The Dunning-Kruger Crisis

Posted on October 31, 2024 by thezman

Much has been written in these parts about the crisis of competence that is creepy up on all aspects of life like the fog. Every day, competent people are aging out and being replaced by people who lack the competence. A complimentary problem, one also driven by demographics, is the Dunning-Kruger crisis. This the problem of incompetent, but highly confidence people, getting elevated into positions for which they are unqualified, simply due to the new ethics of the elites.

The difference here is that the crisis of competence is somewhat correctable, as the unqualified millennial replacing the retiring boomer, has some hope of learning what he needs to learn to do the job. He and his organization will have to suffer through the learning curve, but there is hope he will become competent. Alternatively, the race to supplement or even replace the incompetent millennial with technology offers the alternative of a robot competently doing the job.

The Dunning-Kruger, in contrast, offers no such hope. The person elevated into the position to satisfy the needs of the new morality has no chance to ever become competent at the task. Replacing them with technology is impossible, because it would undermine the whole point of the process. Instead, the system is simply expected to adapt to these new islands of confident incompetence. Every organization is being loaded up with crosses to bear as a form of contrition.

You see how this works with the Kamala Harris campaign. Regardless of the result, it will be remembered as one of the most inept operations in modern history, perhaps rivaling the 2004 Howard Dean campaign in Iowa or even the 1988 Mike Dukakis presidential campaign. After the initial media gaslighting, it has been one unforced error after another, all stemming from the fact the people running the campaign are sure they know everything, but in fact know nothing.

One small example is the Joe Rogan flap. Rogan is the biggest carnival act in so-called new media, so doing his show would be like doing Johnny Carson back in the 1970’s or the Rush Limbaugh show in the 1990’s. It offers a unique setting in front of a huge audience, which itself will attract an even bigger audience. It is the sort of platform a candidate needing attention craves. You take the gig, hope for the best and prepare for the explosion of post-show media coverage.

The Harris campaign never understood this. Instead, they tried to strong arm Rogan into rolling over for them, even leaving his comfy studio to meet them at a hotel somewhere to record a one-hour interview. They should have known he had no reason to take that deal, but stupid people lack second order thinking. Their unearned confidence in themselves compounded the error by carrying on as if they were doing him a favor by entertaining the request.

Rogan, who never liked Trump, did the shrewd thing and invited Trump on his show and Trump happily accepted the millions in free media. The resulting program broke the internet and further humanized Trump. The theme of his campaign this time is that he has dropped the sharp edges, having learned from the past. Hamming it up with Rogan, who was a smitten kitten the whole time, underscored this theme. Team Dunning-Kruger handed Trump a huge win as a result.

This one incident among many is a microcosm of the growing Dunning-Kruger crisis we see unfolding everywhere. It is not just that these people lack the required talents or experience for the task. It is that they lack the innate ability for the roles and the self-awareness to recognize it. Stupid people who realize they are outmatched can be managed, but stupid people who think they are geniuses are a danger to everyone and everything they touch. Invisible stupidity is lethal.

Look at who is running the Harris campaign, and the problem is obvious. The campaign boss is named Julie Chávez Rodriguez. She has three names because her only reason to exist in politics is she is the granddaughter of Cesario Chavez. Her qualifications for politics are that she is female, brownish and related to a famous brown guy. She has parlayed that into a career doing busy work, so that the nice white ladies could put her face on the organization brochure.

Julie Chávez Rodriguez no doubt looks in the mirror each morning and sees a world bestriding figure, when in reality she is a hapless simpleton. She is in this role because of her long relationship with Kamala Harris, another strong diverse female who is brimming with confidence despite having done nothing on her own worth noting, other than being a concubine of Willie Brown. The Harris campaign operates like the marketing pitch for the Christopher Rufo project.

There have been terrible national campaigns in the past, but the cause was always a candidate with little to sell running against a favored incumbent. Mike Dukakis never had a chance in 1988, so his people had few good choices. Bob Dole in 1996 was simply running to pad his obituary. He had no chance against Clinton, and he certainly knew it, but played the role anyway. Harris has the full support of official Washington and the political regime but is still losing.

Given the reality of our politics, this sort of ineptitude may seem trivial, but the Dunning-Kruger crisis is rolling out everywhere. It is why certain members of the economic elite are panicking about DEI at elite universities. They suddenly realized that their good deed installing someone like Claudine Gay as president of Harvard could come at a price to them beyond embarrassment. Handing power to entitled stupid people brimming with unearned confidence is playing with fire.

It is comforting to think that maybe the outbreak of incompetence among the elites due to the cult of diversity will cause them to pull back, but that is not the way to bet because of the religious fanaticism around the cult of diversity. If Harris loses next week, expect to hear endless cries of racism. If she wins, the resulting catastrophe will be blamed on the bogeyman. The Dunning-Kruger crisis ends only when the forces and people behind it come to an end.

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Trump’s Foreign Policy Problem

Posted on October 30, 2024 by thezman

One of the problems the world faces is that the dominant power on the planet has entered a period of incoherence. Joe Biden has come to symbolize the country he allegedly leads in that he is old, frail and not always understandable. This is how much of the world now sees the United States. What they see from Washington are people either trapped in a bygone era or divorced from present reality. It is as if the last several decades never happened.

You see this in this Financial Times post about what foreign policy could be like under a second Trump presidency. Keep in mind that the Financial Times is often used by the intelligence community to plant stories it wants to launder. The audience is not just the English-speaking world, but also Europe. The people quoted are all said to be associates of the Trump team. Their views may or may not reflect the thinking of Trump’s inner circle.

That aside, the first thing to note is that there is no acknowledgement of present reality in the story. For example, Congressman Michael Waltz is quoted often about how to resolve the Ukraine war. He says, “Trump could threaten to crash Russia’s economy by lowering the price of oil and gas.” According to Waltz, this will force the Russians to beg for peace negotiations. This policy makes sense if it is 1985 and Russia is still the Soviet Union with a brittle command economy.

For starters, the president cannot willy-nilly change oil prices. No amount of American production can drive down prices to a level where it would have an impact on the Russian economy. The “break even” point of Russian crude is well below that of the cheapest American production. Then you have the fact that it will take a decade to bring American crude production to the levels needed to crash prices. There is also the fact that Biden emptied the strategic oil reserve.

In other words, the big idea from the foreign policy experts is something they read about from the Reagan years that has no chance of working now. It is as if they are unaware of the sanctions war they launched two years ago that not only failed to crater the Russian economy but boomeranged back on them. The German economy is in in free fall because they no longer have access to cheap Russian gas. Meanwhile, the Russian economy is booming.

Of course, there is the fact that these people can only think in terms of threats when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world. Congressman Michael Waltz is a neocon sock puppet who was an early cheerleader for Project Ukraine. He was also wrong about every aspect of it. In any other profession, being as wrong as Mike Waltz would be disqualifying, but here he is being quoted as an authority on Russia. This is what happens when there are no consequences to failure.

Elsewhere in the article, they quote Fred Fleitz, a former John Bolton staffer and current foreign policy adviser at the America First Policy Institute, which promotes itself as helping shape Trump policy. With regards to Iran, Fleitz argues “The objective should be to bankrupt Iran again and to reinstitute maximum pressure.” Again? Has he not noticed that Iran survived sanctions for three decades? Is he not aware that Iran now has the support of China and Russia?

With regards to settling the war in the Ukraine, Fleitz says, “We freeze the conflict, Ukraine does not cede any territory, they don’t give up their territorial claims, and we have negotiations with the understanding there probably won’t be a final agreement until Putin leaves the stage.” Unlike Waltz, Fleitz has no clue as to why the Russians would entertain such a silly offer. Note that this idea was first floated by the neocons when the Ukrainian counter-offensive failed.

The jaw droppingly ignorant part of that post is the use of the term “Minsk-3” to describe the Trump strategy. The Russians correctly view the Minsk agreements as a Western ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine. The reason they think this is Angela Merkel said this in an interview last year. Naming the Trump strategy after two prior efforts to trick the Russians is just a way to make sure there can be no negotiations between the Trump people and the Russians.

This is probably why this story was planted in the Financial Times. The hope is to poison the well, so to speak, for the next administration with regards to negotiating with the Russians. They may not be able to control what Trump does, but they can give the Russians many reasons to not trust any overtures. After all, Trump will be gone in four years, so if they can freeze the Russia situation, they have a chance to get back in power and resume their efforts to start a war with Russia.

What becomes clear in that Financial Times story is that the American foreign policy establishment does not have a clue as to how to address the many problems the next president will face. The main reason for their incoherence is they seem to be unaware that these problems were caused by them. Compounding it is the toxic ideology of neoconservatism that has poisoned the foreign policy community. It is a cancer in the bowels of America’s most important institution.

It is what makes prospects for a sober minded and realistic approach to foreign policy under Trump unlikely. Trump’s instincts are good, as are those with many of the people around him, including JD Vance, but he will inherit a foreign policy establishment that is both stuck in the past and corrupted by a worldview that is inconsistent with the world as it is today and with the needs of the country. Fixing this problem without the use of extrajudicial means may not be possible.

A New American Identity

Posted on October 29, 2024 by thezman

Note: If you are interested in an hour of precise predictions about the upcoming election, then you are in luck. I was on the Coffee and a Mike show and you can listen to the recording of it here.

The American civil war created an intellectual problem for both sides that was far more important than the issue of slavery. The 19th century was the age of nationalism and national liberation in Europe. These ideas made their way to America and fit in neatly with the American sense of self. After all, the United States was the result of a revolt against an empire in the name of national liberation. The war between the North and South, therefore, was also a war over nationalism.

By default, the South had the better claim. It was the South, after all, seeking to secede from the Union to create a new nation that would better serve the interests of the people of the South. The North was trying to prevent this from happening and willing to conquer the people of the South to do it. From a nationalist perspective, the South was the sympathetic side, even though they were also fighting for the right to maintain the institution of slavery.

A solution to this problem that evolved in the North was the argument that true nationalism was comprehensive. That is the nationalist loved all of his country and all of his people, so a nationalist government must serve and protect everyone. Since the South was not a different people and the Union was not abandoning them in the way the crown had abandoned the colonies in the runup to the Revolution, it was the South that was in violation of the nationalist ideal

Further, the evolving sense of Northern nationalism claimed that the national purpose of America from the start was to spread liberty around the world. America was the city on the hill, so to speak, that stood as an example of freedom craving nationalists around the world, so what the South was doing was a threat to that project and therefore a threat to the national purpose. American nationalism, unlike that of Europe, was a revolutionary nationalism to free all of mankind.

In fairness, these debates about the nature of American nationalism were not at the center of the dispute, but they played a role in shaping how the new intellectual class would define American identity after the war. Those arguing in favor of the war being a new founding are not entirely wrong. The country that emerged after the war was completely different from what existed prior to the war. It was not just free of slaves, but full of a sense of national purpose.

In his book After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman describes the three forms of national identity that have prevailed in America. Goldman comes up with three national identities he calls the Covenant, the Crucible, and the Creed. The Covenant is the sense of national purpose. The Crucible is the old melting pot story popular in the 20th century after the war. The Creed is the idea of America being a set of ideas, rather than a physical place or people.

It is a good book that offers a useful way of framing the main ways in which Americans have tried to create a unitary identity. Goldman does observe that it is the covenantal aspect of American identity that has been the most powerful, but he does not get into how this Puritan sensibility evolved in the 19th century during the Civil War to become a civic religion for the ruling elite. He does not mention how the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam blended into this as Jews took up posts in the elite.

This understanding of American identity, or the best effort at forging one, is essential to understanding the current crisis. For over a century, since Woodrow Wilson, America has been on a mission to heal the world. The ruling class has asked, often demanded, that the people put aside their regional and local concerns for the good of one great cause after another. It has become so ingrained in ruling class thinking that they seem incapable to thinking about the state of the country.

Strip away the panic, the hysteria and the outlandish claims and the coming election is about whether we care more about the fate of Mongolian transgender lesbians or the fentanyl epidemic in Appalachia. Do we care more about the abstract concept of climate change or addressing the slow collapse of our infrastructure? What counts for more as an American? The health of your neighbors or the plight of migrants? Will we sacrifice everything in a vain attempt to save the world?

All these questions stem from a growing doubt in this sense of American identity that has been with us since Gettysburg. Americans are increasingly wondering not only if the cost of saving the world is worth the effort, but if it makes any sense at all for us to stand astride the world, balances in our hand. Maybe the people who demand we do this do not have the right to judge the world. Maybe these people lack the moral standing to stand in judgement over us as well.

Fundamentally, the current crisis is about the covenant. If our national purpose is to be the city on the hill, then we must ensure that the city is not full of vagrants and racked with crime and corruption. If our national purpose is to heal the world, then we must first heal ourselves. On the other hand, maybe our national purpose was to avoid falling for these claims and instead focusing on creating a society in the wilderness, away from the entanglements of the old world.

No matter how one seeks to frame it, the struggle today is over our national purpose, a struggle between those who stubbornly cling to the last century and those looking ahead to the next century. The question is whether America will collapse in a heap, exhausted from trying to save the world or will we pull up, realize our folly and return to a sense of purpose rooted in simply being an example to the world? Will we attempt to heal ourselves with the same zeal with tried to heal the world?

It could also be that all these efforts at national identity have failed and what comes next is the great disaggregation. Perhaps it was always impossible to forge an American identity that could permanently hold the people together. Maybe in the end, we learn that the true American identity is no identity at all. We are simply a diverse collection of people who agree to cooperate, when necessary, but otherwise we prefer to leave the world alone and be left alone.

Interesting Times

Posted on October 28, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the latest drama in the latest version of the new right, a post about how the Battle of Agincourt helps explain why politician die in office and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

We are eight days from the most important election ever, which is what they say about every presidential election. This one could actually turnout to be pivotal as part of the collection of presidential elections that define the Trump era. The results next week, or the following week if we get more shenanigans, will determine which way the political process goes the next decade. Like him or hate him, Trump is the most consequential political figure of this century so far.

The next week could be wild, if the past week is an indication. Trump is scheduled to do a rally in New Mexico and in Virginia, two states no one thought would be in play a month ago, but now may be up for grabs. Harris is coming off one of the worst weeks in politics, but her campaign keeps finding new ways to stumble, so this week could bring fresh idiocy to the race. Over the weekend she was booed at an event in Philadelphia, a thing that is becoming a thing for her.

The handicappers, even those who want Harris to win, are slowly lining up behind the idea of a Trump victory. Everything seems to be breaking his way right now, while everything is going wrong for Harris. Poll after poll in key states move in Trump’s direction and now, we have three new states in the toss-up column. New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia are now in the gray zone. Whether Trump wins any of them is still in doubt, but it is the movement that matters.

Of course, all of this is against the backdrop of 2020, where a tidal wave of fraud made it the least trusted result since 1960. Even if you reject the fraud claims, it was an election that featured many never-before-seen anomalies. For example, Arizona, another swing state, saw a 38% increase in voter turnout. In 2016, Trump won 1,252,401 votes and in 2020 he got 1,661,686 but still lost. Overall, the 2020 election saw the biggest spike in turnout ever and no one asks why.

We are already seeing signs of shenanigans aimed at adding enough new ballots to the Harris pile to overcome the Trump increase. Authorities in Lancaster County Pennsylvania unearthed a vote fraud scheme. Ballot harvesting is a form of fraud in which runners are given pre-filled out ballots and walking around money to then get signatures by registered voters in ghetto areas. It starts with first getting a voter registered, whether the voter exists or not.

What we saw in 2020 is not just about that election and the claims surrounding it, but about understanding subsequent elections. Polling, for example, depends on models of the electorate, which are created using past election data. If the 2020 data is riddled with unexplained and potentially unexplainable anomalies, how can a polling company build a reliable model of the electorate? The answer is you cannot, and they have no way to poll the fraud shops producing fake ballots either.

That means there are two angles to the polling. The one angle is figuring the margin of fraud in each of these states, then adjusting the polls accordingly. In Pennsylvania, Trump needs a two- or three-point margin to cover the fraud. In Wisconsin, the margin of fraud is about one point. The other angle is the polls themselves may have to be adjusted to account for the fraud they are including in their models. Trump consistently outperforms the polling. How much will he outperform this time?

This is the high cost of official corruption. When it is people trying to undermine the rules and the authorities working to stop them, the general public can trust the results, even accepting some problems. When it is the authorities subverting the rules for their own gain, then no one can trust anything. This is because you have no basis of comparison, as the base condition is assumed to be corrupt. We may never trust our elections again due to the 2020 shenanigans.

All of that aside, you would want to be Donald Trump right now, as far as the election, rather than Kamala Harris. An honest look at the polls, adjusting for shenanigans, puts Trump at 262 electoral college votes and Harris at 209. The states that are too close to call as of this writing are WI, MI, PA, VA and NV. If New Hampshire and New Mexico are in play, then it is worse for Harris. That means Trump needs one win to regain the presidency, and Harris needs to run the table.

Then there is the energy. The Trump campaign is resembling the 2016 election with Trump barnstorming the country drawing massive crowds. He was just in New York City doing an event at a sold-out Madison Square Garden. Harris is forced to announce fake concerts to trick people into showing up at her events. She got booed vigorously at that Houston event as a result. The energy around the Harris campaign is all negative energy, which is never a good thing.

There is a strong Howard Dean vibe to the Harris campaign. She has never won a competitive race. She was handed the senate seat by the Democratic Party machine in California because she was highly controllable. Of course, she famously flamed out in the 2020 presidential primary. She was handed the nomination this time when they pushed Biden over the edge. Her entire existence as a political figure rests on a mass media operation to conceal the reality of her support.

Of course, there is the other shenanigans. States like Michigan and Pennsylvania rely on the party machine to “get out the vote” for the Democrat. Both states have Democrat governors with eyes on the 2028 nomination. If Harris wins the election, then the political career of Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro come to an end. They will be too old and too forgotten in 2032. There are also forces in Washington who would like to be rid of Harris and her people too.

That is why Trump is the bettering favorite right now. The betting markets have Trump with a 62% chance of winning. All the things people look at to determine the shape of the race favor Trump, other than the shenanigans. This may be why the billionaire owners of the LA Times and Washington Post told their editorial staff to cancel the Harris endorsements. Maybe the oligarchs are sending a message to the political class that they want to see Trump win.

The English-speaking world is sure the Chinese have a curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” The Chinese have no such curse, but we assume they should, so we insist on it anyway. Regardless, we live in an interesting time and the next two weeks, assuming more election shenanigans, promises to be very interesting. In the fullness of time, we may look back and say this was the most consequential election in history or the last election in our history.

Radio Derb October 25 2024

Posted on October 25, 2024 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
How Low Will They Go?
A Consequential Endorsement
Republics And Empires
Certifiable Lunacy
Miscellany
Signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, one and all, from your inclusively genial host John Derbyshire, here to bring you reflections on the week’s news.

Ten days to the general election and the anti-Trump rhetoric is heating up. Did you know that Trump is a Hitler Hitler Hitler, Nazi Nazi Nazi, fascist fascist fascist? In case you didn’t, all sorts of Ruling Class front men have been stepping up to tell you: John Kelly, for example, Trump 45’s Chief of Staff, and Bob Woodward, one of the hack journalists who helped bring down the great Richard Nixon fifty years ago.

How will it all end up? I don’t know any better than you do, but I’ll speculate.

Before I get to speculating, though, just my weekly reminder that my website johnderbyshire.com is there for your reading and listening pleasure with links to my entire print and online output all the way back to 1966.

On the cover page of that website are instructions on how you can help keep me afloat using snail mail, PayPal, or crypto, or via Zelle direct to my bank, or with a tax-deductible donation by a check earmarked with my name and mailed to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. Thank you for your help. Continue reading →

The End Of Things

Posted on October 25, 2024 by thezman

One of the reasons it feels like the wheels are coming off society is that we seem to be at the end of things. By things I mean cycles. These are cultural, intellectual, historical and economic cycles. Some have played out over generations while some are playing out in a single lifetime. The result of so many things ending at once is something like the confluence of several rivers.

Probably the biggest thing coming to an end is the idea of America that everyone was raised to believe. If you remember the Cold War, then you probably recall people talking about the difference between America and the world. It was not just the free world versus the communists. Europeans would talk about how America was the envy of the world for our freedom and love of individuality.

We put people in jail now for having the wrong opinions. Our institutions are so corrupt no sane person trusts anything that comes from them. The only difference between America today and the Soviet Union of the 1970’s is that we have vast material prosperity, but that is bought on credit. The American economic system is a ticking timebomb just waiting for someone to cut the wrong wire.

People struggle to accept that old America is dying, and this remains a primary obstacle to changing the trajectory of society. The answer to the ongoing madness from the people we call the left is some form of “We just have to go back to…” that can never happen, so we continue to swirl in the churn of decline. This is often the dynamic with the other things entering their end phase.

It is why we are cursed with backward thinking. Everyone is obsessed with rummaging around in the past, like a person searching around for a lost item, as if there is an answer in the past that will prevent the inevitable future. One reason no one talks about what comes next is fear of what comes next. It means closing the door on the past and those past ideas. The future is a terrifying idea for America.

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. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
Cycles & Super Cycles
The Rope Of History
The End Of Things

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

The Kazan Catastrophe

Posted on October 24, 2024 by thezman

Back in the ancient times, if you wished to buy product from someone you arrived at their location with money, or they arrived at your location with product. The product was inspected, and the money was inspected. Once both sides were satisfied, the exchange was made, and the deal was done. It did not take long for a class of middlemen to turn up who brokered such deals. They inspected the goods, arranged transportation and safeguarded the product and the money.

World trade has not changed much since the ancient times. Middlemen still facilitate most of the trade. They are called banks, insurance companies, freight brokers, shipping companies and so forth, but they are all part of this vast and essential middleman economy that makes it possible for the local Walmart to have shelves stuffed with goods from Asia. It is what makes it possible for the Chinese company selling dog food to get paid by Walmart.

One thing to note about this setup is the two greatest seafaring nations in the history of the planet, the United States and Britain, do very little shipping. Instead, they control the flow of goods around the world through control of the insurance markets and the financial system used in global trade. If you are involved in global trade, you are certainly using the American financial system and either directly or indirectly the British maritime insurance system.

The dollar being the world’s reserve currency has been to this point the main driver of the explosion in global trade. The buyer in South America can do business with a seller in China, because his bank is connected to the American financial system through his country’s central bank. He does not have to get RMB from his bank to pay the Chinese vendors, because the exchange is done automatically through the dollar dominated global financial system.

This is about to change with the launch of an alternative payment system that was announced at the BRICS summit in Kazan Russia. The Russians and the Chinese have been working on creating an alternative to SWIFT, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It is the platform that networks the world’s banks to facilitate the flow of money around the world. The new system seeks to replace SWIFT for trade among the BRICS countries.

For most people this is an eye-glazing topic, but in the fullness of time it could be an event that generations of historians study as an inflection point. What the BRICS countries are seeking to do is wrest control of the global financial system from the West, specifically the English-speaking countries, at least for the members of BRICS and those countries willing to trade with BRICS. By extension, it is an effort to reduce the power of the dollar and thus the power of the American empire.

What this new system proposes to do is make it easier for participating countries to conduct business in the currency of other participating countries. Instead of China needing dollars to buy oil from the Saudis and therefore preferring dollars from other countries for Chinese goods, the Chinese will be able to buy oil in RMB and the Saudis will be able to buy Chinese goods in whatever currency they possess. The new system would handle the conversion and exchange rates instantly.

As an aside, that last part is interesting. In the United States, a business does not get paid by the credit card company for a few days. Often, the delay is longer. Of course, there are fees for taking credit card payments. In Russia and China, the movement of money is instant. The system is treated as a public utility, so fees are relatively small compared to what we see in the West. This is owing to much better and newer technology and a different attitude toward banking.

That aside, the significance of this proposal is enormous. The BRICS countries represent half the world’s population. The Arab oil countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, are onboard for this new system. The Saudis let expire the fifty-year-old deal with Washington that established the petrodollar. China, India and Russia are the driving force behind this new arrangement and represent three of the most important economic powerhouses in the world at the moment.

What this means for the West is far less influence over the rest of the world through the control of the financial system. The main reason China, Russia and India have pushed for this new system is they have grown weary of Washington abusing its position to bully the rest of the world. The sanctions war unleashed by Washington against Russia in 2022 was the final straw. If Washington would use the dollar to try regime change in Russia, it would do it to anyone, especially China.

What the BRICS summit in Kazan represents is decades of belligerently incompetent foreign policy in Washington. Ten years ago, it was inconceivable that these important countries would come together to create a parallel financial system, as all of them were committed to the dollar and the Western system. They were committed to the “rules-based order” because they assumed it served their interests, but decades of abuse by Washington has convinced them otherwise.

What this means for the West is clear. What we see forming up is a trading and cooperation block that includes all the countries outside the West, representing the bulk of the world’s population and the majority of economic activity. Add in the fact that the West has let its manufacturing base shrivel and seems to be at war with its agricultural base and you can see the problem. Economies based in providing services tied to the financial system are facing a cliff now.

For the United States, this could not come at a worse time. Debt is already at staggering levels and is accelerating. The productive and innovative portion of the population is aging, while the unproductive portion is exploding. Add in decades of infrastructure neglect, the demographic and cultural catastrophes, and now is not a good time for a decline in the dollar. America is an empire that debased its currency via the perfidious subversion of its own rules.

Contrary to some claims, the dollar is not about to collapse, but what Kazan signals is the steady decline in the dollar. As the rest of the world begins to trade outside the dollar, it means dollars and instruments denominated in dollars, like debt, will lose value on the global market. This means the American banking system must slow the creation of dollars to prevent inflation. This means the cost of borrowing dollars must go up and stay up in anticipation of declining dollar demand

The steady decline of the dollar means a steady decline in the American standard of living, baring a revolution in Washington. Being the world’s mint and banker only works if the world accepts what you are minting. A rentier economy reliant on skimming from every transaction is only possible if you control the currency. The parasitism that has become a feature of our economy is going to become more obvious. That will bring political consequences as well.

The Racial Binary Test

Posted on October 23, 2024 by thezman

There are issues that turn out to be litmus tests which tell us something about how certain people truly think about their politics. Covid, for example, revealed that many people who sounded like skeptics of the current regime were still willing to accept without question the claims of the regime. The war in Ukraine is another example where people who were media skeptics fell in line with the media narrative. Covid and Ukraine were tests of trust in the institutions.

These types of litmus test issues tell us where someone is mentally on that line that runs between those who trust the system and its institutions and those who no longer trust the system and its institutions. Those who wore masks and Ukraine lapel pins are at the pro-regime end of the scale, while those who rejected and criticized this stuff are on the other end of the scale. In both cases, we learned that some people were not that far along the path from the pro-regime pole.

There are other issues that are larger and more enduring that also work as a sorting mechanism in the churn of politics. In the mass media age, it is much easier for someone to pose as something, but not really be that something. Profilicity is not simply about creating a profile you present to parts of the world, but also the ability to quickly take down and respawn that profile with modifications. There are certain topics, however, that get to the nature of the person playing the character.

One of those issues is race, specifically racism. Unlike those prior litmus test issues, this is not one that exists on a scale. It is a binary issue. You either accept or reject the normative and positive claims baked into the word racism. There are those who think it is immoral to make decisions based on race and those who reject the idea that this behavior is immoral. There are those who reject the objective reality of race and those who accept what the human sciences tell us.

There is no middle ground on the race issue, even though lots of people seek to profit by occupying what they think is a middle ground. An example is this Compact Magazine post by Christopher Rufo. He is getting rich being a non-woke liberal or anti-woke civic nationalist, depending upon your label preference. The key to this character is the sort of triangulation Bill Clinton made famous. You see, he not only rejects left-wing racism, but he also rejects right-wing racism!

There is nothing new about this position. It was a popular in the 1980’s when it seemed like the culture was moving beyond race as a political weapon. The good people treated everyone as an individual. The bad people judged people on generalities. That meant the race hustlers like Jesse Jackson were just as bad as the old white racists from the civil rights narrative. They were judging people collectively. Like everything in this age, the new right and its new characters are just reboots of old material.

That aside, what you see with Rufo is that he does not understand the material and he embraces the morality of the people he claims to oppose. He opposes critical race theory not because it is nonsense, but because they acknowledge the centrality of race in American society. Rufo is an anti-racist, which means he thinks it is immoral to acknowledge the reality of race and especially immoral to act on it. In this regard, he agrees with Ibram X. Kendi, but only differs in presentation.

Further, Rufo does not seem to understand how we reached the point in American society where whites are under constant assault through these corporate and government diversity programs. He seems to think that the reason these programs exist is the people behind them are dumb or craven. Somehow, they tricked the leaders of the most powerful intuitions to embrace a form of racism. He may as well claim that these people are witches, who cast a spell over the institutions.

The fact is, these antiwhite pogroms, whatever you want to call them, are the logical outcome of generations of jurisprudence. The “Brown Test”, named for the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, implemented a set of racial and cultural standards that effectively eliminated free association and made openness the standard against which everything is measured. In effect, it made anything that results in racial inequality both illegal and immoral.

That means it is impossible to have a color-blind society under the Brown doctrine because it would lead to racial inequality. The underlying assumption of Brown and the entire moral edifice that sprang from it is that any racial inequality, not matter how trivial, must be the result of discrimination by whites. Therefore, a colorblind society that has racial inequality will mean that color blindness is the cause. It is why people like Ibram X. Kendi can reasonably say color blindness is racism.

This is what makes race a binary issue. You either understand the moral reasoning that lies behind the novelty of the word “racism” or you do not and simply accept it as part of your ethics. You either understand and accept the reality of race as a biological matter or you reject it and embrace the blank slate ideology. There is no middle position and no way to pick a few things from one column and a few from the other to create yourself a bespoke racial awareness.

In fairness, Rufo probably understands this, but the money in seeming to not understand it is too good to turn down. Even though the logic of the open society has led America down a dangerous moral and social cul-de-sac, the economic and managerial elites continue to cling to the moral framing of it. Cultural inertia is a real thing that drags along even the most powerful people and institutions. When there is no profit in opposition, there is no opposition.

The opposition we see among some elites to DEI and critical race theory rests in their own racial awareness. Jewish donors to elite colleges have grown concerned that they are now treated as white and therefore targets for the diversity rackets. Asians resent the racial spoils system that limits their access to elite institutions. The fact that whites may benefit from this opposition is incidental. Once again, we see that in politics, racial or otherwise, it is about who shall overcome whom.

Regardless of motivations, the people promoting the concept of a colorblind society are unwilling to address the root causes. Further, they fail to see that they are advocating a far more radical version of what Brown demands. To achieve the colorblind society, it means either eradicating those who see race or so terrorizing them that they pretend not to see race. The colorblind dogma makes anti-racism sound reasonable and its implementation would make the Khmer Rouge seem tame.

The Lives Of Others

Posted on October 22, 2024 by thezman

Since most anyone reading this has been alive, there has been a debate in what is called the right in America, about what to do about the right. Going back to the middle of the last century, the debate is about replacing the opposition to the ruling progressives with something new or reforming the current opposition. Once side thinks the current opposition is too corrupt to be reformed while the other camp thinks a startup has little chance to succeed, so reform is the best course.

If you go back to the early days of the Buckley movement, you find the same sort of debates going on among those members of the “new right.” The Buckley people did not have much of an “old right” to worry about, as it had collapsed in the FDR years, but they had the issue of the existing institutions. Should conservatives seek to create their own institutions or seek to take over existing ones? In the end, it was a mix of both choices that resulted in what is called Conservative Inc.

It is also why there is another debate about what to do with the old right among people trying to form up a new right. The complete failure of conservatism was made clear in the Bush and Obama years to everyone not getting a paycheck from one of the many conservative think tanks and institutions. Paul Gottfried coined the term “alternative right” in this period while commenting on the failure of movement conservatism to conserve anything more than their positions.

Everyone knows what happened to the alternative right, but the sense that something must rise up to replace Conservative Inc is still with us. People like Christopher Rufo, Matt Walsh and Michael Anton, all see themselves in the process of creating a new right for the current age. Amusingly, all of them are linked to nodes of the old right, places like Claremont, Hillsdale and others. Like Dionysus, they hope the new right will be born from the thigh of the old right.

This gets to the impossibility of either approach to creating a new right. On the one hand, you need money to hire writers, thinkers and activists. Raising that money one small donor at a time is hard and unpleasant, at least from the perspective of people who imagine themselves leading the new right. That means going to the people who have lots of cash to spare. Those are the people who fund the old right, which means making an accommodation with the old right.

Of course, if the old right saw a need to reform itself, it would do it, so the reformers coming in to fix things run into a wall of resistance. The donors like the institutions as they are, but they would like a little youthful energy to spruce things up, which is why they invite in the reformers. Like men who spend a long time in prison, the reformers are eventually institutionalized by the entities they seek to reform. Before long they are leading the charge to purge a heretic.

This has been the cycle since the full flowering of the Global American Empire after the Second World War. The opposition to the prevailing progressive orthodoxy, on the one hand, maintains a wall between the establishment and the public, while on the other hand, selectively recruiting some reformers to provide energy and the facade of opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. Notice how all the members of the current new right sound like exhibits in the Reagan Museum.

It has always been assumed that what makes this system possible and so durable is the money supply. The golden rule says that the men with the gold make the rules, so if the donor class exists as it is, both the progressive orthodoxy and what is allowed to officially oppose it will not change. There is some truth to it, but there is more to it than just money. Even the money men find themselves constrained by a system that they supposedly control.

What has kept this system going is the social aspect of the commentariat. It operates as a subculture, separate from the larger culture. People have noted that Washington operates like a small town, and this is obvious in the commentariat. The people inside depend entirely on the system for their money, reputation, and friendships. It is a lot like how one percent biker clubs operate. You are either completely inside or completely outside the ecosystem. There is no middle ground.

This is why when it comes time to exile a heretic, all of his friends rush forth to condemn the man, often claiming to have never trusted him. On the one hand, they fear being associated with the heretic, but on the other it provides an opportunity to display their fidelity to the subculture. Like Brutus stoically standing by as his sons are executed for their participation in the Tarquinian conspiracy, members of the commentariat heap recriminations on former friends sent into exile.

As a result, everyone is always looking around for cues about what is currently acceptable within the system. When your livelihood depends on toeing the line at the office, you can think about getting a new job. When your social standing, friendships and family relations depend upon toeing the line within the political ecosystem of the commentariat, you can think of nothing but toeing the line. Everyone inside the system, even the donors, are terrified of being exiled.

This helps explain why our commentariat sounds so weird and alien. Our chattering classes are like the courtiers who live their lives walled up inside the king’s palace, talking amongst themselves. Everyone they know thinks the same things, says the same things and cares about the same things. Most important, they fear the same thing, which is the outer dark of exile. The result is a political commentariat that is isolated from the reality of the general public.

This model of the chattering class applies to the regime media, which is itself a subculture cut off from the general public. This model also applies to the managerial class, which now functions as a separate society, with its own economics, culture and morality, sitting atop the larger society. The thread that runs through all these subcultures among the Cloud People is fear of being expelled and having to live with John the Savage and the rest of the Dirt People.

American Trotskyites

Posted on October 21, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the collapse of the entertainment industry, a post about the end of The Grand Tour and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the most remarkable, but woefully unremarked, developments of the last decade is the shift of the neocons back to the left. Starting with Trump coming down the escalator in 2015, the neocons first tried to purge him and his supporters like they did to Pat Buchanan and the paleos in the 1990’s. When that failed, they began their slow march out of the conservative movement then out of the Republican Party, returning to their old home on what we call the left.

Perhaps it is the timescale, but this is not something that has gotten a lot of attention, despite the centrality of the neocons to conservatism. There are prominent neocons at all the major media nodes, where they have spent the last decade railing about Donald Trump on a daily basis. For those familiar with the history of neoconservatism and their wars with the people we call paleos, this transition is like getting confirmation of a long-dismissed conspiracy theory.

Imagine if twenty years from now a collection of retired government officials steps forward and to say that 9/11 was an inside job. The planes were real, but the whole thing was orchestrated by the CIA or maybe the Mossad. It is not just that it would reveal a conspiracy to conceal the truth, but that it would validate the people tarred as conspiracy theories for doubting the official truth. It would be the sort of revelation that leads to questioning other official truths.

That is how this post about Bill Kristol and Eliot Cohen should be viewed. Way back when a group of Jewish intellectuals broke with the left in the middle of the last century and started their march into Buckley conservatism, there was a debate about what they were really doing. Was it a way to subvert the Buckley movement? Were these people genuinely changing their ideological orientation or were they simply opportunists seeing conservatism as a more useful vehicle for their project?

Long forgotten is the fact that the label “neoconservative” was a smear coined by a socialist named Michael Harrington. These newly minted conservatives were often called Trotskyites because they never abandoned their old ideology, but simply opposed the people who came to dominate the American left. Of course, others accused them of being a stalking horse for Zionism and the Israel lobby. Still others suspected that their obsession with Russia was the real motivation.

In other words, from the very start no one trusted their sincerity with regards to their conversion to the conservative cause. They brought lots of money and organizational might, so the Buckley crowd overlooked these concerns and welcomed them into the movement over many objections. Before long, the neocons organized the purge of their doubters and enemies in the movement. Half a century or so since this started, the skeptics of these people have been vindicated.

Buried in that post about Kristol and Cohen is an easily overlooked assertion that has always been at the heart of the issue. They claim that conservative Jews have specific interests that they think are better served by the Democrats now. Leaving aside their definition of “conservative Jews”, what they are arguing is that this subgroup of Americans has interests peculiar to themselves that can conflict with the majority interests of the country, but those minority interests come first.

This gets to something further down the memory hole than the old neocon – paleocon battles of the last century. Jewish liberals and leftists have often accused neocons and Zionists of being bad for the Jews, because they confirm the claims often made by Jewish opponents regarding the loyalty of Jews. Bill Kristol makes explicit that his primary interests lie outside of and often in opposition to the interest of the American people, so you can see the problem.

A lot of people accused of being conspiracy theorists with regards to the behavior of the neocons have been vindicated over the last decade. This gets little to no attention in the mainstream media because the neocons still wield enormous power. They have always deftly folded their interests into those of the Israel lobby and no one in politics dares take on those guys. For elected officials, opposing Israel means losing the next election and for the chattering classes, it means exile.

Another aspect of this is the ease with which the neocons have made the transition from conservative and Republican to progressive and Democrat. Disgraced in the Bush years, they nevertheless hung on in the Obama years, orchestrating various schemes like the 2014 coup in Ukraine. They have had total control of the Biden administration to the point where its sole purpose was war with Russia. At no point in this transition was there a hint of dissent or self-examination.

The other side of this is the fact that the Democratic Party has put up no resistance to the return of their old Trotskyites comrades. The same people who were marching around in the streets, banging their pots and pans over the Bush wars in the Middle East now wear Ukraine lapel pins. Without a trace of irony, they accuse Trump fans of disloyalty for not supporting the Ukraine war or the Israel wars. There is a last scenes in Animal Farm quality to all of it.

Of course, this raises the oldest critique of America’s two-party political system, that it is just a show put on for the masses. The real decisions are made outside of public view by the powerful interests who control the system. One of those powerful groups are the neocons, who work with the Israel lobby to control foreign policy. Given what we have witnessed over the last decade, that old critique is vindicated. The people in charge are immune the ballot box and operate as an alien overclass.

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