Social cycle theory argues that stages of civilization and history generally repeat themselves in cycles. The most famous explanation of this is Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, where he compared human civilization to an organism. There is the birth phase where society comes into being. An adult phase where is fully formed and reaches its potential and then the decline of old age and eventually death. Another way of stating it is that human civilization has seasons, spring through winter.
This way of thinking about the West has been popular with various right-wing movements ever since, as it generally fits the more realistic worldview of the Right. The Left, in contrast, has always embraced the idea that human civilization evolves toward some idealized point of existence. Progressives chose their label, because they are not only in favor of progress, but they believe it is inevitable. They are on the right side of history, because unlike their enemies, they are not standing in the way of progress.
The argument for Spengler has a lot of support in our history books, as there are plenty of civilizations that were born, lived and then died. If human history naturally progressed to some ideal form of existence, it would seem that the middle ages were a detour, which means there could be other detours. Alternatively, Africa made no meaningful progress until Europeans arrived and handed them the tools of modernity. Even so, the magic of historical progress does not appear to be working its magic on the Africans.
Closer to home, it is obvious that the West has hit some sort of wall, when it comes to inventiveness in the social sphere. Regarding political organization, not much has happened since widespread democracy was embraced a century ago. It has become more absurd and corrupt, but that hardly qualifies as progress. Culturally, the West has not produced much of anything worth commenting upon, other than popular culture, which also seems to have stalled. Pop culture today is reboots and repeats of the past.
At a more granular level, this is obvious in the political sphere. Take a look at the Democrats running for president. Bernie Sanders is a sort of weird nostalgia tour for Baby Boomer lefties and their spiritual soulmates in the younger generations. Listen to him speak and he barely makes any sense. In fact, all of them rely on emotive gibberish and their mostly concocted back stories. The gay mayor a gay who speaks in riddles. The mixed senator is Obama with a vagina. Warren is an angry old hen.
Take a step back and the Democrat Party is no longer a political party in the traditional sense of the concept. It has no agenda, other than a hatred of white people, but even that hatred has no point, beyond keeping the non-whites angry. The GOP had been a pointless collection of castoffs for decades until Trump came along, but even there, the MAGA stuff is just a weird echo of the Reagan years. If Sanders is a nostalgia candidate for lefty boomers, Trump is a nostalgia tour for aging Reaganites.
The near total lack of political innovation is quite startling when you read something like this, which was posted at American Conservative. The general thrust of the article is the Right needs a new Frank Meyer, who helped turn the American Right into a fusion of social conservatism, libertarian economics and hawkish anti-communism. The post reads like the pitch for rebooting an old movie franchise. Instead of fighting the Soviets, the new Conservative Man will start a Cold War with China and promise to cut the debt.
It is not just the mainstream political ideologies that are staggering around in the darkness of the past, searching for a reason to exist. The alt-right embracing fascist iconography and larping as Nazis was as much about a lack of imagination as breaking taboos. They could not think of a way forward, so they were hoping for a do-over. This surge in what is called white identity politics is mostly just a rediscovery of old ideas that lived and died a century ago. There are a lot of antiquarians in identity politics.
Francis Fukuyama famously declared the end of history, as if the West had finally reached the Promised Land. Liberal democracy triumphed over communism. He has since backed off on that a bit, but this is the end of a long super-cycle that started in the late middle ages and peaked in the Industrial Revolution. There really has not been an innovative political idea since the beginning of the last century. The expansion of liberal democracy has brought with it weird cults and heresies, but those are decoration, not innovation.
The view from the Right, properly understood, is to look at this and see the winter of Western civilization. The barbarian hordes are pouring over the border. It’s not that the West is incapable of defending itself. It’s that it lacks the youthful energy to do it. Like an old man sitting in his rocker, the Occident is simply too burdened by time to get up and defend, much less build, his civilization. In other words, we are in the same place as Rome entering the final century of the Western Roman Empire.
Another way of viewing this, however, is to be a bit less grandiose and see the West in a transition period. The period from the French Revolution through the Second World War was driven by the technological and economic changes that swept the West. The old political order, which was rooted in the feudal economics of the middle ages, slowly and often violently gave way to a new political order rooted in capital and industry. The feudal relationship does not make a lot of sense when capital is king.
Perhaps this period we are in is a transition from the industrial order to something that better fits the technological age. One reason national governments are in such shabby condition is they have lost one main reason to exist. People in Europe are no longer in competition for resources. Everyone in the West has extra of all the things that matter and extra of most of the luxury items. Organized competition for stuff is no longer a salient part of political life. Germany is not going to be invading Poland to get more farm land.
Put another way, the path forward may be exactly that, allowing the past to fade into the darkness of history, while looking for a new organizational model that fits the needs of technological, post-industrial and post-scarcity societies. A political philosophy that has the attributes of the block chain, rather than the corporation, is the future for a technological society. Instead of decorating old ideas with new trimmings, it will be the past decorating new a political philosophy, purpose built for the current age.
“Everyone in the West has extra of all the things that matter and extra of most of the luxury items.”
Well… pretty much everyone is still dead before his hundredth birthday.
And, most people nowadays of European descent do not think that the reward for dying is that they get to go up to Heaven and play on a harp with Jesus.
As Boomers all start to realize how close they are to dying, this is likely to become a bit more salient.
I suspect the Chinese may already be thinking about this…
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Another great, contemplative post that I had to read three times to fully comprehend.
As a side note the current lunacy just confirms for me that time travel will never be possible, otherwise someone would have come back to the 1960’s and sorted things out, knowing what the 2019 would look like.
There will be elections in the West for quite some time because they serve the purpose of pretending that democracy exists. Even the USSR had elections for that reason. Besides using California as an example, the US will be a one party system so they don’t need to eliminate voting to guarantee their control
I think post-scarcity will turn out to be as foolish a notion as post-racial (Obama) or post-historical (Fukayama).
Glad you’re back, the site came up “Account Suspended” for most of the day. Now to find out what’s up with Gab.
What is missed and is the key, but you and most will reject is Christendom is key.
CS Lewis noted progress breaks down when you go down the wrong road. When that happens the “progressive” thing is to turn around and return until you get to the point where you made the wrong turn..
But that is the only thing you do not wish to return to. The shining city on the hill has a cross on top of it. You wish to go around th mountain, or find some other city with something other than a cross.
As a “deplorable easter worshipper”, I can understand, but dont know wheter to laugh or cry. Like Christmas loses meaning without Christ, you wish to recreate some kind of Christ-less “western civilization” – trying to rebuild the fortress not merely on the sand instead of the scandalon rock, but on the sea.
You wish the fruit without the tree, or at least wonder why oaks aren’t producing apples, pears, or peaches. And no amount of pointing it out will affect the blinded lite-right than evidence can sway SJWs
The Trump presidency, sadly, has indeed turned into an odd Reagan nostalgia play. MAGA went from “Make America Great Again” to “Make America GOPe Again.”
It’s clear that Trump believes that the agenda that got him elected — anti-immigration, anti-interventionism and pro-American trade polices — is dead letter. It has virtually no support from those in power: either party in Congress, the permanent government and the vast majority of his own administration. Hell, his own family has no interest in it.
All that is left for him is a vanity project and “securing his legacy,” and the only way to do that is to win a second term, and he seems hell-bent on doing this as a standard-issue Republican, and most importantly, with establishment Republican money rather than his own, either because he can’t fund another campaign or simply won’t. In 2016 he had no choice, but this year he can tap, and already is tapping, into the GOPe donor well.
His calculus almost certainly is that the votes he loses from the disillusioned believers in his MAGA agenda will be more than made up for by grug-brained, Fox News listening Republicans who simply want to win regardless of the agenda. He may be right. Count me out though…
I never expected much of President Trump at least in his first term. My assumption was that he wanted to leave an America where the kind of enterprises his family is involved in could function and that was his legacy
This meant using the right words to get elected and having policies that would have some small benefit for Americans in the pocket book
He did these things and more importantly shifted the Overton window our way
Its not enough to make him great yet or to actually Make America Great Again but its better than nothing and he might manage a bit more in his second term.
Now as for our leaders, the big money that pulls their strings wants things far different than what we want and money always talks
This may make the TINVOWOOT meme entirely true but so be it. Instead of quoth Obama
They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Maybe they should take the Former Presidents entirely accurate words to heart , lay off the Despair Oxy , Meth and Weed and grow up. No collapse , no zombie apocalypse is going to save you, no one else isn’t going to save you but you and your mates
You want power for your ends you don’t beg for power. You take it . Once you know what you want . Try elections, try running for office first that’s my advice to everybody
If that fails, maybe when that fails , make some friends with common goals who also realize that what those 1.3 million semi auto rifles y’all bought last year are for.
Don’t be like most Americans, all guns, no guts
Shifted the Overton Window? People are not just being deplatformed for expressing heterodox opinions, they are being de-banked and blackballed from the job market. Nice to know it’s all going to come good in the second term though. Now I can go back to plan-trusting…
The blockchain offers the tech to continue the USA from an alternative timeline, say that ended in 1890, which bypasses the Social Democracy of the last 86 years or so.
The problem in the USA has been the advent of Social Democracy, i.e., positive rights, and the erasure of a government based on negative rights.
“They owe me a better life” (positive rights) vs “They have duty not to harm me” (negative rights) — that has been the great battle for the last 100 years. The decline has come from the Social Democrats winning.
That is what progressivism is all about. Progressivism has only ever meant to turn the USA into a social democracy of positive rights.
In law, when someone has a positive right, that one is entitled to an advantage paid by lawgivers who of course borrow and fund borrowing with taxes.
Under republicanism, which the USA no longer has, citizens had negative rights — the individual was entitled to the present position of things, to be free from acts that harm him. That included being free from politicians trying to tax him in unfettered fashion so they could then fund social democracy positive rights.
Until people start talking about jurisprudence concepts of property (right of ownership) in self, chattel, works, promises and of positive rights (others owe me a better life, e.g., UBI) versus negative rights (I have the right to be left alone), little will change.
The decline to collapse is inevitable as social democracy grows.
Social democracy involves the loss of personal agency. The giving up of personal control over various aspects of your life never ends well. Those you give your agency to, never fail to treat it with less care than you do. Giving up agency gives others the power to make you expendable. Keep that in mind next time you are offered UBI or universal health care.
Ours is not a post-scarcity world. I’m guessing that scarcity will be the elemental fact for 90% of humanity within a generation.
The Earth is just a planet, and it has been worked – hard – over 200 years of industrial civilization. Our topsoils are shot, all the easily-mined fuels and minerals have been worked to exhaustion, and we face 10 billion people by centuries’ end – mostly Africans.
Vegetable and animal life will be wiped out by the hungry hordes. But it’s all part of the Program. As long as Social Justice reigns supreme, then of course it’s worth it.
There’s always CR’s brand new ideology, of criticizing capitalism from a NRx-compatible position:
https://chromium.fashion.blog/
It used to be that when the intergroup friction in the west got too intense, the groups fought it out and/or one decamped to a new territory. TPTB will not allow a fight and there is no where left to flee. Even rural “nobody wants to live here” Montana has Lon Horiuchi. If the enemy can use 1984 and Anthem as how-to guides, why can’t we use Elysium as ours? New political philosophy usually comes from fiction, and it appears after exhaustive review that there is nothing new under the sun. Since we cannot go out, we go up, literally or figuratively. The new society will be very literally walled off from any diversity, and protected by automation and insurmountable barriers. Warfare by numbers requires high walls, warfare by technology requires thick walls. Maybe the future is a very high, thin version of the Berlin Wall, but manned by AI with its own machine guns and rocket launchers, around every nation’s insular territory. Nations will be small, but that sounds like a feature not a bug.
For my part, I hope to modernize religion into the science it’s trying to be. You good people are better at the real world stuff, I defer to you for that.
The good news is, there are actual answers to the Eternal Questions, to the point of how big, how tall, etc., and that the white peoples are the ones to answer those questions.
General Epiminondas, I disagree.
This is the Zman’s most important post- not “who are we?”, but, “where must we go?”
The transition that we are experiencing in the modern era is from an evolutionary model that existed for millions of years (and was based upon natural fitness selection) to a new form of artificial evolution in which the fitness selection regime is being fundamentally altered by passive and active intervention by mankind. The left tail of the normal distribution is no longer being excised from the gene pool and our social mechanisms are now rewarding and reinforcing hive/herd traits.
Interesting. I recently read a piece about the mouse utopia experiment proposing a similar reason for the population crash. The author wondered if the West wasn’t heading the same direction for the same reason.
“Michael A Woodley suggests that what was going on was much more likely to be mutation accumulation; with deleterious (but non-fatal) genes incrementally accumulating with each generation and generating a wide range of increasingly maladaptive behavioural pathologies; this process rapidly overwhelming and destroying the population before any beneficial mutations could emerge to ‘save; the colony from extinction. ”
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2016/12/mouse-utopia-and-dysfunction-and.html?m=1
Modeling of our species’ evolutionary processes have been going on since the early 80s and the new variants are quite sophisticated. Most are based upon Game Theory architecture and utilize input from a variety of biological, medical, and social data sources. These tools aspire to achieve predictive accuracy and also allow for case study analysis. Preliminary findings are not encouraging.
“The mixed senator is Obama with a vagina.”
You mean Cory Booker? (rimshot!)
Two things:
This:
https://www.biohistory.org/
And this:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243604.Imperium
Mysteerious Rooshian Vooman recommends both.
Epigenetics is bullshit.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/epigenetics-it-doesnt-mean-what-quacks-think-it-means/
Z demonstrating the American trait to imagine there is a technological fix. If there is then it’s embryo selection.
As for politics, it’s all about the gibs. You need to figure that out.
There’s no doubt that American innovation has stalled, but that’s also true across the globe, even in Xi’s China. I’m starting to see merit in the view that we are entering a technological dark age, and the government systems that emerge from it will be more oppressive by necessity. The future is going to be small groups of conscientious people throwing a lot of sand into the gears of whatever monstrous system pops up.
China is hell bent on making this century their century. You see signs for this all throughout China. They now call the 20th C the lost century.
I’ve been traveling there for more the 30 years. The contrast between the 80s and today is epic, especially in places like Shanghai.
1990 – 2010
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/what-were-reading/Picture%2017.png
They are industrious, smart and pretty unified in overtaking the West in all areas.
They still need the West, they depend too heavily upon our markets. They are working on changing that.
The old saw that they lack creativity is a load of bull. Both the Chinese(300 million live in the modern world) and Japanese (120 million) file as many or more patents than does the US.
In patents that involve industrial technology it’s not even close.
Peter Thiel constantly points out that the last decades of real innovation ended with the 60s and correctly posits that during the 30s, with capital scarce, more things were invented or changed fundamentally than any other time. And that today “innovation” in Silicon Valley is mostly everybody copying everybody else business model and trying to squeeze out a few more points of margin. But nothing fundamental. Politics is at the same inflection point. Watching the Democrat town halls is like listening to the Spartacist Youth League Trotskyites that used to show up on campus periodically. Even Mayor Buttlplug is simply a red diaper baby that figured out the old philosophy needed a more intersectional and less hysterical veneer. Global finance and capitalism feels more like an exercise in finding the last few pockets of fat to digest and remit to a new class of oligarchs. What people miss in the assumption that history simply “repeats” is that the themes may be similar, but it’s the few fundamental changes in the rules of the game that people miss. These come back and end up biting them in the ass. See Tenner, Edward, “Why Things Bite Back”.
There is no “path” of history. It’s not a trajectory to Infinite Progress and it’s not a repeating cycle. It’s a random walk driven by human decisions (often based on trivial motives), natural forces, and a lot of just plain happenstance. We look back and try to make sense of it. The cyclical view of Spengler (and Toynbee, and Plato, and Ibn-Khaldun, and Glubb, and dozens of others) is just an exercise in cherry-picking. So is the “progressive” view of Marx (and Rousseau, and Gibbon, and Kuhn). They’re all seeing faces in the spots on a tortilla, or canals on Mars.
JR Wirth nailed it, fractals. Non-regular, non-predictable, but repeating at the macro, micro, and every level in between. The fractal patterns are easy to see in hindsight, but they suggest that forward predictions are tough, other than the repeats will come. When they come, and how they will be expressed, are a jumbled up mess. That’s fractals for you.
I think there are thematic “cycles”. But these are more a function of what is hard coded into our behavior. But to think that one can diagnose these precisely and somehow account for all sorts of exogenous factors is an exercise in hubris.
SLC:
“I don’t know if history repeats itself or continues on in new directions. All I know is that it sure rhymes a lot.”
History has a path; it’s not a random walk, nor does it lead back to we’re we started. With luck, we end up somewhere that’s the same, only different. Without luck, the nuclear arsenals are all launched in a paroxysm of pure madness, which is hardly impossible, given the spiritual chaos of our age and the fluorine in our water supply.
I’m so far right now that watching “ordinary” politics is like watching a cheap 1960’s sci-fi movie: bad actors on a crude, garishly decorated sound stage saying campy, stilted, cliched lines, with phony reactions to crude green-screen monsters.
I feel no connection to it at all, the pantomime politics of some foreign country.
You step back a bit from it all, and what you see is some sort of cross between the “Airplane” movies and anything Monty Python. But without the laughs. Helluva way to run a civilization.
Clown World Bro. Just take the honk pill, vote Jack Napier for President in 2024 and laugh
This reminds me of the film ‘The Entertainer’, about a talentless miscreant (played by L. Olivier) carrying on in the music hall tradition in a decaying English seaside resort, determined to soldier on in a medium that has outlived its time, because he simply doesn’t know what else to do.
It is obvious that the West has hit some sort of wall, when it comes to inventiveness in the social sphere. Regarding political organization, not much has happened since widespread democracy was embraced a century ago.
Only because people never listen to Uncle Felix’ four-point plan to do to party-rule democracy what social media did to establishment media. It goes like this:
1) You establish a political party, get elected to the legislature.
2) You establish a website where every item on the legislative agenda is put to a vote among the party members. The result of this vote will be transferred proportionally to your legislative seats: if a vote returns a 70/30% yea-nay on your website, that is replicated by your seats in the legislature.
So far, so good. Now you have direct democracy, but that’s unwieldy because nobody can be bothered to read everything that goes to the floor. So therefore:
3) On your website, you allow the party members to transfer their voting franchise to a candidate of their own choice: he votes for you on the party website.
That brought us full circle back to the old, representative democracy, but here’s the kicker:
4) At any time can you rescind your permission to let your representative vote for you on the party website: so when your candidate decides to vote for more immigration, you click the “vote manually” button, and vote yourself on that particular issue.
So now you have traditional, representative democracy with a veto option on individual bills, it didn’t require a constitutional amendment, and there’s nothing within the current legislation that could stop you.
Ignoring the technical side (electronic voting—bad idea), let’s concentrate on the aspect of Universal Suffrage—or what we now confuse with Democracy in modern parlance. In what manner does this proposal produce, educated, knowledgeable voters, with the life experience, understanding, and desire to promote the greater societal good over individual, tribalistic motivations? And that is the crux of the problem, the voters—not so much the system. You are treating a symptom, not the disease and I predict the patient will still die.
In what manner does this proposal produce, educated, knowledgeable voters, with the life experience, understanding, and desire to promote the greater societal good over individual, tribalistic motivations?
We won’t know before we try it.
If we’d had democracy in Europe, immigration would’ve been stopped stone cold in the sixties. According to Ann Coulter, the same is the case in the US.
We have to try it before we have an idea of what it will produce?
Felix, I applaud your effort, but have a low opinion of the general public wrt their ability at voting. I’m happy to apply your proposal to a select body of voters—indeed, I’d insist upon it. But half the population is below normal in IQ—and all that entails. That is the essence of the problem. We already know of few (read none) nations with a functioning democracy with a national IQ below 90. We are headed in that direction ourselves. We need less democracy, not more. Smarter voters, not more.
Get the biology correct, and it’s all downstream from there.
I’m happy to apply your proposal to a select body of voters—indeed, I’d insist upon it.
That’s the problem, right there. No matter who’s getting to do the selecting, your select body will be corrupted by the globalists in a matter of hours.
If you want to buy a Congressional vote in a Krullocratic system, you’d have to buy every single voter, because even if a guy had 5 million votes in his stewardship, these votes could disappear overnight – not just at the next election – so the globalists would gain little by turning him.
The problem with our current democracy is that it can be bought. You can’t do that in a krullocracy.
Also, if people had that kind of influence, I bet they’d take a lot more interest in politics. Why bother if all you do is choose between Tweedlidee and Tweedlidum every four years, and is screwed over even when your guy wins?
” so when your candidate decides to vote for more immigration, you click the “vote manually” button, and vote yourself on that particular issue”
This still requires your voters to pay attention and so still fails. As compsci says, the voters are the main problem.
This still requires your voters to pay attention and so still fails.
You simply appoint someone to be your watchdog, someone who gives you a heads-up when one of your hobbyhorses is on the agenda.
That way, you could design your own de facto party: you appoint your main vote steward, but then subscribe to a number of “We follow Congress so you don’t have to”-sort of parties.
Apart from immigration, my pet issue is energy policy, so I have a guy to warn be about attempts to smuggle in POC, and another guy to tell me when something energy-related, maybe give me a recommendation for my vote.
Also, your vote steward doesn’t even have to be in Congress, he could be anyone, taking machine politics entirely away from the party organisations the same way social media is taking away the raison d’etre for legacy media.
‘ “We follow Congress so you don’t have to”-sort of parties.’
We have this today, we call it media including the internet, and people still don’t pay attention. Or at least they don’t act.
Democracy doesn’t work because voters can’t be bothered.
We have this today, we call it media including the internet, and people still don’t pay attention.
They can’t do anything.
When you cast your ballot today, you pretty much have to suck up the poz and the treachery your candidate perpetrates with your “democratic” seal of approval.
But if you actually had the option of withdrawing your support when your candidate decided to sell your country down the river, I think a lot of people would pay attention when they got a text message saying: “Go block the new attempt to destroy America”. Especially if they could do it by just clicking a button.
The problem is not as much voters as it is party rule. If voters had their way, we wouldn’t be in these straits. Granted, we might be in other straits – people would vote themselves handouts – but we wouldn’t be replaced.
And as for the handouts, maybe a sovereign bankruptcy now and then is not such a bad thing: it’ll give the welfare state a haircut and be an object lesson to voters.
We have the energy at least among the lower classes to fight the hordes, it’s just that TPTB will send thousands of angry white men with machine guns and tanks to prevent us from defending our country. They want the U.S. to die.
Nation states aren’t going away. Tell that to Xi and he’ll laugh at you. The notion they are going away is something promoted by insane Western leaders and businessmen who live in a fantasy world. The only reason it’s happening to it because of the people who run the U.S. and Western Europe want it. It’s not that the people do. The Poles, Finns, Russians, Hungarians, etc certainly like having their own country.
They work perfectly well provided you have a homogeneous population and culture. The countries that have embraced diversity such as ours are headed for a bloodbath. Because few bother to notice the immense amount of energy it takes to keep these states from going Rwanda among themselves. It’s patently non-sustainable in the long term.
It all goes back to John Lennon, who wrote Imagine, the Nicene Creed of the left, which is why they have a shrine to him in Central Park.
You have generations that build things, and generations (like that one, and subsequent ones) that squander them. The reason we’re so careless in destroying this place, is because we never built it. We never paid the dear price to see it built. We never sacrificed, and therefore we condemn future generations to once again sacrifice.
This is why I go apesh*t when I hear baby boomers talk about how tough they had it in the 70’s. How they had to work a summer balancing tires in the heat. That’s funny because my earliest childhood memories involve looking at empty Reunite bottles by the jacuzzi, playing with a mood ring (its black today) and asking what that little amber bottle is that was thrown out of a Corvette window.
Obama was actually right about one thing. “You didn’t build this.” A broken clock is right twice a day.
Rather than ‘The Nicene Creed’ of the Left, ‘Imagine’ is more like their Lord’s Prayer. Their Bible would be some combination of Mao’s Little Red Book, Saul Alinsky, and Dr. Reuben’s ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.’ Their Nicene Creed changes weekly; you have to watch the late night “comics” to know what today’s creed is. At least the Nicene Creed (ignored by most ‘evolved’ ‘Catholics’ today, in practice anyway) – like muh Constitution – is still there, in the printed texts, waiting to be read.
The shame of Lennon’s deplorable song is that (I think) he’d grown out of that fatuousness by his death, and might have wanted to walk it back a bit. People call McCartney silly and witless, but until that monstrosity he did with Stevie Wonder (Ebony and Ivory) there can no doubt that the most vacuous song ever spawned by these two guys was ‘Imagine’, a kind of ‘dirty bomb’ that sickened our generation.
Nothing must be allowed to alter the Program. The destruction of a city by Muslims will not change the Program; the extermination of Christians and their churches will not change the Program. The revival of old diseases sweeping through our cities and towns will not alter the Program. The combined impact of overpopulation, ignorance and filth on our natural environment will not alter the Program. The widespread sexual exploitation of children and young women, too, must not alter the Program.
Only the Program matters.
The universe is full of fractals. Human nature is it’s own fractal. There’s a pattern to it and that pattern is circular and ancient.
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes
Karl Marx got it right — the relations between the means of production get all screwy and you get epochal change. E.g. the transition from Middle Ages to Early Modern. The ruling class was all-in on the old relations — swords-and-crops — whereas in reality, the new means of production were guns-and-coins. In our era, “production” is almost meaningless. Instead, the relevant forces are “access” and “communication speed.” You can’t meaningfully control a “proletariat” that has so much stuff that it dies of heart disease and diabetes, but you CAN control it by controlling its access to health care. You can’t control a “bourgeoisie” that lives a material life that would put an Ottoman Pasha to shame, but cut off his ability to get online and… The first group to figure that out, and work through the implications, will be the rulers when the fallout clears.
Many of these lesser and procedural matters will become irrelevant when the blue state cities begin burning down. Imagine the Rodney King riots with no law enforcement presence, National Guard deployments, or Korean grocer sharpshooters on the roof. Coming to the vibrant city closest to you.
That’s why we don’t really need a name or an agenda. What we need is an understanding of the present and likely near-future circumstances. The Left are not the only ones suffering from a form of normalcy bias. Our normalcy bias is simply a different one than theirs is.
What we need is an understanding of the present and likely near-future circumstances…
I would also add we need an understanding of what the consequences of our inaction will be also because we really really aren’t going to like losing but it seems most really don’t understand that…
This may never happen.
I live in a California and while we have rampant decay, there is so much legal weed, I don’t think we can get a good riot going if we tried.
As for that mythic day of collapse, again we can work around that and make sure there is food and cable and weed at the State level . We’ve done this many times before and can again.
Hoping for the riot season is just lazy. If the Dissident Right wants power or to end rule by the cities , they are going to have to fine a way to make it happen. The Zombies aren’t going to do it for you or make it easy
A.B.Prosper, I live in California too, and I don’t think it will start here. Look at the places with the highest rates of black-on-black major crimes—Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City, New Orleans. The fifth is DC, but I expect the politicians to see that the riots get quickly put down there. There will be copycat behavior in other places. The Rodney King thing initiated many small riots/looting sprees in vibrant areas of most major cities. Neighborhoods and cities with a lot of social cohesion will not see it, but most major cities already have their socially atomized vibrant “no-go” areas already. Stay away from those. Outside of those areas, people and neighborhoods will be tested, and will need to exercise their inner Korean grocer sharpshooter.
Automating and using software to process most of government’s functions will never, ever happen here. The grift and political power that comes to the politicians through the current system is too great to let go.
Automation, as currently practiced, is a disintermediation of the current structure of things. Ask taxi drivers, car dealers, or realtors how that works. The fat gets cut out, but do do the profit margins and many of the jobs, especially the high priced middlemen. The political profit margins and jobs must be maintained, at all costs, and so it will be done.
A government that doesn’t redistribute wealth is a failed state. That’s the job of the State, to put money to a good collective use.
Libertarian thinking is entirely transaction and right based “You have no right to welfare and stealing is immoral.” but human society are based on reciprocity “We owe each other”
The two can be reconciled but it doesn’t allow someone to opt out of paying for society . In order to be allowed to be in business for example you have to give back and if you prefer not to hire people, fine. Either the State will do it or we’ll pay them anyway with your money.
That is the reason that we have welfare in urban societies is we need stability.
And no its not just food riots, such systems tie people into the common system , government good and bad actually is something we are supposed to do together
It also prevents bad effects of good individual choices
Its very good if people save some money but if everyone is hoarding cash against the next layoff or for retirement or for healthcare than the economics effects of all that capital are terrible
Best case deflation, worst case asset inflation
You don’t want post pension Japan or a massive amounts of excess capital with low spending. Consumption is the economy
They key though is to have a homogeneous population, without that, it becomes a spoils state and no one wants to help anyone else.
A.B., your last sentence says it all. You need to start there, then expound. In general, the welfare state as it exists today, in our multiracial population, is doomed to failure and counter productive. You seem to describe it as some type of righteous Danegeld to be paid or else. I see it as unsustainable in a highly technological society where a smaller and smaller fraction of the population are capable of contribution such that they produce enough to earn an adequate lifestyle while the less productive increase in numbers and need. Nothing said here is a promotion of some dystopian Social Darwinism solution, just the realization that no proposals for “more of the same”, e.g., UBI, are going to lead to a fix. At some point, the productive are just going to pack it in and take their place in the dole line—and then it’s game over.
I guess I do since the net effect of high technology has been nearly 50 years of low white fertility.
The White TFR has been below replacement since 1972 (before roe v wade and ubiquitous easy divorce) and its never gone up . At all period in any nation.
I do know it appears there is no social pressure, civic memes or religious memes you can use to hack peoples cognitive process into having babies either
Your choice is steady income and steady work or no babies.
And note the lower bound is perilously close to zero. The global record was in Asia at .4 per family (that is less than 1/5 replacement) ) and the European record in East Germany at .7 (1/3 replacement) and yes its economic not moral.
Unless you are willing to make sure there is enough work your choices are not good
You can pay up, die back until there is enough jobs (and note this could be 80% or more if technology holds) or give it to the Amish
The elite would like to replace everyone but this isn’t effective, anyone with an IQ enough to do labor is effected by urbanization, Hispanics at a faster rate than Whites in fact
Basically unless we take all that Ayn Rand notions of who is productive and toss that in the chipper, replacing society with something that works, we die off.
I don’t know for sure what works though we could try Distributism and tweaking the tax code to favor middle class and working class jobs over machines
However doing anything at all will require an authoritarian state and will not be achieved with the current political system
We may well end up with an economic collapse , a radical die back of the population (1/3 or more) and as a bunch of poorer nations none of whom will be able to recover in any meaningful way .
Too many on the Dissident Right or at least the Militia Right seem to think if we could just break the cities we’ll be fine. This is not the case, empires do not go down easy and sometimes they stay down
I worked on a project to completely re-engineer and automate the SSA’s disability appeals process. It was almost a billion dollar project – but – not a single job could be removed. Instead of people handing paper from one to the other, it was simply people handing electronic files from on to the other. The unions own these agencies and will never allow them to actually automate anything.
Sure.
People need work though and if the private sector is unwilling or unable, than the public sector steps in.
The only way around this is to have a strong yeomanry where most people own their own livelihood or at least are skilled labor.
We haven’t had that since around the 1930’s or so.
A yeoman system is not compatible with large scale global enterprise.
The Conservative assertion that government wants to grow itself is entirely true but its also the case that the elected and appointed would prefer to have to deal with a minimum number of people. Its way easier to take money from the insurance industry than handle a 100 constituents or worse try and come up with something that genuinely solves health care issues
That can be solved with a Constitutional Amendment limiting corporate and group speech and how money is used and given but it won’t solve the underlying issue
You can have a heavily automated society or you can have a tradition driven society , in the US of independent free men. They are not compatible
The problem is though the first is not stable , doesn’t allow reproduction or continuity of culture . The last is however materially less prosperous and slower to adapt.
Basically a mayfly vs a turtle. Choose one.
There’s a way to solve both. Universal Basic Income. You would be better off automating a lot of government functions and just paying people a stipend so they can do whatever they want instead of agitating the rest of us. Who knows they may come up with something useful. Even if they don’t we would have less hassle.
As for Corporations giving people campaign funds. The supreme court ruled they are people well then they can pay taxes the same way people can. Us the exact same forms and they can lose limited liability just like people…or they can declare themselves an artificial entity and give no campaign funds. Let them choose.
when reality copies fantasy, https://youtu.be/9tIcnydrwFY. Like Idiocracy, now highly reflective.
I lived in Rochester NY for 5 years and witnessed the decline of 3 of the greatest companies in America – Xerox, Kodak, and Bausch & Lomb. While I worked for Xerox, we collaborated with both companies, so we learned a lot about each other. Each of these companies lost their way because they became so enmeshed in their own internal bullshit that they didn’t even know who their customers were, much less what they wanted. Although populated by many brilliant engineers, management was the biggest bunch of lying and self serving bureaucrats you could imagine. Xerox became almost entirely run by women, and they gloried in the sisterhood and advancing each others careers. The CIO won a big award back in the 90’s by outsourcing IT functions to EDS in a deal that almost destroyed both companies. I am sure she went on to bigger and better things. The bottom line is, I see America doing the exact same thing. It has turned into a massive self serving freak show where “character” no longer matters, government is just a way to gain power and pilfer the treasury, and the elections seem to be some kind of freak show, where the media tries to boost the weirdest candidate available to the top.
Just like those 3 formerly great companies, America has lost focus and is terminally addicted to fighting each other over bullshit. I cannot think of a single democrat that would not sell out the country so they could rule over a heaping pile of rubble. As long as they have power, they could not give a shit about what happens to everyone else. Unfortunately that goes for most of the republicans as well. Those companies still go on. Baush & Lomb sells salt water, contact lenses, and medical imaging equipment, Xerox tries to copy whatever the Japanese and Koreans are doing, and Kodak, I cannot remember what they do any more. They have all sold off any divisions that actually made money, and now I guess they are just trying to sell stuff other companies make at a competitive price.
They were all destroyed by their own management and everyone underneath them jockeying for position for the scraps. And, while they were doing it, everyone was getting A++ ratings and bonuses. America is doing the same. We will limp along until China puts us out of our misery, but there will be a lot of suffering until that happens. Anyone who tries to bring us back on track will rapidly be destroyed, like they are trying to do to Trump. Until then it will be an endless circus freak show where the lady with three penises and a beard, who promises everything is free will be our next great leader and everything that happens will be blamed on the guy who tried to keep it from happening.
Until then it will be an endless circus freak show where the lady with three penises and a beard, who promises everything is free will be our next great leader and everything that happens will be blamed on the guy who tried to keep it from happening.
Yea as Tom Baugh said in STM the cheaters will always try and get the suckers to kill off or blame the grudgers who are trying to wake the suckers up that they are being cheated…
I look forward to the glorious administration of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Only he can truly MAGA!
Getting to beyond archeofuturism is going to be difficult. A big part of Faye’s views were dependent upon the coming clash of civilizations, especially the north-south conflict. Before we get to block chains we’ll actually need a real Arctic Alliance to make sure the north cooperates in cutting off the south.
We could make things a lot easier on ourselves by cutting off the gravy train to the south but that would require China’s cooperation. As they develop Africa they will displace more and more Africans…who will head north. It’s almost as if the Chinese have learned from our elites: Africans make effective bio weapons against your enemies and those you want to weaken.
Block Chain feudalism has a nice ring to it. The SciFi genre Space Opera has often plowed these fields as have feudal romances. Except for a few exceptions, politics pretty much operated along these lines until industrialization.
We’ll probably need a military dictatorship to clear the decks to get to that point.
There won’t be a alliance. Why should the Chinese ally themselves with whites who are intent on killing themselves off?
The Chinese aren’t stupid like we are. They see us as competition and will use the Africans to knock us off. Then they move in with a small amount of forces and butcher the Brown skins.
Ha bioweapon
https://www.google.com/search?q=giga+nigger&client=ms-android-sonymobile&prmd=ivn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiPs6rPr-nhAhUYURUIHZm8BVUQ_AUoAXoECAsQAQ&cshid=1556131033560&biw=360&bih=512&dpr=3#imgrc=-bU7w4QKru3pkM
Comin fo dem gibs
I’ve long had similar thoughts about the path forward for the US. Much neocon nattering about “who we are” as a country without much about who we aspire to be. The opposition to a Convention of the States to amend the Constitution and how it might run out of control never struck me as a bad thing.
The US Constitution as a framework for our government will forever remain, regardless of how amended it becomes around the edges, at best a civic-nationalist barrel within which we swim while our enemies shoot us.
A runaway Convention produced the US Constitution. The US Constitution produced (or was powerless to prevent) the current morass known as The Swamp. May another Convention produce the next governing framework that is as much improved over our Constitution as it was over the Articles of Confederation. I fear only the Second Republic of the Americas can truly make America great again.
True. In fact, the failure of the US government only 73 years after the ratification of the constitution is damning evidence. Civil wars rarely settle anything. They only point out that the iceberg below the water line was much bigger than previously assumed.
It has been pointed out before that the GOP drives while looking in the rear view mirror. The Democrats drive way too fast and NEVER look in the rear view mirror.
I think fascism was the logical end of western civilization. The traditions of the past were embraced with a revolutionary leader guiding the nation forward. It was a fusion of socialist ideas needed for the economy of the time but guided by the nation and reality. Fascist governments tended to work with traditional institutions, as opposed to socialist total seizure of control. A throwback to the enlightenment just happened to have the largest industrial base in the world and beat it off, but in the process also destroyed the traditions of the past in a propaganda war.
So here we cling to the rotting flotsam of the enlightenment staring at the rotting flotsam of socialism adrift in the nihilistic sea of modernity.
Thank you, sir. I have thought the same thing many times, but lacked the eloquence to state it so succinctly.
Xi has simply become the best practitioner to date of the insight Mussolini had about socialism during WWI. China today looks more like the fascist state the Il Duce dreamed of, but could never execute because he was, well, stuck with Italy and Italians.
Perhaps more simply put, universal suffrage was the end of Western civilization, at least as we describe it by pointing towards European and English speaking nations. As we see in China, a fascist, strongman type government is capable of advancing a country from third world to first in a breathtakingly short period, while the party keeps control and provides a backstop to complete dictatorship, e.g., another Mao. The people prosper more than they ever dreamed possible.
However, the story of China’s strongman, Xi, is not completely written yet, is it. Xi, being human, may well consider his role as leader to be unique and of the utmost necessity for the greater good. He now has no term limits (IIRC). We’ve repeatedly seen such men use their newly enhanced powers to eliminate any possible opposition and removal. Remember the last days of the Roman Republic, when the Senate made Caesar (after winning the civil war and bringing peace) Dictator. A position previously awarded only when the Republic was in the greatest danger, and then for a limited period of time.
If universal suffrage is democracy’s Achilles heal, perhaps strongmen is fascism’s.
But how long will the Western countries be “technological, post-industrial and post-scarcity societies” with mass 3rd World immigration?
The new political philosophy will be built for an age of unprecedented migration of people incapable of maintaining our current society of plenty. As Z-Man has said, we’re moving from the Ideological Age to the Demographic Age. Political philosophies and movements must also adapt. Political parties and movements based on ideas will fall. Political parties and movements based on demographics will rise.
Keep your eye on South Africa. There’s your model right there.
The white South Africans, as far as I can tell from a distance, are practicing the lifestyle and attitudes of the Australians in Nevil Shute’s “On The Beach”.
SA bears watching, but I’m not sure it’s an exact model. We basically have in SA the Blacks against the Whites and the Whites are an extreme minority. The US has at least three major minority groups, four if we include Asians. It may be argued that all the non-white groups now seem united in hatred for Whites, but that is not quite the same as saying they are united in solidarity/love for each other.
In S.A its obvious, Whites must leave or die but the US is not like that
The three groups are far from unified in hating Whites, Its much more complex than that
In Southern California , broadly no one likes Blacks though Whites will sometimes tolerate decent ones . everyone including Whites are starting to dislike Chinese a lot.
Whites and other Asian groups get along fine with Amerasians, part , Korean Thai and Filipinos being fairly common.
Hispanics and Whites get along acceptably with some friction but again this is cultural, White Hispanics and Whites get along fine and Americanized Hispanics are often part White anyway
Indios are basically ignored and make up a separate group
There is some conflict but race war now is pretty unlikely
If it gets hot though Blacks and Chinese will be in a lot of trouble, Asians in some and the White/Hispanic thing will get very complex.
Where its gets even more complex is if the Norteños “Northsider” gang affiliated Mexicans , those above Bakersfield ,get into it, Some of don’t much like Whites, prefer Blacks though again this is not universal
So quite a few sides , all heavily armed with the White/Latino side being top dog. That said soft Whites would do well to leave or harden up.
A.B., your posting is more nuanced than my simplistic analysis. It also explains some of the dissonance I encounter here in the Southwest wrt my Hispanic neighbors. I tend to agree. Thanks.
Expect all the coalition of the fringes to hate whites more in the future due to the relentless hate whitey propaganda in the media and educational system.
One Image of Californian Koreans that Whites should take to heart and learn from was of them shooting from the rooftops of their stores to keep the looting Hutu at bay during the Rodney King riots.
It may be argued that all the non-white groups now seem united in hatred for Whites, but that is not quite the same as saying they are united in solidarity/love for each other.
The only thing that matters though to us is they are United against us and what are we going to do about it besides sit around and note our own demise…Does anyone actually care about seeing that it doesn’t happen…I just don’t know anymore…Sad That…
Our hope is that when genuinely threatened, Whites will “harden up” as A.B. succinctly puts it. Even in my admittedly typically dark opinion, this is not impossible nor improbable.
Here in the Southwest, we have any number of folk—myself Included—who have come from improbable backgrounds and have taken arms and patrolled the border with a diverse array of other like minded patriots, effectively. But of course are small in numbers and overwhelmed by the influx of drugs and IA’s.
The folks you see on TV are most often the yahoos, who want publicity and self aggrandizement. The smart folk keep quiet and go about their business.
Citizen, good observation. Taken to its logical conclusion, immigration—leading to the decline of the producers and the growth of multiple minority groups/division—will lead to scarcity, which will lead to greater conflict between the minorities over the remaining resources.
Perhaps this is a possible cycle posed by Zman. Scarcity is what initially drove our early American settlers here and what motivated them, albeit the fight for resources at that time was with Nature.
This. Z-man lays out how the Progressive view of history (toward a Utopian terminus) is bogus, and then turns right around and embraces something very similar, namely, his view that history has progressed to the point that we are past scarcity.
It is not so.
All it would take is the right scenario for a civil war in the United States, along with a big enough war on the world stage, and we would reach a state where (to paraphrase the book of Proverbs) scarcity would come upon us like an armed robber.
We presently are experiencing a lack of true scarcity because the West is still largely a high-trust society, and it has a highly-complex, highly-interconnected and highly-efficient system for the production and delivery of goods. What if, as Z-man suggests, we are reaching the climax of a super-cycle, one superimposed on and pumped up in amplitude by the Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning Cycles? What if the upcoming Fourth Turning conflict (peak due in 2025 time frame) results in a cascade failure of these complicated interconnected systems of support?
Drop the power grid, even a partial loss for months, and all of that luxury living disappears. Trust will evaporate. Means of production and delivery will vanish. People will starve, kill one another, and die.
Contra Z-man, scarcity is not vanquished. In this world, we will ever live in the shadow of the spectre of scarcity.
I thought maybe there was a glimmer of hope during the Trump campaign when immigration was front and center. Since the focus was almost entirely on illegals and the Muslim ban was about terrorism, it quickly became apparent that it was all about law and order with Trump, and not about ethnicity and race, and who belongs here.
The patriotic MAGA folks make a lot of noise about Ilhan Omar, wanting her to shut up and get with the program, but there’s never talk from them about actually not allowing people like her, the Sun People from the Third World, to immigrate here. It’s unthinkable, because that would be discrimination and racism, which are not allowed in the West today. Nobody wants to break that taboo even if it means many more Omars elected to office.
Recently we’ve discussed things that would have been unthinkable a few years ago that have now become reality, but somehow racism and nondiscrimination seem stuck in place, as America slides towards the third world, or breaks up, or whatever comes next.
There’s a post on the American Thinker blog about requiring natural born citizenship for all elected Federal office holders. I’d go even further and say all cabinet members, Federal judges, and State elected officials. Maybe more categories.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/should_natural_born_citizenship_be_a_requirement_for_all_federal_elected_offices.html
I’d add a 50 year moratorium on all immigration, full stop. Even spouses and foreign-born children (they could get residency, by not citizenship). No H1Bs, no visas for foreigners at out universities. Etc.
I’ve always advocated for a rule that says you vote where you were born. States may add a residency requirement, but if you move to a new area, you don’t get to vote like the people born there. This saps the value of immigration as a weapon in democracy. That said, the people in charge are moving toward abandoning democracy, beyond the ceremonial. In twenty years, elections will cease in many parts of the West.
Immigration and democracy can’t go together long-term. It’s impossible. One side will bring in ringers, consolidate power and never let go. We’re seeing that in real time in the United States, but it’s also happening in the UK and other countries.
Democracy is not our future.
Democracy was never supposed to be our future.
It was a corruption of the system right from inception and has always been about “bringing in ringers” . The only thing that has changed is that they ran out of ringers within the existing population – so now they have to import them.
Good. The key is to make it the Dissident Right’s future not the Left or the Corporations
The problem the West is facing is that we’ve been under socially Leftist regimes for so long we’ve forgotten what an Conservative regime would be like
Social Conservatism and Economic Nationalism with systems designed to mitigate for the effect of technology in creating rootless populations , a good example being our hosts “Vote where you are born” rule
Having thought the same thing more than once my version is in order to vote you must be natural born citizen (born on US soil to 2 parents who are US citizens at the time) have only US citizenship , be at least 21 years old , own property and have lived or had residency for military types for at least ten consecutive years in that state
This way of doing things requires embracing authority though, no B.S libertarian stuff. Libertarianism is fine when you have very few large corporations and a population that is moral, homogeneous and mostly made of rural yeomanry. We don’t have that
As far as the economics, a proper Nu State would have to steward the economy, control corporations especially large ones and push to a population of smaller independent business owners
My opinion is that urbanization and automation driven economies of scale raise the cost of child bearing and lower wages to such a degree that once they set in , our did around the 1970’s , fertility plummets and thus far in nearly 50 years has never recovered anywhere.
1.8 or 1.6 forever as we have now is catabolic collapse guaranteed
The lowest ever recorded was in China with .4 and for a nation East Germany briefly .8
1/5 or 1/3 of replacement
I think but I do not know that a system encouraging smaller famliy owned enterprise in a rooted place might work to make families workable
Again it might not and the pace of change may simply have overwhelmed humanity and it may turn out Alvin Toffler was right about too much change back in 1970’s Future Shock
Like your ideas Brother but I think it will be one of those things that can only implemented after the crash/chaos… I’ve been trying to keep track of all the good ideas so if I’m around after then maybe I will have an informed voice on how we go about starting anew…I use to have hopes that we could change course without having the death and destruction cycle but the more I see the more that hope is fading…Not because of the Commies but by those on our side that can’t seem to get their act together…Sad That…
” had residency for military types ”
Why the special treatment for welfare types?
Otherwise, I largely agree.
Toffler was right . The rate of change has long exceeded the rate of progress (but not “Progress”)
“In twenty years, elections will cease in many parts of the West.” They de facto already have. You get to vote for which actor will be the face of the exact same blob. Or you can vote for an initiative like Brexit, that the state will simply refuse to enact.
The deciding vote in delaying Brexit was cast by a Nigerian-born MP *who was released from jail* to do so. There will be no Brexit, ever.
You people did not vote correctly! You stupid people will vote again until you get it right!
Mayor Buttstuff, the current flavor of the week, was elected to the city hall of a dump like South Bend with less than 10% of the eligible electorate voting. DeBlasio in NYC was much the same. Voting already appears to be ceremonial exclusively in many places.
Indeed. Albeit, I’ve never missed voting in an election, I am now realizing that voting only serves to validate the existing, corrupt system. Old habits die hard.
DeBlowhole won the first election solely on the promise to agree to all union contract demands AND backdate pay increases. Once in office, barnacles are easier to remove.
Not like long ago, when Guiliani ran against Dinkins, it was a million votes on each side … nearly the entire eligible pool cast a vote one way or the other.
More recently, DeBlasio got ~800k votes, Joe Lhota got about 250k votes.
Where did the other half of the eligible voters go??
One side of my family was from Illinois. The other side, Indiana. Both dating back to post Revolution land grants from the cash poor Continental Congress. Today, no one is left in Illinois. Most of the Indiana side is still there. Your theory probably would have worked to keep the crazies from taking over.
Speaking to normies, this is one that everyone “gets”.
As California goes, so goes the nation…because they’ll flood your native state and vote their disfunction in weather you want it or not. (See UT, CO, NV, Idaho soon, etc)
Western states resent the hell out of it, but “‘muh democracy!” Whatever can you do but embrace the inevitable. Lay back, and think of 13 colony America?
(One vote per household, no one votes under age 35, freedom of association…not so much. But great Zman ideas)
No. No to letting them get residency. If they must be with their families, they can do that in their own countries, not in ours. Let those already here leave. That’s “Family unification.” The real thing.
So are you bullish on blockchain, I know that you don’t think that Bitcoin is money and that we’re probably going to enter an economy where value is tied in some way with energy instead of fiat currency.
That was a rhetorical flourish. That said, walk around and think about the government duties that can be automated today. People tend to focus on the private sector, but much of the administrative state can be turned over to software. That truth places us well outside of anything political thinkers of the past ever contemplated. That does not mean those prior age thinkers are irrelevant. It just means we are in need of new thinking to incorporate the massive changes in the West.
Walking around Saint Petersburg, what struck me is my ancestors left, assuming they would never see any of it again. Travel for most people was a massive undertaking. I visited four countries in a week. The modern migrant can live in an alien land, stay in touch with his home village via his mobile phone and make frequent trips home.
Much of the administrative state seems to be, consciously or not, outsourced to putatively private organizations already. Amazon now in effect bans books spreading crimethink. Domain registration is denied routinely to dissident sites yet porn bordering on cheese pizza lives freely online. One of the dissident right groups just had their bank account frozen, by the bank itself. Imagine if a bank discriminated against a group because it advocated Muslim interests; it could never happen. Better comparison: suppose a bank did this to a group that supported Sanders or socialist views. The bank would be sued forcefully or the administrative state itself would step in and coerce it to cooperate. Make no mistake, certain political views now have been made effectively illegal in practice if not in law.
The government grifters and the industrial cartels have teamed up. Win-win for them. Not so much for the rest of us.
And all at somebody else’s expense.
Value already is tied to energy. The dollar is not a real fiat currency, it’s more of a specie currency anchored in oil (and a basket of other commodities). You want oil, you need dollars.
Yes, the grand metro-dollar bargain with the Saudis. Folks don’t realize how Hobbesian things get once you no longer have a reserve currency….
Maybe it’s a good thing; being able to print money at will is the pre-eminent weapon of our enemies.
“Whispered to the conservatives… today too there are still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern “progress”). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more.”
– Nietzsche