Regulating The Public Space

There are few things good about aging, but one of those benefits is you start seeing how history often repeats itself. There is nothing new under the sun, but when you are young most everything is new to you. When you get old, you have experienced enough to begin noticing the repeats of things you saw in your youth. For example, those old enough to remember the early the days of the internet, probably recognize what’s happening with the tech giants trying to regulate the public space.

By early days, I’m not talking about the iPhone 4 days. I’m talking about the Windows 3.1 days, when the internet was for weirdos, who knew how modems worked and liked tricking the phone company for free long distance. It was when hobbyists assembled their own computers It was when NewEgg was called Egghead and operated in shopping centers. That was before the phrase “social media” existed, but there was still plenty of social media and plenty of people on it, just smarter people.

Usenet and bulletin board systems served the same role as Twitter and Facebook, without the cute names and billionaires trying to control the platforms. Like the big social media platforms, they started with the same general idea. They would be open forums for people to debate and argue. The internet was going to be free from the censorship of the old media and free from government control. The same things people say about bitcoin today were said about the internet in the olden thymes.

What happened to those first public forums and those that succeeded them is a good lesson for understanding what is happening to the big social media platforms. Usenet, for example, started as an open platform for anyone with internet access. It did not take long for jerks and troublemakers to arrive. Soon, the squabbling and fighting fractured the community into separate channels. In short order, Usenet became a million little havens for like-minded people to talk about their thing in semi-private.

Bulletin boards followed a similar path. Their successor, the message board also followed a similar arc. The first boards for college sports, for example, soon turned into free-for-alls and shattered into hundreds of small, private boards. Unlike Usenet, the creators of these boards initially tried to regulate the content by having moderators ban trouble makers and people trolling for attention. That just encouraged the trouble makers to find clever ways around the rules, in order to disrupt the communities.

What was discovered in those early efforts of public forums is that the public is pretty awful and needs to be regulated. You just can’t let everyone into a public forum and have them say what they wish. On the other hand, the cost of regulating who enters and what is said is prohibitive. The more you regulate the forum, the cleverer the troublemakers get at disruption. This sets off an increasingly costly game of cat and mouse between the moderators and the people seeking to disrupt the forum.

The solution to the problem was the oldest of solutions. Peaceful separation allowed everyone to have a forum, but it reduced the incentives for the disruptive. Going into the forum of a rival group, for example, and posting a bunch of troll-bait, did not provide the same dopamine rush to the troll as it did on a public forum. There was no one around to see it and cheer it. It was like being a graffiti artist in a blind community. These trolling efforts were quietly removed and the community could easily ignore them.

That is what will happen with the big social media hubs. Twitter is the first that will splinter into a million separate channels, as it is the most public. Gab has weathered the assaults and now provides a home for dissidents. Telegram is now becoming the favorite tool for young people creating small communities. Others are working on alternatives for other tribes, looking for a place on-line both free of censorship and the sorts of people who just seek to disrupt. This is a repeat of the message board phenomenon.

YouTube and Facebook are a bit different. Facebook already has the ability to let users self-segregate within the forum. That solves the trolling a bit, but the company is run by the sorts of people who liked being moderators on chat boards in the old days. They can’t help but meddle in the discourse of others, even those in private groups on the platform. Given the demographics of the platform, it will probably collapse at some point as people realize its user base is old people, robots and gullible advertisers.

YouTube is the one to watch. As server capacity outstrips demand, the cost of hosting video will keep dropping. There are services popping up as alternatives to YouTube, with some starting as commercial enterprises. This service lets you create a branded channel that can be distributed on a variety of platforms. If you have talent and can hold an audience, the days of relying on YouTube are numbered. Since YouTube has never made money, it’s hard to see a future for the service as currently constructed.

None of this is to say that the tech oligopolies will come to their senses and stop trying to suppress speech on-line. In all probability, they will exhaust themselves trying to stamp out dissent, which means things will get much worse. Apple, for example, is now censoring speech within chat programs like Telegram. Microsoft is promising to moderate speech over Skype. The people behind these efforts are driven by hatred and self-loathing, so they lie awake at night thinking about this stuff.

The trouble is, it is expensive. The latest YouTube banning probably cost the company $10 million dollars to organize. It’s pretty clear they invested a lot of manpower in reviewing specific videos. The return on that investment was mostly bad press and greater awareness by regulators that there is a problem. That’s a lesson from the old days too. No matter how right they were to regulate users, the forum moderators were always looked upon unfavorably. They were the prison guards of the system.

That last bit is probably key. A decade ago, Apple was a cool brand run by an equally cool genius who liked wearing black turtlenecks. Now it is seen as a Chinese electronics company run by an angry homosexual. Similarly, YouTube used to be a place where young people could express themselves. Now it’s where old Jewish women yell at young people for using naughty language.With every censorship effort, the reputation of the oligopolies declines. Silicon Valley is now the universal villain.

The point of all this is not that libertarians are right that the market will magically sort out the problem for us. All of this could have been avoided if the government had done its job and cracked down on these oligopolies a long time ago. The natural disaggregation of the public space will not happen without help from the state either. It’s that wide open public forums cannot last. It was tried decades ago by smarter people and a much smarter user base. Eventually, peaceful separation became the only alternative.

If you like living off the sweat of others, then ignore the following. On the other hand, if you care about your community and want to support those working hard on your behalf, consider supporting my work by donating the price of a beer or a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. Unlike those mega-corporations, I will not use your money to destroy your family and community. Or, you can send money to me at: P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432.

209 thoughts on “Regulating The Public Space

  1. Pingback: Scrapbook. – Dark Brightness

  2. “A decade ago, Apple was a cool brand run by an equally cool genius who liked wearing black turtlenecks. Now it is seen as a Chinese electronics company run by an angry homosexual.“

    An angry self-righteous homosexual.

    Problem with Apple is that the only alternative is Android/Google, queen of customer surveillance.

  3. From “I’m not entirely sure I am cut out to be a media whore” to “If you like living off the sweat of others” in just seven short weeks.
    Disappointing. Z-Man, I thought better of you.

    • I hate to say it, but you make a point. The monetization of the Z-man is noted, with its associated ‘fluidity of principle’. I’m still sending him a soiled twenty, though.

      • I’m mulling it over while continuing my mite, I thought the “help me get out of Lagos” was a big error. I see it’s been dropped.
        Let’s give him some time it’s early days.

        Now that he’s monetizing, the fuckups that be will be after him so I hope he’s got the server/host bases covered.

      • I’m mulling it over though still sending my monthly mite.
        His “pay for me to flee Lagos: was dumb beyond belief.
        But it’s early days and I’m sure I’d have not done better,

      • Unsure if some of you are joking. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter how someone “comes across” when asking for funding. (Not an easy thing to ask for.) Just consider the mental and spiritual fulfillment we gain from our top polemicists in this time. The sheer joy of the experience on a DAILY basis. Simple equation: What is that worth to you?

  4. While I share your opinions on big social brands, most of the public doesn’t. Apple and Google/YouTube are still insanely popular brands. They may be in decline, but to say that Apple is “seen” (by whom?) as a “Chinese electronics company run by an angry homosexual” is fantasy, wishful thinking. Almost nobody sees it that way, and the collective voice of the entire dissident sphere isn’t loud enough to meme that into reality.

    I’m not intending to blackpill, but the dissident thinkers need to deal with reality. Huffing one’s own farts will only lead to failing tactics and nonsensical strategies. Forget about public opinion; as you said early on, the public is pretty awful.

  5. The real analog for Twitter is IRC and not Usenet. Usenet is the analog for forums.

    Even the hashtag comes from IRC as it is the symbol that precedes channel names.

    On IRC anyone can create a channel. Persons can hold channels by running bots. Eventually some IRC networks let channels get registered with permanent owners.

    IRC channels with operators would kick / ban trolls. Trolls would fight back with flooding. It was all rather fun.

    Twitter is an asynchronous chat services that pushes chat out to subscribers of users (aka personal channels) and saved hashtags (if you use say, Tweetdeck). That is how IRC works. It is not how Usenet works.

    The Z-man always is in the neighborhood of the subject matter, but always wrong in the details. He gets the history of everything wrong, consistently. He must have an IQ of at most 122.

    • And the guest at the party craps all over the host. I guess your mother never taught you any manners when you were a kid, John.

    • This arrogance of yours, John, does it serve you well in everyday life? You speak ex cathedra as if everyone here has failed to finish high school.

      I assume your mother bragged about your reported IQ and that it is a badge pinned to your breast.

      There is a class of man – mainly white guys, as Eddie Murphy would have said – obsessed with their IQ and the length of their dicks. Are you one of these men, John?

      You make interesting points, then ruin them by being an asshole. Why?

    • John, you trolling again…? Pedantic as the last time too. Z-man got the basics correct and most importantly the concepts that he wished to impart using the (incorrect specific) analogy. You did too, John, but your insight was not important to anyone but yourself (esteem). As to an IQ of 122, that would put Z-man solidly into the upper 10% of individuals, which should be more than enough to handle trolling from folk like you.

      John, thanks for playing, see you tomorrow.

  6. May the tech wokeocracy endure at least a decade of mostly meaningless, but very expensive, embarrassing, value-destroying and time-consuming anti-trust litigation before their bell tolls. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.

    • When Standard Oil was broken up, Rockefeller ended up with controlling ownerships of all seven successor companies and his personal wealth was much enhanced.
      For some funny reason that never gets discussed much.

  7. “… but there was still plenty of social media and plenty of people on it, just smarter people.”

    It was the beginning of the end when the AOL people got internet access. There was a phase change in the quality of Usenet postings. It was also around this time that I got my first spam email. Seeing that first spam email I was like totally WTF! I was outraged. My inner sanctum was violated.

  8. OT: i predict the HK protests will spread to the mainland and the communist party will lose control and be removed from power.

    • No, they will not. Days of colored revolutions are over. Ukraine was the last hooray. Next hot spot is Persian Gulf.

    • I predict that there are two possibilities here:

      1.) You know absolutely nothing about Chinese history. Or,

      2.) You actually know a great deal about Chinese history. Hats off!

      Either way, whether it’s Shih Huang-ti or the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (LOL), one thing is certain: China will keep on being Chinese. Would that we could say the same thing for the West, which will also become Chinese. Today Vancouver, tomorrow the world!

      “China my china, I’ve
      Wandered around, and you’re
      Still here.
      Which I guess you
      Should be proud of…”
      — Brian Eno

    • Ah, no. Some of those guys actually read Tocqueville and Burke and know that when authoritarian rule concedes even a token of it’s authority it loses all in short order. The opposition has read that also, but they, like us, are not moving forward without a black swan. But here’s hoping you are right.

      • China is like a forest w/r/t forest fires. So long as everything is going jim-dandy economically, (which is now), then no forest fire. When the peasantry is too poor, too tired, or too fed up (which they’re not right now), then there’s a lot of tinder and underbrush and deadwood on the forest floor, and then, WHOOSH! Either Tai-ping Rebellion or dynastic change.

        The Chicoms started out as the Taipings, and without Deng Xiaoping they would have crumbled like Tai-pings after death of Mao. But Deng saw the road to prosperity, and prosperity arrived, so now, Chicoms are not failed psycho peasant rebellion, they are New Dynasty. Xi’s dynastic pretensions bear this out. Communist Party is not Communist, it is Heavenly Imperial Dynasty. FFS, us China watchers saw this coming back in the 80s. But did GHWB listen? Nooooooo!

        Tai-pings started when the country was in a ditch. Some peasant crackpot found a missionary Christian pamphlet, misread it the same way Chinese misread Buddhism, and decided he was the Little Brother of Jesus Christ. In prosperous times, woulda been Death By Slicing for him. But the country was a train wreck, so instead his crackpot theology became a peasant rebellion millions strong which burned the whole country to the ground. Since they didn’t have a coherent structure, withered back to dynastic rule til Sun Yat-sen came along. Nice try, Sun.

        Chicoms were the same thing under Mao: charismatic crackpot misreads bizarre foreign ideology (this time Jewish spite-filled Marxism) during time of national distress, leads army of angry crazies to victory, burns entire country to ground, woulda fizzled out if not for Deng.

        Because of prosperity, Chicoms now have the Mandate of Heaven. Chinese don’t revolt because of the genius of a pure idea, they follow any zany crackpot ideology when they’re poor and they’re pissed off. Right now they are not poor and they are not pissed off in sufficient numbers.

        Don’t expect any crackpot peasant rebellions to gain traction soon. Chicoms are a dynasty, and those last for centuries. Get used to it. Coming soon, to an Orange County near you.

      • The “thaw” under Khrushchev, and Mao’s idea of letting “a hundred flowers bloom” demonstrated to both rulers that they held tigers by the tail. Neither man was thoroughly evil, but neither was receptive to changes in their power or their self-regard. When a weak dam holds back millions of gallons of fury, you can’t pull your thumb from the hole. You can’t be moderate, you can’t listen to that little voice of decency and humanity in your soul.

      • Plus they have the USSR as a recent example. Hardliners knew that once they eased off the totalitarian levels of oppression they’d de-stabilize badly. The post-Stalin era was a long march of concessions & decline by the Reds. OTOH, David Satter, (caveat – a raging lib & Askepath-sympathizer) always said that the Brezhnev era when he lived in the USSR was no longer totalitarian because it didn’t need to be – they had already crushed effective dissent & were left with a largely somnelent, if snarky, populace of sheeple by the 1970s. China may be in a similar phase.

        • I sure hope something wonderful and unexpected occurs in China before I die. I like the Chinese, and they deserve something better than a permanent kleptocracy and life under the eyes of a panopticon.

        • There seems to be a lot more personal freedom in China than in the Untied States,
          That may or may not be a tempory thing.

    • Sounds crazy, but then the USSR went down out of the blue when all our experts said otherwise, when ‘A Day in the Life in the USSR’ was a popular coffee table book in the late 1980s.

      Not that I will put money on this horse, but it has happened before, this sort of abrupt change.

  9. Zman – another excellent post. Yes I remember the BBS days. Was never a super nerd hacker but remember those days (pre-AOL chat room) in mid-90s. I’m about your age and yes, it is true that the Interwebs have swung wildly from one extreme to the other – I remember the libs all lamenting the fact back in the early 2000s that the right was dominating the tubes. I guess it is a constant swing between the forces of freedom (us good guys) and the forces of equality (the devil’s spawn).

  10. Silicon Valley is engaged in a balancing act. It’s no longer the hippie libertarianism (everybody gets their own space) of the old days. There are still a few people like that around but they are terrified of their employees, many of whom are literally members of antifa.

    On the other hand if they outright ban all dissidents then dissent has no way to blow off steam except to take IRL action. The more astute understand the need not to completely deplatform dissent.

    This strategy is on its way out. Sort of.

    “Yang Nervousness ” of a white uprising and violent backlash is spreading throughout the Asian communities in the tech world and in Academia. This is why you see a tightening of the screws. The rising anti-white sentiment in the Asian (especially Indians) communities is beginning to spillover into the public square. It’s been there for decades but has been kept under control.

    No one is going to give us a thing except to ghettoize our movement in the hope we continue to only blow off steam…until the anti-white coalition controls all political power.

    They are betting on being able to firmly control all of our politics permanently BEFORE we can organize and put into motion an effective pushback.

  11. I’m fond of saying that Constituitons are formed of paper and ink, while institutions are formed of the accumulated cultural wisdom of a society and its traditions.

    The Bill of Rights was an attempt to encode the God-given rights of Man, as understood by the Founders through the prism of Western Civilization, that no government could infringe. It is a product of Western culture, and more particularly of English culture. There is no cultural foundation for these rights in countries outside of Western Civilization, and there’s simply no reason to believe the rights encoded in Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech, will remain intact in an increasingly diverse America.

    • Exactly. And personnel is policy. I think it was Frank Herbert who said in one of the Dune sequels (about the BG’s?) something to the effect that a system of perfect laws is inferior to a tyranny of good deciders.

  12. “The same things people say about bitcoin today were said about the internet in the olden thymes”. Very much like this line, if there is something much more annoying than libertarians, it is bitcoin people. I understand there might be something to bitcoin/blockchain that is valuable for dissidents, and sure there will probably be some success stories (hopefully from those friendly to whites), but I’ve never seen a group of people so convinced that they’re going to be billionaires and rule the world. Don’t they realize the state and big tech corporations are already making their plans with the technology and its just gonna be another tool, like the internet, that is at their disposal.

  13. Carlsdad identifies a critical difference in the social exchanges: physicality. Online communities lack physical community and I suspect that tying stupidity (trolls) to an actual person, possibly living or working in your physical world, might self-select.

    How can we dissidents “panic early” regarding the use of online tools, gathering points, etc. to minimize the natural effects of scaling the collection of like-minded people?

    An aside. Zman thank you for broaching practical and strategic topics over the last few posts. As a “newly minted” dissident, I’m hungry for forward-thinking / doing labor.

    • You’d need a “secret-cell” structure to provide security in the Current Year. Michael Hayden (piss be upon him) recently bragged in Big Media about how he uses socks to infiltrate us, incite newbs to fed-posting then calls in the FBI et al. Mailing lists, user lists etc are a huge point of vulnerability when Big Other takes down a dissident influencer. Samizdat- Sovs learned these lessons in an even harsher school. Look to spycraft & criminal organizations for strategy & tactics.

  14. We cannot cede one bit of digital space without smart resistance.

    Even when a platform is pronounced dead by the cool kids, our people must continue to plant the flag, 24/7.

  15. Maybe we on the right should have back up systems in place. Like the bbs of old, through dial up, off the internet and away from IP address locations. Are there still serial ports on computers? Ok , I jest but for the real subversive sounds interesting.

    • I’m still interested in “pirate Internet” ala pirate radio. I don’t have enough tech background to have a good sense of its feasibility and lack the free time to give it a good look. Would appreciate a “for Dummies” reply from those of Us in the know

      • The entire Dissident Right should be on TOR.

        Thus far, only Daily Stormer has made that leap. I’d strongly recommend to Z that he do so in the near future.

        • I thought Tor was thoroughly Fed-compromised if not outright back-doored or false-fronted. Weren’t they exposed for similar around the time Snowden started making news?

          • >Tor sites can’t be shut down by the Silicon Valley Thought Police, that’s the reason to have a presence there.

            >If you are any sort of bad thinker, you should be using a VPN. Drop what you’re doing and get one now if you don’t already have one.

          • If the Feds really want you, you’re fucked, The issue is the endless horde of freelancing antifa wannabe’s and the corporations whose resources they control. You just don’t know who might be building a dossier on you.

      • It’s just websites you go to directly via IP address, with no easy-for-girls-to-remember url to type in. So they’re “dark.” It sounds a lot more Awesome Pirate Adventure than it really is.

  16. “Black Pigeon Speaks” has just been banned from youtube with nearly half a million subscribers.

    • That’s what you get for relying on enemy infrastructure. They keep wailing about censorship and alt tech, but they still post all their videos on Youtube, making money for the opposition.

      If the creators can’t be arsed to move platform, why should I?

      • Pretty much the point I’ve been making for a while.

        Plus – if people move platforms, and start posting all the same things they did before , what can Google, Youtube, Facebook, etc – do about it then?

        The only recourse then – is to have the government start shutting people down.

        Which will go to illustrate very clearly who is really the enemy.

        This is how the fight will play out. If you refuse to engage and want to just keep whining about how all those leftie content platforms are “unfair” – you’re not really fighting the war – are you?

        • They suffer from battered wife syndrome. They’re being assraped by people who hate and despise them, and they complain about the lack of lube. A lot of them even have the lack of self-awareness to complain that there are no alternatives to Youtube.

          If you want to do your favourite youtuber a solid, flag him, help wean him off the globalist tit.

          Oh well, in a few weeks, YT’s terms will include a clause that you can’t post content on supremacist platforms; we’ll soon see who will walk the walk and who will fold.

        • > If you refuse to engage and want to just keep whining about how all those leftie content platforms are “unfair” – you’re not really fighting the war – are you?

          I want to know… where are the hackers? When I was a young man (in those glory days ZMan mentions in his article) any company doing the equivalent of what YouTube is doing would have received the Electronic Wrath of Every Dork in the Universe. I’m a hardcore computer guy, and I KNOW the defenses are not enough to stop even a mild 4chan assault– so where are they? Why aren’t they electronically beheading the king?

    • Well, this is bad news – not surprising, just bad, like learning that your 90-year-old mother broke a hip… I just checked to make sure that PJ Watson and The Truth Factory are still available; I don’t watch political videos often, but when I do, I tend to binge-watch, and BPS was one of the best.

      I’m binge watching PJW and TTF now, just in case.

  17. I really think this whole discussion is missing a very vital piece of the puzzle: beatings.

    Going back probably 17 years ago now – I got into big arguments with the Linux tech nerds at the job I had about how to properly handle the massive increase in email spam that was happening at the time. They kept talking around all sorts of technical solutions to the issue – but most of these guys were Unix geeks going all the way back to the 80’s – so they were exactly those guys you talked about who populated Usenet.

    I kept telling them that they had removed a vital component of human communication in the email system: the possibility of repercussions. Before the internet existed – if I went around and knocked on people’s front doors – and then started annoying them by saying stupid shit they didn’t want to hear, there was high likelihood that behind one of those doors was a severe beating just waiting for the wrong person to knock on the door.

    Go around the neighborhood “trolling” your neighbors and sooner or later somebody was going to take you out. Human society has handled “trolls” like this for pretty much forever. One of the go-to complaints of lefties – is to bitch about how many blacks hung from trees – for what they claim were minor transgressions (whistling at a white woman) – down south where all the bad white people live.

    Go to a public discussion at a New England town hall – and just continue to say stupid shit and “troll” people – and you were very likely going to take a beating , or at the least get kicked out of the in-group of the community you lived in.

    As a member of a number of online forums that have had more than their fair share of trolls, I usually disagree with the masses about banning the trolls. I’ve always believed that the proper response is “beatings”. On an internet forum that means verbal abuse that drives the troll to the point where they do something really stupid and just take themselves out.

    The problem is that – in my experience – the vast majority of people just simply don’t have the verbal or mental skills to take these people on one-on-one. So they resort to the easy way out and ask for a ban. The problem is that bans don’t solve shit – because the troll (as you pointed out) just get more and more sophisticated in their trolling.

    IMHO this is a basic behavior issue, that you can even see manifest in animals.

    We have two cats. One is a 14 year old female. The other is a 1.5 year old male. The male is full of energy – and is constantly harassing the female. It’s pretty obvious at this point that he just does it because he gets a rise out of her. If she would just beat the living hell out of him – I’m almost positive it would stop. Because I can’t possibly catch a young male cat that can jump 6 feet in the air and run thru the house over, under and around things I simply can’t – there’s simply no way I can “moderate” the behavior. He’s always going to outrun me – and any ban I put on him is temporary. When I’m not around – he goes right back to harassing the shit out of her.

    I had a similar situation going back 20 years or more ago. The difference was that the older cat was a 4 year old male who like to fight. The kitten in that instance got the living crap beat of him by the older cat a number of times – and that set the stage for the entire rest of their relationship (they got along very well).

    The internet has implicitly removed the threat of violence that used to accompany bad behavior.

    From what I can see – that is what underlies an awful lot of the insanity that we see manifesting all over our society these days.

    • I completely agree that the lack of immediate and often painful repercussions has had a seriously negative effect on our society, both online and off. The problems with the offline part are social media and legal. Today, if someone receives a well-deserved beating, it most likely will be recorded, carefully edited to portray the ‘beater’ in the most negative way possible, then auto-played constantly. This will be followed by investigations, the ‘beater’ getting fired, and lawsuits. Sort of takes the incentive away from being civilization’s enforcer and gives the incentive to the ill-mannered dick.

      My liberal Canadian wife (BIRM) likes to say that violence is never the answer. I often find myself correcting her (and paying for it); no, violence is quite often the only appropriate answer.

      • Men always had two choices when confronted by another. Fight it out or walk away. Just like the animals do in the wild. Our feminized culture has mostly eliminated all that, including on-line. Create an environment where posting things can cause a couple of very angry people to show up at your door uninvited, and a bunch of this stuff would go away.

        • “Create an environment where posting things can cause a couple of very angry people to show up at your door uninvited…” We already have that; they are called Antifa.

          • Yup, Antifa. They are sort of a hired Mexican Cartel hit team, sent out by others to do their bidding. They do the heavy lifting because the soy boys aren’t willing to face their enemies directly, and they have to hide behind the coattails of others.

            Bezos might be physically capable of settling matters directly and personally, one on one. But Zuckerberg or Eric Schmidt? Big LOLs. The Zuck sends Sandberg out to fight his girlie slap fights for him now.

            Personal honor and face-to-face is so yesterday. The laws are also set to discourage such settling of scores. Go up man to man and get yourself arrested and sued.

          • Who exactly are Antifa though? Judging by remarks made by some people they are hired Soros goons. Others indicate that they are bored college kids radicalized by professors.

            The tactics for dealing with the one group do not necessarily apply to the other and it would be helpful to know what is behind those black ninja suits.

      • It probably took me until my 20’s to get there , but I have grown to hate that “violence is never the answer” thing.

        When I hear people say that , I ask them this: “What is the universal language ?”

        Typically, they’ll totally fall into the trap and say “Love”.

        That’s when I get to say :

        ” you’re completely wrong. The universal language is PAIN. Literally EVERY living thing understands it. I can’t reason with a shark that just grabbed hold of my leg – but I can punch it in the head until it lets go. I can’t express love to a pissed off mother grizzly bear – but I can shoot it a few times until it backs off. Human males and females despite tens of thousands of years of evolution – haven’t come up with a reliable way to convey love to each other – but if I punch you in the face you’re going to understand that instantly. Even plants understand pain…. scientists have found that when you start pulling leaves from a plant they exhibit electrical impulses that are a sort of pain signal. So love is NOT the universal language – PAIN is. And what comes from that is the realization that violence actually IS often the answer – in the case of that shark who clamped down on my leg – it is in fact the ONLY answer. So you’re completely and totally wrong …………”

        That usually pisses them off pretty good.

        • “Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedom.”
          (Starshiptroopers, by Robert Heinlein)

    • This is the dilemma of anonymous speech. Absent Facebook levels of accountability, which leave you horribly over-exposed to doxxing, the solution is to ignore the troll. Deny him his frission of engagement. Imperfect, but optimal.

    • “IMHO this is a basic behavior issue, that you can even see manifest in animals.”–calsdad

      To the power dynamic, add the male/female dynamic.

      Watched the fishies in the bowl, the dude fish chasing the girlie fish round and around and around endlessly. It was either for fishie nookie or guppie dominance or fish beat down. Over and over and over he was chasing her in circles. Wah-Wah-Wah poor little tormented girlie fish.
      Then noticed the he-fishie was stopped, just breathing, resting in the other side of tank.
      The girlie fish watched for a moment, then rushed over to him, nudged him, dancing around saying in fishie talk “WhatsamatterU? Let’s get going with the dance!” And off they went.

      Moral of the story: Take time to observe. Reality may not be Reality.

      • My fish tank story is a little different.

        I put about ten minnows in my first tank to help the nutrient cycle get started. One day the guard to my water filter was off while cleaning and sucked up one of the minnows and spit him back out with some striped scars along his body. He was weak for a few days but gradually came back to life.

        Over the next couple months that minnow grew disproportionately fast and proceeded to peck, harass, and somehow kill every other minnow in the tank. All social instincts in it were dead, it was simply an apex predator.

        Being the de facto God of these minnows, I decided justice was due once he killed all the others and I removed him from the water to administer death by suffocation, a little sad at what I had created and tended and a lot more knowledgeable about nature.

      • Range, right! I might also add from a youthful interest in Nature shows that in the animal kingdom, violent confrontations are most dangerous when the two competitors are fairly evenly matched. Such begets injury and death. However, most always, the “fight” is not even, is brief, and when over, order is restored to the group, and everyone gets back to cooperative survival.

        Seems only humans want to fight until death or live in an unordered, unchallenged, “hierarchy”.

        • Interesting…..that only makes sense.Add male cats to the list of fight to destruction and die by abscesses.

    • The reason you’d get the crap beat out of you if you walked around the neighborhood trolling is because they know who you are. Take away the anonymity of the net, require REAL names addresses, phone numbers and emails and let’s see how fast it calms down. It’s easy to be a commie ass hole if you can’t be found.

      • Hoagie, unfortunately—as AntiFA and Leftists in general have shown—it can’t be done without great risk. The troll’s anonymity is my anonymity. Indeed, in the very early years of the Internet and email/message board communication, our department head published a manifesto for use of our systems in this “brave new world”. There were 14 or so points, all I thought were good—like no anonymity, one had to use one’s real name—and the concept of “generosity” in ones use of the (limited) facilities—respect for copyright—and so forth. Sorry to say, within the decade just about all his points were ignored or had to be enforced through “police” action. The barbarians were indeed at the gate.

    • Duels. Just imagine if they legalized dueling. Politician lifespans could be measured in seconds, in today’s environment. They’d have a little more interest to make citizens happy.

    • Cal, if the allegory you write is about concerns eliminating trolls, I might add that how the comment software chosen here may present some possible “solutions”. Some comment software allows ratings—like this one does—but the ratings have little import to them. That is to say a Tiny Duck troll with 50 dislikes appears loud and proud next to a positively rated comment with 50 likes, and I’ve noticed TD gets continued reads and responses even days later. Trolls thrive on being noticed and responded to.

      Perhaps another comment/discussion software that in some manner sends highly negatively rated comments into the void would be in order? Even simply not having them automatically appear might be useful.

      • Excellent point. In a perfect Z world, the “obvious” trolls should have no thumbs up, thumbs down, or replies. Just treat their input like junk mail, tossed unopened into the garbage. To down vote a TD is food and drink to him or her or it; it means you’ve read and been irritated by he/she/its verbal offering.

        For all we know, TD may be the moniker of some sociology department at a state university studying us, probing for our sensitivities and weak points.

        All of TD’s comments seem computer-generated to me.

        • OK, I’m Tiny Duck and I get -45 on a comment. Or, I get -0 on another comment. Which result is preferred by TD?

          New policy: From now on, either here or at Unz, I go +1 for every TD comment. All of us should do the same. +117 for TD resulting from (say):

          The white man is on the run. He knows women Love men of color, that a new society is being born from the Wombs of white women who love black men

          he knows social justice is coming and his own women hate him

          -Tiny Duck

  18. Do you moderate here at all, Z?

    Yours is about the only internet meeting place I’ve seen that doesn’t seem to have any trolls. I think the only one I have seen is Tiny Dink or whatever his alias de jour is. Another odd thing about this site is that the posters all seem to talk TO each other, rather than past or at each other. The flame wars of the old message boards and most blogs are curiously absent… and it is most refreshing.

      • This venue has probably the best comments section I have ever run into. Its almost like we are using the Information Superhighway to allow the Z community to enjoy coffee and a stimulating chat every morning.

      • Never moderate. Instigate intelligent conversation in your comments. Gather likeminded fellows. Generate a support network for your fellow whites. Erase the need to always apologize for being white. Remember white is always right.

        Jockeying with liberals never works. Everyone always loses that game. Whichever comes first, Separation or civil war may be required.

    • I don’t understand tiny duck. Because when he chooses another name it almost always has the initials TD so it’s easily identifiable so why even bother to change the name? And he’s everywhere. Is it the same person or a bunch of people using the same handle?
      I’ve actually seen that with a couple posters here where they post a bunch of personal attacks that make them seem like they’re off their meds and the next day it’s a totally different tone which makes me think it’s more than one person on the same name.
      Its baffling to me

      • Agreed. My gosh, casting one’s mind back to the days when reading the NRO blog, or the Belmont Club, or Instapundit, belonged to everyday life, like taking a shower or feeding the pets. It’s like my car ran out of gas on a country road and I had no choice but walk through green fields, to rediscover the smell and color of truth.

        And the commenters, well, a long and energetic thread can be as entertaining and instructive as a classic Russian novel.

        I still need to send my unmarked twenty to the PO Box for Z-man.

        • You mention Fernandez.

          Do you have the impression he’s lost the pop off the fastball since joining PJM? It felt like he was producing good, deep stuff near daily. Now, seems rare.

          • Agreed. He was my “Z man” back in the day. I even bought one of his e-books. But Trump’s election disoriented him, and the last time I checked in, his fastball had indeed lost its pop.

          • Plus PJM is, or was (haven’t checked it lately) an annoying, insulting site designed by incompetent dickheads, pardon my anglo-saxon.

    • As I’ve said before, the comments are at least 50% of my learning/benefit from this group. Z-man is of course the other 50%. Can’t have one without the other. But I don’t think the comment section formed from some statistical anomaly. Z-man puts thought into his musings and writes about such at a high level. He’s not (IMO) cursing the darkness, but in a long process of lighting a candle. This piques interest and attracts a certain audience and that inevitably forms the type of comment community Glen remarks upon.

  19. This raises a question. Censorship is not an effective longterm tactic to fight dangerous ideas. The concept of free speech is its own Achilles heel. What works?

    • Balance. A little censorship but not too much. Driving at 0 gets you nowhere, driving at 200 gets you killed. Ideologues think in binary terms. Practical thinkers see those false dichotomies as positions on a continuum. Deciding where to reasonably dig in on a slippery slope is easier than coming up with a whole new approach, if one even exists. Public speech will always be censored and the debate will always hinge on how and how much.

      • Additionally, discourse within homogeneous communities requires less censorship. America is extremely diverse, and as diversity grows, so does censorship. Diversity causes everything it touches to wither and die.

        • Ostei, are you sure? I see where you are going, but there are ethnic communities, religious communities, etc. Hard to imagine that rules of discourse, even within such homogeneous communities, won’t run a broad spectrum—from censorious to open—which would get us back to where we are now, calls from competing groups to restrict others’ expression (or do we just disconnect from each other as well?).

        • I don’t think so there was almost no corporate or state censorship five years ago yet equally high levels of diversity

          The US when it was 90% White had heavy use of obscenity laws and vice squads

      • Driving 200mph does not get you killed.

        It only increases your chances of getting killed.

        I pretty much speed each and every single time I have gotten on the highway – traffic willing. And I have been doing it for more than 35 years.

        I can drive in rush hour traffic with a highway full of similarly minded people at 80mph – with everybody’s car hanging off the bumper of the guy in front of him – and everything works just fine.

        On the other hand I know people (women and Asian drivers) – who can’t seem to drive down a side road at 10mph without driving into something.

        Why should I have to drive slower even though I’ve proven thru decades of driving that I able to not pile the car up even though I exceed “the speed limit” ?

        I’m not the problem. Vo Chang is the issue. He can’t drive his car without hitting things. Most of the women on my street are the issue – their cars are all full of dents.

        • Dude…you’re killing me! Years ago living on Oahu, Hawaiian friends would call it “Driving While Asian!” They used to laugh and say, “If all you see is a set of eyesballs barely above the dashboard, watch out.”
          As for driving-while-woman, gave up bike riding because I kept somehow aiming for the pylons in the middle of the bikepath. Sigh….

          • One of the cities near me filled up with Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

            There was an awful lot of “Driving while Asian” going on in that city during that time.

            They seem to have gotten better over the years though.

        • Carlsdad – sounds like you drive like me – and I am female, albeit a unicorn. The problem is not merely Vo Chang and a majority of women (although they are a large part of it). The problem is that
          Most People Are Idiots – even most White people. Sure, get rid of diversity and you can have the autobahn with no speed limit (God, I loved driving on the autobahn). But when I drove on the Italian highways I was terrified going merely 85mph – because the other drivers were nuts!

          tl;dr: As Zman said,a total lack of rules/control does not work – even with a White, high trust society. It would minimize the need for regulation/intervention, but it would not eliminate it because human nature.

    • How about… if you think censorship is okay, you agree to be censored. I.E. Alinsky’s make them live up to their own ideals. Treat a socialist by socialist rules, treat a freedom guy by freedom guy rules.

      So under these rules, YouTube is subject to government regulation, as much as we can pile on. Gab is not.

      The left has never had to live under their own system. They always retreat under the muh freedom umbrella when anyone punches back. We need to take that sanctuary away from them, but leave it for decent people.

      • I’ve proposed that system before – it drove the normie cons nuts.

        But I still think it would be a good way to make for a separation.

        You want a welfare state? Then guess what you have to pay for it.

        You want a warfare state? Your ass just got drafted – AND you’re going to get taxed to death to pay for it all.

        Companies full of white guys won’t be forced to accept “diversity”.

        This is exactly what Alinsky said: make them live up to their own rules.

    • Truth wants out and all that. Overt Censorship need only work long enough to provide cover for the rest of the social engineering to take hold.

      Then its all Huxley, the sheeple are too overwhelmed, distracted, and satiated to care. The seeds of badthoughts find no fertile ground.

      Then censorship need only be overt in cases where self-censorship and the other conditioned mechanisms are failing.

      In current year, the online censorship is overt and heavy-handed because the technology got too far ahead of the forces at work in meatspace.

      The problem of anonymity and decentralization allow for badthinkers to strike and maneuver.

      Until the landscape can be managed such that there is no safe space for dissidents within the mainstream products, the culling must go on. Even if that means losing market until people can be lured into the next honeypot.

      This only needs to go on until “we all agree that we have always been at war with East asia” or whatever.

      For example. Millennials already think nothing of privacy. So the machine neednt overtly intrude; the vampire is invited in willingly.

      So ‘free speech’ Is not much concern to most, relative to the socially engineered values of status within the state religion.

      To half the population, if you are a badthinker you shouldnt be allowed in the online sandbox or for that matter in the local park for your hate rally.

      In fact you should be punched or doxxed into bankruptcy in meatspace. How long before that 50% becomes 80%?

      I see censorship as a weak force, as are most top-down authoritarian levers of power, but it doesnt need to be strong in the sense of obvious once it becomes part of the social DNA and censorship becomes embedded and bottom up. Think: its not okay to be white.

      You are right about dangerous ideas. But it is a matter of perspective.

      The real dangerous ideas are those that have caused generations fo voluntarily submit to the thousand cuts of censorship, to the adulteration and destruction of language and ultimately, inversion of truth.

      The operant conditioning, a specialty of tech media, has out kicked its coverage. I think that is a big part of why we see the dustup over speech. Its a “bug” that they scrambling to fix.

      I’m not as optimistic that the market will splinter into self-selected chambers of speech because we don’t have that in real life.

      To me that overt media censorship is not the censorship that matters most.

      A bigger issue is why my neighbor can’t or won’t truth speak over a beer in a public place.

      The fact that dangerous ideas are now those that challenege the state religion suggests to me that censorship as a tactic isn’t about long or short term but rather about who whom.

      So does technology follow meatspace or vice versa? Will free speech zones emerge online or IRL first? Or at all.

    • In the past, most porn was illegal and any speech or especially art and writing directed at minors was regulated both for good reason.

      TV was heavily regulated until quite recently as was radio and many private or public venues had morals clauses

      For that matter homosexual conduct was illegal as was sex outside wedlock also for good reason

      All of these anti freedom laws existed to slow the propagation of harmful behaviors and ideas.

      Most likely if there is a Dissident or New Right state it will be pretty authoritarian on some topic for several decades as an interregnum is a necessity in such cases to prevent counter revolutions and subversion.

      You could pretty easily select say the legal code of some random state from 1960 and apply that though with the internet and the likely mesh network successor it will harder to maintain the regulatory envelope

      One example would be to bring back En Loco Parentis and using it to make teaching cultural marxism to anyone under 21 not a member of your family a crime. Doesn’t affect adults but shuts down the schools

      There are plenty of similar sneaky things you can do, for example forbidding the sale, posting or trade of images of sexual conduct.

      Combined with a blocked Internet (no foreign traffic) and import controls you can gut the porn supply

      This won’t stop all of it but will reduce it which is the goal.

  20. >All of this could have been avoided if the government had done its job and cracked down on these oligopolies a long time ago.

    But why? Anything the government does sets a PERMANENT precedent (until collapse). Is it worth setting permanent precedents just because a lame silicon valley revenge-of-the-nerds culture ran rampant from 2014-2021?

        • Anyone trying to push Libertardianism picked the wrong comments section to do it in

        • You pull a gun on someone who is punching you and it’s a felony in many states . Proportional force it’s the law

          • A.B., there are exceptions of course—and valid ones. I’m pushing 70 and are of light build, so I’m required to defend myself with my body (what still’s working) when a 6’1” muscular meat bag begins to pummel me? Not here, not most anywhere. A codified defense is of course “a reasonable fear of death, or grave bodily injury” for use/display of a deadly weapon (my side arm). That one goes from fist a cuffs to lethality in one step is of course a factor to be considered in assessing guilt, but the defense as stated above is valid and indeed is the only one wrt use of deadly force.

          • I am an incredibly persuasive speaker and charismatic man, and will have no difficulty convincing a jury that it was proportional force. 🙂

          • Maybe.

            A gunslinger mentality is a great way to get dead or seriously hurt.

            Also best hope that whoever you just murdered doesn’t have outlaw kin.

            In reality though the kind of people liable to punch you over politics are groups like Antifa who often have tacit backing of the State

            You may be in trial in some Lefty town and you can ask the guy in Charlottesville how that went for him.

          • >So, in other words, (in your own words, really) in defense of libertarianism you’re willing to shoot unarmed little girlls. Pre-emptively.

            There’s thousands of us. All looking at you.

          • There is millions of us . I like those odds.

            In any case, Libertarians won’t get a say in things no matter who is in charge.

            The Left is highly authoritarian and only tolerates corporate action when its woke or in their interest.

            If Leftists were kicked off YouTube there would be a law, yesterday

            As for the Dissident Right, we know all your tricks. Many of us came from your end of the field

            You have a mostly Libertarian society now and it sucks. No one s going to let you double down on that.

            The Dissident Right doesn’t want you or anything to do with you so you can shoo and either join Team Clown or pack your bags, the third world is calling

          • Out of curiosity, what is the “libertarian threshold” here? The only comment I made was, roughly, “it will be unwise to centralize MORE power for left wingers to eventually wield, just because of a brief problem that outraged you for less than a decade back in the 2010’s.”

            Have you all become such philosophical Eloi that this is an outrageous potential outcome?

            See, while you see me as a libertarian (I’m not), I see you as neocons, forging eternal patriot acts to correct 2001’s problems, and making 2020’s people live with it.

            Anyway, back to the subject: We can shoot straighter, and more often, and build killdozers. We will do all that while you’re discussing a good date for the committee meeting to determine what regulations should apply to magazine manufacturers. 🙂

          • “You have a mostly Libertarian society now…”

            What an amazing assertion. There is nothing remotely libertarian about the ongoing incest between big corp and bloated gov, or the debt-based jewbuck cabal, or the gun-backed tax, property confiscation, and redistribution racket. or corrupt militarized law enforcement, or endless war mongering abroad, or institutionalized anti-White persecution, etc.

            If our society were actually libertarian-leaning, tyrannical behemoths like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube would long since have have been dissected under anti-trust legislation.

          • I’ve never met a Libertarian that believes in anti trust legislation of any kind. You might be the first.

            Now in fairness not having corporate subsidies reduces big corporations somewhat but no Libertarian I’ve met is opposed to foreign trade cheap labor or has a real plan to do with things like dumping to destroy markets either .These things cause endless problems

            Most are basically money obsessed anarchists who like big corporations.

            That said our society doesn’t need a lot of things like gay marriage (the least harmful of all of these) weed, vagrancy and porn that are now legal and were not in 1970

            I’ll go as far as to say that a lot of ideas that are propagated these days should be criminal to teach to under 21’s unless you are the parent and that State schools need heavier regulation to make sure they educated kids not indoctrinate them

            alright I suppose they’ll be indoctrinated anyway but what is better, Right wing culture or the Left wing culture ?

    • Whatever is good for our people is our only principle. If that means nationalizing, regulating, or breaking up corporations so be it.

      • Well– now, I think what you have in that is a trust problem. In that– who you gonna trust to do this? I don’t trust you. I don’t trust my neighbors and my society, who elected a foreign invader as president a mere ten years ago. I don’t trust my fellow citizens who were okay with making the purchase of a product from a private company (health insurance) a condition of citizenship. Fuck everyone.

        For Big Companies, though, I take a pragmatic solution: Socialists have to live by socialist rules. So for these big companies that get in bed with government, happily there is no philosophical quandary: they lived by socialist rules, and will die by them. They don’t believe in free speech, so they get none. They don’t believe in a free market, so there’s no problem constraining them.

        What I object to is that precedent being set so that I, and a million other non-offending non-criminals, must also live by the socialist rules. You’re going to be taking fire from behind, trying to impose that.

        • Join or die. Not exactly a new slogan but an apt one I think.

          In any case Libertarianism is a dead letter. The future will be regulated for the common good, the only question is whose vision of the common good will it be either the Left or the Dissident/New Right

          • There’s no “common good” with this much diversity. Are we going with the common good that allows Muslim men to rape kaffir women who are dressed provocatively? Or the common good that allows panicked females to destroy the livelihood of any male whose gaze lingers on her too long? Maybe the common good that allows urban youth to simply take your car radio because you neglected to guard it for an hour while you ran into a restaurant?

            You have several decades of solving the diversity problem before you need to turn your mind to the common good problem. And if you solve the diversity problem, you won’t even have to bother with the common good problem, because it’ll be a high-trust society again and action will not be necessary.

          • The US will never be a high trust society again no matter what the racial dynamic. People aren’t religious enough

            In any case the US is too developed to tolerate the high levels of our historical grifting

            Left or Right it is going to be a lot more regulated just to make sure people have enough income to raise a proper family and stable jobs

            if we don’t do this, we won’t have babies, And note after it fell, the USSR went into population freefall and thus far not a single nation has ever recovered

            Hungary might but Poland’s baby bump from 1.2 to 1.4 in 2018 is just slightly slower social death

            As far as the ethnic issue, you can’t partition or run from that, You have to physically remove people in large numbers either through active or passive means

            No other options.

          • You understand that there are two paths before traditional whites: minimize diversity or libertarianism.

            Libertarianism fails because of the inherent tribalism on non-whites. For many non-whites, ethnocentrism often is more powerful than the deracinated pursuit of individual advantage. Non-whites, as a group, want to crush whitey and there is no reason to believe this will change.

            If libertarianism fails then we must pursue the other path, as difficult and unlikely as it is.

          • Libertarianism would only work in a society where everyone was White and middle class or up and is a Libertarian themself.

            In reality it will be voted out of existence by non Whites and will just mean Whites have to pay for spoils for everyone else.

            Grab the spoils or be screwed. Truth is there are no cuck options, no retreat options , no Benedict option.
            Fight for your people or else.

            Right now, the Fight is political and economic but its not going to stay that way forever.

            The net result is simply Join or Die

          • “Libertarianism fails…”

            Libetarianism explicity supports feedom of association or disassociation for any reason. No justiciation to higher authority needed, Libertarianism explicity supports the right of self-defense with whatever level of physical force is required. These are core principles.

            A secession from the larger, diversity-ridden polity is perfectly consistent with these principles. This includes the formation and defense of a tribe, or any other type of orgainzation, based on race or ethnicity.

            But then, how White men choose to organize – whether libertarian, fascist, socialist, republic, monarchic, oligarchic – is not really the issue. No matter what shape our eventual collective takes, we will at some point be forced to re-learn how to be more ruthlessly tribal than our fiercest enemies and to wage organized violence against them, or die.

          • This will work great till woke people get you deplatormed from all banking , nearly all shopping and and unemployable

            They are already trying to do this to gun companies claing freedom of association.

            So no. Its bullshit

            Rule or be ruled.

    • Unless you have a time machine, all precedents are permanent as the past cannot be changed. Regulating markets is the duty of the state. These firms should never have been allowed to grow so large and they should never have been allowed to gain this much power.

      A simple way to solve a lot of this is to restore property rights to the people. You own your name, your habits, your image, etc. if Facebook wants to use it, they need your written permission each and every time they use it. No more one-way contracts.

      • My problem with pretty much EVERY single argument I’ve ever seen about “regulating” the market – is that the entities in question have ALWAYS gotten so large BECAUSE they were intimately connected to the state.

        Google is deeply in bed with the deep state – and is (as I believe you yourself have pointed out) almost another arm of the government.

        Facebook is the same way.

        So the arguments that they should be “regulated” by that very same government – seem just a bit naive and ignorant of the true situation.

        Going back thru time – when it was usually lefties who argue that an industry should be “regulated” because it got too big – I always thought it was somewhat comical that the lefties would argue and scheme for big government , then an industry would use that government to drive out smaller competition and retain their monopoly – and then those very same lefties would then argue for regulation because now the company was ” too big “.

        (BTW – they never seemed to have an issue with a company being too big when it came time to build 100’s of thousands of trucks to send to the commies in Russia so the evil Nazis could be defeated)

        Way back in the 70’s I can remember lefties complaining about companies like GM “being too big”. American auto manufacturers were chock full of union workers (sanctioned by the state). Why were they so big? In large part because the state prevented competition from coming in (in this case we’re talking about Japanese built cars).

        I drove GM cars from the 70’s and into the 80’s. Then I bought Japanese. Why? Because I have to go work every day to earn the money that buys me the product – and the Japanese just simply work harder to earn my money – that’s why. Once the US government stood aside and allowed Jap built cars in – an awful lot of other people came to the same conclusion.

        “Too big” problem solved.

        • Pretty much the opposite has been true of Silicon Valley. They got a free pass from the government and grew into monsters.

          • They didn’t “get a free pass” – they are CONNECTED. That’s worse than a free pass.

            This is why I can never take lefties seriously – they’re like naive children about the true nature of what is REALLY going on.

            When the local factory owner’s kid runs around town banging all the dumb girls from the wrong side of the tracks , smashing cars up in drunken driving escapades – and smashes into the local carpenter’s work van – and the police don’t do shit about it ……. it’s not because he “got a free pass”.

            It’s because the police chief has a new car – because the factory owner bought it for him. The patrol officers party at the factory owner’s house and get to bang his whores.

            It’s not a free pass – it’s deep connections and tit for tat “favors” going both ways that let that kid treat the town as his plaything.

            Going to the cops to complain about the kid – and expecting anything to happen – is just hilarious. Going to the factory owner and asking him to stop bribing the cops – the same.

            Hey – I know how to fix it – we need more government!

            LOL.

          • You describe how I felt about the whole “Money out of Politics movement”. Haven’t these retards ever heard of Quid Pro Quo? The explicit exchange of money isn’t necessary to make deals, and in fact plausible deniability is preserved if you refrain from actually exchanging money.

          • I don’t give a crap about economic systems if outright Communism or more likely National Socialism got people to have kids at a decent clip, I’d got for it

            So long as the White TFR is at least 2.1 which it hasn’t been since 1972 BTW ! and its 80% White the rest doesn’t matter.

            As it is the current system is not working and giving more power to woke multinational companies in hopes they’ll trickle jobs on us like some golden rain is stupid

            A healthy future US will probably be a closed fairly regulated market with little foreign trade, almost no immigration and a 30 hour work week.

            Deal.

            You want White babies in modernity the cost of doing business will have to reflect that

          • Except it didn’t

            The Chinese might have out-bred their commie leaders lust for death, but the Russians sure didn’t. What was left after the Soviet goat-fuck collapsed was a destroyed country and a seriously lowered expected life span AND a shitty birth rate.

            Nazis DID increase the birth rate – then they took all those extra male bodies and buried them in the ground. Less than one lifetime after the Nazi experiment left German a smoking pile of rubble – the people left in Germany think it’s a good idea to let the entire third world immigrate into their homeland.

            One of the things that retard lefties and pretty much ANYBODY who argues for any form of socialism in modern day America conveniently forget – is that both Nazi and Soviet style socialism wasn’t an exercise in working the productive and healthy to death supporting the non-productive and unhealthy. In fact it was the exact opposite: you either worked – or you died. In the case of the Nazis they were very proactive in pursuing that policy.

            They started emptying out the sanitariums of the mentally ill and disabled very soon after they came to power.

            Just for the record : I have NO problem with shutting off the non-productive and letting them fend for themselves – even if it ends in their ultimate demise.

            You on the other hand have already stated that you believe we need big government and some form of socialism to help out those among us who need it.

            Seems to me you haven’t read the damn history – and the Nazism you think you want isn’t what you think it is.

          • They got a free pass. And they were in bed. They got a free pass in part because they helped big gov surveil the citizenry and propagate the approved narrative. How many times did Zuckerberg hobnob with BO in the WH?

        • Carlsdad, if we applied the Communications Act of 1934 to Social Media companies, it would solve most of our problems.

          One of the act’s provisions denied Ma Bell the ability to deny phone service to someone based on their personal beliefs.

          • I’m not fully familiar with the 1934 act – or the follow-on 1996 act.

            But from what I am familar with – those acts would apply more to the actual internet services used to transmit the content supplied by Youtube, Google, Twitter – etc. , than they would for opening up those company’s platforms for opposing view points.

            Regulating Twitter, Facebook, Youtube – etc, seems more like regulation of TV stations – than it does the airwaves they transmit over.

          • Cal;
            The communications acts were, made necessary because common or regulated property had to be used to advance the technology. Re wireless, the radio spectrum is, in effect, a commons that is easily made useless by everybody just doing their Libertarian thing. My use of frequency X most defiantly harms your ability to use it too.

            But you might want to use frequency X too. How to sort this out_? You and I alone might be able to sort this out by ourselves like good Libertarians, but the situation becomes unwieldy as more actors are added. And, all it takes is one pirate radio station to ruin it for everybody.

            So third party regulation is the only feasible course short of actual armed conflict. But the regulator has to be able to make his decisions stick (no pirates), Hence govt. regulation

            So the 1934 answer was creating (limited) property rights in spectrum or physical rights-of-way such that I had license (exclusive or shared, depending) to use frequency X in a limited geographic area and you had a license to frequency Y under similar restrictions.

            On the wireline side, the carrier (phone, telegraph, etc.) actually built out the network (bought and strung the wires) but usually built it on public property (poles along roads) or on third party licensed property (railroad rights-of-way). IOW, they depended on monopoly use, just like in the wireless case, of already regulated land, i.e. property. Hence they fell under common-carrier-type regulations, like those already in effect for roads or railroads.

            The closest analogy in the inter web era is to the fibre-optic networks carrying the packets. Facebook is more like the old TV *networks* in that it is distributing content for profit using regulated property/land (e.g. fiber conduits under the streets). That it has tricked its users into providing that content for free is immaterial, IMHO.

            So there IS precedent for regulating the Robber Barons of Silicon Valley should the political will be found.

          • That’s a very good explanation – but doesn’t apply to Youtube or Twitter or Facebook.

            Yes – everybody can setup their own radio station on 92.9 FM. Because the airwaves ARE a common. Without somebody saying : ” you get this frequency with this much wattage ” everybody is potentially stepping on everybody else’s dick.

            The internet however – technically – is NOT, a common. Until the available bandwidth gets filled – nobody is stepping on anybody else’s dick. And all it takes to resolve bandwidth issues – is to add more, or go to a better technology.

            If people are going to make a screwy argument about how Twitter and Facebook are “commons” – they had damn well get their facts straight.

            Newspapers were NEVER treated as “commons” – in the manner you’re trying to portray by using that radio frequencies example.

            If you owned the printing press – you owned what could get printed in the news.

            You guys keep trying to make the argument that social media sites are commons – and I keep telling you I think you’ve got your heads firmly implanted in your asses on that subject.

            You’re making lefty arguments for taking private property.

        • If you look back at the when the anti-trust laws came into effect in the early 20th century, one of the reasons was the robber barons were controlling the gov’t. So thinking that a vast public outcry to make the gov’t break them isn’t naive. It has happened multiple times with from the robber barons to AT&T. In the 90’s, Microsoft pumped money into Apple to keep it afloat and avoid more antitrust scrutiny.

          • Chris L;
            Agree. The historical pattern with new technologies seems to be ‘Cutting edge to oligarchy in one generation (sometimes less)’.

            For example, railroads were cutting edge technology in the 1850’s. They had different gages (track separation), weren’t interconnected, etc. But by the 1880’s they had become standardized and were busy exploiting the farmers and miners. By the 1890’s they had to be broken up/regulated due to political pressure from public outcry.

          • And in modern times the railroads have been deregulated thru the Staggers Rail Act.

            Now we have actually have functional companies running efficient freight rail lines using modern technology and being run at a profit.

        • Good post. And what it points to is the reality that all of our various quandaries point to–we need a new country with a very different government and populace.

          • Well, we could become Mennonites, who may safely be described as white people practicing their own religion, disciplined and industrious, untainted by diversity, procreative, passing their history and language on to their children, thriving in new countries with very different governments and populations. The 70,000 Mennonites in Bolivia, for instance, are doing rather well, as are their brethren here in western NY.

            Our quandary is that we want some generalized equivalent of what the Mennonites (and Amish) actually have, through tradition, faith, community, etc., but without the work.

          • I’m not sure a horse-and-buggy society is necessary to have a flourishing, traditional society. Not that I have anything against the Mennonites, mark you. I’m just not particularly tempted to join them.

          • That’s my point, Ostei. Neither am I. But it’s a community that will outlive the rest of us, for all our talk of ethno-solidarity and rejection of hypermodern capitalism.

            They’re interesting and impressive people, and they made their decision a long time ago, and it seems to work for them.

          • It will work until the Leftist Borg takes notice of them. They have to solidify control over mainstream society first before liberating the Amish and Mennonites and bringing them the wonders of diversity.

          • “. But it’s a community that will outlive the rest of us, for all our talk of ethno-solidarity and rejection of hypermodern capitalism.”

            Amish and Mennonites exist in America only because the larger society tolerates them. But who say can for sure that some future ever-Leftward marching USA gooberment will tolerate such deviant Christian groups?

            One of the stupidities of Libertarianism is the notion that politics can or will whither away and leave Libertarians unharmed in some future Utopia.

          • Ostei, I had occasion several years ago to tour the eastern farmlands of Paraguay where there were several large and separate Mennonite communities. They had immigrated there from Germany more than a century ago, I believe. They spoke both their native German and the Paraguayan Spanish. At the time I was more interested in the geopraphic sites, but I did notice the lush condition of their fields, the high-quality construction of their massive barns, and the excellent condition of their modest, but attractive homes. As far as I could ascertain, they do use certain types of machinery and they drive pickup trucks and sedan cars. Their dairy products in particular were the best in the local markets. On a side note, our host told us that the German hospitals in Paraguay were superior by all standards.

      • >A simple way to solve a lot of this is to restore property rights to the people.

        I agree vehemently with this solution. It probably only takes a couple well placed lawsuits, too.

        >Regulating markets is the duty of the state.

        Well, as long as it’s being done by someone we trust. 🙂

        • Free markets are what progressive teach white people so they will not fight against their dispossession. There are no free markets. For a market to exist, it must be regulated. The question is who regulates and to what end.

          • The unanswerable part is: Who are we going to trust to do this regulation. I’m a total Trumptard, and I wouldn’t even trust him to do it. How about you?

            We’ve gone from a high trust society to a low trust one to a complete shit trust one now at this point. The “trust someone to regulate” solution is simply going to be economic warfare, switching which side at each election, from here on out.

            And frankly, I’d trust a king more than I’d trust a liberal democracy. At leas the king wants to leave his children in a good position.

          • None of that matters. Breaking up Google, changing the law to compel these big publicly platforms to respect free expression, ending one-way contracts, etc. are all good thing in themselves. That’s the job of the state.

          • We agree, but for different reasons. My take is that Google (etc) are Big Socialist Network Industries, and therefore are 100% subject to whatever Big State wants to do to them.

            What I don’t want is a law intended to break up Google to eventually stop a little Mom and Pop internet provider from existing, while not hindering Google int he least. Which is what happens Every. Single. Time. You guys are always catching dolphins in your tuna nets.

            Figure out a way to reserve punishment for abusers, instead of incurring it on everyone and anyone, and not only will more people be on board with your ideas, but you won’t be trying to, failure-guaranteed, harness evil to do good.

          • ” In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
            It would seem Sunspot is saying that we have long ago passed the point where we can expect the government to control itself.
            “I am unable to conceive that the people of America, in their present temper, or under any circumstances which can speedily happen, will choose …men who would be disposed to form and pursue a scheme of tyranny or treachery….who would either desire or dare…. to betray the solemn trust committed to them. What change of circumstances time, and a fuller population of our country may produce requires a prophetic spirit to declare, which makes no part of my pretensions.

          • Good quotes.

            And exactly why all these people moaning that the government should “control” Google, and Twitter and Facebook et. al , are wrong.

            The original concept of these United States was that if you didn’t like Puritans beating your ass for coveting another man’s woman – you could move your ass to another state where the people didn’t look so badly on that.

            Like Madison said:
            “the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority”

            What it seems so many of the tards in this comment section don’t seem to get is – you’re not supposed to bitch to the government to put the boot on Google – what you’re supposed to do is stop fucking using Google – and build your own competition.

            If you’re not willing to do that – you don’t have any right to complain.

            If you DO go out and try to build a competitor – and THEN the government puts it’s boot on your neck to defend Google – well then you definitely have a legitimate complaint.

            But until that day happens – all the whiners are no better than all the lefties I’ve grown to hate so much over the years.

          • Not to be too argumentative here, but it’s the job of *what* State? Seems when we are talking about protecting “free” expression, we only have to look around to our “peers”, like France and Britain to see that they regulate free expression to the detriment of the expressee. Plenty of hate speech rules and folk currently on trial (Le Pen for example).

            So the question is, as posed previously, who/what is that State you magically cede regulatory authority to? Or for that matter, forget the State, how would you word a statute to be applied to our large media entities that would prohibit the abuse you now lament?

          • We’re low-trust mainly because we’re diverse, and there’s no fixing diversity. I would trust my government, be it democratic or autocratic, far more if it was rooted in a homogeneous populace.

          • If we had a homogeneous society we might be able to have a government something along the lines of the one that the normie-cons constantly refer to when they instinctively defend “Muh consteetution!!”.

            Which was NOT “democratic” – at least not in the way the word is currently used.

            I’ve got no real urge to live under a dictatorship or autocracy. The only reason to have one IMHO – is to keep uncontrollable people under control.

            Get rid of the uncontrollable people – and let the rest of us live in our high trust (white) society.

          • Democracy is only as good as its voters. The quality of the American voter has declined precipitously since, oh, I dunno, about 1965. So, in theory, if we could somehow get a voting public that resembled the American one in 1965, democracy could flourish again. However, it was that very populace that was gulled into believing that importing the Third World was just a peachy idea. So there must be obdurate safeguards built into democracy, even when voters are reasonably intelligent and moral.

          • Democracy works in pre-modern towns and, apparently, in Switzerland. Any vast, multiethnic empire such as India, China, greater Russia, or the United States, cannot be democratic.

            The quality of the voter is neither here nor there. The quality of the candidates, on the other hand… in 2016 we had a vain, semiliterate billionaire going toe-to-toe with a corrupt and drunken murderer. The voter had two choices.

          • > The only reason to have one IMHO – is to keep uncontrollable people under control.

            You’ve worded this better than I could. Any law they pass to stop Google abusing its power will also apply to me (and, ironically, not apply to Google in the end).

            When I say I don’t want this bullshit, fuck-you solution, they start yelling about the white genocide and libertarians (wtf?)

            These big-gov solutions are fitted for a diverse society. But they won’t work in a diverse society because everyone’s going to grab what they can, when they can, and there’s no such thing as law. If the society ever gets less diverse, the solutions won’t even be needed, because things will revert back to high-trust.

            It’s a goddam tragedy to see otherwise intelligent people experience such a philosophy fail.

          • White people invent printing press… now, most major newspapers and publishing houses controlled by Jews.

            White people invent democratic republics… now, your entire government controlled by Jews.

            White people invent the dollar… by as early as 1913, already controlled by Jews.

            White people invent radio… soon, most radio stations and radio networks owned and controlled by Jews.

            White people invent film and cinema… in no time, movie studios owned and controlled by Jews.

            White people invent television… in the blink of an eye, all TV studios and networks are controlled by Jews.

            White people invent the Internet… guess what? All major choke points, bottlenecks and systems owned and controlled by Jews.

            White people invent free speech in Florida (oh. and also, White people invent Florida itself)… you see where this is headed.

            If you build it, (((They))) will come.

            Regulate /that/.

          • /that/ is why we can’t have nice things.

            I’m not in elementary school any more – and I really object to being punished because little Chaime has been scheming everybody out of their lunch money.

            The rest of us kids were treating everybody each other fairly. And when somebody got out of line – they got beat up during recess when the teacher wasn’t looking.

            The kids who got beat up knew what they did – and kept their mouths shut. Otherwise the beatings would get worse – AND they’d be cast out permanently.

            Chaime thought he could run to the principal after he got beaten. Now we have to sit thru mandatory diversity training and nobody can say shit about Chaime and his stealing because we’re a bunch of racists.

            Chaime is also screwing with the black kids and talking shit to them too. Although we each stayed on our own sides of the playground – us and the black kids largely got along until Chaime started playing his little games.

            The system worked pretty good until Chaime showed up.

            One of my friends just asked his father the other day whether he though a pig would fit into the pizza oven in their back yard. I think I know where he’s going with that………….

          • Progressives are the biggest market regulators out there.

            Progressives lie.

            That’s what really needs to understood.

            Pretty much every market regulation I’ve ever seen – was aimed towards dispossessing me of something I wanted or needed.

            Gun regulation = market regulation. Removes gun ownership options I would otherwise engage in absent the government saying NO.

            Regulation of the automotive market. I seem to remember getting along just fine driving cars without ABS, airbags, GPS, backup cameras… etc. The critical thing to understand is that you’re going to have know how to navigate – and not smash the vehicle into things. But now – because of the bleatings of the masses AND the endless machinations of the “progressives” – I’m FORCED to buy these things unless I want to engage in restoring a vehicle from say 1972.

            I have a hard time reconciling the constant arguments for white nationalism / homelands, with the fact that we pretty much had that more than 100 years ago – back BEFORE we had all of this market regulation and socialistic welfare state big government. All the progressive screaming for regulation and big government originating in the late 1800’s / early 1900’s – are what put us on the path for the massive infusion of POC

            The progress towards white homelands being taken from our control – have marched in lockstep with the advance of the welfare – warfare state , and it’s constant advancement of regulation – and it’s constant advocacy and effort to just bring in a replacement population when the whites started complaining too much.

            Last night I briefly watched a Ken Burns documentary about the National Park system in the U.S. I had to shut it off because of the insipid self-congratulating of all the lefties speaking about how great the parks are – and how much of a vital part of our “democracy” they are. They also made a lot of references to how the parks needed to be protected from development – and how they were vital to a happy healthy “American” society.

            I wonder how they’re going to reconcile that belief with the flooding the country with third world immigrants? Who I am sure won’t give much of a shit about preserving the white man’s precious national parks.

          • Here’s the problem. Government regulates food. It’s not perfect, but only lunatics think our food supply is worse as a result of government rules regarding the growing, distribution and handling of food. Sure, there are shenanigans. Organic is a crock and Kosher is a scam. But, the trade-off is a good one.

            The point is, some government regulation is beneficial and some is not. The government giving Silicon Valley a free pass on labor laws, contract laws and other areas has been a disaster. And it was not due to cronyism either. These tech firms, until recent, had little presence in DC. They simply enjoyed the ignorance of the political class, which is the least technological savvy group in America.

            If the Feds had enforced labor laws and contract law, a lot of what’s happening would not have got off the ground.

            The important take away here is there is no “free market” solution to the defects of the “free market.”

          • And history is showing us that there is no limit to a government that you ask to regulate you into safety.

            Once you start down that road – EVERYTHING is open to regulation. And since since absolute power absolutely corrupts – it is INEVITABLE that this government will go out of control.

            All it takes is a wacky leftist ideology of POC worship or blank slateism thrown into the stew – and you’ve got what have right now.

            Long before all the POC showed up and the lefties adopted blank slateism, whites were getting sick of living under the yoke of other whites.

            That’s why this country exists in the first place.

            That problem existed before the POC and {{they}} even showed up over here and gained power.

            If I’m going to live under some sort of autocracy – then a whole bunch of people are getting thrown into the void.

            That includes an awful lot of whites.

          • But our problem is not too much government, so you are worrying about a bogeyman that does not exist. That’s always been the scam of libertarianism. They use the threat of the imaginary monster as an excuse for not fighting the real monster. “Oh, we can’t have the government protect your interests. That would be socialism!” Meanwhile, we are being enslaved by global corporations.

          • LOL

            “but our problem is not too much government”

            Said every damn commie I have ever run across.

            Said every damn lefty progressive in this country since I’ve bothered to pay attention.

            There is never too much government for those who wish to push their boots into our necks.

          • Cal, I hear you. Seems Z-man is really asking for a government of “Angels” and not “men”, but he can’t tell you how to change men into Angels. Libertarianism’s answer to this conundrum is to eliminate government by ideally reducing your government to “yourself”. And that would equate in Z-man’s thinking to unworkable anarchy. Both approaches seem problematic, but are not without valid insight into the problem.

            Seems to me what Z-man is implying (although he may not realize such) is that government would indeed work—at least for him—if he were in charge of it, or it’s organization.

            Hell, that would work for me as well. However, not sure what the other 300M folk in this country would say. 😉

          • No!!! I’m just expecting a government. This false dichotomy you guys are creating is the problem. The choice is not between the libertarian paradise and a brutal tyranny. We have laws on the books to address much of this stuff. Some small changes in existing law would address most of the speech issues.

          • No one ever leaves anyone alone, It’s not what people do . Someone’s boot is always on someone’s neck. Best ion be your on theirs

            Otherwise you should enjoy the abortion on demand, free porn, celebrate gay marriage ,love the legal weed of clown world and just push for less gun laws

            Long term if f you don’t want some woke company deciding what you can say or your ISP banning you from the Internet for having the wrong opinion than you had best get boots on their necks

          • Gentlemen….you are both correct. The is a giant circle and a cycle. You can argue over how much and when. Believe Derb once wrote about a great-aunt whose husband died in a mine accident. At that time Britain had just started up gov’t pensions, in this case for widows, and his great-aunt and her children received gov’t aid and didn’t have to lose all and go destitute upon the death of her husband.

            Derb noticed this is about human nature and our need for security. People would eventually vote security through government, and “reliable” pensions rather than church and charity. Aunty Em and Uncle Henry could retire on Social Security and not work, all bent over knees aching, until they dropped in their tracks.

            Once you open that door, there is no way to stop government from growing into our lives. It is the human nature/security cycle, meaning we will vote in whatever it takes to keep the wolf away from the door. Then the bureaucracies get bigger, gov’t needs more to keep the burping bureaucracies rolling, people want more free stuff….just keeps rolling out bigger and bigger.

            Another example of this argument is National Parks. It looked like a great idea to enact the first National Park, Yellowstone in 1872. Hard to fuss at that. Yet now in the West, the Feds own 67% of Utah……in Nevada the Feds own 81% of the state. This is our existential threat in the West……the Feds land grabbing and in some cases stealing the land…..the Bundys, Hammonds, Wayne Hage. Obama grabbed almost 2 million acres for the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, and Trump reversed it.

            Once the door is opened, this is how it plays out. And there is no way to stop the door from opening. And no way to stop government from growing bigger. This is not an Either/Or. There is no way to stop these cycles. This is human nature manifested as government writ large.

          • Spot on. The libertarian types don’t give a rats ass about people, period. When Clinton was preparing to sign NAFTA, the opposition didn’t come from chain smoking Libertarians, who just ran their mouth about “muh free markets” would fix everything but from white factory workers who smelled a giant rat and fought to stop it.

            As our country’s industrial and technological sectors got a** raped, the “free marketeers” said squat. The only time we heard from the buggers is when someone tried to stop abuses.

            You see it here, anyone who proposes any sort of government regulation to reign in Big Tech and you get Libertarians flipping out and coming out of the wood work. They spew crap like “make your own Facebook”, yadda, yadda. Always a excuse to do nothing as whites get curb stomped.

            If we ever do get a place of our own. Libertarians along with their progressive allies need to be kept out.

          • > The only time we heard from the buggers is when someone tried to stop abuses.

            > The libertarian types don’t give a rats ass about people, period.

            Are you sure it’s legal to use both those sentences in the same paragraph?

          • An electorate that was 90% White people elected Roosevelt 4 times in fair open elections making him for all practical purposes President for Life

            LBJ expanded the New Deal into the Great Society and minus the Black Problem and later immigration, were super happy with that

            Most of Europe has socialized medicine and welfare states essentially no one wants to be rid of either and they are probably better educated about the tradeoffs than Americans are

            What they don’t want is more migrants

            Also you have right now with a few caveats more freedom from government than you would have had 50 years ago . Your oppressor is the private sector

            My feeling is that most Libertarians, and I am not accusing you here, hate not being able to grift, get cheap labor or use the usual flim flam they do to get ahead,

            They hate the idea of a society that is mostly middle and working class, somewhat stolid and careful since they relish chaos like many Lefties and thing Progress, at least the monetary kind is more important than a healthy civilization

            Fuck that,

            Any economic or social policy that discourages kids especially White ones is anathema to me.

            If regulation gets the babies, than get too it.

          • >If regulation gets the babies, than get too it.

            Why don’t you chart out birthrates vs. regulations on the books, over time?

            As you take away people’s autonomy, you make them permanent children. Children don’t have children, they drink in clubs and vote for gibs instead.

          • I’ve done this actually but it has to take into account urbanization and technology to be relevant

            The US is not a nation of farmers and hasn’t been in any lifetime here.

            AFAICT from my research the US TFR has been in gradual decline since 1900 or so and steep decline since 1930 with the baby boom in the middle

            THis was before income tax BTW

            It hit below replacement in the 30’s with the Great Depression, my estimates say 2.0 or a bit higher TFR or so with no birth control, a highly religious population but a high childhood and infant mortality

            That collapse level low BTW

            It got even lower by 1940 as nothing could goose the economy even things like the civilian conservation corps were inadequate to support anyone on.

            The post war baby boom was caused by the US having an export surplus which is something that will never be repeated

            That boom ended in 1972 and has never even with mass immigration from highly natal countries been significantly above replacement. There were two years which came from a weird happenstance of 3 fertile generations (a very few youngest boomers, Gen X and Gen Y) and massive immigration it hit 2,2 or so, 1970 level for a couple of years

            It is currently back to its near half a century low norm at 1.8 with fast decline among Hispanics

            And note too the Great Depression was in full bore mode in a low regulatory environment prior to Roosevelt so its not “more regulation and cost.” the economy was also essentially entirely domestic. Smoot Hawley maybe didn’t help but it jackshit to the economy as trade was 7% of the entirety and mostly exports

            Fundamentally this decline appears to be driven by urbanization and increased costs of child rearing along with free trade and technology lowering wages drastically

            Some deregulation might lower the cost of child rearing but people aren’t putting off having babies because the need to buy a car seat or have to pay a bit more for something

            Largely its because society has changed and more importantly wages have been arbitraged heavily , down 50% of GDP

            Combine this with a failure to prevent investors and foreigners from making houses expensive (an dyes some regulation) and a lack of stable jobs and good schools and you have a recipe for disaster

            Worse with social changes, the “healthy family” TFR, two parents and intact is rough 1.0 or so. The other .6 to .8 come from broken homes

            You want to fix this? Regulation is the key because if people don’t have good schools , stable families, decent housing and long term employment, , they’ll have less quality kids

            Your business model might be about virtue signaling how great abortion is and driven by quarterly profits but the national interest takes place over decades

            It takes 20 years to make a family, sometimes more,

            we don’t do this? we die. Or well the Amish and Orthodox take over in a few centuries

      • The internet has done vast damage in normalizing one sided contracts of adhesion (eg every EULA ever). Restoring, even enhancing, their former disfavored status under the law would vastly improve matters across-the-board including the kind of “opt-in” privacy system you’re talking about. We need a silicon-savvy pol (Yang?) to push an internet bill of rights that includes opt-in privacy, Draconian penalties for doxxing and a mandatory set of limitations on EULA’s and other “click to agree to this 30 page shit no one ever reads” contracts of adhesion.

      • Trusting in regulation as a problem-solver assumes 3 things: that 51% of voters are of sound ethical judgment, with this being their primary motivation in the polling booth; that these voters elect statesmen of integrity and justice; and those being regulated are prohibited from lobbying said statesmen.

        There’s no solution in regulation because we’re a postmodern culture, with >50% of the populace unable to objectively make ethical distinctions. Sure, we can have congressional staffers gin up a few hundred pages of regulatory balderdash but I can’t fathom how that works out for our side.

        • It’s like this. Your choice is use government to prevent these global pirates from pillaging your community or lay back and hope the end comes quick. There is no third option. That’s always the problem with libertarian thinking. It assumes some as yet unrevealed third option will magically appear. There is no third option. “Oh, something magical will happen to take care of this” is like hoping the lions are full before they get to you.

          If you want to have a marketplace, it means having a state with enough power to enforce the rules of the market place.

          • Sorry, personal experience makes me no fan of modern era regs ginned up by lobbyists, and you’re naive if you don’t think that’s who writes them. I live on a farm … can’t legally sell milk, although my product is far superior to Big Dairy. Small farmers are continuously shoved out of the marketplace due to regs bought and paid for by Big Ag … tell me how that expands the marketplace? I can’t legally retrieve a bucket of gravel from the creek on my property, as it might threaten native grasses. Buzzards threaten calves, and hawks descend on poultry, but I’m regulated against shooting birds of prey. In my previous life I was responsible for enforcing thousands of pages of CFR regs, none of which served the purpose of salvaging communities or stopping global pirates. It’s not libertarian to simply DISTRUST our government’s ability to regulate with objective justice. You know who will end up writing the regs you suggest? People bought and paid for by the global pirates. That will bring “the end” quicker than simply doing nothing.

      • Here’s a useful antitrust precedent to apply to FB, Goog, TWTR, etc.:

        “Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 U.S. 131 (1948), (also known as the Hollywood Antitrust Case of 1948, the Paramount Case, the Paramount Decision or the Paramount Decree) was a landmark United States Supreme Court antitrust case that decided the fate of movie studios owning their own theatres and holding exclusivity rights on which theatres would show their films.
        United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.”

        – Wikipedia
        en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc.

    • Precedent only matters to the extent the present decision-makers respect the precedent on principal or its merits. If precedent had the mystical force process-honks rely on to give slippery slope arguments validity, the Warren Court would have been impeached en banc and White cultural hegemony would reign unchallenged. You can’t beat a results-first opposition with a rule of law defense. Start thinking about what you’d like to achieve not whether the rules permit it.

    • Government did do its job. The primary job of government is self preservation. Government did nothing that would draw criticism from powerful controllers of up and coming media.
      Job done,

  21. To our opponents, “peaceful separation” means us in shallow graves. Never forget that.

    • You took the words right off of my keyboard. The Balkanization of digital media, as Zman describes it, looks like a microcosm and a paradigm for humanity.

    • Its stage 3 in the 5 stages of grief that ” I have to go to war or be killed or enslaved because cultural Marxists and globalists fucked my nation.”

      #1denial. very few people are still stuck at this stage

      #2 anger. We have a lot of that

      #3 bargaining. hey maybe we can have a peaceful separation

      #4 depression. black pills ahoy

      #5 acceptance. better check my preps and my accountability lists

      Most people on the Right are still at 2 with a fair amount at #3 and #4 and avery few at #5

      When enough reach 5 and there is a consensus on what people want, hell breaks loose

      As to stage 3, its possible to do enough damage to the Left to force a succession but these people are driven by quoth our host a Judeo Puritan religious instinct to perfect the world and can not be reasoned with. They will never leave anyone alone and as such must not have any access to any power if they are not destroyed

      Eventually the numbers of them will thin as society becomes harder, there becomes less room for virtue signalling shenanigans and people typically find a proper religion

      However if will take time and if the new society is doing its job properly and becomes more prosperous , this crap will spring up again even the the new constitution includes heavy safeguards

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