A favorite expression is “pressure reveals character.” Anyone who has played sports has probably used the expression. It is one of those truths of life that turns up all over, but is most obvious in sports. Guys can look like heroes in practice when everyone is loose and there is nothing on the line. In the game, they perform poorly, unable to perform under pressure. It’s why the military performs live fire exercises. It’s a way to see how men will perform under the extreme pressure of combat.
A public crisis like the current panic over the virus is where we see how people operate under pressure. More than a few people, who we thought to be steely-eyed cynics, have been revealed to be hysterical ninnies. Nassim Taleb, who really likes to tell everyone he is a man’s man, has gone so far as to post a one page paper explaining how best to throw your dress over your head and run around shrieking like a girl. He brings to mind this classic scene from the movie Airplane!
This graph gets to something else that has been revealed during this crisis. Those inclined to left-wing politics are more easily frightened than those attracted to more sober minded approaches to public policy. It is something to keep in mind when looking at how our guys have reacted to this crisis. For example, many of the old alt-right people now sound like one of the girls from the Huffington Post. It is a good reminder that there is a left-right axis within dissident politics.
Another thing the pressure of the moment has revealed, something I touch on in the show, is that many of our guys are wholly ignorant of economics. Given that the rejection of the neoliberal economic order is one commonality on this side of the great divide, it is a bit surprising that many of our guys do not have the first clue about how the system actually works. More than a few of our guys have taken to sounding like one of the girls from the Democratic Socialist camp.
Of course, much of this is the result of people living outside the system that most people take for granted. The typical college professor, for example, spends his life in the adult daycare center we call the college campus. He lives in a fantasy world. Eventually, his understanding of reality is warped by that fantasy world. It’s easy to demand we pull out all the stops against this virus when you feel as if you are immune to the consequences of pulling out all the stops. It’s easy to be generous in behalf of others.
Similarly, people completely invested in politics can also become divorced from the daily reality of life. It is surprising just how many well-known figures in dissident politics don’t have jobs and never had jobs. Maybe they kicked around the publishing world or the academy, but that’s not real work. In the world of political theory, staking out an extreme position has no cost. In fact, it is often the point. In the real world where people live, staking out the extreme position has a cost, a big one.
This is why the stimulus bills that get passed during each crisis get bigger. There’s no benefit to prudence, so no one considers it. There is a benefit to showering favored constituents with cash, so everyone tries to be the most generous. It’s also why these efforts never amount to much. The people crafting them don’t have the slightest clue how the retail economy works. Small business is as alien to them as everything else about the people over whom they rule.
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. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- 00:00: Opening
- 02:00: Economics
- 07:00: The Human Costs
- 17:00: Markets Versus Main Street
- 27:00: Economic Illiteracy
- 37:00: Middle Man Leverage
- 47:00: The Good Stuff
- 57:00: Closing
Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute
Full Show On Spreaker
Full Show On YouTube
https://youtu.be/6Ti4dAdiHLM
I recall my horror and disgust watching those videos playing ominous background music, in the early days of youtube, about our Evil Overlords that promoted “Eugenics” in the early part of the last century.
After watching the reaction of the public over this mess, I’m starting to re-think my aversion to the idea.
The Elite’s disgust with humanity has become more understandable.
Here comes the next bailout
and frankly, horribly it makes sense in a world of UBI for banksters.
1 year Break on mortgage payments = shit rolls UPHILL = MBS’s can’t get paid= rolling bankruptcy = no 401K =
Equals we have to bailout the MBS, means another bailout.
And frankly with all due respect to the sainted and holy 401Ks …I ❤️ The idea of shit rolls Uphill, and trickle up economics.
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/03/27/mortgage-system-collapse-coronavirus-pandemic-152338
Gonna add; I’m not against retirement funds, but the larger point is we cannot continue with socialism for the top, crumbs to the bottom and destroy the middle. We cannot have socialized Trillion dollar payday loans aka REPO and QE, liquidity injections and the rest and tell the masses to eat welfare cheese. Doing nothing for small business. That is such a formula for Revolution that even our idiot elites get it.
As far as 401Ks mr Z; I haven’t trusted them since Financial Crisis. They’ll haircut them ala Cyprus, Poland if they dare. If they must. At one time I had the 2009 vintage RFC from the Feds discussing exactly this, but it has disappeared. For those who don’t understand how our govt’s system of administrative law works- they put out a proposed regulation and and ask for comments. They get enough pushback they back off. They don’t it becomes law. This is the Federal Register. That is our actual Constitution.
What I am saying is you can’t rely on the 401K no matter what the balance, they have your money, not you.
For more adventures in modern economics check out “rehypothecation” a term you may hear again. Its what Corzine did with his investors physically “secured” Gold. It’s taking the piggy bank you were entrusted with and gambling er investing it. And that was physical bullion.
Illegal in USA: which is why Corzine gambled at the City of London; where its not illegal.
It would be nice to count on the 401K.
You can’t.
UBI is an inflationary, bad idea.
Unless you already have UBI for a generation for Banks and “the market” to the tune of now $40 Trillion and counting.
In which case some of the same love for the little guy is a really good idea.
Unless you think keeping your head literally is a bad idea.
Yes- Big corp just got bigger
Woke capital just got stronger
You hit on something important here at beginning Z; we’re a Federation.
It is vital for a Federation to not betray its various groups- ours has. Part of this is an ongoing and ultimately failing and retrenching struggle of centralization. This is perhaps their last great gasp. Spasm really.
Does this mean breakup? Not one that would last, No competent power in possession of North America would settle for less than atlantic to pacific.
Its a question of how much war and suffering it would take.
OT – having a James LaFond bug-in fest this weekend while lurking in the Inland Empire – check out his Myth of the 20th pods. To whoever mentioned it before, I agree – he has a somewhat similar style. Probably b/c both of us are of an age-ish and read a lot of REH.
“REH”?
I agree that LaFond is a fascinating guy. Sadly, since he devoted all this time to writing, he’s living close to homelessness.
Robert E. Howard (Conan) – a close friend and correspondent of noted rayciss H.P. Lovecraft. Shot himself, died poor. Painter’s line upthread about barbarians could have been written by him.
Listening to the Mot20th pod LaFond did on sportsball right now – good stuff.
gotta link?
[Those inclined to left-wing politics are more easily frightened than those attracted to more sober minded approaches to public policy.]
True enough, but the Right is famous for crashing its sober minded plans with laziness and stupidity.
zman, taleb is usually full of crap, especially about IQ, but he is right in this regard that more aggressive action should have been taken in the early stages. Such as contract tracing and closing of all borders and most intl flights.Now we’re stuck with a big problem that in theory could have been smaller. a 1-3%mortality rate is high enough that this is not a trivial mater by any stretch, and the fact it was rampant in Wuhan demonstrates the potential problem it could and has caused elsewhere. The panic we are seeing now is the secondary effect of a problem that possibly could have been stopped sooner. I dont think trump still has closed mexico border..cuz cheap labor. there are so any exceptions that the border closure is effectually useless and porous, much like all or most his policy so far.
Z-Man, I have to thank you for linking to that great scene from “Airplane!” Even knowing what’s coming up, it always cracks me up.
When they pan down the line, to the two black guys (armed with boxing gloves and monkey wrench) and that old biddy with a gun, it kills me.
This is a wild story. It is amazing that all this happened so short a time ago and the world replayed it knowing that it had just happened. Wild.
“Initially the coronavirus outbreak started with 186 persons and 38 died, a ghastly shocking mortality rate of 20.4%. A public health emergency was considered.
“Right away World Health Organization (WHO) authorities realized doctors weren’t prepared to manage such an urgent situation. Patients were crowded in emergency rooms and multibed hospital rooms; family members visited freely, facilitating a second spread of the virus. Doctors narrowly focused on treating patients rather than managing the epidemic from a larger point of view.
“The socioeconomic impact of the outbreak was great. Yet the numbers of infections and deaths from coronavirus were smaller than the numbers from tuberculosis or seasonal influenza.”
“The country involved was the Republic of Korea. The strain of coronavirus was identified as the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/03/no_author/what-happened-when-a-country-was-quarantined-and-locked-down-due-to-a-coronavirus-outbreak/
————-
I have known since the start that this was a very mild outbreak, but then I understand the lies that the medical establishment tells. They lie with statistics — the misuse of statistics. And one should be damn careful about believing a doctor or medical researcher. They are almost all owned by Big Pharma.
Not sure of ownership by big Pharma, but “lying” with statistics is quite easy when you really are not conversant in the area. Most folk are not—including “researchers”—which unfortunately is heightened when papers in the area are not peer reviewed and data analysis rushed to get out to those in the field. Analysis and conclusions are often not supported or have alternative explanations.
Actually we just do live fire exercises for practice. The more practice, the more repetition the more training takes over in combat.
There isn’t all that much pressure.
Chart from Malcolm Pollack showing concern wise COVID is a Dem disease.
http://malcolmpollack.com/2020/03/27/rashomon-4/
concern over terrorism is a republican disease. hence patriot act. news at 11
Its funny but “stay at home” social distancing type orders have simply made my regular lifestyle common. Who the hell wants to be out with all those damn dirty annoying people anyway. A friend of mine called and asked me how it feels to now be mainstream…..
Center for Disease Control: It is imperative that you stay home and avoid people.
Introvert: I’ve been preparing for this my entire life!
We all carry around with us a bucket. Being social animals, we need to collect and store social experiences in our bucket. Extroverts have large buckets, while introverts have smaller buckets. Not filling your bucket daily can make one feel unhappy and lonely. Introverts can fill their bucket with small talk, a handshake, and a few emails. Extroverts need parties, hugs, and shopping malls.
Wuhan is the replacement for Detroit.
This was about $4T and counting to bail out the Just Too Late Again supply lines of grossly over-debted corps and banksters.
Now that they’ve got their Trillions and realize they crushed the not online consumers the MSM is reversing course. MSN carried a story today that perhaps the shutdown and recession has gone too far, critically mentioning the actual cases don’t meet the ‘models’ – models of course cited to incite hysteria.
This may be another nail in the coffin of expertise; the Medical Dr Dooms not only got it wrong but did real harm to ward off phantoms.
As has been pointed out, another vaulted “institution” gets poz’d and bites the dust. Medical “experts” will never be treated with the same respect again.
I was totally on the Nick Fuentes train until this Coronavirus thing happened. He’s gone full on statist. He is a little baby who makes 500K per year without going outside and can sit inside playing Animal Crossing and regressing into his childhood while our freedoms (such as the right to do commerce) are taken away.
Nick Fuentes and his Groypers are a useful force when it comes to activism and needed political change, but I can hardly listen to his ideas anymore when things are at a standstill like they are now. Fuentes would probably gladly hand our country over to the Jew bankers and the Deep State, taking power away from the flyover salt of the earth rednecks whom I would trust a lot more.
Of course people are hysterical about the virus. They have been conditioned over the decades to be hysterical girls no matter the sex.
Multiple cards on the table/reasons why. There are no dire consequences for bad decisions! People used to die due to bad decisions. Now everyone is rescued by Daddy Sam. Seriously. If you lived Little House on the Prairie, you Knew your decisions meant life or death. One of the consequences of living in a modern termite mound.
Another card on the table is we have too much soft free time. Honestly, we get into mischief if the nose isn’t to the grindstone. The irony is our deep time ancestors worked to invent–invent and attempt to make life chores more efficient, easier and time saving. Well, we have arrived, Aquarius.
God has been jettisoned. Whatever you think of God, those were standards that worked and informed the entire culture. Cultural capital in the air. In a non-multiculti homogeneous culture, everyone knew the rules and how to behave…room for a few wobbly-eyed hermits in a cave….but most people knew the structure. Now there is no reward for mastering self discipline. The reward is given to the loudest hysteric. And girls have risen to the top of the milk. Emotional self discipline went out with my grandmother’s generation.
Hysterical frightened people are the easiest herded sheep for the Totalitarian Left to direct. People like my Commie parents have spent the past 100 years gnawing at the pillars Western Civ…and they have succeeded. Welcome to Cloward-Piven chaos to earthquake the system. Open up those pearly gates is replaced with open up the prison doors! Wah! Feed us…clothe us….entertain us! Wah…oh no! .violent psychotics breaking down the front door…oh Jeez..the Overlords pushed sheep herd off the cliff!
Speaking of hysterical https://youtu.be/Gd5PGlfBoJU
RFF, I appreciate your perspective. We are HUGE fans of LHOTP. ” If you lived Little House on the Prairie, you Knew your decisions meant life or death”. Your decisions, and labor, were in the constant balance of life or death (maybe long and slow, but certainly premature). The only production value Michael Landon missed was the dirt. I’m confident everyone was really dirty all the time.
Beautifully done.
If nothing else the bailout packages are going to be a fascinating exercise in monetary theory. It reminds me a bit of the hypothetical the Keynesians posit about the tourist coming to town where everyone is broke, dropping a $50 bill on the hotel desk to reserve a room, then leaving briefly before taking the room. In his absence, the hotel clerk swipes the $50 and pays off the hotel’s debt to the caterer, who then takes the $50 and pays the butcher, and round and round the $50 goes until the town prostitute pays back her debt to the hotel with the $50 bill. At this point the tourist decides not to stay in the hotel, takes his $50 bill and leaves town, but now everybody is debt-free and happy.
To the Keynesians, this hypothetical illustrates that the injection of the $50 in liquidity into the town’s economy allowed everyone in town to clear their debts and the withdrawal of the $50 in liquidity had no adverse impact on the town’s economy. In theory, they could have held a town meeting, tallied up everyone’s debts and credits, and had all parties forgive their debts to each other in order to achieve the same result, but this process is unwieldy and difficult to coordinate. The $50 bill liquidity injection just provided an efficient clearing mechanism that allowed the process to flow smoothly.
The lunatics in government have now shut down large swaths of our economy, which in a debt-based economy is inherently deflationary in part because it reduces the velocity of money circulating through the economy. At least in Keynesian theory, if the FedGov injects new money into the system in an amount that offsets the deflationary effect of the shut down then everything should balance out. When the economy restarts and monetary velocity increases, they can withdraw that liquidity from the system and ride out of town leaving everyone debt-free and happy, just like our hypothetical tourist.
We’ll see if the Keynesians have a point.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the Keynes tourist example before but I don’t see how the tourist can take back his $50 if the hotel clerk used it to pay off his debts.
I searched for “Keynes tourist” but didn’t find an answer.
If the tourist used a credit card to pay the $50 and was able to successfully withdraw the $50 payment later then wouldn’t the credit card company or the hotel have to assume the $50 debt?
Sorry if I was not clear. The hooker brings the $50 back to the hotel to pay her debt to the hotel. Hooker leaves the $50 on the desk right where the tourist left it. Tourist returns, takes the $50 he left, unaware that it has traveled about town, and leaves.
You didn’t listen to the podcast did you? Z uses this example.
Not yet. Working.
It doesn’t alter anybody’s net credit/debt position, just lowers the aggregate level of both. The benefits lie in the interest rate differential between the parties and the change in credit risk: which is where scumbag Bankers like me swoop in.
The upside is, now we know. There are guys I would’ve gone to the mattresses with pre-Wuhan Flu; now I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them. You can even use Kung Flu to tell who’s a Liberal-by-convention, vs. a true believer. I say “gosh, isn’t it funny how the same people who tried to impeach Trump for being a dictator just three months ago, are now mad because he’s not being enough of a dictator?” The ones who chuckle uneasily can still be reached. The ones who stare back uncomprehendingly, or tell me to go eff myself, are lost souls.
One of the best pools to fish once the actual costs of this thing are being felt is the blithe young (and not so young) whose inheritances are going to be liqiduated.
I’ve been reading that unemployment benefits are going to get supplemented with a $600 weekly stimulus check on top of unemployment. So, in my state, UE tops out at like $450 a week, so this is basically $1050 a week. So if you are making 15/hr, you will actually be making more money on UE as you could working your job. Now, as you make a lot more money, this effect goes away. But even someone making $20/hr is going to be getting a pay increase if they get laid off. $800/wk before taxes will max you out on UE and then the addition $600 takes you several hundred dollars higher. These are the people who will be the quickest to be laid off. MW retail workers are going to get a big salary increase from 280/wk to probably better than 750/wk.
They are talking about giving this money and the “stimulus” money to foreigners! The absolute best case for having foreign guest workers is labor shortage. Well, if 25% of the workforce is unemployed, why the hell do we need guest workers? Send them home.
“Maybe they kicked around the publishing world or the academy, but that’s not real work.”
Yeah, Spengler, Aristotle, Evola, Kevin MacDonald, wtf do girls like that know? And Einstein, a patent clerk! When did they ever meet a payroll, cut open a buffalo for shelter from a blizzard, or put their hand in a pile of goo that used to be their best friend’s face?
Seriously, ZMan, we get it; as Tom Wolfe would say, you have beer barrels hanging between your legs. But you really need a new lens to view the world with. This post reminds me of Hunter Thompson’s take on a sports writer without a thesaurus:
“Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: “The precision-jackhammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jackthrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends…”
Anyone who thinks a white population will solve all of our problems need only go to the most white state in America, which is West Virginia. Last I checked, WV was the whitest state in America and is also near the bottom on just about every measure (probably not violent crime though). Why, exactly, this is the case, I have no idea.
Maine and Vermont are whiter. North Dakota and New Hampshire would also like to say hello. Turns out that all white people are not the same.
Yes, Hello from Montana as well.
Coastal areas have and probably always will attract population growth, especially the talented; the weather is better, opportunities greater, etc. You see this in even “cozy” places like Japan where Yokohama/Tokyo are crowded almost beyond belief while Hokkaido has to bribe families to move there. Combine those factors with a rough geography hostile to infrastructure and being part of a country that hates it, West Virginia then has a lot of adversity to work through.
Appalachian culture is mostly poor Scots Irish
and they have been poor even back in Great Britain days. They occupied the poorer areas of Great Britain. Now they are in the Appalachians.
West Virginia is one of the centers of that culture.
We ain’t the same white folk as Puritan New England.
White people really are different, a white ethnostate might have less small crime in it but we whites would not get along.
It would be fighting from the start.
America is fortunate the whites have held together as much as we have let alone flooding us with the vibrant populations to replace us.
The anti-Appalachian bigotry really gets under my skin. The stereotypes all come from Hollywood and the media. NY and Hollywood Jews who absolutely hate those people and see them as stupid and backwards because they aren’t like them. It is just a sub category of anti-white bigotry and hatred.
It is near universal among these types that the white people in Ky, WV etc are stupid or inbred or some other defect. You will notice there is NEVER the excuse making that exists around blacks and other “brown” people who have significantly lower average IQs than Appalachian whites. We are not allowed to heap the kind of scorn on other groups that we are not only allowed, but encouraged to heap upon whites in Appalachia and to a lesser extent, in the South. The hypocrisy and naked anti-white hatred is infuriating.
They may be culturally different from me and originate from a different place in Europe than my ancestors, but they are not my inferiors (though to be frank, neither are non-white groups like blacks) and they are not deserving of our contempt or scorn.
I’ve done a lot of hunting and fishing in West Virginia. I used to have business dealings there as well. One thing you can’t help but notice is the high value on independence. Mountain people would rather be poor but self-sufficient than middle-class and directly dependent on others. There’s also the clannishness, which is not as common among other whites.
Kephardt really emphasizes the clannishness. Anyone here who preaches family, kin, clan and community who is squeamish about muh hillfolk is straddling a fence. This is clannishness, guys – the good and the bad.
There’s still a lot of good in many, no thanks to the Yanks who spit on us now that Richmond is pacified.
So close to Washington, so far from God.
Good for them, because the way things are going, all white people in the year 2200 will have a patriarchal attitude toward women and a shoot-on-sight attitude toward diversity. Like the North Sentinelese but with better weapons.
Liberal whites are destined to die without issue, stabbed in the streets and pillowed in nursing homes by their beloved diversity. Not being racist means you think your DNA is no better than anyone else’s, so why bother having children?
I do not hold Appalachian culture in contempt. Part of my family has roots there. It’s just a fact that a lot of that culture has a history of struggling financially. Doesn’t mean they are not proud and a great people.
And it’s true the usual suspects make them an easy target.
That’s my adopted fam, SE Ohio, born about 50m north of WVa, spent a lot of time in both VAs as a kid.
Check out “Our Southern Highlanders” by Ohioan (ed. Pennsyltuckian) Horace Kephart – Prohibition Era, little dated, but as the book shows, most things about the American Sardaukar are anachronistic.
We don’t do peace well. Mostly Ulstermen who came over to fight the Indians for the Deutsche-cuck Quaker pacifists. Peace turns us into the Wild (less than) Wonderful Whites in about 2-3 generations.
It’s been all downhill since we won the War of Northern Progression for the wrong side.
Conquistadors for Clown World and Ersatz Israel, good enough to win their wars but not fit to live next door.
——————–
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Kephart
He also has a book on practical camping and woodcraft that’s still useful, and it will intro some guys to old school woodsman Nesmuk as well. You can get that stuff from Librivox if you don’t mind very erratic narration.
My dear friend was born in West Virginia, although her family moved to Ohio as she grew older and then Texas. Her mother is the youngest of 25? (I think – by the 2nd wife) and she has literally hundreds of cousins, all of whom keep in touch. When I mentioned the Dunbar Number to her she just laughed! Family’s roots go back to early Virginia settlers and England proper before that. She’s as sweet as could be but has a backbone of steel.
Sounds like hobbits.
I don’t believe that a white ethnostate “will solve all of our problems,” only that it will remove many problems.
Many whites aren’t all that into civilization. There I said it 🙂
When I lived in Virginia, West Virginia was the state for the butt of our jokes. We used to think it led the nation in chewing tobacco rate. I just looked it up and turns out that’s not true. But it is in second place, after Wyoming.
Re: the lessons of Uncles past and Third Position politics in general, judge the policy by its merits, not the mythology.
There are lessons to be learned from how Germany grappled with similar problems only a century ago. 20th Century Germany’s a helluva lot closer to the modern Anglosphere than the Romans, yet we still take cues from the classics.
That doesn’t mean everyone in the DR has to dedicate themselves to rehabilitating Hitler’s ghost. Third Positionism is bigger than Hitler (see Mussolini and Salazar, for instance).
Don’t bury 3P with Bad Uncle and don’t let Shlomo Overton your reading list when lessons remain to be learned.
Sure, but with a few exceptions, the people flying that flag are fans of Bad Uncle or fans of Uncle Joe.
There’s the problem. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from 20s and 30s Germany (and Italy and Russia), but the minute that you start talking about the era, the crazies come out of the woodwork – on both sides. The optics for Joe Normie are terrible even if you try to keep it on topic.
Fall of Rome is safer, if less relevant at times. That said, I notice that with very young people, the ghost of the early 20th century is fading. Teenagers (correctly) view WWI, WWII, Hitler, Stalin, etc., as just another period in history, a class lesson no different from Rome or the American Revolution.
Changing demographics and time will end the taboo (and appeal) of that era. It’ll just be another eventful historical period.
Citizen, I tend to disagree. Talk about these events in history with most any HS grad and I bet you get blank stares or gibberish in reply. We simply don’t teach these things any more and students don’t study such on their own.
A failure to teach these things allows us patiently to take over that ask and teach the way we want do. They learn our narrative.
Non STEM education is essentially storytelling after all.
That’s the rub, Z. We’re still in the adolescent stage of “anti-Semitism” and there are a lot of guys who just like telling oven jokes that haven’t been boiled off yet. The post-Zoomer generations (Generation AA?) will have more historical distance and fewer Shapiros in their favor.
I call it 1.0-ism. Lots of guys who got into the alt-right stuff ended up in one of the 1.0 ghettos. The cold hard truth is the smart fraction is still deeply invested in neo-liberalism. Until that changes nothing changes.
That’s what I alluded to above. For teenagers (if they know about history at all), WWII and the Holocaust are just another history lesson. It’s not some mental morality play. Sure, their teachers give a few extra Nazis were bad, but these kids hear that about all kinds of things – slavery, colonialism, etc. Nazis, Jews and the Holocaust just don’t stick out in their minds.
They’re not obsessed with it and they don’t feel any guilt about it. As to fewer Shapiros, you got that right. They’re out there but there’s way more Changs and alphabet-soup Indian name kids – and you can bet your ass those latter kids really don’t care about the Holocaust and Jews. To them, Jews are just another group grabbing their piece of the pie, and the Holocaust is just some white things. Might as well be talking about Caesar wiping out the Gauls.
On paper, Our Thing is messy, ill defined, seen as fundamentally evil, and as pie-in-the-sky. What little of it that has been implemented, here and there, has worked out pretty well in the real world, until it gets hijacked by the weirdoes.
Their thing is great on paper, but consistently disasterous in the real world. Every time. Even though it feels like Our Thing is pushing against a string, what else have ya’ got to go on?
On the bright side, reality is already robbing the crazies of their influence. See: libertarians, progressives. We’re just about to the point where the willingness to play extremist games evaporates.
In the 19th century, STEM was going to change the game of life. The future was whatever humans wanted it to be. In the mid 20th it started to hit the wall, leading to skepticism. Soon it’ll be cynicism.
To a certain extent I think that a correct historical framing of Hitler goes hand in hand with advancing a 3rd position.
Until the cartoon villain image of Hitler is corrected, the Jews and their ilk will always use that to beat us back.
I don’t think you need to wave a Nazi flag, but I do think it is important to push back on caricatures of National Socialism. I acknowledge that it puts you in some bad optics situations, But I see this thing as more of a marathon than a sprint.
Flair, I agree – it’s a balancing act. Revisionism is most needed in debunking the Holocaustian faith – it’s integral to Second Founding mythology in America and globohomo worldwide. Time is on our side on that.
Exile, this also presents a point of common ground with non-whites. Jewish landlords are hated in New York for a reason.
When I lived there I was one of the only white men at a company filled with minorities (lol) and none of them liked Jews. One black guy confided in me that he believed one day “the white people would wake up”. I think the ridiculousness of many anti-BDS activities provides an opportunity her.
One note on the JQ – something I’ve noticed is that it often defaults to negative positions rather than positive ones. Fighting against something rather than fighting for something. Both are important but negative positions tend to be reactive, and you always need an enemy. Example is the lefty media who are simply against trump no matter what and this has left them devoid of any unique charisma and appeal.
Chad, no reason we can’t do both. Positive identity is a lot easier to focus on when someone’s not stepping on your neck and wrecking your kids.
In order to get people to begin listening to an alternate view on that part of history you have to get them to start thinking about identity politics. Once they have a team, they are open to hearing about whether their team’s allies were in a fight before.
I think moving the ball on “us versus them” is the first priority. The rest will pull itself together after a critical mass is reached.
Well, two good things about the ChiCom Flu are:
1. People have suddenly discovered the value of firearms. Should not be long before they discover the 2A.
2. Schools won’t be needed much longer since everyone can stay at home and learn from technology. Even poor people have cellphones.
As far as 2nd Amendment and firearms—every damn incident produces what is termed record sales. Fine, but who the hell is buying them? Are there that many is this damn country without a firearm who wants one? Yeah, I know the reported stat’s. Just have a hard time believing such.
My guess is that anyone who would stand in line either does not have a firearm, or thinks he doesn’t have enough because he hasn’t bought any in 10 or 20 years. Now, try telling this new group of concerned Americans, who wish to buy firearms in a crisis real or imagined, that you were going to take away or limit the right to own a firearm. I hope the political consultants working for the Republican Party and its candidates will fully magnify this to attract more voters.
A person we were doing business with (dog boarding) off handedly remarked her neighbor was a redneck with more guns than teeth. I replied, here in AZ that’s common in the rural areas, like with me, except I have all my teeth. She had to think about that one.
I hope what gets through to the 2A crowd is the supply chain problem. Yes, you as an individual could ignore anti-2A laws, but can you make your own ammo or guns? One emergency declaration and we’re all inside and “non-essential” gun stores are gone.
Thanks for pointing that out. I’m still hoping for more votes, particularly new ones who have suddenly seen firsthand that gun rights and freedom are inseparable. Even liberal—left gun owners might not vote for candidates who want to grab their guns. I mean their NEW guns.
Todays stats
• We received 2 COVID test results today; 2 negative and 0 positive.
Total tests sent: 107
Positive: 3
Negative: 99
Pending: 5
I am thinking of all those people sick NOT with corona…must be the best sick ever.
Thank you. Please keep reporting these numbers, if possible.
Can you disclose the general metro area? I believe you said West Coast?
Portland OR VA med center
Thanks Roberto, please keep posting.
It’s amazing how revealing this is. Nobody can wear a mask. What’s really amazing is how little pressure it took. Society is remarkably fragile. It takes a lot of sacrifice to maintain that noticeably few people seem willing to make. That’s the salient point: it’s not about tweaking or devising a new scheme. The lack of social capital, as it’s called around here, is the fundamental problem.
The future belongs to the barbarian. Down the road we can worry about high civilization. Better get on board!
Nassim Talib wrote some interesting and insightful books, such as Black Swan and Antifragile. However, he disappoints and comes across as an intellectual bully.
Yesterday I talked with a Person of Color who is afraid of his wife being unemployed. There seems to be little sympathy from our ruling class for such people. Although I am extremely reluctant to call persons with different world views “evil”, John Derbyshire’s “Good Whites” currently seem to be pushing the envelope.
Daniel Greenfield at Front Page Magazine has a great article today on the arrogance of the media, which can be viewed as one of pillars of our ruling class.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/why-media-exempt-coronavirus-business-shutdowns-daniel-greenfield/
By the way, New York State is considered to be a hot spot with 500 deaths directly attributable to the coronavirus. With a population of 19 million, that gives a mortality rate of .0026%. Even allowing for exponential growth, that is hardly the Black Death or Spanish Flu.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Taleb really doesn’t understand what point he is trying to make with The Black Swan and it makes me wonder whether any value in that book is accidental. The point I THOUGHT he was trying to make is that certain outcomes are completely unpredictable given your decision making framework and the available information (“unknown unknowns” in the terminology of a well known war monger). Nobody’s ever seen a black swan so no one can possibly determine whether it exists or could exist or what the likelihood of it existing is. And more importantly, there’s no value in sitting around after you’ve seen a black swan and trying to figure out what you could have done better. “If only we had put this procedure into place, we would have known about the black swan.” I thought at the time he wrote the book that this was actually a good point as you see a lot of wasted effort in business trying to “learn lessons” from these surprises when in fact there will always be things like this that happen that are completely impossible to prepare for given the limitations of what you know.
On the other hand, he spends a lot of time now running around now with hair afire talking about “fat tails” and that is an entirely separate phenomena. Fat tails are just larger probabilities on very big moves than the ones given by whatever model you’re using. Moves in stock prices are pretty random but they DON’T have a normal distribution because big moves are always taking place that a normal distribution would put nearly zero probability on occurring. This has been known for 50 years at least on Wall Street though and the solution is just to use some other model that puts reasonable probability on the big moves. Fat tails are almost the opposite of a Black Swan as they are widely known from observing past events and people working in the area in which they exist will model outcomes appropriately by controlling for them.
So as I say, I don’t even understand what point he was trying to make anymore and I don’t think he does either. Are black swans these completely unpredictable things that we can’t prepare for or learn any lessons from after the fact? Or are black swans these occasionally big moves in something that just tell us that we need to adjust our model and everything will be OK? Those are two completely different things in my mind and Taleb seems to be trying to have it both ways.
Fwiw, William M. Briggs has some good stuff on the flaws in NNT’s thinking: https://wmbriggs.com/?s=taleb&orderby=relevance&order=DESC
I saw a link to that guy’s site in the comments the other day and it’s great. I’ve bookmarked it to start visiting regularly. From what I’ve read of his site, he appears to be a Bayesian and those guys do tend to be cultists. At the same time, non-Bayesians have a lot of problems too as Briggs rightly points out in trying to attach some kind of “truth” to the results of their tests. I’ve worked with statistics for years, but I like to think of myself as a mathematical rather than statistical person so I can do what works without having to adopt any particular set of religious beliefs.
He isnt even Bayesian – I guess the easiest way to describe him is a “logical probabilist” maybe. His book, Uncertainty, is excellent. Bascially he is of the opinion that we are far to certain of pretty much everything.
I can’t speak on the current discussion, but Talib was pretty interesting when I read him several years ago. Black swans really do exist I think in Australia. And in one of his books he talks about totally unexpected outcome like the unfortunate incident that happened to Siegfried and Roy with the tiger back in the 90s. More to the point on social Decay, he also talks about part of his life in Beirut. as a civil war there slowly progressed, people adjusted their expectations to fit the new worldview, Even so everything eventually fell apart. I guess you could say people can get used to anything.
Shanghai too at least is lousy with black swans. We visited some friends there last year and there were flocks of them living in the pond/lake behind their apartment building.
Grace under Pressure
You can think of Hemingway as a writer or of his character and politics anything you want but you cannot deny the man
When he decided to self isolate he put the bullet through his head
I do not remember who said that the problem of today man is the fact that he can live all his life without knowing if he is a coward
Well such no longer is the case
They are many who these day realized it,the more they did the more they screech and call for a “compassionate” society
Trying to turn their own cowardice and fear into “concern” for society and “elderly” is a quite spectacle to behold
The analysis is spot on
It is embarrassing to hear “right wing” people repeating after leftists “He chose economy over people”
It is true that some them do not have idea how economy works but it also true that have nothings always dream of a turmoil which will turn tables
Most of them have nothing to lose and I guess in a perverse sense it is comforting for them to see other people loosing everything
In a society when everybody is loser no one is a loser and that is the most definitely one of the reason why have nothing crowd cheers for doom
Not to pile on (and the usual caveats that he’s one of our greats and I will continue to send him money each month), but Steve Sailer is not showing his best side. His post yesterday about procrastinating on making the call as to when the lock down will end shows a blatant disregard for business owners and workers.
Where’s Steve’s deft statistical analysis and snarky humor?
It’s gone, replaced by emotional appeals that have no semblance balancing both sides.
The bloom comes off this lock-down rose once people start to feel the real cost of listening to madmen.
My sister is trying to decide whether to lay off her employees and break her office lease because her business is running out of money. She’s trying to decide whether to order certain perishable products if she does keep the doors open so to speak. Should she pay her business insurance bill, which is an annual bill. Etc., etc.
Knowing when this will end would be sort of useful. But Steve and that crowd just tell people like her to figure it out.
Steve writes: “Right now we are flying fairly blind.”
THEY’RE flying blind. BS. They have a tremendous amount of data on this virus. Look at China, South Korea, Japan. Hell, look it Italy. There are patterns, timelines, etc.
The people flying blind are people like my sister and other business owners who have zero idea when the lock down will be lifted. Every day brings a host of decisions for businesses that costs money, money that they’re running out of.
And if anyone thinks this stimulus money will save them, you’re crazy. How much of that money will reach these people and when is unknown. What red tape will they have to go through. What weird rules will they have to agree to in order to get the money, rules that may no want to impose for the long-term. Who knows. The point is that businesses can’t be certain about that money, so they’re back to flying blind.
Just tell her to keep her business in “suspended animation” and that she’ll soon “bounce back.” In the meantime, enjoy The Superdole
It will be an early summer, then. The Blue State governors and Blue City mayors will tax the hell out of the people they forced into poverty before giving up grift and welfare programs. The thorns will go off the rose when that happens.
100% of nothing is nothing. When unemployment skyrockets, it will simply be impossible to tax anyone as almost no one has anything to tax.
Round two though comes with the next flare of this disease or the next one after that. November will get us hit again and there will be more after this.
Flailing around or authoritarian measures that destroy the economy can be tolerated for a while but not forever and it only takes one or two screw ups to make things dicey.
My guess is that UBI will be implemented if we last that long and if the Democrats get any power all measure of cost controls and the like. The results will not be nice at all but unless your guys are seeking and getting power, well vae victus
The economic hit could well be our Chernobyl not that this is entirely a bad thing.
Maybe we need a bunch of new smaller States to replace this one.
Problem is when it happens, folks like you stuck in Lagos or wherever are humped.
I guess we’ll find out if shutting society down for a few months to save some lives and maybe the health care system, maybe, was worth it.
I honestly don’t know .
While my guess is total casualties from this disease and spillover effects of the health care system implosion might have hit as much as 5%, was it worth it ? I don’t know.
I’m glad I didn’t have the make the call as I don’t like any of the outcomes and there were no good ones.
I think that you may be overthinking Steve Sailer’s situation in life. He’s in frail health, and has been so for years … a semi-invalid and quasi shut-in. … probably as hypochondriacal as can be, if we knew up close and personally.
Since he seldom beyond his house and back yard, he should be safe from the Yellow Peril Plague. But no, Steve doesn’t want to die!
I hope many mayors, governors, and other politicians lose their jobs over this. Wait until all the tax revenues go substantially down, it’s going to get fun.
Can we now start the flatten the unemployment curve virtue signal?
60-90 days from now, Find all the pictures of cute homeless children you can, and post then on normal social media with lines like “Hope it was worth it, curve-flatteners”. And “flat curvers kill children.”
Let’s use the weapon of the enemy against him, for once.
Psychopaths don’t shame easy.
But that’s not bad messaging for all the normies watching the exchange.
You’re never arguing to persuade Them – impossible. You’re arguing to persuade those listening to the argument.
It’s also going to be a reason to do the lawfare equivalent of carpet bombing of those people. Gun stores are already prepping the class action suits and will be joined by a zillion other retailers large and small who suffered from this shutdown. If you’re not suing someone you’re behind the curve. Better Call Saul!
Stolen from an UNZ comment at Sailers blog:
“The problem with the HBD crowd is they don’t have any loyalty to us. It’s almost a borderline sociopathic mentality. They’re interested in what you have to offer in terms of IQ and traits, but that’s about it.
So concepts of loyalty to a particular group is alien to them. They tend toward the “civic nationalist“ approach. They don’t mind if you’re replaced, as long as the new person has a solid IQ.
As you can see, they do spaz out about their own personal health. But the health of their people doesn’t rank so high.”
That’s what drove me away from Unz Review and, particularly, Sailer (though probably more his commenters). They notice average differences among races/ethnicities and how those differences impact societal outcomes.
However, instead of that leading them to embrace those differences, to discover a love for your own people and to understand the need for good fences, they descend into an atomized world where high IQ trumps all.
I’ll never understand how Sailer reconciles Citizenism (civic nationalism) with his beautiful definition of race/ethnicity as an “extended family.” If your race is your extended family, why would you let others into your family’s house, eat your family’s food and, eventually, take ownership. How can you betray your family in such a way, Steve?
Well said. The fatal flaw of “High IQ” nationalism is that there are other bonds that bind people together more tightly than high IQ.
“Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear” comes to mind. I think the HBD crowd suffers from their own type of myopia. That’s why they have lost their marbles over this virus. To them, it appears much larger because they obsess over this stuff more than most people.
They have the unhealthy obsession with IQ that you find with smart but unaccomplished people. It’s all they got so they make that the measure of a man.
Universities are filled to the brim with these folks.
Luke Ford BTFO.
Citizen, it might be that smart people (or those who think they’re smart; or those for whom being smart is the highest value) are a class unto themselves, with their own interest and instinct for self-advancement and self-preservation. They have (or believe they have) more in common with each other—even across national, ethnic, familial lines—than with “lower IQ“ people of their native group.
As I think about it, that’s close to being a motivation for a James Bondian evil mastermind. No wonder they can’t be trusted.
The example I use is Rhodesia.
The Bantus didn’t say – “Gee, those whites sure have a high IQ! Let’s just roll over and let them rule over our people”. Instead, the fought as a people. And today, Zimbabwe exists and Rhodesia / Rhodesian whites do not. Who won there, the high IQ, “rational” people or the Bantus?
The IQ fetish is just another way of proving they’re not racist. Since Asians supposedly have a higher IQ than whites on average, they always say “Well actually what I’m saying isn’t racist, because Asians are actually better than whites!” Total cucked-out bullshit.
IQ is important but meaningless in terms of racial solidarity. Yes, there are dumb whites, and the smarter whites should be taking care of them.
Cross cultural competition meant that some societies prospered and others died out – often because their more successful neighbors killed them. Over time the traits of more successful tribes became enshrined in traditions and religious values. People often did not know precisely why a lot of these traditions worked though. Why is inbreeding “bad”? Most societies have enforced taboos against it for millennia before modern genetic science elucidated the dangers of double recessive traits though. Likewise loyalty, bravery, honesty, defense of one’s homeland. These things all just worked for people long before modern evolutionary biologists came up with ideas about group selection and game theorists were talking about prisoner’s dilemma situations and making their little payoff matrices. Additionally, long before IQ testing, it was pretty obvious to everyone that Europeans and Asians were smarter than Africans and that this had something to do with the fact that Europe and Asia had high civilization when Africans were still hunting with stone tipped spears.
HBD advocates are trying to be as scientific as possible and that means as reductionist as possible. They are looking for the “one trick” that explains everything. This approach has been enormously successful in everything from medicine to astrophysics of course so it’s understandable that they take it. IQ is also something you can measure and produces quantitative data that can be correlated with other quantitative data such as economic stats and life expectancy.
Most of us here understand that our societies succeeded on the totality of their traits. We started with a fairly smart demographic, added in patriarchy, aggressive defense of territory, loyalty to tribe and king, religious faith, and 10,000 other factors that came to make up The West. To most of us here it just seems like a good idea to preserve that totality and that means keeping most others out, firm borders, and unsentimental views of foreign carpetbaggers with sad stories. This is not as easy to quantify as IQ though.
I often get the impression that the HBD types are trying to sort of reconstitute what they think of as the essence of Western success but do it entirely in a “rational” and “scientific” way and of course above all, avoid “racism”. So they focus on intelligence as that essence, maybe allowing in other “personality” factors that can also be measured like agreeableness, altruism, time preference.
What they would get if given the chance, I suppose, is a new nation whose constitution would start “We the People of the Republic of Meritocracy, who score in the upper 10% on the following 8-axis comprehensive psychological profile….” Something tells me that even smart people need something more emotionally satisfying than this to forge and defend a nation though. That something is those old bonds of tribe, race, and culture that our elite derides as racist, fascist, etc…
It’s really a mirror version of what I’ve heard from progressive people I’ve personally met – “I’m a Citizen of the World, my race is the human race…” I just want to slap them and say, no, you’re a citizen of the USA, a country dying of the stupid globalism and promiscuous welfare state democracy that you vote for in every election. When it’s finally overrun and destroyed there won’t be any embassy for your imaginary World Government to seek refuge in. You’ll be enslaved or killed, just like it’s always been.”
Agree, but Unz serves a useful purpose.
It’s all about boundaries. In the real world, there are always boundaries, financial, social, job requirements, time commitments, responsibilities to others. Those who fly out to strange ideas and unrealistic concepts are those who do not have the boundaries to keep them in place and level headed.
Bloomberg’s little business news station continues to harp on climate change as “the defining issue of our time”. Good one, cloud people guys. You just keep banging that drum. That’s the kind of unintentional comedy that lack of boundaries is capable of generating.
Odd how “defining issues of our time” (e.g., budget deficits, terrorism, climate change) recede from the collective consciousness.
It’s double curious that the old alt-right types, who all wanted a collapse of the (((economy))) and culling of the sheeple in favor of ubermenschen, are the least chill about corona-chan. This could be your moment, fellas.
Being right on this topic will increase Z’s influence exponentially…
And if you’ve been saying the same thing IRL, it will do the same for you. Take those sticks and stones now.
How will we know who was right?
Time will tell. From what I have seen nobody really knows anything. People are changing their stances on a dime, then changing them back again. The only thing that is clear is that western society has become incredibly fragile. Compare how people dealt with the consequences of a world war and a Flu pandemic much worse than this (1918) to how people deal with a flu much less lethal with no world war. We have become incredibly soft and fearful as a society. Hopefully the resultant fallout from this thing will toughen people up some. That’s the only silver lining I can see.
I been consistent (though essentially silent) from the beginning: I know nothing. 🙂
FYI, the point of my post a question of logic: If we do X, then how can we ever know that if we did Y it would have turned out better/worse? Folks can do studies, write articles, pontificate, etc., but really…
FTN has been frustrating to listen the last couple weeks. They straw man the back to work argument pretty hard.
Also if America loses reserve currency status, this money printing will come home to roost. These guys who are MMT fans seem to miss that the cornerstone was of MMT in the case of the US is that the dollar is the reserve currency.
I stopped listening. It is despair radio and I don’t do self-pity. That said, I think it is just a phase. They imagined Trump to be something he was never going to be and are now suffering through the stages of grief. They will tire of it and get back to their old ways soon enough.
Same. I always enjoyed their work but their 180 on Trump seems to have infected everything else.
They have donned the Orange Man Bad goggles that were once a favorite – and worthy, target.
This virus thing has them particularly spun up. But like so many, especially leftists and media hairdos, their position seems to be more about their dislike of Trump as opposed to a rational assessment of the threat and the realistic options available.
And like all those prone to TDS, they avoid the difficult task of taking an actual position, instead favoring deconstruction and milking memes.
The Trump tree has plenty of low hanging fruit, I get it. But how about something constructive?
I still listen for deep dives and to round out my walking and biking podcasts but the doom and woe is wearing on me.
They’re trying too hard to keep justifying the 180. We all got fooled by Trump, no shame in it, my dudes. I can sympathize – I despise being jilted like this.
What do you mean by “we”?? I made the point over and over that Trump was no ideologue. He was unlikely to push through any reforms. He was just a guy who will break a bunch of things. I compared him to The Mule in the Asimov novels.
I think it was Hitler who said, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house.”
Re FTN and Trump, Z… I get your point. Sometimes a gun fighter is hired to clean up the town and be a bull in the china shop. Don’t expect him to spout poetry, speak like Churchill or be stately. That’s fine….he makes NPR crazy….yes! He’s only an okay gunfighter and no Tom Doniphon. And to use a High Noon analogy, he discovers late in the game that no one in town will support him or stand with him to clean out the town. He wasn’t paying attention to his own Deep State problem. Plus his wife is a New England Progressive Quaker. (Notice when Quaker wife breaks to defend him she shoots one of the gunfighters in the back and scratches another’s face. With highly emotional Progressive women, all’s fair in love and war and there are no rules.) This is his reality.
Even in The Range household, BH and I have had many tense moments when I have pointed out a Trump failing or blindness, and BH growls, grabs a flag and rushes to watch Laura Ingraham. He acts like I’m throwing the baby out with the bath water. Life is mostly not Either/Or. No, just not blinkered to Trump reality. Glad he as a blind pig sometimes gets a truffle. Better then the alternative for me. He used to be fingernails on a chalkboard. Now I am acclimated and I find him greatly entertaining as he crashes around, making the Left absolutely crazy. That’s worth the price of admission alone. Is he going to save us? Of course not. We’re living downstream of Mulholland’s dam. So be it.
Range – you have quite a turn of phrase there. ” . . . growls, grabs the flag, and rushes to watch Laura Ingraham.” God yes, same same here – but less as time goes on. He turns on Fox, I hear Hannity’s voice and put on my hearing protection. But hubby’s coming along, just a bit slower than I am to shake off the shackles of the past. He’ll always listen when I want to read him a Zman post.
Hope is a hell of a drug. I fell for it too, shouldn’t have. He’s an actor after all, like Reagan, willing to say the things people wanted to hear without really meaning them. He did have the effect of moving the overton window though. Ultimately, and unfortunately I think what has happened is that he’s functioned as more of a pressure release valve than a chaos agent, at least in the medium term.
How about dislike of Trump AND banging on about the Jews behind it all? Tiresome.
Exactly. MMT works because the dollar is king. Once the Chinese Yuan (or God knows what) becomes a solid competitor, the US economy will fall into an area somewhere between Greece and Zimbabwe’s.
Interesting. There must be some point were MMT fails. But no one probably knows where. Are we at the edge or do we still have a few (or many) more trillions to blow? As the intellectual bully Nassim Taleb might say, we are in Black Swan territory.
Who’s hosting FTN nowadays? I heard Ethnarch took off.
Jazz & Alsup. Good guy.
Allsup getting Shoah’d from YouTube was tragic…he made tremendous, normie-friendly content.
Alsup is a good guy. Young, but he seems to have a good head on his shoulders. That’s critical to keep in mind with the under-30 guys. They’re still figuring it out and that means they will make their share of blunders. It’s why I give Fuentes a pass on many of the things he says. He’s 21 and lives at home. Of course he will get a lot wrong. Ten years from now he’ll be a totally different guy.
Most of us cringe when we think of ourselves at 21. I find those young guys like Fuentes and Allsup pretty remarkable at how much they’ve figured out by now. And conversely how dull and incurious people 40 and older are.
I meant to say “how dull and incurious A LOT of people 40 and older are.”
FTN has been appointment listening for me every Sunday for my weekly 9 mile hike, which takes up the entire episode. I agree that the last couple of shows are a difficult listen. Also where’s Ethnarch? He’d be a welcome addition these days as a voice a reason, and to balance things out a bit.
Supposedly the dude lives, or lived, in east Asia, and presented himself as a sort of quasi-Sinologist, so maybe he’s caught up in the Corona problem. A few good hosts have disappeared from TRS over the last year with no warning. Not just them, but the best members of the paywall community seemed to have jumped, too. Not something easily quantified, but the other side of the paywall has changed tone quite a bit.
I feel like I’m listening to Beevis & Butthead with FTN. Ethnark was good. This duo is constantly giggling. And maybe the “stonks” meme was funny at some point for someone on Earth, but damn is it old now.
We’re better off with a multi pronged approach of hearing what we want to hear and what we’d rather not hear.
I disagree with FTNs take on Trump. He’s still useful to us. He buys us time, anyone who supports him gets labelled a nazi so in a way our enemies paint everyone white as Alt Right and he gets under the skin of our enemies to the point where many engage in unforced errors.
Hearing from Cassandras forces you to justify your more optimistic or different positions and also in a way keeps other options open and in mind. You will learn a lot from people you disagree with. Hearing from all corners if they all have the same end goal in mind is a good thing. Even if someone seems to be working in ways that seem destructive. Maybe they have a good idea that’s being implemented wrong or visa versa. But listening to anyone committed and capable and keeping those lines of communication always open is a good thing. In this case diversity is our strength.
The irony as I look at this dispute is that Trump’s actions in the face of the coronavirus outbreak (shutting down the economy via shelter in place directives, etc., and pumping in trillions of dollars to keep things afloat) seem generally in line with FTN’s prescriptions (though they would want the $$ to go directly to people rather than to the banks, etc.).
At the same time, those here that are critical of FTN for bashing Trump and offer qualified praise for him, including Z Man, by and large seem to be critical of Trump’s actions, i.e., grinding the economy to a halt.
I’m sure both sides would take issue with my assessment for this and that reason, but as a “neutral” in this debate (i.e., I don’t feel qualified to assess the proposed/implemented prescriptions or offer any of my own, much less make prognostications) this is how I see it.
You can mark the ones unfit for leadership by this sign: they are the ones using this crisis as an opportunity to engage in infighting rather than anything constructive (or at least destructive to the Enemy).
I’m not sure I see a lot of infighting. Maybe it’s happening outside my field of vision. I don’t consider Greg’s criticism of me and RamZPaul infighting. We simply disagree. There’s nothing wrong with disagreement. Now, people like Spencer are a different matter, but at this point, who takes him seriously?
It becomes in-fighting when guys start questioning motives rather than tactics and strategy. Some guys are a personal mess and/or net-negative strategically or tactically, but I tend to suspect those who cry “Fed” first – probably another reason I don’t care for AA. Denouncing your denouncer before he reads your name from his list is as old as the National Razor.
Might have had something to do with Jayoh being an actual Fed, but hey….
Screenshot or it didn’t happen, Meme. We’re not getting anywhere with this. I’ll walk away when you do.
N/m
Saying everyone is a Fed is the quickest way to make people scared to say anything that challenges power. If you are going to make accusations, then provide some proof. It’s the same principle behind why whites are scared to stand up for themselves, they never know who is a shitlib white who is gonna tell on them to daddy and get them fired or worse.
Does anyone know how Spencer is getting funded? I would have thought whatever sources he had would have dried up long before now. How is he able to keep going?
His family is wealthy and he gets an allowance from his mother.
Trustafarian.
I’m pretty sure Spencer recently tweeted something positive about Hillary Clinton. If so, that says quite a lot about him, I reckon.
He did. He said Hillary, if she had been elected president, would’ve handled this Covid-19 crisis better than Trump. It’s not that surprising when you understand that Spencer likes to shock. Maybe it’s also because he’s not getting attention these days or maybe it’s because of his leftist girlfriend, or both. I also think he despises giving takes that are remotely associated with normie conservatism.
I do not understand why Dutton does Spencer’s show.
Bruce Charlton, who’s a smart man, may well feel the same way, since the YouTube stream that he did with Dutton a few months ago no longer seems to be available.
Spencer still has friends in this thing. Like a lot of people, I have lost interest in his act, but he still has fans. Not as many as before, but he still has fans.
spencer ‘s audience is the neet-nationalism crowd, versus trad-nationalism . that is the big divide in the alt-right, since it began.
Spencer has an audience because the media made sure that everyone in america knew who he was. It has nothing to do with the man himself. It has to do with the media exposure he was given by globohomo. If he was effective, they would never have given him airtime. He is a foil.
>>> . For example, many of the old alt-right people now sound like one of the girls from the Huffington Post.<<<
For the record, Andrew Anglin, the only person to learn from and take responsibility for what happened in Virginia three summers ago, has consistently been on Team Sanity.
It’s funny, but few people notice this. I said a long time ago that he is much more clever than people realize. If you look at his site as an over-the-top satirical comedy, it makes more sense.
The problem is that it’s not intended as over-the-top satirical comedy. He’s serious. Yes, some of his content fits the bill, but I don’t recall ever telling a joke that required 10000+ words to get to the punchline – and I’m not exactly laconic.
Maybe. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve read the site, so my impression could be wrong.
He’s not worth beefing over – seems to be the epicenter of a lot of drama – a daily storm worth.
Anglin has said many times that DS is a satire site, with the satire used to bring people over to our side.
When he writes an explicitly serious piece, he’ll preface it as such.
He’s not calling guys feds and white-knighting Weinstein for lulz. I know satire when I see it. Agree to disagree.
I encourage the group here to read Anglin’s response re: Weinstein, as it’s an important topic for our movement.
https://dailystormer.su/neo-nazi-white-knights-go-all-in-on-defending-the-honor-of-women-who-had-sex-with-harvey-weinstein/
Also, note how when Exile and I disagree, we don’t call names and keep it constructive. That’s how iron sharpens iron.
This is stupid. Everyone involved with hollywood is trash. Taking a side in a fight between a sleazy jew producer and the prostitutes who whored themselves out for fame is asinine. They all deserve to be shipped off to leper island.
the amount of $ these people make is more than most realize. huge bitcoin wallets , donations, memberships. it’s a business
Consistency is not a word I associate with a guy who’s covered every fringe ideological base from cartoon Nazi to White Sharia to MAGA. Don’t get me started on Weev et al. YMMV.
Best case scenario Anglin is just a troublemaking pot stirrer. Worst case, he’s an plant. Read the series Hunter Wallace had on him at Occidental Dissent. This asshole turned on a dime from being #1 Nazi to Nazi hunter. Screw the little bastard.
You’re using Hunter Wallace, costumed retard #1, to make your point?
If you want to talk about doing damage to our side, let’s talk about his “White Lives Matter” freakstravaganza in TN two months after C’Ville.
Hunter Wallace no such thing. And to blame him for the fact that dissident politics is filled with broken people is hardly his fault. The same problem that plagued C’ville, costumed weirdos that were not actually part of the main group, was something beyond his control, and for all we know part of discrediting ops that 9our govt. agencies have been doing for decades. And obviously, since you haven’t read his articles on Anglin and Weev, you have no ability to argue this point, beyond the fact you have a big f*cking mouth.
But here’s the thing: Wallace actively organizes costume marches. That Tennessee thing, post-C’Ville, was 100% his! He even went on TDS to promote it!
Wallace writes some great stuff and he’s very articulate. But the fact is, he thinks costume marches work. They do not, and we’ve got decades of evidence as proof.
His work on historical revisionism is top notch. But that does not make him the leader he fancies himself.
The DailyStormer gang are arsonists. They disrupt to revel in the chaos, they burn to roast a few jokes. Sometimes that works in our favor and at other times it does enormous damage to our side. They’re a mixed bag but the balance sheet usually comes up negative.
A lot of the younger crowd in our thing came through their site, that can’t be ignored or go unappreciated. They operate like a monkey that’s been taught to perform brain surgery. It’s a skill they can master. What they can’t seem to learn is when not to perform brain surgery. Pull back on the monkey business a bit and they will be a great asset.
I sat through one Paul Watson video about the Chinese flu. Couldn’t believe it when he sneered at the “it’s only the flu!” stance. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say I “couldn’t” believe it.
The left = emotion driven (female)
The right = reason driven (male)
Any surprise there?
But can you so easily separate the two?
It’s funny you mention the live-fire exercises. They’d discontinued a lot of that by the time I cycled through basic training. I remember after some time in theater, though, I noticed that all the guys with muscle beach physiques and barbed wire tattoos and the Under Armor shirts worked in Finance or as Quartermasters, whereas all the infantry guys were lanky and unassuming. I only found out later that they looked like scarecrows because 1). It’s impossible to meet your calorie needs on operations, even eating high caloric MREs 2). They didn’t have time to sculpt their bodies in the gyms in the air-conditioned FOBs. I give credit to my boomer father who’s been terrified of death these last few years, going to the oncologist for the smallest pimple, but has during the last weeks gone to work every day (despite being a diabetic in his 70s). Maybe it’s ill-advised but it also shows this thing has brought out mettle in him he probably didn’t know he had.
While never in the military saw the same in the Fire/EMS business. Remember years ago at the academy seeing guys that showed up to Basic school with “no fear” stickers and similar shit on their newly issued helmets. These were all volunteer schools–but in this part of NY departments were very strict about certifications and training. One of the first truck company exercises was to stick a 100′ aerial up at a 7 degree angle in middle of thetraining ground. You had to climb it, hook in at the top with a ladder belt and stand up with both arms out. A bunch of the “no fear” talkers got halfway up and bailed. The quiet guys that listened and didn’t talk a lot turned out to be the best performers.
Joey,
I noticed something similar. We had two guys rotate into our Airborne unit from posts in Korea and Germany respectively. Both were body builders and looked like Adonis. Neither could road march or break brush for more than a couple klicks before dropping from exhaustion or literally passing out. Most of us were lanky sinuous and could hump a ruck all day. I’m sure both men would have been an awesome spectacle in hand to hand combat if the need arose, but there was no way they could actually get their bodies to the fight. Both transferred back to mech infantry and artillery units as soon as the opportunity arose.
I downloaded/read the paper. Talib is a coward, pure, plain and simple. His cowardice is of a magnitude approaching (if not exceeding) the magnitude of Hitler’s megalomania. He is also a confirmed collectivist. His justification for his cowardice is some amorphous collective good which to this observer is really just an excuse for Talib not to expose Talib to any sort of risk. But then the ZMan perfectly characterized Talib’s sort. Talib is an academic; an ivory-tower academic totally divorced from the real world. I once had a professor like that back in my college days. He had multiple Master’s degrees and was working on his THIRD PhD. He didn’t think a man was qualified to tie his shoes without AT LEAST a Masters degree. Unfortunately, he was head of the department in which I was majoring. He flat out told me – in front of witnesses, mind you – that there was no way I was going to get a degree from any department of which he was head. I finished the semester and dropped out. I no longer wished to do what I wanted to use the degree to do.
Most people in the world are tribal. If you disdainfully reject the idea of collective good then you will be an individual who is picked off one by one by a tribe. Good luck with that.
Those with neither tribe nor nation are easy meat for the cooperative foreign predators.
For a man who wrote a book called “Antifragile”, NNT doesn’t half seem brittle at times.
Any criticism or reasonable question on twitter – Taleb blocks you.
He has some good points. Calm isn’t one of them. He’s right about skin in the game; apparently not his own skin.
You can also gain insight into the Civil War in Lebanon from observing this man’s behavior; his civics lessons should be weighted accordingly.
just block him and post what you want. he wont see it.
Bill. He might have done you a favor, rather than blackballing you in secret. But you did get screwed. The public often thinks an advanced degree is something like a class test—objective. Nothing can be further from the truth. It’s more often like a membership application to an exclusive golf club—you have a lot of social hurdles to over come. And it gets even worse when you attempt to apply for a faculty position.
I remember I had to get minor committee members on my dissertation defense from Statistics dept. Went to the dept head for a meeting, he was informed of the reason for the meeting, so I guess he did some asking around. Anyway, after a couple of minutes of intro and chit-chat, he looked at me and said, “I been inquiring about you from faculty, I think I’d best sit on your defense.” Scared the piss out of me and I had to live with that for several weeks. In the end, all passed me (as required for degree completion), but it was a gut churning. Something I did not need in prepping for a defense.
I’ll White Knight for Taleb a bit here. He’s an autodidact floor trader by background, not an academic. He’d spit nails at being called one. He describes himself as locally communist, regionally socialist and nationally libertarian. He’s not Our Guy but he’s not Their Guy either.
Taleb may indeed be said to be his own man.
there is little evidence he is a trader and even less so that he was a floor trader. Taleb is more of adviser and PR guy to funnel l ppl to a fund one of his business partners runs.
Yes, very clear Mullins hasn’t read Taleb at all. If he had, he’d genuinely like how Taleb regards the Ivory Tower.
Where I live, the walking trails are packed. I noticed everyone looks so happy.
Thank you for an unusually to the point daily blog. Yes of course there will be enormous economic damage. But you pessimists overlooked the wonderful role of rescuer that the government will be able to play. Think of all the public works and distribution of money that will come in coming months for them to assuage the very damage the policies caused in the first place. 😯
A lot of that where I am too. The spring weather helps, as does the closing of ski hills and everything else, but there is more behind the different behaviors.
I think the axis of right/left reveals under pressure in all kinds of ways that may not perfectly mirror party politik, but do seem to track along a more fundamental set of attributes.
There seem to be two groups emerging here: the concerned but productive; and the panicked and unproductive.
The panicked seem to revel in the situation, as if their panic, which is always just beneath the surface, is finally validated. And their aversion to discomfort of work is similarly quelled by official permission to do nothing.
For them any crisis is a positive feedback loop of fear and external control; they feel out of control (“i dont feel safe”) so demand to be controlled more by external authorities.
Whereas the concerned and productive seem more inclined toward solutions and work-arounds to manage through the external interventions, with a negative feedback loop of discomfort aroused by those creeping external controls.
There is probably a correlate of time preference as well.
These seem to align with different “values” prioritized by the right and left.
E.g., Liberty v. Justice; Freedom v. Fairness; Meritocracy v. Equality; Responsibility v. Authority; Universalism v. Relativism, and more recently Truth v. Feelings; respectively.
What strings thru these is a kind of intrinsic vs. extrinsic battle in which ones actions trip various circuits in these breakers; progressively moving one toward self-empowerment and actualization, or on the other side, abdication of agency in exchange for authoritative protection.
More simply: I must do something, as opposed to something must be done!
The greater the reliance on the extrinsic and orientation toward the necessity of an intervening authority to take responsibility, the more prone to panic.
I suspect this divide tracks fairly well with those on the trail vs those hunkered down. Here in my bluetopia, there are shrieking shut-ins demanding something be done with all the people enjoying the parks because they are literally going to kill is all.
Screwtape,
I think there is an underlying gratification element for the panicked and unproductive as well as those with an opposite bent. Except for the past 100 years in the West, humanity as a species has always had it rough, it’s in our DNA to expect toil and turmoil. We seem to need it. It’s there whether we face it stoically or run around screaming that the sky is falling. The panicked-bent people as well as the productive seem to be getting a little charge out of this pandemic. For the former it’s a little dark thrill and I’ve noted for the later there seems to be a new found pride in coming up with workarounds (whether it’s learning to cook up meals with a depleted larder or helping a neighbor out while many services are temporarily shut down).
This keeps striking me in the face. Major of Chicago says you can walk but you can’t run 5K. She’s now the fun police?
My niece, repatriated from her junior year abroad in Italy two weeks ago, got out of home quarantine today. They did it by the book: my sister hadn’t even hugged her yet, after not having seen her in person for six months. Knowing her parents and sibs, I’ll cover bets that she never got within six feet of another person during those two weeks. She ran a 10K every day to stay in shape. When I mention that to a certain type of person, they get angry or indignant.
This has become some perverted sacrament: I care more about your health than you do. When I tell you what to do, it’s for your own good.
There is a strong correlation between political orientation and virus fear. You know intuitively which side is which.
Grazed cattle are much happier than those kept in the feedlot. /sarc
Painter, true enough. Supposedly, happy cattle taste better too. Spooking them during slaughter sours the meat.
Regardless, I’d rather be the rancher.
Some like the taste of fear (so I hear), some happiness. If we’re food I’d rather be happy. But yes, you can be your own rancher if you’re willing to give up some of the perks of civilization. Not too many, I’m finding out. It IS possible.
It’s all about the division of labor. If you depend on farmers for food, police for security, carpenters for shelter, etc., you’re cattle. Fancy, wealthy cattle, but nonetheless.
The farm is called civilization. It has its perks, it has its downsides. Everybody has to decide what’s important to him. The fact we’re losing more and more rights you the operation isn’t going well. If it was humming along I’d have tried to be a Wall St. psycho or something, but I think there’s too much downside at this point 🙂
My wife and I went to local park and I predicted there would be more nods, and hellos. There were, but on another walk on the local city streets, three separate cases of women stepping off the sidewalk, nearly walking in the streets or just freezing in place.
Yeah, women but also an older guy walking as if the Andromeda Strain had been released with a scarf and makeshift hazmat suit.
David, i’ve seen some of that too. A soyboy walking his dog actually looked terrified as we approached on the sidewalk. He veered 10’ off the path to avoid me. I laughed.
Dogs are the big winners in all this. Never seen so many people walking their dogs, playing with them in the park. And everyone is home too. These are the dog days of corona I guess.
” It is a good reminder that there is a left-right axis within dissident politics.”
I prefer “authentic” and “phony.”
We have seen who fits where and will remember.
While I have been as pissed as anyone about Trump’s failure to push harder border controls and suspend immigration, during this manufactured crisis he has moved into the authentic category and he has never claimed to be a member of the Dissident Right and in fact opposes much of what we support. Odd how many of his DR critics have fallen into the phony category. It’s that actual employment thing you mentioned.
The Left is one panic away from Jonestown, and so are many people who claim to oppose Cultural Marxism. Cuckery is much wider spread than we realized, but it is good to know who deserves our trust and who does not.
As I mentioned here a few posts ago, this “crisis”, which, by the way, is not producing anywhere near the numbers necessary to qualify as a pandemic,
has shone a bright light onto many writers I once deeply respected, and who now look utterly weak and flaccid in the face of sustained media generated hysteria.
A week ago, the Imperial College in England issued a dire projection about the spread of this virus, leading one to expect masses of bodies piled up in the streets. They have since backed off of that nonsense completely, and are estimating maybe 20,000 may die, not the millions they were projecting.
This massive downgrade in the span of one work week.
In other words, they are now expecting a fatality rate equivalent to a bad flu season.
I wonder if any of the leading lights of the DR will issue apologies and corrections?
Maybe once they crawl out from under their beds.
Vox Day, Roderick Kaine, Steve Sailer, even Brett Stevens, all seem to have succumbed to the hysteria. Z, Briggs and a few others have kept their sanity.
i thought vox is part of second crowd. He has said since this began that most cases are mild and that most deaths are limited to elderly. i have not detected any alarmism from him.
He may be more balanced than the others, not sure, but the last time I looked he seemed to be taking the official stats and the supposed need of “flatten-the-curve” measures at face value.
He published a post asking people to wash their hands every 20 minutes for 20 seconds. That seems a little OCD excessive to me.
Ben Shapiro surprisingly has dialed it back and is now on the anti-panic side.