2024 by thezman

Note: As everyone probably knows, VDare has been under assault by the regime for years and may finally be forced to close down. They have been de-banked so the only way to send them money at the moment is GiveSendGo. If you can spare a few bucks, they could sure use it.

In the early days of the internet, the public places were mostly populated by people who assumed wide open was the natural order. As opposed to the real world with its silos and private spaces, the internet would be wide open. Everyone could go into this new public square and say and hear what they liked. That is why the first public forums were wide open and comprehensive. The idea was that you had one big forum, and everyone could pile in and have their say.

It did not take long for that to fail. The early forums quickly splintered as factions that would develop and soon the forums were a riot of antagonistic posting. This was long before the smart people made it easy for the progressive kooks to get online, but even in a world of smart, tech savvy people, factionalism was an issue. Bulletin boards then UseNet and then message boards followed this pattern. They started centralized and open and soon balkanized into private platforms.

Once the internet was made accessible to the midwit progressive, this pattern became more toxic and nastier. Instead of college football forums unable to maintain civility amongst rival fans, it was the tone police and moral scolds creating dissention and demanding their rivals be censored. They worked to gain control of the platforms and then set about driving off their bogeymen. This led to alternative forums for the people who had been purged from the main platforms.

Another aspect of this new version of the old pattern is that the progressive kooks are unable to start their own forums, so they must infiltrate and co-opt existing platforms, which is why we have a censorious atmosphere online. It was not enough for the kooks to gain control of Twitter, for example, they also had to attack any alternative sites that sprang up in response. In other words, the kooks were threatening the normal balkanization dynamic that had existed since the start.

The point of all this is the last half century of the internet demonstrates the reality of large societies, whether they are digital or analog. Once a society gets to a certain size factionalism is inevitable. The message board experience is the best example, as these platforms created lots of tools to allow people to exist on the same platform but ignore the people from factions they did not like. It never worked. The only solution was peaceful separation in the form of separate private platforms.

This makes perfect sense when you learn about the Dunbar number. This is the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. The generally agreed upon number is one-hundred-and-fifty. For many people, the number is much lower, so this means in any large group, the typical person will have a sense of belonging with a minority of the people. Consequently, they will be alienated from the rest and there is a short trip from alienation to hostility.

This explains the general sense of unhappiness in modern America. The mass media age has not brought people together as our politicians endless blather on about all the time, but rather increased the sense of alienation. The normal person is now bombarded with the presence of alien, perhaps hostile strangers. Every online experience comes with someone trying to scold you, lecture you, harass you or they are simply outside what you consider to be normal and acceptable.

Digital life is making analog life less tolerable. Of course, this is compounded by the fact that it is now impossible to avoid the scold. In the analog world you can easily spot the scold and avoid her. They have a look about them that is easy to recognize. If you knew nothing about Kate Starbird you would take one look at her and know she is someone who should be avoided. Online, there is no way to spot these spiteful mutants until they begin to immiserate you.

Here is where we see the horrors of the virtual world jumping into the analog world, as these people now do to our institutions what they did to the internet. For example, spiteful mutants have taken over the court system in New York. Just as we saw with social media, they are using their power to harass normal people. They have litigated VDare into closure simply because they can. This is not much different from what the scolds did to social media platforms with moderation.

New York is like Twitter before Musk. They have law-fared the NRA into bankruptcy, charged Trump with various invented crimes, levied a fine on Trump for denying he committed a crime that has never been demonstrated, litigated VDare out of existence despite never alleging any wrongdoing and sent a growing number of innocent white men to prison for the crime of being white men. Douglas Mackey is the most famous, but there are others like Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman.

It is clear that kooks in other states are looking to follow the lead of New York, much like we saw with the internet. One site would be subverted by kooks and before long the other sites followed their actions. The peak of this mania was when every internet platform banned Alex Jones on the same day. Even obscure sites like Roku banned him in the rush to anathematize the man. The dream was to bring back internal banishment through de-platforming.

There is another important lesson here, a scary one too. The internet has proven too big to control in this way. The scolds got the upper hand for a while, but the cost of endless policing exceeded the carrying capacity. People forget, but the reason Musk was able to buy Twitter is they were in serious financial trouble. He fired over two-thirds of the staff, the scolds, and harpies, because these people did nothing but immiserate the people who kept the site running.

This will apply even more to a continent sized country. New York can make itself hostile to normal people, but normal people can leave. After what New York has done to VDare, every reformer now knows they have to shop for safe jurisdictions to avoid this sort of problem. The same will be true for industries that know they are threatened by the kook squads. The gun makers are fleeing the Northeast because they know better than anyone that there is no reasoning with fanatics.

The point here is that we will see in the analog world what we have seen in the digital world for the last decades. A great disaggregation is unfolding in which normal people seek refuge from the areas now controlled by the fanatics. Further, the social media experience has shown that you cannot last long when you are overrun by fanatics, even when you are systematically robbing them. Even if peaceful separation is not possible, people will seek it anyway.

In the end, this is the reason to be optimistic. A society in which people like Fani Willis and Letitia James are doing anything more than pulling a cart is a society that will eventually destroy itself. For any human organization to survive it must be run for the interest of normal by the sober minded and talented. This is true for a social media platform, and it is true for a country. Nature cannot long tolerate the unfit and human nature will be compelled to do the same eventually.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Monthly Archives: April 2024