Last summer, I was asked to do a presentation to an industry group on the topic of technology and small business in America. The question was how can small and mid-sized business compete with and cooperate with the tech giants. I suspect they expected a dozy talk on how best to use LinkedIn and Facebook to attract new clients, but instead I gave a speech on how these companies need to be destroyed. If we are to avoid techno-feudalism, Silicon Valley must be wiped from the earth.
The funny thing I noticed is the older more right-wing people were uncomfortable with this sort of talk, even if the facts made sense to them. The older left-wing types were taken back by such talk. The Left in America is fully incorporated now, an extension of the human resource and training departments of global capital. The most receptive to what I was saying were the younger people. They asked a lot of good questions, suggesting they have been wrestling with this reality as well.
Last weekend, I was at an AIM meet-up. Jared Taylor, James Kirkpatrick (buy his book) and Patrick Casey were there as well. Jared gave a talk on the dangers of picking the wrong enemies. One of the wrong enemies, according to Jared, was capitalism. He gave a fiery defense of market capitalism. One of the things I noticed is that the young guys were not really buying it. Everyone loves and respects Jared, so they were polite and respectful, but I could not help but notice the skepticism.
Now, Jared is a man of his time. He remembers the 1970’s and he remembers living in Japan as the country turned the corner from post-war depression to economic powerhouse in the 1980’s. Young people inherited the product of market economics, so they take it for granted. At the same time though, they inherited the consequences of marketism. The broken homes, the busted communities, the sterile suburbs, young women throwing their lives away on feminism. That’s their frame of reference.
I thought it would make a good topic to cover in the podcast this week, especially as we head into the holy season of marketism. It is one of those topics that I think is useful in reintroducing the types of topics that must be the focus of any cultural movement. One consequence of marketism is that those naturally inclined to right-wing politics are no longer comfortable speaking about culture. Instead, everything is framed in the sterile terms of market capitalism. We’ve lost the cultural language.
This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.
For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!
This Week’s Show
Contents
- 00:00: Opening
- 05:00: Monetizing Social Capital
- 15:00: Institutional Dishonesty
- 25:00: Neo-Taylorism
- 35:00: Evaluating The Results
- 45:00: Markets As A Tool
- 55:00: Closing
Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute
Full Show On Spreaker
Full Show On YouTube
https://youtu.be/Coilp17aoEc
I saw the destruction of community capital you described happen in all the little towns in the mid west I lived in . bobs auto parts , locally owned and run, was run out by auto zone,NAPA, ect. the local hardware was replaced by ACO or menards , and on and on . now all the profits that used to be recycled through the communities are sent off to new York city or wherever the corp. is headquartered. it has gotten so bad that this summer , I drove through some of the most remote and poor parts of the… Read more »
Capitalism is a tool. It can be used for good or evil, but it is not itself good or evil. A people simply need to think about how this extremely powerful tool should best be harnessed. That will be different depending on the people, but it should be discussed. But to do that, you first have to have a people. We outlawed that for whites, so there was no constraint on capitalism while white men still controlled things. Now that other groups are grabbing power, the role of capitalism is again being discussed and will be molded to what they… Read more »
When we idiotically surrendered power in 1965 all the constraints on everything went, not just capitalism.
We must take back power. None of the others can wield it responsibly or well. Our mistake was conflating rights with power. There can be no right to power. Rights and decency we can and should share – not power.
Topple the now openly treasonous liberal administrative state and the power is ours again. No formal measures but that are needed, the rest will know. True power can wield it softly, there’s no need (or wisdom) in degrading the others.
100% this.
My wife knocked one out of the park last night.
A neighbor and good friend who exemplifies Midwest Nice suddenly asked her, seemingly out of the blue, “Are you a racist?”
My better half said, “Yes. Aren’t you?”
The woman reflexively got a shocked look on her face, but responded, “I didn’t think I was, but lately I think I am.”
From now on you can all address my missus as The Right Nurse.
Doc, you got a good one.
Don’t I know it. Married her twice – she appropriately dumped my ass when I got into a drug problem and I couldn’t heal myself. I fell from a high position in several organizations and lost a lot but I stuck the landing: on my knees, asking for help. She was wise enough to wait ten years to make certain I wasn’t up to my old tricks. The first marriage was a by guy in a candy-apple red leisure suit in Las Vegas who called me by the wrong name, witnessed by a bunch of my drunken buddies. The second… Read more »
Wow, the pills this doc prescribes are all red.
Good on ya, guys.
Hopefully more and people will start saying, “look, I’m just not going to keep up the charade any more.”
Supportive reactionary wife = Holy Grail
Sorry for making it about me, but I’m going to share here: Two compliments that mean the most to me are one from my late father-in-law many years ago (“I like what you’ve done with your house, I like what you’ve done with your husband, and I like what you’ve done with your son”) and a very recent one from one of my older son’s friends. I was told that later online he noted “So I met “X’s” mom.” Response: “What’s she like?” Answer: “Totally based.”
Zman talks about how people selling used cars don’t point out the flaws in the car. I’ve done that, though. Most recently was a stock trailer. I’d gotten a new one and I was selling my old one. I made a point of telling the couple buying it (actually trading — I got a Honda generator), “This thing has a lot of rust, and the plank floor is due to be replaced. You need to go over it very carefully when you have the floor up and make sure all the supporting beams and structural parts of the trailer are… Read more »
Very huwyte of you. I would hesitate to sell anything that was unsafe without warning the potential buyer.
I think it’s the defining racial trait of White people. Certainly we have our criminals and grifters, but we have a much higher-than-average portion of the population that simply has a conscience. Our “elites” are doing everything they can to destroy that with the rootless, godless society they are bent on creating.
I think the key piece is that the conscience of the average person of European descent extends to beyond their immediate social group. I think could be a function of 1500+ years of Christianity + Roman/Greek philosophy providing both cultural and biological selection pressure. There are always people who behave badly, but Western Civ was built on a foundation that doesn’t just kill the bad person, it tells them to *be better than they are*. This can be twisted into the bad things we see today (feminist puritanism as an example), but hundreds of years of pushing people to look… Read more »
I’d buy a used car from most of you.
Not you, Tiny.
Don’t even get me started on TV.
I know you can find much worse stuff on the internet. But TV, being curated by the capitalist and “elite” classes and as such representative of our “official” culture, is such a nauseating combination of the rancid, banal, and dishonest that I’m surprised our TV-watching nation doesn’t have people just mentally snapping in their millions every day.
TV is already at a 1984 / Brave New World / Turner Diaries level of dystopianism.
“…cut the chord”, “don’t even own a television”, “stopped paying attention to mass media…”
But how much time does your face spend fornicating with a smartphone? Eh? How much stupid shit do consume on that thing? Yeah…replace one drug with another. Maybe you don’t. But the above fragments I’ve put in quotes are typical virtue-signaling points I see in dissident comment sections all the time. Maybe you don’t fit that description, but you would be an exception.
Phone content strictly The Bible, Shakespeare, and Ow My Balls!
I do about a three-hour (each way) commute once a week. In one direction I listen to Z, Radio Renaissance and Radio Derb. In the other, a Shakespeare play, with the tragedies playing over and over.
In between commutes I deal with the weakness, illnesses, infirmities of age and often contrary-nature of people who need medical care.
I consider myself well-grounded in human nature, more or less in equal measure as a result of these endeavors.
For someone who invented a doo-dad and has ‘F U money’ you sure don’t strike me as the brightest bulb in the pack son. I know you like to be purposefully controversial on ‘dissident comments sections’, so here is a little back at ya. Ask yourself a simple question what is the -primary- difference between TV and ‘a smartphone’. You are a bright wealthy inventor I’m certain you can figure it out. Passive one way feed of propagandized talmud horsesh1t vs. -active- seeking out of Truth in the few places left where you can dig & scrape to find it.… Read more »
Gotta go with Apex here. With a smartphone we can reach back through the screen and grab them by the throat. Internet censorship is hot because we’re the abyss that not only stares back at them – we’re the demons who can speak through that two way portal as well.
That two way portal is a necessary Faustian downside (for them) to the power of the technology they’ve chosen to use.
Like I say elsewhere here, there’s an activist niche for using our own black magic to fight their (((witchery))).
I don’t even have one of those electronic leashes you mention. If people were smart they’d make the peddlers of those devices eat them until their stomachs burst.
Same with TV,. They only exist to distract people and convince them they need more products made by Chinese slave labor.
Pretty much anybody defending Capitalism is a grifter. There is far too much capital floating about ( hence 0% interest rates) and it’s financing billion dollar ponzi schemes that further skim the mandatory 2% or so to the financial overlords. What we should be defending and promoting is free enterprise. That mean free of the entire edifice of corporate conglomeration as well as the many levels of the State. My largest expenses are Federal Taxes State Taxes Local Taxes Health Insurance Auto Insurance (recently added a teenage boy) Only then do we get to things that matter to my family.… Read more »
That Auto Insurance matters a great deal to the person you might crash into (or to you when an uninsured Mexican crashes into you).
But generally, your point is taken.
Any good or service which is mandated by government should be provided by government or at least have a government-provided option. Captive markets served by wholly private interests are the worst kind of crony capitalism, a lose-lose worst of both worlds situation for customers.
I’m not against that, there is the free-rider problem (e.g. will people drive more recklessly if they won’t have to pay more when they are texting and crash into the guy in front of them…)
I’m not saying the gubmint option should be free. Government auto insurance could work pretty much like the private sector version with the citizens being functional “shareholders” who exercise corporate governance by voting or otherwise exercising their normal political options.
The only effective way to police any free rider problem is on the bio-cultural scale. As we often say here, Scandi socialism works b/c Scandis – they don’t as a rule free-ride on their fellow tribesmen. Others can’t seem to make that One Weird Trick work.
Even the most industrious, high IQ, Cooperative populations can be corrupted by a socialist system. One must get the incentives correct and that means strong property rights and the rule of law. Of course one could impose the most efficient wonderful system upon a Ethiopian population and it would still result in shitholeo fandago.
Ah yes. But its the best of worlds if you’re in that loop.
I really want to keep government out of providing services. That’s why Britain still had food rationing in 1955 or it took 3 months to get a phone line in the 70s’ and we made the poorest cars outside the GDR. It’s why we have the near to worst healthcare in the developed world. I take your point about crony capitalism, but even that isn’t as bad as the alternative.
You sneaky libertarians ninja’ing a general railing point against auto insurance. I bet you don’t have a point about government subsidized roads, either.
How much of bilejones’ listed expenses go to roads? Whenever the left looks to fleece us for more taxes, it’s always about roads, parks, police, firefighters, teachers, and of course, “the children.” These are tiny percentages of government expenditures.
In my local community of ~40k people, 25% of revenues pay for Public Safety, and another 25% to Public Works. Code Enforcement/Development is about 8%, and Parks/Rec are 5%. Various other expenses make up the rest (e.g. tax collection expense, finance and exec salaries, debt service, etc). So at least, locally, it is about roads, police, firefighters. The school budgets aren’t as great, with 65% going to instruction (teachers) and nearly 25% to ‘instructional support services’. The ‘retirement contribution’ of the school (counted as ‘instruction’) has gone *massively* up as they continue to pay forever for all the baby boomer… Read more »
You have to get deeper into the weeds of local government spreadsheets. So when they say 25% goes to Public Safety, dig deeper. In my county’s public safety budget, that includes dental and health coverage for inmates, as well as their ever-increasing educational opportunities. These benefits far exceed what law-abiding people enjoy. The deeper you dig into local budgets the more nauseated you’ll become.
The numbers I posted are at the smallest level. It definitely gets worse the higher you go, and it can get pretty bad in larger municipalities. Generally I live in a relatively corruption free area compared to some places only 30 minutes away.
Good grief man, my county is redneck rural and only 40K people; the county seat is <10K. The problem I'm raising is everywhere. Corrupt-free has nothing to do with it. Rural governments get stuck with a myriad of unfunded mandates thrown down by state & fed regs. Dig deeper and you'll find the muck right where you're living – guaran-f'ing-teed.
Indeed, an excellent example is CA’s recent hike in gasoline taxes and vehicle registration fees, which was sold successfully to the sheeple as a source for road improvement funding after years of neglect and deferred maintenance. Two problems: 1. a close reading of the law shows that large portions of the tax revenue can be allocated to the failed bullet train project and other make-work mass transit projects or public “education” efforts, reduction of greenhouse gasses etc. In other words, not building or repairing the f-ing roads. And 2. the state can simply “borrow” from the fund to create a… Read more »
Always vote against every tax increase no matter the stated reasons. The government is flush and can move money to anything worthy.
Nonsense. With all due respect to our esteemed blog host, I submit that Z is only seeing things from his perspective on this one. There is nothing wrong with capitalism – the problem is with our marketplace. Consider the healthy marketplace: if Z starts shorting the jars by one pickle, he opens himself up to me as a competitor to cut his throat: I will throw in an extra pickle, or a coupon and my sales guys will cluck and squawk from one end to the marketplace to the other about it. Yes, you can sell honestly and should! I… Read more »
Are you one of those Prosperity Christians that says only happy Christians are REAL Christians? Or even worse, a Calvinist? I seem to recall much to be said in the Bible about *suffering*, not *happiness*.
I never really thought about it, BT. I am a crime thinker among Christians too – I believe the bible says what it means, and means what it says. I am by no means a theological scholar. Nor do I mean to insult others. One of the things I got from the bible is that you can still live well and be happy – even under the most adverse circumstances. The bible is not the only source of this thinking, you should try reading it again and bolster your study with readings in stoicism too. As far as our esteemed… Read more »
Compared with the actual theory, what you’re describing is a “No True Scotsman” capitalism dominated by ethical actors mutually obeying a code of honorable value-for-value exchange. This concept was a big cope/crutch for us Randroids BITD. I know it well. But if you read Alisa Rosenbaum closely, you’d see the lie – i.e. “Atlas,” where Hank and Dagny pillow-brag that they’d strike the hardest deal possible with each other the day after sweating up each other’s balance-sheets. This anarcho-capitalist underbelly is the actual face of primal capitalism. Any more tame version results from assuming a moral governor external to capitalism,… Read more »
And yet, back in Mayberry when our blog host and I were kids, that is exactly how it went. Rand had a lot of good points and ideas but her rejection of altruism has to be taken in context. Her reasoning was that socialists have made an art form out of abusing the virtue to the point where it becomes a vice. In fact – that is the entire reason SJW’s exist – and why they are so toxic and destructive. Given a choice between letting objectivists or SJWs call the shots – I will take my chances with the… Read more »
Rand didn’t reject altruism. She rejected the idea that government could be altruistic.
She totally rejected altruism, claiming it was immoral. From a letter from Rand to John C. Gall: “…altruism is the curse of the world and that as long as we go on screaming “service” and “self-sacrifice” louder than the New Deal we will never have a chance” More quotes: “Time and again, I have found that the basic evil behind today’s ugliest phenomena is altruism.” “If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.” The woman hated the idea that one should be asked to do something not in one’s own self-interest.… Read more »
In many ways, the Objectivists have *won* – we live in a transactional society, where every single human interaction is mediated by ‘the market’ in some way or another. Hence Z-Man’s podcast. Objectivists reject any notion that a man can relate to his fellow men through any way but *trade*: https://courses.aynrand.org/lexicon/trader-principle/ ” Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit — his love, his friendship, his esteem — except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure,… Read more »
I think what John is saying is that “real” Christians follow Christ and take their Bible seriously. They’re obedient, they follow-through with their convictions, and they don’t beat a drum whilst doing it. If you befriend a “real” Christian you’ll notice that his life is different, and generally the family is different … and the “real” Christian won’t take the credit, because any redemption found in man is God’s glory. The American church is replete with phony Christians and hypocrites, no doubt about it. But given the despair of the prevailing worldviews that are out there it may be worth… Read more »
Thank you very much Captain, and much obliged.
Capitalism is fine for what is. During the Cold War it was mythologized as this all encompassing moral philosophy as a vaccination against communism. Maybe that was necessary then but it isn’t now. We have to deal with the problems of our age and the excesses of capitalism are one we have today. Capitalism is good at making things efficient. So for the healthcare industry more of it is probably better. For my town having its businesses destroyed for a more efficient mega-corps I don’t care about efficiency. There’s more to life than efficiency. This is like when Z says… Read more »
Book Peddling: The steady trade-off and rot of social capital and of the estate control of market capital to capital markets was the work of a great historian who should be widely read: Fernand Braudel. He wrote about the rise of material wealth and how that affected our civilization. He saw it as a negative. His work is a detailed study of how this change came about. He focused on the period between 1400 to 1800. His central work is the 3 vol. The Structure of Everyday Life. It’s a slow read but worth it. For a more gentle intro… Read more »
Yves, Thanks for the recommendation. Due to it, I’ve got Braudel’s History of Civilizations on order.
Cerulean, it’s a good one volume history but he wrote it as a one volume text for upper level high school students. It was rejected because it was all social movements and no great men and ideas.
His great contribution was in the 3 volumes of “The structures of Everyday life”.
The 100 page little book i mentioned above is a good intro to those 3 volumes.
His History of Civ is okay but it doesn’t measure up to his great works.
Yves, thanks for the suggestion. I’ll look for the “Afterthoughts” book you mentioned. And I’ll try to plow through the high school text. In school, I hated having to memorize battles, dates, and genealogies, so maybe the broad-brush text would be good reading for me. Thanks.
What is the functional difference between capitalism and free enterprise? What policies would you promote for governing the system that would be different than we have now? How would you reduce those tax levies you list? How would you prevent your free enterprise system from spawning large amounts of capital and large corporations without intrusive top-down economic management (which you can bet is going to entail high taxes)?
Z: “(Jared Taylor) gave a fiery defense of market capitalism.” One of the most destructive things about our current situation is that economics at the high-end, academic, intellectual level, is taught entirely wrong. (I say this as an honors graduate of Most Prestigious University, and if you knew who my advisers and peers were it would turn your hair white.). It is a very cart before the horse situation. Here is the basic low-down, a combination of Wittgenstein, summary economic history and common sense. So-called “Free-market” institutions really have one basic function: to establish the most accurate notion of price… Read more »
Price. Cost. Value.
Regulated markets.
Market dynamics.
Consumerism. Culturism. Marketism.
Dissident realism. Honesty, moralism.
A lot to know. A lot to understand.
Keep your head up. Helmet on.
Just when I think I have it all figured out, I realize I don’t. Capitalism has done more to uplift the common man than any other system. So they say.
Even Rubio is being forced to say that we have a market to serve the people, not the other way around. This is a good sign.
I agree that one of the virtues of the market is to discover price, but I don’t want to discover the value of American workers when we flood the country with immigrants and outsource the jobs.
Bingo. There’s a reason why “destructive testing” is usually limited to a small sample of a fungible test subject.
“We had to kill the working class in order measure it.”
Schroedinger’s VAT.
Oscar Wilde quipped that a cynic was a man who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. But if all the free market of the economists can deliver is accurate prices, then the cynical view would be that the purview of markets is the truly valueless stance. The drive for perpetual GDP growth fueled by ever greater consumption has been the destroyer of our culture.
I remember being in a high school economics class and the teacher was worrying about that the rate of growth of the economy was slowing. I asked why the economy always had to expand, why a steady state was so bad.
A credit based economy requires expansion at or beyond the cost of the credit. Once the economy became based on credit and borrowing, the economic growth treadmill was required.
Not getting the growth required to cover the cost of credit, we are now busy reducing that cost. Europe has even turned that cost into a revenue source, of sorts.
I saw recently, can’t recall where, that a 1% increase in GDP now requires a 4-5% increase in debt.Someone should introduce these dipshit economists to the wonders of compound interest.
Bile,
Sorry, the nihilistic homosexual pedophile determined, in the last century, we can untether ourselves from reality and it’ll all be fine. Didn’t you get the memo?
If you can’t trust a childless English faerie (and a Baron no less) with perverse appetites to guide your future… then who can you trust?
I think we’ve found the cynic amoung us.
Penitent’s not wrong….
Keynes did less harm than M. Friedman or R. Reagan
Your teacher would have been right in the first half of the 20th century, when there was actual poverty and growth was a means to lift everyone out of it. But today “the poor” are obese and have quality shelter, nice cars, cell phones and big screen TVs. Only the mentally ill are truly poor in current day USA.
We need God and religion back. No, I can’t prove God exists. That’s irrelevant. We can prove religion works. We can also prove that societies that lose their god or gods lose their way, then usually return to what works and rebound and rejuvenate. < thats what usually happens, not the fall of rome, not dark ages. We need religion back. There are many more examples in history of decline then rejuvenation then there are falls of Empires and Dark Ages. As for the market – our high trust society created conditions for these markets and the modern system of… Read more »
Part two… Like I was saying earlier, economics from a university perspective in this country, is taught completely wrong. If you look at an Introductory Economics textbook for say a freshman university Ec course, you will quickly be introduced to a “supply and demand” graph. It will show you two intersecting curves: one is “supply” and the other is “demand”. They are leaving out a third, invisible curve, one which is equally important: the curve for “Jews”. I said that for shock-comedy value, but the point stands — one could just as easily label that third curve “market-dominant minorities” or… Read more »
I thought the remark about Dan Crenshaw threatening students was interesting.
I mean, in the past, politicians were probably often just pretending to listen to people.
But now they’re not even pretending. And they don’t even seem to realize how quickly that’s going to corrode their legitimacy. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they feel the game is so rigged now that they, as a class, can’t be removed from power.
Maybe that’s true? 🙁
The most profound two-word sentence I ever heard was by, of all people, Peggy Noonan: “Wealth detaches.” Wealth detaches us from community, family, friends, religion–even reality.
One reason people stick together is because they have to. And when they’re rich, and they don’t have to stick together, they … don’t.
The problem is the the profound, sui-genocidal implications of this emerge only slowly, in fact only when things are pretty far gone. That’s where we are now.
I would agree with that, except most people aren’t rich. I’ve got f*ck you money and am thus well-heeled from a doo-dad I invented and licensed out decades ago and series of investments I made, but I’ve got far of a public social life than most people I know; none of who are monetarily wealthy by any stretch. My tale is anecdotal, true. But your main point stating wealth isolates people is largely correct, but piss-poor people are even more atomized. So how do you account for them?
If you have Fuck You money, why the anonymity?
There’s no such thing as FU money, only FU attitude. The more money you have, the more you’ve got to lose
Maybe for some. But for me, I will disprove that assertion for the low low price of $750,000.
Three quarters of a million is NOT fu money. At 4% p.a. (per Trinity study safe for 30 years with 95% confidence level) that yields a mere $30,000, which is the pre-tax equivalent of $15 per hour full-time, i.e. practically minimum wage in Mexifornia. Don’t sell yourself too cheap, brother.
If you are young and starting with zero, yes absolutely.
I am neither, and that is my number.
My experience in Big Capitalism has been that the more money a person has, the more likely he is to have acquired the money precisely because he is the sort who would never imagine saying, “FU” to a person above him in the corporate hierarchy. It is one reason I detest Capitalism.
” the sort who would never imagine saying, “FU” to a person above him”
Plus that sort usually gleefully F’s the people below him.
Because you may lose access to your F*ck You money when your bank (along with every other bank) decides to deny you service due to badthink. People with FU money are vulnerable, unless you manage to propel yourself into the billionaire ranks by which time you have F*ck Everyone Else money.
Atomization is mostly a direct result of predatory capitalism which pretty much defines capitalism as practiced in the U.S. It convinced people that hyper individualism was the way to go(something rich people don’t practice, it’s only meant to keep the shlubs in their place) and that all ones needs could be satisfied via consumption including intellectual and spiritual needs. Which is a complete lie. Take black Friday.That’s something your ilk greatly benefits from. Convincing people they need a bunch of crap. A wonderful bit of human manipulation that would make the Devil envious. Really people killing one another over a… Read more »
noonan is the one of the worst of the worst shills for the neocon crowd. she has been subtley encouraging the dem impeachment for a while . now today she goes full Romney https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-defenders-have-no-defense-11574382421
I know; she’s bad, she’s bad! But that’s a great line all the same. I think that once you become an “establishment figure” you kind of forget what’s outside of the bubble. Her early memoir “What I Saw at the Revolution” is pretty good; her memories of pre-dystopia NYC are particularly fascinating. She also has some very politically incorrect things to say about “racism,” suggesting (correctly) that it more often comes not from a priori biases, but from simple inductive observation of crime patterns. As for the claim of most people not being rich: most contemporary western people are rich,… Read more »
She sure has drunk the kool-aid, hasn’t she? Classic case of choosing a side, then denying the existence of what is right in front of one’s eyes (with fingers in ears and “lalalalalalala”), in order to justify and double down on the position already taken. I am not surprised at this, she is a dutiful follower of what is expected, always has been, which is why she has that gig in the first place.
But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
-1 Timothy 6:6-10
I suspect that in his defense of capitalism, Jared Taylor falls prey to a very common fallacy in political argumentation, namely projectionism. Namely, you project your own personal qualities onto all the actors in a hypothetical political system. I think Jared Taylor is a good guy. So if he ran a company, he would run it in a good way. Capitalism is really just freedom–freedom in its economic aspect. Good guys can be trusted with freedom. They don’t want to use their freedom to hurt other people or reduce other people’s freedom. Generally speaking, capitalism run by good people would… Read more »
Boomers whining about the 1970s economy is unconvincing and off-putting, and tends to ignore the fact that the economy has been run almost entirely to maintain their own pain and guilt-free consumption habits ever since.
That said, Jared Taylor doubtless has the Japanese experience from 1989 to present in mind: bubble, collapse, intervention to prop up asset prices, three decades of stagnation producing multi-generational societal decline. Which is more or less what the US had been operating for a long time now, with far greater social impacts.
Hence why the system was originally envisioned to make the sociopaths fight with each other… but that was subverted nearly immediately.
The barrier to sociopaths was whites ran things. The others didn’t. They worked. Let them succeed. But don’t let them run things. That’s madness, and it is our madness not theirs. Topple the now blessedly openly treasonous administrative state and their depredations end, and with it our rule is (softly) restored. They’ll know, and there is no need, wisdom or profit in degrading them publicly or legally. Using power to degrade is a sign of weakness and fear. Be strong, sure, even just – and lets take the power back. If anyone reading this thinks that’s unjust to the others… Read more »
I haven’t listened yet, but I’ve had a related idea in my head for a while now about corporatism: In virtually all the businesses I deal with (stores, restaurants, services, etc.) the owner is never there. In fact, the owner is a shell corporation, owned by another shell corporation, and so on. The “owners” are faceless investors. The few locally owned businesses I deal with – a hardware store, a pizza place, a barber shop, etc. – have completely different feel. I can meet and talk to the owner. I can sense his commitment to the enterprise. In all the… Read more »
The legal fiction that a corporation is a person, with many of the attendant rights of personhood, has had a toxic influence on our society. Perhaps the most damaging consequence of this idea is that the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC held corporations have a First Amendment free speech right to donate unlimited funds to political action committees. None of this insult to human dignity was necessary if the only goal was to create a form of business organization that shielded the proprietor from personal civil liability.
Meanwhile, us ordinary folk can start an LLC, but if I want to borrow money to fund my business, I’m still going to have to personally guarantee the loan… and there are cases where the owner of an LLC still faces personal legal liability.
I guess I just need to become too big to fail.
While I don’t want them in our future states, they can serve our purposes here and now. LLC’s can be used to obscure the ownership, control and funding of our activities if we play the jurisdiction game and otherwise hit the right marks. We can use our own corporate black magic to fight (((witchery))).
100% agree – and then some. Ficitious business entities in general are one of the pillars of Burnham’s managerial state, separating ownership from control and accountability. I’m inclined to throw out limited liability entities in general. Make the bridge-owners live under their bridges again. An owner who stands to lose his literal shirt will take a more active interest in controlling his managers. I want a scaled-down, de-financialized economy with businessmen focused on their local situation, not on arbitraging macro-trends with a satellite-level perspective on the economy and the tiny economic units they should instead see as their neighbors and… Read more »
That’s a great explanation, Exile.
And the same concept goes for banking: if every “mom–and-pop” bank was a hyper-local entity that was subject to the LOCAL population and the LOCAL industries, with the swings in LOCAL economy that come with it, we wouldn’t have much of the _____ that we’re in now.
I don’t fully understand banking, but I know enough to know that when things like business and banking go hyper-local, the people who live in the area are the beneficiaries.
For those who know more of the economic ins-and-outs, please feel free to correct me.
I grew up in a small town in the South. I lived next door to the owner of the local bank. Went to school with his grandsons. Today the only local bankers offer payday and auto title loans.
Debt in general is nearly always a net negative. Banks are useful a a place to protect assets and offer services like money movement (and useful things like bank-notes backed by the gold in the bank’s vault). When they started lending out that gold the bad things started.
My late father was a local banker who worked for a small bank created by farmers to ensure loans for annual planting. He worked in the era when bankers subscribed to the 3-6-3 rule: Pay 3% on savings, lend at 6%, and quit work at 3:00 p.m. It was a congenial life. Banks that lend to assist people with acquiring capital assets and managing cash flow issues will always be needed. What should be rejected is the creation of CDOs and derivative trading. Basically, banks go bad when they massively over-leverage deposits and poorly underwrite loans that can be financialized… Read more »
Workable balance. Basically we need to revive the old nigh-universal cultural contempt and legal prohibitiions on usury and thrown in a debt jubilee every few decades or otherwise prevent trans-generational debt to arrest the capital accumulation problem.
I’d also throw in a “use-it-or-lose-it” principle of ownership for fixed scarce quasi-public assets like land & water. Future aristocrats (e.g. clan partiarchs) and monarchs in a mixed Aristotlean constitutional system should dominate the “market” for these assets as well.
Agree.
To a large degree though, an honest legal system would fix the most egregious lawbreaking “by corporations”.
A company can only act as authorized in its articles of incorporation, Most have a general purpose rider “any other activity legal in the State of Whatever”. Not even Joe Biden’s Corporate haven of Delaware authorizes illegal behavior by corporations.
Any person performing an action not authorized cannot be acting for the corporation. Their actions therefore are on their own behalf and their own responsibility.
You cannot jail a corporation but you can jail lawbreakers trying to hide behind the corporate veil.
The existence of the veil is part of the problem and I think the overall result is net-negative. We spend a vast amount of time and money trying to answer the question of whether some particular action was authorized, etc…
We’re encouraging complexity as camouflage and IMO, an “honest legal system” would be one that doesn’t permit pretend entities in the first place. They create fertile ground for plausible deniability and corruption and I don’t see how their benefits outweigh the downsides.
Citizens United was to defang McCain/Feingold; which would have banned bad talk about politicians esp incumbents. Its the worst thing John Mcain ever did.
Corporations were established so liability is limited to your share, banning them would expose the shareholders to the total liability of the corporation. Do you want to be bankrupted by lawyers in class action lawsuits because you own some shares in Chik-Fil-A or whoever the Eye of Sauron is targeting? Probably not.
I’m beginning to think the next stage for disenchanted libertarians is nihilism.
“Do you want to be bankrupted by lawyers in class action lawsuits because you own some shares in Chik-Fil-A or whoever the Eye of Sauron is targeting?” Do we need a multinational stock corporation to provide our chicken sandwiches? Something wrong about a local family business that does that instead? You’re trolling again. As for nihilism, your tactical practility is the tiresome black pill here. It’s a contrarian shtick that infects every comment section – the “that’s never gonna happen b/c….” guy who has nothing to say about how to get anywhere from where we are now. Now go put… Read more »
Mitt Romney is a great example of the holier-than-thou Ivy League prick who is able to get money at low interest rates in order to take over businesses that could be broken up and sold off at a profit…and be damned to the human costs involved or the impact on those communities where the businesses were once located.
Beyond that, Mitt was able to do all of this behind the scenes, yet present a clean-scrubbed virtuous public image. Only his running for President as the then-latest incarnation of “literally Hitler”, with the attendant scrutiny and character assassination, revealed who he truly is.
Yep. I see more examples where the acquired firm is loaded up with debt, which pays back most of the purchase cost to the acquirers, who are then playing with house money. All upside, no downside.
I agree Romney is a prick, but what he and others did (and do) is a rather raw example of the crucial function of “creative destruction,” which has been called “a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress.” An in-depth discussion of the process, and why it is ultimately necessary and beneficial, can be read at https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CreativeDestruction.html
Vehemently disagree. Contra Adam Smith, most global trade today is simply wage, environmental, and/or other regulatory arbitrage. Period. Those thousand of factories in the industrial US that were literally stripped and shipped to China did not result in any sort of “progress.” They simply made the exact same products in slave-wage markets without environmental regulations and shipped those products to the US. In the meantime, it destroyed lives and communities in the US and contributed significantly to the conditions that bred the opioid crisis. Your comment is reflective of the Conservative Inc. free market uber alles mindset that got us… Read more »
A crucial step in fighting Big Tech: Extend the ban on child porn to all porn. It would sharply reduce profits while increasing costs.
Z needs to address porn.
I think this is one area where there are actual brain-structure differences involved between the generations. Those of us who had to cache tattered copies of Penthouse in the woods behind the house had a very different experience from those who at birth had interracial midget orgies available at the touch of a finger.
I think the first question about the unlimited access to pornography is how much attitudes about sex and sexuality are culturally loaded. The next question is how easy access to sexual gratification changes male and female matting strategy. My hunch is that the answer to the first question is where people will focus, but it is the second question that matters most. Japan has seen a collapse in fertility and now a collapse in sex. This coincides with the explosion of pornography. A decade ago, there was a Japanese baseball player on the Yankees who would carry a suitcase on… Read more »
As the father of a 19-year-old boy – he’s not awkward, just deeply suspicious of women. Seems the right approach for his generation.
Drake, my thought as well. How strange it is that young men can have virtual-reality, unrestrained, hedonistic sex lives, but must have signed consent forms to flirt with actual women. Throw in the facts that 1) feminism goes silent when the check arrives, and 2) if they get the woman pregnant, she then has all the power. She can have an abortion without any input from the father, but if she “chooses” to keep it, he is on the hook for 18+ years of child support, while she is favored in all custody disputes.
I know some time back Drake that he might be interested in becoming a lineman is that still something he is thinking about?
It’s a small world, Lineman. No dox, but are you in huckleberry country?
Nope – decided college football wasn’t worth it after a concussion. Just works out a lot and plays club lacrosse.
“young people are better looking now than at any time in human history” — they are? Some of them are, but a lot are now just plain fat.
As might be expected of an Albino Walrus, I also only find light-skinned women to be attractive. The percentage of those is going down as well.
Go on Tinder, set your age range to 18-20, and see who shows up. I predict you will be underwhelmed by most of them, to say the least.
There are a lot of fatties out there. But for those who care, there is far more information on good nutrition, useful supplements, and much better gyms than when I was a teenager and trying to get stronger and more fit. While most things in life aren’t much better than the 80s, the gym at my son’s school is seriously from a better future.
I’ve got an experiment you can try at home: if you are over fifty, get out your old HS yearbook.
Think of the people who were made fun of for being fat.
Prepare to be shocked. These are now the weather babes in some markets.
“The shocking thing…about young people is how awkward they are around the opposite sex”. The atomization and pornification of growing up in public schools and colleges, and also the on-line arena, mean that the kids have no socialization into relating to each other, and they also focus on masturbation and the gay thing.
In my daughter’s case, once she got away from school and got a real career-type job, working closely on a long term team with smart STEMy peers her own age, her social skills with the opposite sex (and her own sex) have blossomed and matured.
Porn exposure at a fairly young age definitely damaged me – only half-sarcastically, I’ll blame it for my former libertarianism, quasi-feminist belief in sexual equality, buying into the “authoritarian personality vs. sexual liberation” BS and a lot of years chasing the wrong kind of women.
It’s even more toxic for precocious kids who can understand the pseudo-intellectual elements but lack real maturity and discernment. When you start off thinking guys like Bob Guccione and Hefner are purveyors of high culture and sollonniers for “intellectuals” like Norman Mailer, it’s a long Orphean climb to get back to even.
Exile, your posts make me a better man through shear force of dictionary usage…”sollonniers” is a prime example. Thank you.
I wonder what daily exposure to contemporary digital porn does to a young man’s neuroanatomy, especially as the brain is still developing. It can’t be good, but I wonder how bad it is.
I hear generally right-minded young people say “Porn turns you gay” and I wonder about that, also.
Check out Borzoi’s stuff on TRS on this (raceborz.com, American Sun as well). Mike Enoch’s hit on that as well. The science is pretty settled on porn’s desenstization effects and accelerating fetishism – criminal justice has been studying this for years.
Without getting into Z-blog-unfriendly cringe detail, you can connect the dots pretty common-sensically between certain visual and thematic elements in porn and society’s inceasingly correlative degenerate behavior.
Look at the porn-monster gubmint employees – this is clearly pathological.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/Dozens-of-Federal-Employees-Watched-Abundance-of-Porn-on-the-Job-in-Recent-Years-414743293.html
“The science is pretty settled on porn’s desensitization effects and accelerating fetishism.” As Ted (in the movie “Ted”) said, “There are no chicks with dicks, Johnny, only guys with tits.”
I had to dial back the Borzoi – I doubt even the Frost Giant could handle his blackness these days.
Is American Sun where Ghoul is now?
(((Polymorphous Perversion)) will do that to you.
I think young people’s teeth and complexion are definitely better, at least in the US.
I wonder about the rest of it though. There is a schlubby quality to a lot of young men in my area, although I do not know if this is who they are or only the fashion.
Feminism (the theoretical kind which is evil, not the practical humanistic kind, which is good) has gone a long way to subvert and destroy the basic universal valences between the sexes, which are as standard and universal as electrical charges. People have become trained and conditioned to be embarrassed by reality. Misuse of linguistics has done the rest. I’m only an X-er, hovering around 50, and even I can remember a long-ago world where reality was still real. When a nice, attractive girl who likes you, cooks you a fine, home-cooked meal and then serves it to you, she is… Read more »
Japan has a history with pornography that predates the Jewish industrialization of it in the west. There’s sumi paintings depicting girls getting railed I think going back several hundred years. Apprentice artists would do smaller hand-drawn copies and turn them into little books for newly married couples (along with a list of suggested sexual positions, implication being – here’s how to have kids). A lot of these materials were funded by the Imperial government or local lords. Just an addendum to your post, really.
That great feeling when you refresh the page hoping that the blog post has dropped only to find an hrs worth of that smooth zman voice!
Zman voice = 50 social capital points
Out of all the podcasts and streams I listen to, Z has a voice made for radio.
… and a face made for radio as well. Ba dah boom.
Yo mama (with a paper bag).
There’s actually a terrifyingly dystopian way of settling the matter.
https://www.livescience.com/65689-ai-human-voice-face.html
Smooth voice but I wonder if he looks like Charles Grodin.
I look like Ramzan Kadyrov.
Nice beard; good trigger control. A relative?
I wonder how much longer we will have rural electrification. Running power lines to small communities that don’t produce enough to pay for it is inefficient.
PG&E’s management of its power lines has been found to have caused at least two of the devastating wildfires that have ravaged northern CA. Their solution has been to shut down the grid, plunging thousands into days without power like some third world shithole. This is their anticipated response for perhaps the next decade. When confronted with the costs, economic and otherwise, that this planned disruption causes, PG&E stated that burying the lines, which would essentially eliminate the problem, would be prohibitively expensive. So much for the market delivering acceptable solutions.
We have a local electricity co-op. While they buy electricity from AZ and lease lines from SCE to deliver it, and we had the power down this week due to storms, they are local and they give a rip. You can call the office, talk to a real person that cares, and who wants to make sure everyone in the area is OK. They reach out all the time to keep us informed and to ask us to call them if there are special needs or an emergency situation. The best future we can hope for appears to be the… Read more »
I know a guy that works for one of the finance arms of the rural electric co-ops. I have heard that the guys that run the co-ops are local folks that care about the communities they are supporting.
Forever. There is still a tax on your electric bill for it. In several billion years, the sun will swallow the earth, and that tax will still be there.
What will be amusing is when the rural communities divert the hydro/wind/solar produced in THEIR districts . . . .
I am a Yesterday Man so I get nervous listening to you too. “Regulate the marketplace.” a. Who is going to do that for you? The Clintons? The Bushs…? And who will regulate the regulators? What you are calling marketism as a cause – I would tend to call a symptom. b. how do you intend to deal with the black markets that don’t want to be “managed?” And their patrons? c. How would you change this? Eating the rich? Markets are how the human animal rolls. It has always been that way since the dawn of time. The One… Read more »
I still think of the Z-Man’s example of the crab industry in Baltimore. They were screaming about the lack of illegal immigrants to work the harvest, while whole neighborhoods of people in the city are collecting welfare.
One way of looking at it is that people used to be able to do their business locally, with people who bothered to find supply chains, store space, and the capital to build an inventory. With mobility of markets, capital, and the net into every last space, all of that has been steamrollered. The world of today is not really comparable to the one of fifty years ago or more. It is all about coming to terms with the environment we live in now (see yesterday’s discussion on the medical industry).
Dutch. Do you see signs of the pendulum swinging back toward localized spending and patronizing? For us, part of our rebellion is found in where we spend, and with whom. We’ve realized that JIT consumption is not worth the slight savings (time, money, selection) of online or big box options oftentimes. Not always but general weekly consumption is mostly commodity items.
I think a mega-corp behind the scenes is inevitable, but some sort of hybrid with a local public face and interaction seems to be a good compromise. I love local co-ops, not because they are efficient or economical, but because they take care of the local community, as best they can. Once real communities are established, the people in the community can provide that buffer for each other. Franchises where the franchisee is totally locally involved (many McDonald’s used to do this, with single store ownership instead of the bulk/regional ownership patterns of today, and Chick-Fil-A has the single store… Read more »
a. The Clintons & Bushes are no more an argument vs market regulation than Jeff Epstein is vs. sex. b. Jail them, or better yet, execute them. Death penalties for white collar offenses manage to keep Han criminality within functional limits despite their Semitic power-levels of corruption and callousness. c. Yes. I’d rather err on that side than on the side of deifying them like we do now. How you got rich matters. How much money you have can become a quality issue as well. But ultimately we need to revive the Greco-Roman concept that wealth entials greater responsibilities and… Read more »
Our so called capitalism is outright poisonous to healthy societies asit embodies 5 of the 7 deadly sins and puts greed as the highest virtue. The faster our rotting system goes under the better it is for the rest of the world. Just look what it done to our nation and people. In enriched the top 5% while a** raping 95%. Our business leaders think nothing of importing millions of 3rd worlders to fill their factories and eateries, Exporting work to a country that uses child and slave labor and practices genocide along with organ harvesting. Our leaders don’t care… Read more »
Correct. We have the laws to do that. Hillary Clinton and her husband should both be in jail. Capitalism is not responsible for this; corruption is. Wherever you find money and power, whether in the USA, Canada, Russia or China – you will find the corrupt vying for money and power. We need to do something about the Clintons and the various crime families before we start dismantling the most powerful economic system in the world. It is my belief we have a people problem – not a systemic one. And if we don’t correct in the manner you prescribe… Read more »
“It is my belief we have a people problem – not a systemic one.” Absolutely agree. What we call “crony capitalism” isn’t capitalism at all. It’s rampant corruption and thievery by economically powerful actors, resulting in way-to-powerful (Medieval-level) “oligarchs” if you don’t put a stop to it. Putin did put a stop to it in Russia, at least to a degree.
Gosh, John. I think you are bein far too lenient by opining that Bill & Hill should only be in jail.
I can think of so many more creative solutions!
So business as usual eh? Keep killing off the blue collars and middle-class and then wondering WTF happened to America. Keep importing millions of illegals to work at sub-minimum wages and forcing taxpayers to subsidize your employment of said illegals. Then wondering why your town looks like TJ . Keep making excuses why you need to off-shore your business to evil Communist country that uses slave labor and practices genocide and poisons our people. I notice all you hard core capitalists are cool with these practices. And lastly why you are confused by young people seeing Socialism as a good… Read more »
Please do not misunderstand me, RWC. No – business as usual won’t cut it as you point out. We won’t have a country left if this continues. None of that is the product of capitalism – classical capitalism decrees that you and I negotiate a deal that is good for both of us or we go elsewhere. None of what you describe is good for us. Why are we not walking away? Who is responsible for that? I think we all know the answers to those questions. The question is – what are we going to do about the people… Read more »
I.e. “how are we going to stop the people who have the power from doing what they’re doing?” They own the Deep State, the media, the academy, the public schools, the police and the military. Like the French aristocracy in 1787 did. The result was total breakdown, the Terror, and the horror.
Did you even listen to the podcast? We HAVE a regulated marketplace and we always have had one. But anyway, you think things are just peachy and we don’t need to change a thing. So why are you listening to the Z man?
In the pre-internet era White Nationalists were divided entirely between Jared Taylor & Lew Rockwell’s monks of Lindisfarne on the one hand and the G.L. Rockwell-Metzger-Pierce Vikings on the other. Ironically, a bunch of largely Third Positionists who revered German philosophers couldn’t forge a dialectical synthesis between these extremes that would have allowed for a broader-based movement. The internet has been a Rosetta Stone for unlocking the language of culture necessary to inspire at least some of the masses that WN 1.0 knew only how to scold or terrorize. Time has also worked its magic, allowing our new Third Way… Read more »
I think some are waking up to the problem with doing business with China. A decade ago every ambitious business guy was all-in on expanding into China. Some of them have woken up to realize – 1. China is evil and will rip them off. 2. Doing business with them is terrible for our country. 3. The cost of going there may not show up on a spreadsheet.
Every time I hear the news on trade negotiations with China, I keep hoping that the talks fail and Trump continues to raise tariffs on them.
In my day-to-day services to Globohomo, I work with lots of people in China and India. The heuristic I operate under is “do not trust a single word coming out of their mouths.” That heuristic serves me well. It’s interesting to compare the two. The India folks pump out garbage quality work because that’s all they know how to do; they couldn’t produce better if they tried. The China folks, I think, are better/smarter/more capable, but they actively choose to cut every corner they can possibly get away with. In either case, if I bring up quality concerns, I am… Read more »
Quite a while ago I worked for a company that outsourced a bunch of work to India. A complete disaster of course. My boss had me do a financial analysis of the “savings”. Once I plugged in all the new quality controls and rework, the savings were hugely negative and he deep-sixed the whole report while quietly rehiring many of the laid-off Americans.
I think people get the wrong impression of Chinese and Indians from the top1% who show up in our universities and corporations in person.
I have the same experience & approach in law with both groups. As for the Tribe, imagine the Han with a dash of perversion and two side dishes – aggression and paranoia.
The heuristic I operate under is “do not trust a single word coming out of their mouths.” I strongly endorse that. Unless it’s a specific individual from either of those groups who is personally known to me (by which I mean has a track record, not that we met once), I operate under the same principle. That’s from sad experience; burned hand teaches best and all that. Additionally, at least from my personal sample, sub-Continental types are more likely to play political games and rules-lawyer than east Asian types (as a rule, NAXALT and all that). Oh, and then there… Read more »
NAXALT and all that is real, Mike, but doesn’t at all negate your wise general rules. 🙂
For over 25 years I have worked for the biggest of the big tech companies at a fairly high level in a tech field. I can attest that not a single big tech “American” company is waking up to the problem of doing business in China. Most are pushing harder and harder into China, and even India. This is a tacit admission by big tech of what I routinely get down-voted for stating here: in the long run China is going to win, and the US is going to lose. China has spent the past thirty years developing a global… Read more »
In school in the sixties, I had to learn about “the mercantile theory of trade.” As time went on, I wondered what had become of it. Now we know.
I know that a lot of our guys worry about degeneracy. I do, too. Worrying about degeneracy in fact is one of the things that starts you down the yellow brick road to Our Thing.
But I feel it’s a bit cliched to reach for the the Weimar analogies every time.
I posit that in the Wal-Mart corporation, America has made an entirely new and unique contribution to the history of human degeneracy. Future generations will shudder with horrified delight at its uniquely Americo-capitalist awfulness.
Take a bow, America!
I would argue that the ‘department store’ and the Mall pushed the degeneracy much further, Wal-Mart in some way is a reaction to that. At least the working class can ‘afford’ Wal-Mart (for some definition of ‘afford’ which leads to community destruction)… Perhaps it’s the idea of ‘franchises’, which evolve because we are a low trust society now, so you don’t know Bob at bob’s hardware anymore so you don’t know if you can trust him, so you go to NAPA where at least there you know you’re getting some baseline (low, but there) level of service…
Criticism of capitalism is often assumed to be promotion of socialism, at least by my generation. Usually to get anywhere you need to at least hint socialism isn’t where you’re going. Libertarian types love to narrow the definition and say “that’s crony capitalism not real capitalism.” The idea they have in their head of the system is what they’re talking about, not the reality on the ground. Which is the same as the “that’s not real socialism” argument. I’ve had some luck pointing out that talking about capitalism without the crony element is like talking about socialism without the authoritarian… Read more »
Excellent comment. There is no such thing as a “market” when one side holds all the cards: “. . . But I don’t know how else to separate the very rich from their control of monetary policy, trade policy, antitrust law, securities law, mass media and the tax code … except with a flamethrower.” https://twitter.com/EpsilonTheory/status/1191160405449527296
Mark said: “Libertarian types love to narrow the definition and say ‘that’s crony capitalism not real capitalism.’ The idea they have in their head of the system is what they’re talking about, not the reality on the ground. Which is the same as the ‘that’s not real socialism’ argument’.” No it’s not. False analogy. Capitalism means market freedom. Crony capitalism can’t exist without state power supporting its corruption. Socialism outside very small cohorts—e.g. nuclear families or extended blood relations—must perforce always be coercive, and is usually deadly. (Note: Scandinavia isn’t “socialist”; see why at https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-of-scandinavian-socialism/)
”Crony capitalism can’t exist without state power supporting its corruption.“
Right and your capitalism will exist in a stateless society that isn’t susceptible to corruption, and has never existed right? Otherwise you’re talking about a theory in your head.
Capitalism will always exist within a state. It will always be beneficial for capitalists to use that state to their own advantage.
And it’s often not even more efficient, though that’s the lie that gets told to distract from the scam. My employer of 30 years, though always owned by a large corporation, was allowed to run itself locally. We sourced supplies, materials, travel arrangements, etc. locally, as a long-time member of the community. Then Lockheed bought us. All the deep community ties went out the window as everything was now dictated by central planning. To hell with the local travel agent that we knew on a first-name basis, now all tickets have to be booked through corporate and printed on the… Read more »
What is happening with this is that we only look at one side of the ledger. This is what we do with immigration, it’s what we have done with technology and it’s what we have done with social capital. When they are trying to convince us to sell our souls, they concentrate on all of the ‘benefits’ and the high value of souls and how your soul has gone up in value blah blah blah. After a while it seems like a no-brainer. Why isn’t everyone everywhere selling that useless soul? It becomes easy to forget that the other side… Read more »
Marco Rubio talked about in a recent speech….
How do you know when Marco Rubio is trying to con you? He’s breathing.
Ryan landry over at the American sun has been posting this sort of observation at the late “social mater ” and other places . he has the same philosophy of response as the Z man . get out there and live your life ,make and support friends, build community .
well worth a read.
https://theamericansun.com/2019/11/22/what-to-do-ten-friday-reads-11-21-19/
Wow. Money quote: “All men know a truth that women do not, and that is that the universe doesn’t care about you”. Everything before and after is a must-read, up close and personal about who we can be and what we can do. If you are reading Z and buy in at all, you had better internalize what this guy is saying.
I had no idea Ryan Landry was posting again. I used to really enjoy his 28 Sherman blog which he shut down a few years ago.
Great podcast as usual, Z. As the U.S. population becomes more heterogeneous, trust declines in most locales sans the wealthy ones, and for many it becomes an existence of caveat emptor, particularly if you live in large urban areas. And that’s the bugman lifestyle the Cloud People want you to live. I think the grift is less pervasive in rural areas; living in flyover country for example, my uncle ran a modest-sized dairy farm and would typically buy his machinery used from the same two brothers for a number of years. Getting a lemon was not a problem because they… Read more »
This topic is incredibly interesting to me, as economic concerns affect us all. I’m not sure what comes next after capitalism (historically, economic collapse occurs at scale, then culture collapses? Or is it in the other direction?), but inquiry minds. So all you genius history guys / gals please school me. From my simple entrepreneur’s perspective, smooth access to credit destroys perfectly. When capitalism has buckets of cheap money dumped on it, it becomes what I call scaleism. Yes there is a better term here but I’m working with what I got. Everyone worships something. As businesses scale, they act… Read more »
You’re on the right track with scale. That’s a useful lens for viewing a lot of our problems. Start with the Dunbar Number. You can only have meaningful relations with around 150 people. Larger groups mean every problem based in social interactions and behavior becomes one of scale.
Person #1500 is 1/10 a person to you, and person #15,000 is one of Stalin’s infamous “statistics.”
These podcasts by Zman are truly impressive, being both wise and insightful. BUT: I don’t like listening to them. Not to be critical of the content. I just prefer reading to listening, especially when considering important, interesting and/or singular ideas. Reading concentrates the mind, allowing us to fully engage (as well as mull over, closely consider, reconsider, and re-read) concepts and contentions. Thus my question: Are these podcasts being transcribed by anyone anywhere? Reading them in essay-form—for me at least—would be an invaluable option.
Just listen to them Jim. Come on, once a week?
Whoops: I misspoke. I shouldn’t have said “I don’t like listening” to the podcasts. Should have said “I’d really like reading” them. This occurred to me while listening to this podcast (and enjoying it), i.e. that reading the thoughts and asseverations would be especially enjoyable. Either way, it’s irrelevant since our host has said no deal on transcribing podcasts (and all content here is his obviously). This makes sense when we understand that Zman’s delivery is modified depending on the medium (i.e. whether it’s in writing or spoken). Sooo…I’ll continue to enjoy listening to the podcasts! 🙂
This will never happen. I will never post transcripts.
Somebody is used to the Derbyshire method!
I read Derbyshire transcripts at work and listen to Zman in the car.
In the past I’ve transcribed audio recordings; it takes about 4-5 times as long as the recording to do it.. a 1 hour recording takes 4-5 hours to transcribe, what with running the tape back and forth, trying to hear inaudible things , capturing the non verbal stuff (inflection, cadence, pauses, laughs), spell czeching, editing.
I also prefer reading, but asking Z to transcribe is too much.
If I worked from a script, it would be possible, but I don’t work from a script. Then there is the fact that the spoken word is intended to be heard. You lose a lot from reading a speech. Watch Shakespeare, don’t read it.
There’s also the fact that the audience fro podcasts is a different audience from reading. It’s smaller and younger. Video is even smaller and younger. That’s why a lot of what I do in one medium I do in the other, adjusted for the medium.
I listen to a lot of my “reading” nowadays but still have a gut aversion to vidya. I can’t get past the fact that 90% of vids in Our Thing (and in general) are just talking heads in front of a mic or worse yet, Power Point style presentations you have to read anyway. Few bother to do anything that takes advantage of the medium. I know the kids elect for YouTube as Option 1 but this is a crusty oldster tic I can’t yet kick.
I think there is a niche for short presentations on factual issues related to politics. No one does those, but that would be a good use of video. Short documentaries would also be useful, but those don’t happen either. Instead, it most just guys in their bedroom wearing headphones. I don’t get the point of that, but I’m old. What I’m surprised about is that no one on our side is doing a regular internet based call-in show. That is a medium the right has owned forever and it is not expensive to produce. The super-chat stuff could also be… Read more »
I would enjoy that – both listening and performing, but I would need a semi-pro to handle the production aspects. The non-verbal expressions, body language etc.. of even a talking head can be interesting if they’re reacting spontaneously vs. working off a script, particularly when it’s a duo or small group. Spontaneous reaction also tends to separate the real Big Brains from the mid-wits and the wise from the high-IQ spergs. TDS can be tds when the cast has an off-day, but when they’re in the zone in that format, it’s very entertaining and effective. MotTC is much the same,… Read more »
Slightly OT, but a member of my family works for a company that sells “voice transcription” software. You know, the never-type-again thing? Well, family member and a few hundred others do nothing but listen to audio and type what they hear into a computer while the company “works out the bugs” in the software.
Dictaphone was a company that sold a gadget for secretaries to transcribe voice recordings. It had headphones and a peddle, so the woman could slow or stop the recording, back up and replay it, without taking her hands from the keys. I recall my mother using one when I was a kid. She had a stay at home job as a typist. She would transcribe tapes during the day while we were at school.
I want to learn some of the old-school technologies. A fellow Code-Monkey’s wife made more than we did as a court stenographer. Apparently that’s still a thing. My great-Auntie taught shorthand back in the day. It still looks cool to me.
You’re talking about court reporters. They now have the ability to type into a stenograph machine that instantly transcribes onto a laptop or other computer screen. (You still need to know the special typing-language to do the input however.)
That type of functionality exists now in the form of digital recorders from which an audio file is downloaded into a computer and played back with a foot pedal. It has more abilities then the old Dictaphone I believe. Used to use it a lot.
Point taken! Makes sense.
Agreed, but wasn’t asking Z to do the transcribing, just noting that I’d like reading the verbal essays.
Jim, it sounds like you have created a position for yourself. Please contact Dr J over at Counter-Currents for tips on how to achieve 116 transcripts.
I would! Maybe…but our Zguy has said nix on that here anyway..
Needs of the man, I say.
If you really want something to read (but is not perfect and takes time to do), you could download the mp3 and run it through a speech to text tool (IBM has one here: https://speech-to-text-demo.ng.bluemix.net/ )
It doesn’t do a great job but it’s probably ‘good enough’ if all you want is to read a MP3 that you’ve downloaded.
You can create an IBM cloud account and get 500 minutes of transcription per month free, but it does take some technical chops to get it working.
You can extract the entire YouTube self-generated transcript by clicking on the little 3-dots thing under the video, and then selecting “open transcript.” Then click on the 3-dots for the transcript and select “toggle timestamp.” You can copy and paste the whole thing as a transcript.
The big, big problem is that it doesn’t generate punctuation marks.
That’s an idea, but I wouldn’t do it against the wishes of our host, the author.
I agree. Plus you can read 4 times faster than you can listen. I largely listen while I’m driving when, I understand, reading is discouraged.
I’ve heard that too. It’ll be a few more years before we’ll all be reading continuously in our self-driving cars.
I nominate you, Jim Smith, to be our de-facto transcriber!
LOL. I would be undone! But Zman has saved me by saying nix on that.
Ahhh, free market capitalism at work: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/her-amazon-purchases-are-real-the-reviews-are-fake
Thanks, Jessica! You are truly the embodiment of the American Dream.
Great example of a scale problem (see MossHammer’s comment above).
I… I love a good Zman podcast. I love a good intro uh introduction where he’s the discussing top … Taboo topics and fascinating fascinating content. Uh that is hot stuff, you can hear those podcasts from uh any number of devices
Your critique of the state of the nation today vis a vis fifty years ago is accurate as far as it goes, but misses the real cause. The economics of the country over that time have produced a mountain of physical goods, making everyone materially better off. At the same time social and spiritual ennui has become widespread, with real negative impact on millions. But the thing is that economics never promised anything beyond the physical abundance that it delivered. And that abundance does improve lives in real ways. It gives people greater freedom of action and inaction. My ability… Read more »
“The thing though is that it’s entirely within the power of individuals to reject the cultural rot, consumerism, debt, hedonism and lead a normal life.” Is it? If so, it’s extremely difficult for a significant percentage of human beings (and certainly our population). Consider the ubiquity and ubiquitous popularity of pornography. Consider also the obesity epidemic currently afflicting much of the world. The question is…HOW to instill values and habits that are not self-destructive in terms of consumerism, debt and hedonism. Tough nut to crack, we’re finding.
You are right about Silicon Valley – but how much of this is Progress rules HR through colleges and school?
Business Titans enforce the official religion or face Chik-fil-A, bake the cake etc. They’re not innocent, but they’re a symptom not the disease.
I really don’t agree Markets = broken families. Family Law+Feminism+destruction of faith/culture= broken families.
Socialism could be family friendly but with the exception of National Socialism it never was.
I don’t really care anymore about markets, socialism, capitalism since its all neoliberalism these days, but lets not make coincidence into correlation, never mind cause.
Not to get hung up on labels, but: a nationalist who likes communism is a national bolshevist, a nationalist who likes socialism is a national(ist) socialist; a nationalist who likes neither socialism nor capitalism is a third positionist.
What do you call a pro-capitalist who is also a nationalist? A market nationalist??
Most White sane people a generation ago
If you were a White Christian European person who was living in a country without any Jews, overseas Chinese, Muslims, or negroes, then your problems would be reduced by something like 85 percent, and the rest you could take care of handily, peacefully, and rationally.
Even an infestation of Mexicans wouldn’t really be too much of a problem, in the complete absence of Jews and negroes.
Your equation is half right. The other half, whites killing whites, took a pretty heavy toll last century.
“The other half, whites killing whites…” History takes a long time to be properly written. It’s early days yet, history-wise, so far as those wars are concerned. Eventually (assuming there are any of us still left) when the dust settles, the accurate history will show that it was not so much “whites killing whites” as really “whites manipulated by Jews into killing other Whites, for fun and profit.” Of course that may never make it onto the bookshelves, because whoever coined the aphorism “history is written by the victors” forgot to add, “and then it gets edited by the Jews.”… Read more »
I’d like to qualify “complete absence”: NAJALT and NANALT, and we all know it (although neither fact should proscribe or even lessen your desire for an all-white polity, so I’m just sperging to make the point which I like to mention so that people will keep it in mind).
I tend to reject all of those labels and definitions, because they give pride of place to economics, rather than culture, biology and tradition. Economics is an option on the car, like heated seats or a roof rack. It’s not the model of the car.
Good analogy.
Rejection of labels makes you a virulent anti-labelist.
You mean anti-Labelite
As opposed to the non-thinking anti-Lobelite.
Or maybe a counter-Labelite.
I’ve heard the phrase “national libertarian.” John Derbyshire has used “libertarianism in one country” to mean basically the same thing.
You could also label that a “right libertarian” (which is the last step before getting off the L-train entirely)
The defining feature and problems with our economic system is the dominance of large publicly trade joint stock corporations. They have vastly undo power vis a vis the individuals that they interact with, both customers and employees. The diffuse and temporary nature of stock ownership also means that they have no real ownership in the form of individuals tied to their performance and reputation.
Markets work fine and require very little or no regulation when the participants know each other, have equivalent bargaining power, frequently interact and both have freedom to exit at will. In that type of situation lying and cheating, by either, will end the relationship and damage the reputation of the offender. Problems arise when the nature of the interaction is not repetitive and when one party has much greater bargaining power. In those cases a neutral arbiter is necessary to prevent fraud. Related but different is the issue of competition decreasing with scale -and freedom of entry/exit decreasing with scale… Read more »
How do we manage or inhibit scale?
You missed the biggest flaws with the managerial movement and Taylorism which is that both viewed competition as inherently wasteful, leading to over investment and under utilized capital.
This flawed view was incorporated into all flavors of socialism and is a major factor in its universal failure.
In counterpoint they believed that some platonic ideal could be achieved with an optimal level of investment (beyond which was definitionally wasteful) and that maximum performance achieved via cooperation not competition.
These beliefs have been persistent despite repeatedly failing at all scales.
Z, that “lying” part of business has always troubled me. I don’t like it. My son and I often quote Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair, where he says to a group that just purchased one of his sky scrapers, “You Overpaid.”
Anybody been over to Taki’s recently?
They’ve had the decorators in. Nice clean bright look.
V. many gallons of white paint.
Our current basement dweller host might pick some up on the aptly named Black Friday.
I found the video of Li’l Marco Rubio discussing this topic, as well as Kevin Williamson’s riposte. Williamson really does hate his fellow citizens.
https://youtu.be/Dtp2jeDgSgo
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/marco-rubio-elizabeth-warren-capitalism-common-good-argument/
Josh Hawley gave a speech along the lines of this episode. He seems more sincere than Rubio, but sadly he’s subservient to Israel (as we learned after Jabroni’s phony nationalism conference), and no one will listen to his speech.
It’s worth a watch. It’s only twenty minutes. Play it on 1.5X and it won’t take much of your time.
https://youtu.be/6E8d4kiL6NU
Any good books on the dangers of big tech? I can’t find any at my local library, there or through a loan. I know they take suggestions, and will buy them with fine money. Heck, they might even buy dissident books too.
The guy is somewhat pozzed and a man of the Left, but Nicolas Carr’s book on the Internet called “The Shallows” isn’t bad. He as a recent post up: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thieves-of-experience-how-google-and-facebook-corrupted-capitalism/
“Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.”
I would encourage everyone to read or listen to David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
Harvey is an actually existing Marxist and/but has a lot of good points about capital. He is a very readable stylist, which is rare in actually existing Marxists.
Based Jared Taylor defending the white man’s achievements!
Whoever tells you we have tried free markets for decades while we are living in a world of negative interest rates, must have a huge blind spot when it comes to central banks. They’re not exactly free markets institutions.
I see parallels to Kunstler in this podcast . . . the reality that the market is a sham and humanity must be more than a dollar sign. Both classical Marxism and the illusion of the “liberal capitalist order” has taken us to the same place — the atomization of humanity — t he reduction of humanity to an economic unit. The soul is gone. There is nothing left to save.
Not your best effort.
bilejones: “Pretty much anybody defending Capitalism is a grifter. There is far too much capital floating about ( hence 0% interest rates) and it’s financing billion dollar ponzi schemes that further skim the mandatory 2% or so to the financial overlords. What we should be defending and promoting is free enterprise. That mean free of the entire edifice of corporate conglomeration as well as the many levels of the State.” I agree with Bile, but one could quibble over what is “real Capitalism”. I love the last part where he defends free enterprise. I defend something we have had very… Read more »
AG Barr; Epstein’s death a perfect storm (TM) of screwups- not suicide.
https://www.fox5ny.com/news/ag-barr-epsteins-death-was-perfect-storm-of-screw-ups
The Law is behind me since ROE* holding its knife. The Law chose.
Not that this crowd needs convincing, but let it sink in – the law is no recourse for our political difficulties.
*Rules Of Engagement
Everyone, well almost everyone wants to play with a stacked deck. Marketism.
We need to be able to acknowledge unpleasant truths. Is this an example? David French:
We spin out more fictions—that the economy has left hard-working Americans behind, in spite of the fact that truly hard-working Americans still enjoy an immense amount of economic opportunity. Is it too much to ask a person to seek an education or learn a trade? …
Ask any person who employs blue-collar workers, do you have workers who show up on time every day, work hard, and are willing to work overtime? The answer is almost always “not enough.”
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/nationalist-is-how-a-republican-spells
FFS. They can never find enough good workers – at the wages they’d prefer to pay. This is always the scam these bastards run: offer wages that won’t support a family and then complain that they can’t attract men who act like they are trying to support a family.
What a mystery! If only the Free Market had developed some sort of… mechanism… an invisible force, maybe, that could somehow… align… the people who are supplying labor with the people who are demanding labor so the system attains a… balance… an equilibrium, maybe. Dunno, just spitballing’ here.
“at the wages they’d prefer to pay. ”
I think you understate the problem:
“at the wages they believe they are entitled to pay”
probably better portrays the mindset.
Hey, they got what they wanted, a massive influx of labor in the 70’s from Wahmen entering the workforce, so they’ve been able to keep wages down. Now that people are finally hitting the wall even with double incomes, “there just aren’t enough hard workers, we need to import mexicans and Pajeets!”
I suggest Jim Donald’s compromise: Price controls and rationing of women so that every man who’s not a cripple or imbecile can have a virgin wife. Free markets in everything else. Because Marx is dead, no one cares who owns the means of production, and those who presently own the means of reproduction are squandering it on parties, careers, and cats. Failing that, capitalism might soon give us artificial wombs, so that any man who wants children can have them. Then women may do as they please; aside from a few thousand exceptionally talented and beautiful egg donors, we’ll have… Read more »
When ectogenesis arrives, please launch me on a rocket into the sun. Brave New World will have officially arrived. We’re almost there even without it.
There’s a lost “Dune” origins tale in here somewhere. “Bugmen of Terra.”