I have been a reading a biography of Nikolai Bukharin, probably the second most important Bolshevik theorists after Lenin. You cannot read about old commies without also reading about their ideology. These guys were consumed with politics and the disputes about politics. All of their relationships were through politics, usually along ideological lines. In fact, they never seemed to have genuine friendships, just ideological allies in the many ideological disputes at the time.
The Bolsheviks were a lot like the intensely on-line people of today. The people who make Twitter what it is are 100% committed to both their politics and the life of politics they experience on-line. It is why every minor disagreement becomes a great drama that always ends in tears. Bukharin and Lenin would have big fights over what turned out to be trivial difference in language. Of course, all of the old commies were fond of denouncing one another as deviationists.
Another thing that shines through when reading about the old communists is they had a Calvinist’s faith in their own destiny. The inevitable end of capitalism was as certain to them that the sun would rising in the morning and setting in the evening. Their only concern was in mapping out how it would eventually meet its end. They made some very prudent observations about what they called capitalism. In fact, they gave us the word capitalism as a label for what they observed at the time.
The weird thing about their observations of capitalism is that you get the sense that their good observations were accidents. They were so obsessed with proving the inevitability of communism, they looked past their bets observations about the present. Often, they would focus on the nutty claims about the present, rather than the insightful one, because the nutty claim fit their narrative. The French Revolution reads like a new madness gripping humanity. Communism has the same feel.
The funny thing is though, all political theorists on the Left, I would place libertarians on the Left as well, had this assumption about their politics. Once they arrived at some sort of theoretical framework to explain the world, they started to assume that events would naturally arrive at some determined end point. The superiority of markets would inevitably triumph over central planning. The moral superiority of communism would inevitably lead to revolution and the end of capitalism.
Of course, this determinism is prominent with our rulers. They are always reminding us that they are on the right side of history. That is their get out of jail free card, which allows them to dismiss critics. The communists were like this. The logic errors in Marx were dismissed as technical issues that would work themselves out as capitalism reached its denouement and socialism rose up as the inevitable replacement. It was the source of their fanaticism, this certainty about what was coming next.
Interestingly, this fixation on the inevitable future led them to do no thinking about the details of that future. This is something we see today. On the one hand, their sense of historical inevitability drove them to smash the present, but it prevented them from thinking about the details of that inevitable future. We see this today with the latest spasms of the cultural revolution. They are sure that white people will not be in the glorious future, but how that will work is never considered.
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: Marxism
- 17:00: Austrians
- 32:00: Marketism
- 47:00: Dissident Economics
- 57:00: Closing (Be Like Me)
Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon
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Full Show On YouTube
https://youtu.be/I4MbT0GY3F4
You’re either intentionally misleading people about Marxist theory, or unintentionally betraying your ignorance when you read the Communist Manifesto as if its 10-point plan was a blueprint or pre-determined goal that Marx and Engels wrote to be applied to any country in any historical context. The Manifesto is a pamphlet that was written in the context of the nationalist uprisings in Europe of 1848-51. Its primary value is its concise distillation of the principles of Marx’s materialist conception of human history. You get one partially right: Marxist theory is first and foremost a critique of capitalist society that focusses on… Read more »
Z, Things have changed. Ideas have lost their ability to inspire sacrifice, even the Left does nothing without a promise of reward. What I contend with below; The fact is, Saul Alinsky was right when he said, “He who controls the language controls the masses.” But the masses are finished Z. The last gasp of the masses was 1/6. No one will fight for a dead idea, and the Republic is dead. The Dems and the Left are on top by force and fraud; > this is normal, pre-Enlightenment politics. Politics returns to the naked struggle for power, with money… Read more »
“moral superiority .. would lead to .. end of capitalism…” Wrong. That was never claimed. The basis for all Marxist theorizing was 2 observable phenomenon which continue to act, even if it is difficult to measure the pace: overproduction and declining rate of profit. It was observed by Marx that capitalism created a totally new type of economic crisis. Whereas historically an economic crisis always implied a shortage of goods, under capitalism it was possible to have a crisis where huge stocks of goods were sitting in stores that couldn’t be sold. Overproduction was a distinctive feature of the new… Read more »
You keep getting closer to Catholic economics….
Yep, I was noticing the same thing. Not that I mind of course, it all comports with my natural sentiments as well.
I’m not a Catholic, but aren’t the Catholics unique in the Western World for forbiding usury?
I bet we could ignite a war on this site if we broached outlawing usury.
If you ban charging interest on borrowed capital, the risk premium shows up as mandatory insurance. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly how we got insurance.
The issue isn’t lending money at interest, it is kiting checks AND charging interest on the kited value.
Risk is always conserved and there is no economic model that can eliminate this fundamental fact.
QED.
My understanding is that usury doesn’t ban charging fees for the risk of lending capital, it bans compound interest on the loan. Am I wrong?
Interest is not the issue
It’s excessive interest. Punitive interest. And what often follows is the borrower can’t pay so the lender gets to break his kneecaps or take the collateral.
Interest in and of itself was never the issue. In fact interest, some, internet, has the unique psychological benefit of telling the borrower he is in a real deal and needs to take it seriously. If you simply give him the money, there is no sense of gravity to the situation and he’s likely to bail out on the deal.
Z; agree with Gab comment on calculating Trump/ MAGA utility- any movement needs bodies.
On Trump raising Hell; be warned- Trump has no Hell in him, and lets be honest nor does MAGA. We’d know by now.
To update Hamilton: I think the People Sir are a Great Sheep.
But still a pool. Maybe even an organization ripe for taking.
Is Gab worth going to? I signed up a few years ago but never go there. I found it a bit empty. Like, I didn’t see many comments. If there’s a certain section of Gab that’s best for DR / Zman type followers, please let me know.
I signed up in Jan 21 of all things but have been on there today for the first time talking sh-t, as it were Kinda fun. At least you don’t have to worry about being banned. You get some pretty lovely debates going on. I’m still trying to feel it out. A lot of Christian stuff, which I don’t in fact mind, but lots of Bible citations and so forth and I haven’t read the Bible in, say, ever. Take that back, I did read the Gospels. But these guys are masters of the Book. Lots of pro Trump /… Read more »
You don’t get banned.. you get muted by Investor class – no one can see you.
But it’s probably better than being banned by Pakis who wrote a Python script, with English words they don’t understand.
Thanks for the replies. I’ll have to give it another shot.
I didn’t consider the muting by the investor class. So there’s a snob factor in play I take it. Or a social hierarchy. Fair enough. Reason enough to bail on the platform. It’s no fun if only “commoners” can see you.
Excellent ‘Sunday Thoughts’.
mfw when Z says we won WW2.
“Let the market decide” is a monstrous lie in every aspect. First, it is absolutely false. Government intervenes constantly to choose winners and losers. Secondly, as you point out, the assumption a free market will reach a better endpoint is rank bullshit. Third, hamburgers are more expensive for some than for others–mass migration, if we want to use an economic analogy, is the rankest, vilest form of cost-shifting.
This not only will not end well, it cannot end well.
To be fair, the Austrian School is almost completely correct on what is good and bad for markets. What it gets wrong is where this intersects with morality or what is good for a society. Often their free market solution to a moral problem is pure fantasy. For example, I’ve heard people argue that we don’t need regulations to prevent corporations from dumping waste into a river. The consumers would be so repulsed by the act that they would not buy from the company, which would force them to behave morally. Pure fantasy. It assumes an actual press that would… Read more »
The only people you’ll find with a copy of the Fountainhead on their desk work in Govt – GOP. Paul Ryan for instance.
I appreciate the fresh look on communism, libertarianism, and liberal democracy, Z. A couple of points: 1. As much as they were presented as polar opposites during The Cold War, communism and liberal democracy are, in fact, very similar. This is well presented in Ryszard Legutko’s “The Demon in Democracy”, a Pole who lived under both systems. Communism and Liberal Democracy are both utopian, ideological, progressive, totalitarian, born of the Enlightenment, and hold systems, principles, and processes above people. The unattainable heaven is out there somewhere in the distant future, we all must be sacrificed to it in the present.… Read more »
Z: On Marketism: 37:35. “We don’t *want* the market to determine everything. Most cultural items we don’t want the market to dictate. Like tradition. We all feel a bit of sadness when an old building is torn down.”
Here’s Johnny Rotten lamenting similar things around London. Johnny was the singer of the Sex Pistols. The first political punk band in ’77. (Yes, New York’s The Ramones were first in ’76…but were a-political).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrz92Z0SsDI&ab_channel=madferrett
This is the full 30 minute version. It’s from more than 10 years ago. He comes close to saying anti-immigration things. Even 10 years ago, you can tell the channel took him aside and said “Some of this is sounding a bit racist. We’re going to need you to slip in something about how you are pro-immigrant.” So he did. Today this “tour” wouldn’t have been aired at all. It’s not racist, just populist. A working class lament.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SkUPM_T7FE&t=1766s&ab_channel=identitycrisistheft
I’ve brought this up previously but it goes well with your comment. Get an old dust jacket to Jean Raspail’s CAMP OF THE SAINTS and look at the glowing reviews from Washington Post, New York Times, Newsweek, etc. These outfits would be trying to destroy Raspail less than 40 years later.
I’m shocked this from Rotten was allowed onto the screen even 10 years ago.
Eric Clapton endorsed Enoch Powell in the 70s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYccj2PmraQ
Clapton’s 2018 apology, blaming drugs and drinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XgwjQdpH4o
Why aren’t the government or political actors considered a market? They don’t use money?
A: Why aren’t the government or political actors considered a market? They don’t use money? Because, as a good little shabb0s g0y, you dutifully allow them to define the vocabulary and the grammar of the discourse. Create your own vocabulary & grammar, and then you can speak as a free man, not as a s1ave. Z: [T]his determinism …[that t]hey are… on the right side of history… was the source of their fanaticism, this certainty about what was coming next. I beg to differ, but the causality works has to work in the opposite direction – it’s the innate fanaticism,… Read more »
I listen to z on the way to pick up fresh, raw milk from the farmer every Saturday at 11am, so no spoilers, please!
No spoiled milk either, we all hope.
Its said there is nothing new under the sun, and Marxism is certainly an example. Its pretty much the same thing as the ancient Sumerian Empires: conquer neighbors, enslave them, use their LABOR forced to cultivate the land and crucially, build and maintain irrigation ditches, and reap the agricultural surpluses. Its very primitive, and not sustainable as neighbors eventually get tired of being enslaved and the core military tech and manpower is available to anyone. But it worked for thousands of years, it was basically the modus operandi there until the mid 20th Century and mechanization and industrialization. Our oligarchs… Read more »
The oligarchs happen to operate in a power vacuum. With modern states mostly leaving their citizens alone to live their lives, there’s no one to boss us around. The oligarchs see a need for this. They must see themselves as a combination of father figure and patron. And of course there’s the popular notion that he who has the cash is the wisest.
They must see themselves as a combination of father figure and patron. And of course there’s the popular notion that he who has the cash is the wisest. This is what the Frankfurt School sanheder*, sigmund freud, mis-named as “Projection” [which should have been called “Reflection”, and the fact that freud mis-named it was an act of Meta-Projection on his part]. Anyway, you’re making an excuse – namely “paternalism” – for their behavior, based upon how you imagine you would behave around your own children & pets & servants & slaves, and failing to summon the courage necessary to ponder… Read more »
Agreed. This is one to attribute to malice. It is sociopathology at its worst. And, no, there really are not historical precedents for this.
Actually, it’s quintessentially modern. Medieval lords generally left the serfs to their own devices just so long as duties, in the form of corvee and in-kind payments, were made in a timely fashion. Serfs were limited in that they had to grind their grain in manorial mills and could not hunt and fish with impunity on noble lands, but they were not required to perform functions they found morally objectionable. But it wasn’t the case that the nobles were precursors to Ludwig von Mises; rather, they simply didn’t have the means to control the peasants’ lives they way our modern… Read more »
But it wasn’t the case that the nobles were precursors to Ludwig von Mises; rather, they simply didn’t have the means to control the peasants’ lives they way our modern Afrofascists do. You’re making a categorical error here, in assuming that the genetic motivations of Dark Age & Medieval White Christians bear any resemblance whatsoever to the genetic motivations of 21st Century non-White and non-Christian tribes. 99.999999% or more of our behavior was burned into our genes at conception – there is no nurture, only nature. And that includes the brainwash-a-bility of the Insula-dominant/Amygdala-submissive amongst White Christians, because that very… Read more »
Are non-white non-Christians really so un-susceptible towards brainwashing though? They haven’t faced a decades long campaign to subvert, destroy, and replace them. Not sure they would stand up any better. Here in Canada within one generation, Indians, Arabs, and Chinese are raging SJWs, anti-white, low fertility and homo/abortion advocates. Taiwan had 0 gay marriage until 2019 when the supreme Court legalized it. There was not even a debate. Whites fought for decades on the issue. I think it’s remarkable that 75 million mostly white Americans voted for Trump despite decades of brainwashing, abuse, and hatred. To me is shows how… Read more »
B125: Are non-white non-Christians really so un-susceptible towards brainwashing though? For purposes of classical 20th-Century U.S. demographics, the non-Whites I had in mind were the kneegr0wz, and of course the non-Christians were the Tiny Hats. In the 21st Century, obviously the Brahmin and the Mandarin are making an yuge push within the U.S. to supplant the Tiny Hats at the top of the pyramid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyZsABI8Gk And we don’t yet know much about the generic Latino/Mestizo/Central-American-Aboriginal foot-soldiers and their intentions, other than the fact that AOC religiously eschews mocha-flavored-Appendage in favor of vanilla-flavored-Appendage. Now getting back to the question of brainwash-a-bility,… Read more »
The vast majority of our contemporary AWR overlords are whites who descended from white, medieval Christians. Category error, indeed.
The vast majority of our contemporary AWR overlords are whites who descended from white, medieval Christians. Category error, indeed. PART ONE… Chez Z, apparently “AWR” refers to a White which publically professes to be anti-White? [I had to go to a search engine to try to figure that out.] With that usage, I don’t know of any AWRs which don’t live in [or who by now haven’t fled to] ultra-White neighborhoods with of course the very best skrewlz. Even the Tiny Hats are leaving JYC in droves, and heading to Broward County. You are aware that Tater Joe, back when… Read more »
Sorry, I got distracted by something moderately urgent, and I was cutting & pasting furiously to try to get that poast past the anti-spambot filter [so that I go deal with the moderately urgent something], with the result being that portions of what got poasted started looking kinda like gibberish [trust me, it looked an helluva lot better before the cutting & pasting]. Anway, if you have gonads the size of grapefruit, then you can broach the topic of miscegenation with authentic American blacks, and tell them that they very likely have substantial Presbyterian blood in them, with not a… Read more »
I object! The communists did too think about the details of the future! Marx himself explained in detail how the future after communism would work. He said once communism arrives you will be able to …hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, … without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. Marx, um, doesn’t seem to have had anything else to say about how things will work once capitalism has been smashed, but hey, isn’t that enough for you guys? Do you really need more detail than that? Doesn’t it sound… Read more »
What the control freak’ sycophants (marxists) and ambitious achiever types (libertarians) fail to grasp is that economics, accounting and math are just tools to observe how goods, services and RISK are allocated throughout society. Both factions seek to moralize money for their own interests, but money is just the unit of account. Kiting checks, which is what the entire banking system is a thin veneer over, powers the entire show by allowing everyone to pretend there is no insolvency and that you can earn your way out of bad financial decisions. When the kiting machine hits vapor lock, which can… Read more »
Link to chart didn’t make it in the post, so here it is.
Buy or sell?
Z: “Those cheap burgers turned out to be extremely expensive.”
That line should have closed the segment followed by the thunderous mic drop effect.
Things are so dumbed down now with ghetto-vogue and fag flamboyance that you don’t as often hear the phrase “crass commercialism”. Crass is key. It comes with free-market holy maxims like, “the market rules”, “the customer is always right”, “whatever sells”, and “give the people what they want”. That’s ok in Denmark with cultured Danes and civilized zoning. Here in the US it works for sellers because the people can be made to want everything, without being judged. The term “crass” is avoided when possible since it’s class divisional. In the same way “tacky”, “gaudy”, “loud”, and the literal “low-class”… Read more »
my introduction to crass commercialism was ordering shit from the back of a comic book, circa age 10.
Did those “X-ray” glasses really work?
Asking for a [preverted] friend.
I can remember being 8 years old and *really* hoping that they did.
Zappa was always annoyed by that iconic image of him. It was shot without his permission, and he was a libertarian (approximate) so he said what annoyed him was that he didn’t own the copyright. That wasn’t quite true. As stupid and vulgar as his songs often were, they inveighed against vulgarity and stupidity—and they were surrounded on record by what was probably the last great high-Western art music to reach the popular consciousness. He’d never have pantsed himself for the money.
I knew a Zappa fan would come forward to strongly defend him (and hype him to the heavens). I know his music well and I’m not a fan of most of it. I won’t quarrel with you about him. I’ve learned to respect the loyalty you guys show to the man. I’ve never seen anything like it. Rush fans come closest.
Same. I really respect the uniqueness and complexity of his work but there is an underlying nastiness to a lot of it that I can’t get past. On the other hand, the song “Joe’s Garage” is warm and catchy. “Don’t you boys know any nice songs?!”
Speaking of Rush, the best known girl repellent is a Rush tee shirt.
“On the one hand, their sense of historical inevitability drove them to smash the present, but it prevented them from thinking about the details of that inevitable future. We see this today with the latest spasms of the cultural revolution. ” You see this in primitive Christianity as well; since the Second Coming is any day now, “take no thought for the morrow,” trust God to provide food and clothing (if not, this proves your lack of faith and ‘love of the world’), do not marry and certainly have no children, etc. Eventually everyone either falls away, or sets out… Read more »
The key lesson of the 20th Century is that authoritarian regimes are still prone to killing off its citizens in huge numbers (read 100+ million in a half century) in order to remain in power. Most of this was enabled by industrialization, but also required an elaborate apparatus of bureaucracy and jackboot enforcers. And each tyrant sprang from a different flavor of totalitarianism (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Mugabe, etc). It takes great determination and efficiency to kill on that scale, which ultimately is managerial skill, not ideological purity. Some think it cannot happen here. Famous last words. The US… Read more »
Yes Tom its hard not to see how the cheka of our time will look more like an IT department than some snappy dressed hit squad. Jackboots down the line for sure but efficiency in the insta-courts of purity has all the infrastructure it needs in Act One. Call it ‘Chekhovs Algorithm’.
Just so. There are three possibilities for AINO’s future. 1. Whites will be incarcerated in the millions and possibly massacred Nazi/Bolshevik style. 2. Whites will be turned into 3rd-class serfs with absolutely no rights whatsoever, including self-defense and defense of one’s private property. 3. Whites recognize the probability of outcomes 1. and 2., organize, threaten mass violence, and manage to carve out some form of autonomy.
An SS equivalent is already being formed using select personnel from FBI, HLS, and a few other Departments. But they also will be relying heavily on a few contract mercenary organizations of dubious provenance. Planning for detention camps has also been completed under a Continuity of Government Executive Order expanded under Reagan and now again under Biden. As I understand the current plan, they will initially use false flag OPs and entrapment to create an appearance of domestic terrorism and make examples of a few scapegoats. Then comes firearm confiscation and whatever it takes to foment Civil War 2.0.
Wanted. Firearms confiscator, must love lead. 18 sheckels per hour, No whites need apply..
Most rural county sheriffs will abstain. They know that they would be going up against their neighbors, almost all of which are law-abiding citizens, and very good marksman. And you can’t really divide and conquer in a rural community, because neighbors will stand together in a crisis. This is an ancient behavior that won’t be overridden by cell phone propaganda. Big city PDs are a different story. They don’t have the resources to go house-to-house, so their strategy will simply be to arrest someone on pretext criminal violation or complaint. First take them down in neutral space & lock them… Read more »
The vaxx casualties will be blamed on the unvaxxed.
That’ll be their excuse for the agencies to kick into high gear.
Not a sudden pogrom, but the platform for a Permanent Revolutionary Committee- against us, of course.
Still going with holohoax myth, eh..
Not a myth, but an exaggeration.
I’ll give equal odds to any of the above – 33% each.
As I am in an unusually optimistic frame of mind today – 0.99% odds the AfroStalinists see the illogic of their positions – shut up and go away. OTOH, I leave room for 0.01 % that Covid wipes us all out.
It took a huge bureaucracy and industrial killing equipment for Europeans to kill Europeans, reportedly even then some 15% of SS guards committed suicide, as killing people who look like distant relatives and were mostly women, kids, middle aged men, was not the glory and distinction they were promised. HOWEVER, from April through June 1994, Hutus killed about 800,000 to 1.1 million Tutsis and “moderate” Hutus, mostly with rocks and machetes. This was btw the estimated death toll at a certain camp during its entire existence 1941-44. There is also a documentary on the mass killings by Indonesians (mostly of… Read more »
“There is also a documentary on the mass killings by Indonesians (mostly of Chinese) during the Suharto coup, the killers gleefully re-enact their killings and have no regrets.”
The documentary is “The Act of Killing”. Perhaps this is the scene that you remembered:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZqEzIEWzPk
“Racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists who advocate for the superiority of the white race”.
Found that little ditty on the White House.Gov site.
Guess the honkies really are the most dangerous thing to national security.
I’ll be checking under the bed and behind the bushes in my yard to see if I can find any “white supremacists”.
Who knew?
You forgot that the anti-abortion crowd is ALSO on the list of Dangerous Subversives.
Good show. A reasonably fair treatment of Austrian Economics. The elephant in the room that you (deliberately?) overlooked in the discussion of Marketism is the role of government. All of the tech giants, Facebook and Google most famously, are creations of, or were very early adopted children of the Deep State- In-Q-tel usually cited. https://sagaciousnewsnetwork.com/cia-funding-of-tech-companies/ https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-funded-by-cia-2016-9 This next one makes me smile- an optimistic premise I think. http://themillenniumreport.com/2019/05/big-tech-was-created-by-the-pentagon-funded-by-the-u-s-taxpayer-therefore-these-utilities-are-owned-by-we-the-people/ etc etc The Banks have been in bed with the State for so long that we recently celebrated the 100 year anniversary of the institution created by Congress to bail them out… Read more »
In Fascism: the State is supreme. And then, the corporations are made to co-operate. Notice that Russia, China and many others get great military equipment at a reasonable price.
The United States would be well likened to “Inverted Totalitarianism” because the Banks, et. al. control the State. Notice that United States pays handsomely for ever deteriorating quality.
One thing about Marx I always got a kick out of: he said communism would only be possible when the means of production were autonomous, or something like that. It’s been a long time.
In other words, communism is science fiction! I’d say Marx was a socialist with a theory of communism, regardless, to base one’s ideology on a daydream… people should’ve seen that his revolutionary program wasn’t the product of serious thought.
Today it’s Science! Yesterday it was philosopher kings. And people keep falling for it.
That’s the problem with lefty. He’s capable of great insights, but then he leaps into fantasy.
Fine show today, very fine. Many years ago I considered myself a revolutionary communist and was actively involved in the pipe dream of a revolution of the people. Then I grew up. But the basic principle is not so different. As you point out, Marx‘s analysis of the fundamental social problems of capitalism remains accurate. If big capital has its way, families are destroyed, people are pitted against each other, and many lives are unfulfilled. Individuals are members of families, families are members of tribes, and tribes are members of nations. We are, in a sense, an extended family. This… Read more »
One thing the libertarians love to do is change the past to agree with their existing economic ideas. Take child labor, for example. They retcon the shit out of this. First, they deny it existed. They re-frame child labor as “labor” by equating helping out on the farm to operating heavy machinery in a factory. Milking the cows before breakfast is exactly the same as a 12 year old schlepping his way to the factory before dawn and working 12 hours therein. But then they do a bait-and-switch and say that the market was actually what drove child labor out… Read more »
Priorities matter. Big “L” libertarian bashing is useless venting over a perceived enemy that is really inconsequential in the Grand Scheme of things. Libertarians have no political power and enact nothing. Their only function in society is to be a convenient whipping boy for the lazy and aggrieved within the dissident community. A libertarian is not going to slaughter its nation’s citizens by the tens of millions, but a real tyrant will. And being killed dead is a lot worse than being harangued over some esoteric economic principle. Maybe you should consider redirecting some of your ire at the real… Read more »
I’m no historian in these matters (or any other matter) but they aren’t completely wrong. A good example was the practice of “shanghai”ing sailors which wasn’t made completely illegal until the practice was largely dead. In this case it wouldn’t surprise me that after the titans of industry discovered that the 40 hour workweek gave the most bang for the buck that they set about codifying it into law.
Submitted as shallowest comment of the day:
I’m now of a certain age and able to have a more rational perspective such that what the, um..little head thinks no longer automatically trumps what the big head thinks. That said, I wonder if Stalin and his ilk just needed to get laid more often in their younger years. Maybe they’d have been less frustrated and had more time to focus on…baser desires.
Seems like being sexually unsuccessful when young has lasting negative effects and is never truly gotten over, if people like Gates and Weinstein and so many others are examples. Then there is Bill Clinton who was probably having sex with cousins when seven but is just a perverted horn dog. Or maybe not. Maybe he had issues.
bill c’s problem is his mom was a stone whoore, and wasn’t shy about letting lil’bill watch her with johns….
According to one of his biographers, young Koba had no problem getting laid. His hatreds stemmed from being born intelligent but dirt poor with a drunk for a father.
The revolutionary underground in Imperial Russia were hotbeds of sexual revolution too. Banging your way through the vanguard of the proletariat was another way to prove your Bolshevik credentials by rejecting “bourgeois morality”.
Agree. Stalin got laid plenty. Yes the political and sexual revolutions moved in parallel. Stalin saw himself first and foremost as a revolutionary (even though his revolution was won by the mid 1920s). The lifestyle he chose left him outside normal family life (distant from his women, children). Until he died he worked like a grad student, meeting with colleagues and working late into the night, then falling asleep on a couch. Not much room for emotional connections. Also, its not clear to me that he had “hatreds” or was “frustrated” or anything like that. Instead I think he had… Read more »
Our rulers Z-Man do have a plan. When Whites are gone, (we can all agree that is their step 1 from Biden to Milley), they will simply use the talent of India and China as managers. As America becomes China’s resource farm, with themselves as head managers.
They’d rather be small frogs in a great pond than big ones (answering to no one) in a slightly smaller one. They chose subordination to China so they can get their anti-White hate on as part of their religion of wokeness and racial utopia.
I don’t know about “leftists” in general, but “Marxist” is certainly a widely used self-label in the factories of leftism, which are the universities. They all call themselves Marxists.
Marx was correct in a lot of his critique of mid 19th century industrialism. Especially as it developed in big cities in England. However, he was also myopic in thinking that the conditions in a few concentrated areas were universal. He also failed to grasp that the conditions in the country weren’t all that great. People were (mostly) voluntarily moving from the country to industrial slums, presumably because life was easier or better in them. The poverty of the slums was obvious to social reformers such as Marx while the rural squalor that pushed people into those slums was invisible.… Read more »
Marx’s analysis was pretty good.What he failed to provide, and his putative followers have failed to envision and enact, was how to get to the workers paradise. All attempts so far have ended in blood-soaked poverty.
The rise of China since Deng’s pronouncement that “To grow rich is Glorious” seems to prove the point.
What he really failed to understand?
That there never, ever, will BE a ‘worker’s paradise’–or any OTHER paradise–on Earth.
Dino – Important points about rural poverty. Farming is hard work, and trying to do it as a family, without the wherewithal to purchase some of the new labor saving machines, made earning a profit even harder. I was struck, listening to a recording of a distant relative of my husband, about how her Italian-born father much preferred American factory work to his work as an agricultural laborer in Italy. He had no desire to go settle far out west and work his own acreage. He liked having a definite salary and definite hours. Ironic, when so many of us… Read more »
Up until the 20th century most farmer workers in Europe and the US did not own the land they farmed. They were either sets, share croppers or day laborer hired help. So it was incredibly hard for them to “profit” from their efforts. And there was little incentive for them to invest in capital or land improvements. This was noted by a number of reformers i the 19th century. This was especially the case with Russian peasant farmers, who were not even given the same plot of land to farm on an ongoing basis and had to communally share their… Read more »
Austrian economics developed a number of precepts which remain valid today. Diminishing marginal utility, subjective valuation, the socialist calculation problem, time preference and their contribution to emergent order.
However, they went off the rails with Mises’ business cycle theory and rejection of empiricalism.
The could never get past the idea that money is exogenous to cultures instead of a social construct.
I dislike Boomer bashing as much as the next dissident, but immigration is more or less the fault of Baby boomers entirely. Boomers have known since they were kids that social security would not and could not work if they didn’t have kids. They were well aware of this before the oldest Boomer hit menopause. I can still remember as a kid the articles and tv spots about the demographic time bomb of baby boomer retirement and that there simply would not be enough workers per boomer retiree unless they had kids. Then, later, after it was largely too late… Read more »
” but immigration is more or less the fault of Baby boomers entirely. ”
The 1965 Immigration act, the biggest single cause of the rise of the mud peoples in America, cannot be blamed on teenage boomers.
Mass immigration didn’t start in 65. It started in the 80s and really picked up since 2000. That is largely because by the 2000s, the die was cast and could not be changed. The last of the boomers were in their mid 30s at the turn of the century. Gen-X was too small to do it itself. Not coincidentally, the rate of abortion peaked when the mass of Boomer women were in their fertile years. Today abortion is at its lowest since Roe. Divorce peaked in Boomers too. I get it. White Boomers are still white and still our people… Read more »
Women do not make choices.
They follow what is popular.
It’s notable that the ’80s immigration uptick coincided with the opening cries about social security (and other retirement plans) going insolvent. If you think the WWII generation wouldn’t sell the country and their grandkids down the road for thin slice of retirement comfort then I have a bridge to sell you.
Bilejones: The ’65 disaster was heavily pushed by Juice for decades prior to its passage. All relevant politicians blatantly lied about what it was intended to do and what its results would be. Even then, from what I’ve seen, the WWII vets and Silents were not fully onboard. IF it was possible to repeal or ameliorate it, that would have been a job for the boomers, but they were too busy getting high and getting laid and then getting ahead to pay much attention to the quality of life for the country as a whole. I will agree with Tars… Read more »
I’m not big on boomer bashing either, especially as I’m a late boomer and the youngest of six siblings. However, there is an emergent factor related to boomers that is causing a lot of our current problems. I ran across it while doing some math on my own family not too long ago. Of my five brothers and sister (and their spinous) I’m the only one working in the private sector. The others are all retired, on disability or housewives. That’s one out of twelve people. Add ini the ten children between us and three more work in the private… Read more »
“The others are all retired, on disability or housewives. ” Well, I at least hope the housewife was raising a large family. Frankly, that was her responsibility, not sitting in a cube. Women today act like this was such a bad deal. Be with your kids while they (and she) are young and then go “enjoy” cubicle life when the kids are old enough to make their own sandwiches after school. It’s not that big of a deal and has a lot of upside besides. The “lucky” ones that still managed to have kids, but had to work throughout their… Read more »
Couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard ‘I won’t be around to have to deal with it.’
Don’t hear it too much these days. In fact, most of the boomers I know are now awake. That’s a good and shocking development, so the hatchet is buried as far as I’m concerned.
One might refresh oneself on who and when wrt SSI. Bush did little to nothing. Last significant change occurred under Reagan. At that time, SSI was deemed “fixed” under early 2000’s—at which point more changes might be in order. Here’s a synopsis (brief) fro Brookings (not a conservative voice):
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-crisis-last-time-social-security-reform/
Libertarianism is the codification of the cultural norms of one of our country’s founding Anglo-American cultures. The codification pushed the norms to a reduction-ad-absurdum level. But the core of leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone was there from the beginning.
The real problems with libertarianism is claiming that those values are universal to human nature, as opposed to the preference of our people. And of course, pushing them to ridiculous extremes as some ridiculous intellectual project.
The Founders were not libertarians. They would have viewed libertarians as unbalanced lunatics.
Well sure, libertarianism didn’t exist as a formal theory at the time. But the base ideas were part of the Sotts-Irish-American culture. Not the puritans or the tidewater pseudo aristocrats. But those weren’t the only cultures in America at the time and not even that of a majority of the people.
They were the leaders and dominated the government, but wouldn’t have won without the SI.
Libertarians are unbalanced lunatics.
Libertarianism is very familiar, so it can seem to appear whole in the less familiar old things it descends from, including the (not sure what to call it broadly) martial agrarian republican propertarianism? of the founders.
Possibly, libertarianism is the “slave morality” mirror of the founding—the soporific form of our capitulation to what was worst/strongest in it.
The notion of universal human values and human rights goes back, of course, to the Enlightenment. And it was surely the beginning of the insipid notion that all races are equal, which laid the intellectual groundwork for inundating the West with savages. Postmodernism, which rejects Enlightenment universality, effectively argues that non-white peoples are not only fundamentally different from, but also superior to whites. (They are half right.) This is the boat in which we find ourselves today.
Sorry, pal. Universal human rights goes back to the Gospel where the Golden Rule was re-emphasized.
You’re about marektism determining our morality by majoritarian support. Instead out morality is driven by liberal’s (or progressive whatever you prefer) quasi religion. This is easily proved by observing that every time the liberal moral project of the day is opposed or thwarted by majority action it is imposed by i democratic means. Gay marriage was opposed and defeated just about everywhere it was put to a vote. Still became a universal across the land. The tranny bullshit wasn’t even put to a vote, probably because the liberal acolytes knew that it would go down in flames. And yet it’s… Read more »
There are at least tens of billions of dollars backing the alphabet soup stuff.
The alphabet soup flood didn’t just happen.
People paid good money to make it happen.
Yeah, but the NEXT liberal initiative that comes down the line will be defeated by pure and simple logic, and by dint of voting even harder.
Dino – Combination of an older generation failing to pass on lessons learned to their children, and a younger generation freshly and intensely indoctrinated via public school and mass electronic media. The wholesale rejection of the very idea our forbearers had any wisdom to pass on is incredibly frustrating. That, plus the absolution dereliction of duty by so many parents. Saw 2-3 young, fairly attractive White girls at the gym today with black men. They could possibly have been their trainers, but I didn’t get that vibe. That is an utter failure of parenting – particularly of fathers (who probably… Read more »
The bigger failure is raising sons properly. It’s not difficult to see why young women in general don’t want to be around young white men: most of them are soft and spineless. I run a business and my rule is to never hire or sub contract with anyone under 45, and I’m only 30 myself! My direct experience has been that most young white guys tend to be flaky, lazy, and generally lacking in strength and stamina. I don’t like mud sharks, but it’s really hard for me to look at white guys my age or younger and see anything… Read more »
These people’s arrogance is stunning really. They are so sure of themselves and that all their plans will proceed exactly as they want yet from Thucydides imponderables to Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns there were thousands of other people inbetween saying the same and numerous experiences in history proving the they will be foiled. I just want to live to see the day
Sunlight, the great disinfectant. Shedding light on it it as usual Zman. The last segment of the podcast really got to me. I build things that could potentially kill someone if not done right. This requires ability to read measuring instruments, simplistic and semi-complicated. Nothing more than a good old old high school education and some passion Was needed for a lifelong career with a reasonable retirement. Both those things are non existent in America today for the most part. I was never a big Walmart fan, not because of the people who shop there, because I could see what… Read more »
You may recall, as I do, when Wal Mart got its start by only selling things Made in America That was their gimmick. American flag emblems on every product. Then they did a 180 a few years later, shamelessly, didn’t even have a good story to tell the country whey they were changing their format And I had/have a similar problem with places like Bass Pro Shops. I had been living in CA for a long time and want back to FL maybe around 2005 or so and everyone was huge into Bass Pro Shops. And in CA I had… Read more »
welcome to the world of proles. shame they are allowed to vote…
I just listened to a E. Michael Jones gave where he talked about his ideas on the hellenizing of Christianity to make it accessible to the Greeks. Logos, etc. IIRC he said it’s possible to come to the ultimate reality of God through faith or reason.
Then I read the opening paragraph of today’s post, how the Bolsheviks were consumed by politics and ideology, which reminded me of the ancient Greeks’ reputation as talkers.
Idk, just something that stuck out to me for whatever reason.
Christianity was already deeply Hellenized. Jesus talks like Socrates in the Gospels. Hellenization was strong in that part of the Med. Less strong in Persia and Babylonia.
well, the orthodox church was. catholic church not so much…
Great stuff, Z. Your wrapup line should replace that crap on the base of the Statue of Liberty.
Aside, re. your Gab post on ‘Hate Whitey, the Western’: We have come full circle back to blaxploitation films. The music even has a Shaft vibe.
The best observation I have read about communism is that in practice it was a tactic not a political or economic philosophy. Consequently there was no drive to think through the implications beyond will it give the right people power and how do they maintain that power while settling old scores.
We see that today with all the woke ideology from the oligarchs and most of the rest of the tribe. Some things never change.
“The best observation I have read about communism is that in practice it was a tactic not a political or economic philosophy. “ Politics is Power. All the Philosophy is tactics. Socrates was the movement leader and the movement was to overthrow Democracy. Plato was the military leader. Alcibiades his most brilliant student. Socrates was executed for “corrupting the youth” but we’d call it sedition and treason. In any case people are quite exhausted by all these ideas and won’t march for ideas anymore. We are all Wittgenstein’s now. The “Synthesis” that changes our fate will be people, resources (money… Read more »
Socrates was a soldier, a mystic, and a philosopher. Philosophers ask questions. Socrates did not seek political power, he just made people uncomfortable by asking too many questions. Socrates was a truth seeker, not a sophist.
Unrelatedly, I already miss Mcafee. Shakespearean-tier genius and lunatic.
Mcaffee was Satoshi.
Its all over.
McAfee didn’t kill himself.
Saw someone jokingly title him “Protagonist of Earth.”
Not quite, but he was the last character.
“One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.’ God doesn’t make many of these guys. When he does, he never takes them back. John McAfee is beyond the great blue yonder now, aboard his eternal freedom boat to sea, a drink in hand, still searching for that great white whale to fuck.”
H.S. Thompson
“Another thing that shines through when reading about the old communists is they had a Calvinist’s faith in their own destiny. The inevitable end of capitalism was as certain to them that the sun would rising in the morning and setting in the evening…they started to assume that events would naturally arrive at some determined end point.” “The end is nigh!” “The Kingdom is near” “Communism is inevitable” Does every radical movement, beit progressive or reformist, need to have an eschatological claim at its core? On the Left we have Climate Change, or the end of the entire planet. On… Read more »
When someone said “you can’t turn back the clock,” Chesterton went to a clock on the wall and turned back the hands.
“Interestingly, this fixation on the inevitable future led them to do no thinking about the details of that future.” I think we see here the Left’s good, old-fashioned Nihilism of the Will to Power, if we can trot out Nietzsche here as back-up QB for Marx, who obviously threw a lot of interceptions. The “neo-Marxism” of the CRT Left is just theoretical camouflage for their main event – Nihilism – that is, the destruction of everything White and the canon of Western thought. They haven’t thought about the “details of the future” because they don’t give a crap about the… Read more »
Yeah, there’s something to that. Why think of future details of a “world without Whites”, when your ideology claims that all bad things observed/experienced come from Whites? Logically, the world must improve when Whites are removed. How much it improves is simply a detail. I’d spend my time speeding the process along if I were a Lefty of such a bent.
They think of all issues in terms of extremely simple problems, with extremely simple solutions. Whites are a contaminate or a tumor. We simply need to excise them from the body and all will be well! Of course they are not surgeons. Not only have they misidentified the problem, but they don’t care to see how the excising of it will affect the entire body.
Since several people have mentioned Chesterton, its kind of like “Chesterton’s Fence” but worse.
Good point. The other side of the coin is that all too often we think in terms of mind blowing complexity leading to inaction. Sometimes simply cutting the Gordian Knot and moving on *is* in order.
Ahh yeah, good point. The trap of the midwit. Thinking that the most convoluted theory is always and necessarily the correct one.
You made my point better than I did. “I’m going to kill you and take your sh*T” is the agenda and the rest is just intellectual camouflage for the chattering classes.
The song Highwayman makes my eyes water up, every time
These are guys saying they ain’t going away, they’re still here. Something about it speaks to our current situation, and the reality that we aren’t going anywhere. I think it was me and B125 some time ago saying that you go out into multi-culti hell and these foreigners are both aggravated and perplexed that we are still here. I think they believe the hype that we are already dead and forgotten.
Good memory lol. Yes that was us.
One of the guys who saw this early on was G.K. Chesterton. His observation: All systems should be measured by whether they are good for the family. If feudalism or barbarism or a palace economy allows a man to raise a family, then they are good. If capitalism or communism or anything else does not, then they are bad.
Simple as.
Z, I get what you’re saying about “build your own internet”. I get it. No it’s not fair, it ain’t right.
But heels bells – life isn’t fair. Not only do we have to build our own internet, we have to build our own country now, with its own institutions. At this point it’s obvious.
The old commies aren’t the only ones that ignore the nuts and bolts of implementing their agenda. The dissidents really need to address this if they intend to make something of themselves…
we don’t have to build our own internet, just stop supporting the existing internet. so to speak.
The eternal problem is, we did all that, and here they come a-runnin’
“Interestingly, this fixation on the inevitable future led them to do no thinking about the details of that future.
On the one hand, their sense of historical inevitability drove them to smash the present, but it prevented them from thinking about the details of that inevitable future.”
They are Generals focusing on conquering territory on a map, with no regard on how to minister to the conquered or the condition of the captured territory. That shall be left to others. Their concern is to advance ever forward with no regard to losses. The objective must and will be taken.
“They are Generals focusing on conquering territory on a map, with no regard on how to minister to the conquered or the condition of the captured territory. That shall be left to others.”
I’d go a step further. Today these “generals” don’t even think about logistics, but assume infinite materials and mobility. When reality intervenes they never take account, blame everyone else, and continue to scream for “MOAR!”
Yes but they always get MOAR. and he’s correct. They are in conquest and now consolidation mode. They mean to ERASE 60% of the country. Explicitly. Of course they don’t care about the common good. “Hey this stuff never works” – 😂 It ALWAYS WORKS if you judge by results. As opposed to the sales pitch. There seems to be some insurmountable difficulty in accepting they mean harm, no matter what they have done, what they do, no matter how many times they tell us our Doom. Because until they do it to you, its not real. When they do… Read more »
I had never read The Communist Manifesto, but your take on it I enjoyed immensely. Particularly the more moral take someone like Marx had on these ‘new social structures’ that are being created and that may be bad for the people. Who, in the MSM ask this now? If the new social structure of our age involve the information industry, who is now loudly asking such questions. Companies like Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram and a whole host of others, and their products can be rightly judged in many cases as bad for society. On the Austrians, the only books I have… Read more »
Possibly your best show yet. Thanks for making me think about Marxism as a reactionary movement to the troubles of that time.
Seeing the terrible working conditions, the industrial pollution, the unnatural living arrangements, and the fat cats at the top, I don’t blame Marxism for setting the world on fire. I’m a bit surprised that it has lasted as long as it has, and evolved into what it has, instead of being one of those curious time & place movements like temperance. More curious that non-European peoples had adopted it whole-heartedly. Why is Beijing, for example, still so dedicated to it? Couldn’t they have grabbed any number of bullshit theories from their past to justify their present tyranny?
One is tempted to say something about “the Oriental mind” here. Marx always anticipated that The Revolution would happen in Germany, Britain, or the United States, those being the most advanced industrial nations in the world at the time. So did Lenin (who was as surprised as anyone when it happened in Russia), but I recall the Bolshies admitting, in a rare moment of candor, that the long more-than-half-Asiatic tradition of serfdom made Russia an ideal breeding ground for Socialism. Asians, especially East Asians, have always been collectivists. As our host keeps saying about the Swedes, you can’t fence in… Read more »
WRT China, I’d posit that the CCP is not Marxist/Leninist. I’d say it’s more along the fascist line. Where did we see, before the 90’s, any Communist country with capitalism created billionaires? Communism in China, is not Marxist. Rather it is a new entity we’ve not observed before. A logical adaptation to the inherent flaws in Marxist theory. As a more modern Chinese leader said: “What care we the color of the cat, as long as it catches mice?” The only similarity to the old commies is an unquenchable thirst for control and power over it’s people. That we see… Read more »
It certainly isn’t Marxist-Leninist now, though the country is still into all the symbology. It’s not uncommon to see pictures of Marx in classrooms, and the nightly news has a hammer and sickle logo when they’re talking about the deeds of the local Communists. Point is, the highly-nationalistic Chinese could’ve used any number of ideologies from their past, yet they cling onto a German Jew’s fantasy writings. As do other peoples such as Vietnamese, Cubans, and Arabs. I know this is a holdover from the Soviet period, but it’s crazy how Marxism has been utilized so thoroughly for non-European tyranny,… Read more »
Third world Marxism is an odd artifact of colonialism. Throughout the third world, local elites with a lot of cynical ambition and some measure of sociopathy would send their kids away to the universities in whatever Western country had conquered their people. Some of those kids would return home and of course when they did, they had the Marxist framework already in their heads since it was basically the de facto “rebellion” ideology of the West. Unlike the more subtle ideas they were learning at university about Western philosophy, science, mathematical reasoning and logic, Marxism was a simplistic formalism that… Read more »
It certainly isn’t Marxist-Leninist now, though the country is still into all the symbology. It’s not uncommon to see pictures of Marx in classrooms, and the nightly news has a hammer and sickle logo when they’re talking about the deeds of the local Communists. Point is, the highly-nationalistic Chinese could’ve used any number of ideologies from their past, yet they cling onto a German Jew’s fantasy writings. As do other peoples such as Vietnamese, Cubans, and Arabs. I know this is a holdover from the Soviet period, but it’s crazy how Marxism has been utilized so thoroughly for non-European tyranny,… Read more »
haha you actually think, no, believe, that marx gave a shit for the condition of the working class! too precious.
Interestingly, this fixation on the inevitable future led them to do no thinking about the details of that future. There doesn’t see to be much agreement about what occurred in the past so how likely is it that anyone can predict details of the future? Unforeseen events keep messing up those details. A case could be made that Tsarevitch Alexei’s hemophilia so distracted his parents that it in itself enabled the Bolshevik revolution. Who, at that time, could have foreseen that? We don’t know, and won’t know for some time to come, all the details that will be the result… Read more »
Great post–‘conservatism’, at least the Anglo-American variety, is just dumb.
Humans are remarkably myopic and prone to self-deception. It’s a failing of the species, and not just the Marxists. Think back to the 1960s and realize that nearly every major disaster that has occurred since has been predicted by someone and ignored by the masses and those who rule them. 1960s: Ending immigration quotas –> Critics: America will become majority non-White and multicultural nations are rarely stable. Verdict: true. 1980s: Corporate deregulation –> Critics: a few people will control the news, meaning they’ll also control your minds. Verdict: true. 1990s: Free trade –> Critics: our critical industries will be outsourced,… Read more »
“The moral arc of the universe is long, but bends towards justice” –
by every politician since MLK who wants to trample your god given rights and said with the blind faith of a fanatic
Also 2020s: Anti-White Critical Race Theory taught in schools –> Critics: Will lead to White genocide. Verdict: To be determined…
“Take down the Confederate statues.” Sam Francis, in 2000 wrote: In this new order, whites — whether Southern or not — would be denied any public affirmation of their cultural and historical identity, and the denial of their identity would more easily allow their cultural and political subjugation to the non-white majority that has been projected to emerge in the United States in the next half century. The end result of the attack on Confederate symbolism, in other words, is not merely the disappearance of the Confederate flag, “Dixie,” and other symbols and customs of interest mainly to Southerners and… Read more »
it’s not enough to save hard-copy of all the old books, we must also save hard-copies of all the old photos of America prior to the 1970s.
the photos of street scenes, then vs. now, shows the huge changes in racial and cultural norms.
a picture is worth a thousand words.
Mindblowing.
“Colorizing” photos used to mean going from black and white to color.
Future “colorizing” will be “touching up” vintage USA stock photos to make pre 1960’s America look diverse.
A few days ago someone commented about American amnesia in regard to its European cultural roots, to much derision. Apparently the American culture, whatever that might be, isn’t strong enough to resist the influence of barbarian invaders and their domestic enablers. Part of this sad situation is the brief existence of the US itself and its deep divisions from its inception. In its attempts to forge an impossible national unity it cancelled the historical background and culture of its immigrant components. Americans thus have a historical legacy of a few generations, the last widow of a Civil War veteran died… Read more »
Don’t forget all the alphabet soup critics that were also proved correct.
Stockman, you forgot one. Hubert Humphrey argued as VP for the Civil Rights act (which laid the basis for AA) would *not* result in quota hiring and burocratic sanctions, but only allow a fair shot at the “American Dream” for minorities. That went into the crapper by the early 70’s. LBJ argued *for* AA after the Act, stating that it was only fair that people starting so far “behind” be given a head start. In the 80’s, SCOTUS recognized the illegitimacy of AA, but said it should not be removed at this time—maybe in 30 years or so. And here… Read more »
Bukharin, cool! Which one? I’ve got Conquest’s book about him somewhere on my shelf but haven’t managed to start it yet; I’ll have to move it up the stack.
(He’s another one of those very important writers for Our Thing who is just… dull. No zip to the prose. A. James Gregor, Paul Hollander, Robert Service…. all would be required reading if I were still in the syllabus making biz, but jeez they can be a real slog).
Scratch that, the book I have is Stephen Cohen, “Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution.” Is there a newer, better one?
That is the one I’m reading. I found in a pile of books and never read it or at least I don’t recall reading it. I have too many books.
I have to say, Cohen is a real slog. I can’t put my finger on why the test feels like running through quicksand, but it is a struggle. Maybe that is the point, to make the struggle real.
In grad school I learned that historians tend to write like their sources. A buddy of mine, for instance, studies the 17th century. He talks like a normal guy, but you can always tell when he’s working on a new book or article — even his text messages get byzantine. For commies, turgid prose really WAS the point (“the kind of stuff you could cut and sell by the yard,” as either Orwell or Derb wrote).
Cohen was an interesting guy in his own right. He was on the Left, but not terribly strident and never all that interested in American politics. He was on the international Left, which has been a sock puppet for US and British intelligence since the 1950′. They Nation Magazine may as well be located in Langley. I often wondered if his politics were just a way for him to have maximum access to his subject.
Years before Mr. Cohen succumbed (lung cancer, I believe), I often tuned in to John Batchelor’s syndicated radio show out of WABC in New York. Cohen was a regular Tuesday guest, usually appearing at around 9pm CST, concentrating on current events in today’s Russia. Though he had the reputation of being a Lefty, he pushed back against the hysterical (yet cynical) Russophobia that was shared by both the Left and Neocon, Inc. He was a most concise and reasonable proponent of real detente with Russia, never losing his cool even when he suffered fools like Max Boot on Tucker’s show;… Read more »
Btw, the myth20th guys just did a show on the camp of the saints. Concerning the show here, I think it’s long past time that the tech oligarchs should be reigned in, by brute force if necessary. In fact I’ve always thought it would make a good book to explore how the small hats captured Facebook and Google (dominate search engine). There were Alternatives at the time, and it’s not like zuck and brin were great inventors or anything. I guess bezos is a goy, but a monstrous one.
Good recommendation. Great book (I own a PRINTED copy..boy howdy, that’s a forbidden book. Original copy would send you to the poorhouse.).
Thanks for the promo.
Excellent precís. The key takeaway from talks like this is the mantra, the market should serve Man, not Man servile to the market. I find this much more instructive proslyetizing normie friends than a traditional conservative v. liberals harangue. The hidden costs, the loss of social capital that they sense, but cant quite put their finger on, becomes clear when framed as you did so wonderfully in this pod.