Note: The Monday Taki column is up. The topic this week is the increasingly familiar and obvious Jim Snow laws of America. Behind the green door we have the weekly Sunday podcast where I rant and rave about the world.
In every form of human organization there are layers of responsibility. The simplest way of expressing it is that at the top there is always the boss who is the guy making the important decisions for the organization. Everyone else, in one fashion or another, takes orders from the boss and carries out the orders. Always at the bottom are people who just do what they are told. The vertical arrangements are one of the truths of work life that everyone just accepts without much thought.
More formally, at the top layer of an organization, like a business, are the big decision makers for the organization. Below them are the policy makers. They take the big initiative and turn it into rules and plans. Below them are the people who make those rules and plans into reality. This is the layer most people inside and outside the organization see. They instruct the bottom layer of the organization, train them and making sure they follow through on their orders.
The important part of this arrangement is that everyone in the organization understands their role within the organization. The private in a rifle platoon has to understand that his role is to follow the orders given him by is squad leader or platoon leader. His job is not to determine strategy or decide on objectives. Similarly, the guy on the shop floor has to know his duty is to perform the role he is assigned at a workstation. Otherwise, the organization breaks down and fails to operate as intended.
At the bottom this is rarely a problem, as the people at the bottom are well aware of their status in the hierarchy. The people at the top, of course, know they are at the top of the hierarchy and what that means. The trouble comes in the middle layers where the people tend to be the most ambitious and most prone to overstepping their bounds, hoping to impress the boss. They can also be overly cautious, fearful of getting blamed for doing something wrong and losing status in the organization.
This is where the culture of the organization plays a decisive role. A company with a good corporate culture will have a management layer full of people who not only know their roles but embrace them in the context of the larger organization. A good military culture is one where the officers respect the chain of command, but also understand mission priorities and the need to improvise when necessary. Good organizational culture is what makes or breaks an organization.
This is also where we see the inherent problem of democracy. The basic premise of democratic systems is one man one vote. That means every vote is equal, which is another way of saying that every opinion is equally valid. In the political sense, it means the opinion of the bum counts the same as the opinion of the businessman who volunteers at the church on weekends. The bum’s vote counts for the same as the vote of the man committed to his community.
Democracy flies in the face of everything we know about human organization, because it rejects the natural hierarchy we see everywhere. Worse yet, it gnaws away at the basic understanding of human relations. Those middle-managers in a well-run company are happy to be in their roles. They may have ambition, but they also accept reality and know that their ambitions are linked to that reality. The morality of democracy undermines the very basis of their relationship to the whole.
This is why modern democracies are full of people confused about their place in society as well as the role others play. There is a whole genre of videos on-line where people confront store managers about things no reasonable person should expect them to know or control. We have the opposite, as well, where people at the lowest ranks of management carry on like they are shot callers, pushing people around and going well beyond the limits of their role.
Imagine a factory where everyone thinks they should have a say in what the factory makes and how much they make of it. The guy who cleans the workstations gets the same vote as the sales manager and the plant manager. Imagine a platoon where the men vote on their missions and collectively decide on their targets. It sounds like madness because it is madness. That factory would go out of business in a hurry and that military unit would quickly become a criminal gang.
This is, however, how the West has decided to run their societies. Now, it is true that the real shot callers hide in the shadows, using the institutions to manipulate public opinion and coerce people into their positions. They do so, however, while promoting the idea that everyone’s opinion is the same and every opinion counts. On the one hand they promote chaos, while on the other they try to maintain order. It is no wonder that the liberal democracies are shaking themselves to pieces.
The temptation is to blame the internet for allowing the stupid to have easy access to the public square, but in reality, the internet is just a facilitator. According to the tenets of democracy, Twitter is the goal, not a terrible accident. Imagine the town square full of howling lunatics and you get the prefect image of democracy. Social media made real is a public riot but is also exactly what you get when everyone stops accepting their role in the hierarchy and thinks they are a king.
Fundamentally, all forms of democracy are as hostile and contrary to the nature of man as all forms of communism. Both communism and democracy assume something about people that can never be true. That is, all men are equal. This is obviously false in the simplest organization and even more so in the most complex. Just as communism has always ended in disaster, democracy has always ended in murder. Both delusions are the fruit of the same poison tree named equality.
The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!
Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.
The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.
Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at
sa***@mi*********************.com
.
I take issue with this line from the Taki column: “The people who thought wrapping your underwear around your head was a good way to prevent Covid are not master strategists.”
Everything the ruling class has done has been aimed at making Covid as painful and deadly as possible. Mandating ineffective safety measures both furthers that aim and provides a liberal-style moral screen where they can claim to have tried. Bad faith attempts to “help” are a core and long established strategy of our enemies.
After Russia and Germany informed the revolutionaries that success requires a completely stacked deck, they began to use their positions in the US to offer help to counter-revolutionaries and then betray them. I have heard that this happened in China, Bay of Pigs for Cuba, Charlettesville and all the other recent entrapment schemes in the US. It helps that soldiers, clinicians and media talking heads are paid to believe what they are told in that it is easy to make an effective conman and traitor out of someone who does not know that they are a conman and traitor. Mask and vaccine mandates are this false promise of help meant to flush out the opposition, ideally into a trap.
Liberals are heavily invested in the myth of “do something” in order to feel virtuous and good about themselves in any given situation, particularly in situations where there is nothing positive to do, like a pandemic. Hiding in your home does not count. Masks are easy social currency for liberals; wearing one means they are doing their part and everyone around them can see it. Likening masks to underwear makes the show of pious care all the more meaningful. Martyrdom is at its best when you make the bar to entry so low that mere inconvenience can qualify you.
Conversely, masks being ineffective against the virus make them extremely good distractions for the conservative mind which is wired to try and suss out the best solution available. Masks are a mental chew toy to annoy and distract to begin with, and then triggering conservatives on this topic puts them in direct conflict with the incompatible liberal goal to “do something”, which drives conflict between the sides which then drives the purity spirals within the sides. G. Floyd uses the same dynamic for the same aim of conflict and division.
Masks appear to be very effective in the sense of a keen and crafty maliciousness that furthers multiple strategic goals.
Some good life advice is to never follow someone who has not done what they ask you to do before they ask you to do it. Preferably, they have done it multiple times so you can get a sense of whether they glow or not.
You know, I’ve never worked in a hierarchical organization that actually functioned. Supposedly they exist, or maybe existed at some point in the past.
Our civilization exists not because of, but in spite of the hierarchies. Part of what is poisoning it – part of what leads to the ossification, death, and corruption of any nation, is becoming infested with towering hierarchies.
America was mostly built by independent farmers, tradesmen, mechanics, inventors, etc. The frontier allowed them to exist, and to obtain the minimum prosperity of a dignified existence. When working hierarchies existed, they existed because they could draw on competent men: These men could only exist because somewhere outside “the system” (whichever system) existed for them to come *from*. Sometimes the people who ended up saving the Republic from itself did so in the teeth of some arrogant bureaucracy.
The Wright Bros developed the airplane, not Langley. Simon Lake developed the submarine, not the government funded masterminds of “The Plunger”. The atomic scientists were refugees from Europe, as was Von Braun. Goddard was on the right track, but was sneered at by all the “right thinking people”. Sikorsky was a refugee from Georgia. Philo Farnsworth was a farmer. Edison ran a successful industrial lab, but I doubt if he had more than two layers to his hierarchy, and drew from a vibrant culture that allowed free men to exist.
A hierarchical organization, indeed any organization or a living organism, can only function if it has the power to repair, or more likely, eject or destroy, faulty components that threaten the overall system. It’s not the system itself that is the flaw. The question to answer is simply “Does the system work?”
Author(s) [I think] James Dale Davidson or Wm. Rees-Mogg wrote (approximately): Any fool can rearrange his living room furniture and it’ll likely still be usable. But you cannot similarly rearrange the organs of your body and expect the body to survive.
Nazi Carl Schmitt says that the political is the friend vs. enemy distinction. This means that anyone in the political world thinks in terms of friend or enemy.
So, our ruling class, the “allies” of the “oppressed peoples,” are bound to want to beat up the “white oppressors” of which we’ve heard tell.
I started noticing the slippage of civility, and the break in the chain of command about 10 years ago when people, mostly joggers wanted to see the manager of the restaurant because a spoon had a hard water spot on it, instead of just asking the server for a new one. Oh and let’s not forget the blatant free meal request. I never go out to eat. Covid just made it easier.
This seems relevant to your prior post on economic matters, but rather than post it on a dead thread, I will drop this in on a slightly less dead thread:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/11/stew-peters-interviews-la-port-worker-to-get-ground-report-on-cargo-ship-backlog/#more-218302
Supply chain matters discussed with a bit of finesse.
JerseyJeffersonian: Further evidence of supply chain woes – Auguson Farms (producer of freeze-dried food, not as pricey as Mountain House but has solid reputation) will not accept any corporate or individual orders via its website for the next 90 days because they cannot procure sufficient product. All their efforts right now are fulfilling existing orders (such as for Amazon or Walmart, where you can purchase their food at a markup).
And, of course, Walmart has now joined Costco in restricting toilet paper purchases. Expect various grocery chains to follow soon.
Re Southwest Airlines, two words:
Trash Pickup
?????
Struggling a little with the metaphor/smilie thingamabob here.
Are you saying that the average passenger of SWA amounts to nothing more than human trash?
similie
.
.
.
it was a typo
need more characters to meet comment minimum
This is all true. Democracy is so flawed that it will fail with or without social media. However, social media adds the octane to the craziness and in a way, it facilitating and pulling forward the coming failure.
social media is an accelerant.
this southwest airline sick-out seems like a pretty big thing. bunch of air traffic controllers also left as a group. on top of that you have large masses of people spontaneously shouting “fuck joe biden”. revolution is in the air…
This is just one small aspect of fantasyland meeting reality. Don’t expect the D.C. insiders to buckle. Expect them to say, in a Greta like way, “how dare they!” This is a fantasyland in which the faux leadership won’t snap out. Because doing so would pop their narcissist bubbles and they would realize that they’re not up for their jobs and never were. You literally have shit libs on twatter calling for mass arrests of these “terrorists” and praising Reagan for how he handled the air traffic controllers. The depths of hypocrisy are deeper than the Mariana trench.
Though I have not yet seen the mainstream/bourgeois libs finding Strange New Respect for Reagan 1981, that’d be something of a watershed for me if the meme takes off, no pun intended. When I was growing up one of the reliable smug shibboleths of suburban lefties & white-collar government employees was to chirp to each other about the vulgarity of the PATCO strike getting busted, out of their sincere second-hand union-label solidarity of course (this is of course funnier nowadays that mainstream libs worship free trade and billionaires as forces of great racial sensitivity).
It was right up there with “ketchup is a vegetable,” as I recall. When Reagan kicked in 2004, George Will made a good argument that the PATCO bust was the defining foreign-policy success & credibility moment of the Gipper’s first term (perhaps truer an assessment than he intended, in light of our continuing dividends on “This film is dedicated to the brave mujahideen fighters” type of ops). It doesn’t seem like a foreign policy thing but that makes sense, considering that democracy-hating evildoer nations like Iran have always had terminal problems epitomized by work slowdowns.
But I’m not sure the 1981 analogy is correct to what just happened with the Southwest flights. We seem to be heading into an ominous Mad Max era, i.e. the libertarian dream, that does not map easily onto old blue-coalition “labor actions.” I have read about the private police protection in Oakland, Calif. and can see that coming to many cities within the next 5 years, since they are also run by women who are functionally interchangeable with Libby Schaaf, a Jerry Brown protege; not without parallels to Kate Brown in Oregon, and rookie wrecking-ball Tishaura Jones in St. Louis…
Totally agree. And yes, the coming Mad Max era won’t exactly be a libertarian paradise. Just rife stealing from literally the top to the bottom. Same as today but without even a semblance of order.
Career Federal workers have plenty of sick leave banked 😀
Amtrak Local 410 and 465:
Darn thunderstorms
F Joe Biden.
I like Let’s Go Brandon better. Same message, but delivered with humor and mockery, and you can even teach the chant to younger, tender ears.
The duelists could also decide that satisfaction had been attained and call the whole thing off. I agree that things should be more personal and local. Your example of dueling is only one of many such examples.
The general subject of unrealistic ideals being detrimental to society as whole brings to mind another important point. Could it be any more clear that there are no rules but winning? If you aren’t cheating you aren’t trying hard enough and we need to somehow internalize that. Maybe it’s impossible to expect the general population, conditioned over a lifetime to standards of fair-play our enemies scorn, to reject that conditioning in their everyday behavior but we can form our children’s moral framework in recognition of the lived reality that identity is fundamental. Any tension arising from principles in conflict with loyalty to identity can be resolved by favoring identity. This will be made that much easier because it’s in harmony with the observed reality of how all other identity groups behave.
“Could it be any more clear that there are no rules but winning?”
In order for there to be “winning,” there must be a game. In order for there to be a game, there must be rules that participants do their honest best to follow. When people begin to cheat, you cease to have a game and begin to have anarchy.
The game is survival and there are no rules in nature except winning. This is reality, not ideology. If you think white genocide is just hyperbole then I suppose it’s easier to cling to philosophical ideals that propose an independence or aloofness from the game and can justify adhering to artificial rules, observed by no one else but your own team, in the name of some kind of metaphysical purity. The Sacklers know how to play the real game, our rulers endorse how they play it.
” there are no rules in nature”.
Exactly so. Nature is not immoral, but amoral. Rules only exist in the civil society. When the civil society begins to break down, so do the rules that once held it together. Democrats are warriors who play to win, while Republicans are content to be losers as long as they can do so with white gloves and style.
I like the boxing analogy where ‘our representatives’ observe the Marquis of Queensbury rules while our opponents are free to kick us in balls. The double standards are so obvious that it is finally dawning on a significant proportion of our side that ‘our representatives’ are actually vetted and chosen by our enemies to stand there and receive the groin kicks, all while presenting the false impression that these were our chosen champions. I want to see LeMay enter ring.
The MeToo episodic saga gave me the idea of something (which I haven’t fleshed out into a unified field theory yet) about “rules.”
They seem to originate, starting in grade school application, as a type of hortatory/scolding social ritual devised by women for imposition on the boys and men they disdain. Those men who are deemed proximately useful or even interesting get a blanket waiver on the rules, like Afghan/Haitian bushwhackers and aspiring rappers.
The game the OP mentioned was society, not survival, and my response was to that. If you wish to live as an animal, by all means do as you please. If you wish to live in a human society, then you must abide by the rules and hierarchy that order your society. There can be much more to living than merely not-dying long enough to reproduce: that’s what rules are for.
So you equate an existence that recognizes the realities of the human condition as an abandonment of humanity? Implying our adversaries, who do behave in manner that demonstrates preference toward their co-ethnics in favor of proven maladaptive adherence to philosophical ideals, as sub-human? I sympathize with sentiment you express of course, it’s what I was raised to believe as well. But reality is here, rubbing our faces the excrement.
@tastego
Since you’re a bit slow on the uptake, I’ll spell it out for you. Let’s say anarchy is a critical principle of leftists. If you decide to meet them on anarchic terms, you become a de facto leftist. It doesn’t matter if you bloody their nose or they bloody yours, you’ve lost the moral battle because you agree on moral terms. This is what the Zman, among others, has observed repeatedly in these parts. Once you accept the premises of leftism, you become leftist. That’s why conservatism has failed. If you wish to street brawl like a leftist, then you’re a leftist, you embrace their anarchy. Of you don’t want an ordered society, bully for you, but you may as well become antifa because you share their goal.
You’re applying your worldview across time, space, and demographics as if it were universal. That’s pretty arrogant, actually. Worse, history shows quite the opposite. Morality is often dependent upon circumstance. Stealing an apple may be bad if you don’t need it (or if the person you’re stealing from is poor), but most would agree that it’s much less bad if you’re stealing it from a wealthy merchant to feed your starving family. Likewise, there are times when the use of force is justified; it’s not a universally immoral thing. Missing that nuance is how we got here.
“It doesn’t matter if you bloody their nose or they bloody yours, you’ve lost the moral battle because you agree on moral terms.”
Morality is the luxury of the victors. Name one major war solved solely through appeals to morality. Was the nation you live in now created through mutual respect for some ill-defined morality or was it created by a conquering power that broke most of its treaties and killed, or marginalized, most of its enemies?
That’s not advocating force in all circumstances as a matter of course, but rather it’s an acknowledgement of fact. The natives weren’t wrong to oppose their enemy with force because appeals to morality certainly weren’t working. Same here.
Force of arms, and the willingness to use them, has solved more conflicts throughout history than any other factor — and by a huge margin.
That’s the reason why the Left won and you now live in a police state. Our side did nothing while the other side concluded they didn’t care much about rules or morality, and that we weren’t much of a threat because we wouldn’t fight back. That gave them a decisive advantage, which they’ve pressed in recent years.
“you’ve lost the moral battle”
The other side doesn’t have morality. They are not interested in fighting a battle you have picked, one that only disadvantages them. They don’t care about respecting your rights or playing nice. They’ll ignore your appeals (as they do now) and conquer you through naked force. You would have us do nothing in response to that.
“If you wish to live as an animal, by all means do as you please.”
You’re not humane for letting a blood thirsty enemy conquer your side and impose their tyranny on you. You’re the opposite. Men who demand others take a nonexistent high road just so they can advertise their virtue are the worst sorts. They’d doom us all just so they can go down with their principles, none of which exist inherently in nature.
When they are taking your kids to the gas chamber, remember that you took the high road — for all the good it did you. Or perhaps losing your life and freedoms, and the lives and freedoms of your people, was the greater moral tragedy. You could have done something, but you chose to do nothing because you wanted to feel virtuous. You doomed everyone for your own immediate benefit. That’s not only selfish, but incredibly immoral.
Says the person on the losing end of every societal level game in the last 50 years.
There are no trophies for playing the game.
Oh no gentlemen I will not live as a savage. As you are stood in a smoking ruin surrounded by savages who have obliterated your nation in living memory.
Darrell Waltrip after the 1976 Daytona 500 (the subject was illicit N2O trickery):
“If you don’t cheat, you look like an idiot. If you cheat and don’t get caught, you look like a hero. If you cheat and get caught, you look like a dope. Put me where I belong.”
Now that’s getting down to root causes. Free speech is another shibboleth we need to explicitly address. Having experienced first hand what happens to a society that does not defend itself from the uttering of lies and poison by traitors & aliens and amplifying their destructive effects with universal suffrage, lets not make this mistake again if we live though this. Our misguided extension of first amendment rights to the purveyors of anti-American propaganda was like giving ourselves AIDS, rendering the body politic defenseless to ward off cancerous mutations and corrupting and debilitating infections.
Speech police? Hasn’t that already been tried?
Not by the right people.
It’s funny–until very recently I was something approaching a free speech absolutist. I’m reconsidering that stance. Something to think about, anyway, for when the ethnostate is created.
The late great David Stove was one of the staunchest champions of free thought in the 20th century…
…but by the end of his life, he was calling for the expression of what he called “the equality opinion” to be a death penalty offense.
A man ahead of his time.
Yeah, me too.
Free expression works great within a small cohesive society where everybody is in it together.
America ceased being such a society more than a century ago.
America ceased being such a society about 1850, with the beginning of the great influx of immigration from central and eastern Europe, after the revolutions of the late 1840s and the Irish potato famine. Of course, the upper classes remained pretty much cohesive until 1980 or so, and about 2000 there was a real turning point. And mass media did – and still does – reflect the point of view of that ruling class, as do societal mores. The corruption of our institutions is largely due to the decay of the ruling class, the hereditary upper class, which really got kicked off good about 1970 or so. The demise of neighborhood schools probably had a lot to do with it, too. I think that racial and cultural cohesion are definite factors in this, and school integration didn’t help things, in retrospect it was probably a disaster, the different cultures just could not and would not mix well together.
Speech policing is an example of exerting authority and power in the interest of protecting your society. It is a separate consideration if that society is worth protecting. Abdication of that authority is not a virtue. It creates a void which in the course of time gets filled by someone else willing to fill it, as we see today.
Libertardians advocate Muslim immigration in the name of religious freedom. I once pointed out to a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian what it would necessarily mean to fill the country with the enemies of religious freedom–in the NAME of religious freedom.
He actually said that he didn’t see that.
All I could say was, “I know.”
And that was that.
If religious liberty is a positive good, then MORE of it HAS to be better than just SOME. These people seem not to have any kind of intellectual brakes. They get started but can’t stop. They necessarily crash into the brick wall or the reinforced concrete bridge abutment.
What we need is a return to feudalism. It’s necessarily (1) local and (2) personal. It is not possible to shirk one’s civic duty by turning it over to a “representative,” as in a republic. The very foundation of a republic is shirking one’s responsibility by handing it over to a “representative.” Such a system BEGS for bribery and corruption of every kind. And gets it. And also, feudalism is necessarily LOCAL, and that cannot be changed or feudalism ceases to exist and you have something else instead.
A return to feudalism doesn’t mean a return to the living standards of the 11th century.
The original constitution was strongly feudalistic, in that it had the State Legislators choosing their Federal Senator [which immediately distributed phenomenal power down to the granularity of the county].
That was changed in 1913, with the XVIIth amendment.
1913 was a very very Bad Year for our people.
Thanks, Woodrow [et al] !!!!!
I just got a taste of my own medicine! haha. For the first time I’ve noticed my comment got moderated. From what I understand that effectively means it is censored?
Depends. But the chances are good that it will eventually make it through the seine and into the thread. All of mine have in the past.
tashtego: A certain unnamed blogger, worshipped by some and loathed by others, may be an a**hole but he’s not always wrong. And he has written a number of posts – rather thought and controversy provoking – explaining the chimera of free speech. There is no such thing; the question is merely who is in control, us or them.
I wish it weren’t so but there it is, brought to life and empirically confirmed. Someone else mentioned how different The Republic reads to them today than when they were young.
Would that be none other than Vox Day?
The issue of free speech is fraught with deception. Just like the Marxists in the 1950s we have to demand free speech so that we can grow stronger and later silence our enemies.
White men favor free speech yet we must recognize that all societies have taboos. I want to live in a country where the two positions that will get you shunned for advocating are immigration and outsourcing.
Line: Not merely shunned, but silenced and then exiled if the first two don’t effect the necessary change in both behavior and thought. And not merely immigration and outsourcing but equality, equity, compulsory compassion, etc. Long list.
No liberal democracy has ever successfully resisted a bolshevik insurrection like we are now facing.
Play by those rule = You lose.
Check out “Liberalism is a Sin”. The catholic church has been the strictest enemy of liberalism.
Pius IX condemned freedom of speech and freedom of conscience from the chair. IOW, infallibly.
Speech is for the truth.
I understand your point of view. The problem remains how can you have freedom of speech if only certain, approved types of speech are allowed? The Left largely does that currently, via social media and deciding what can be sold in Amazon, for instance.
Or freedom of religion: does that mean only for Protestant Christians? Etc.
The system needs a consent-manufacturing machine! The historical expansion of suffrage in the US obviously served this purpose. It’s very difficult to run an imperial industrial economy wherein labor (and soldiers every so often) is a crucial input without broad consent and some “participatory democracy”.
Here we are now in a post-industrial, finance and technology-driven economy. Broad consent really isn’t that critical to the system’s function. And the Elite globo-Media has taken over the consent-manufacturing machine from the political system.
So it’s obvious that the current Media-driven “participatory democracy” isn’t about real democracy/consent, or participation either, since the Elites decide the policy. It’s about preserving the illusion of “democracy” and “consent” to convince the losers to accept policies on which nobody ever gets to vote. Griller inertia and conditioning does the rest.
Elites/allies: “We all took a vote and decided to cornhole and bankrupt you!”
White Griller: “Well, if you took a vote I guess it’s okay……….that’s democracy”
Captain Willard: Well done.
Here’s an excellent explanation of democracy’s true nature and true end:
https://www.alibris.com/The-End-of-Democracy-Christophe-Buffin-de-Chosal/book/38976052?qsort=p&matches=7
IT’s also readable. The translator did a very creditable job.
Griller inertia indeed. Trying to dislodge the illusion of democracy from grillers is a lot like trying to convince your buddy that he is in a perpetual friend-zone with that hawt chick at work.
Bro, she is just not that into you. But there he is with his pickup truck on Saturday morning ready to help her move out of that jerk boyfriends beachfront condo. Again.
Democracy, the process, is the “chase”. It only takes one party to believe in the illusion to keep it going.
Patriot Joe voter is convinced that his civic niceness will one day win her over for good. In the same intractable belief, he is also convinced that those jerks will be revealed for the jerks they are.
But then when they are, Joe quickly rationalize why she is busy washing her hair every friday night.
Meanwhile she will let Joe keep on believing he has sway because he is so nice. She thinks she is actually doing him a favor by propagating the illusion. Plus she needs new brakes on her car and her ex-boyfriend jerk mechanic wants $1000. Did I mention how nice Joe is?
What are the chances of us getting together?
Not good.
Like 1 in 100 not good, or one in a million not good?
Well, like one in a million not good.
So you are telling me there is a chance!
Yes – we need a “red pill” movement here! The “Beta” Grillers manifest themselves politically by voting for Mitch McConnell and sexually by watching “Alpha” grifters and bad boys bang the chicks they can never manage to attract.
The Beta refrains: “wait ’til the Midterms”…”wait ’til she realizes what a jerk that guy is”
You’ve described me to a “T” in my youth. 😢 All hail Layabout Ben, the beta orbiter. I’ve learned my lesson, even if for men like me, the best solution is priest-like abstinence. As one ages it gets easier. 😑 Finally, it’s probably just my rationalization speaking, but I believe it’s true that even the alpha male that gets the hot chick gets all her benefits — but at the end of the day, he inescapably also gets all her negatives. 🙂
Democracy – two foxes and a goose deciding who’s for dinner.
The gallows should have always remained the peasant’s veto. We should have never strayed from that historical precedent.
I hope you don’t think I’m being a wise guy because I’m serious. I think dueling should also be legal and I don’t know why it’s not. The rules can be agreed upon by the participants. Could be till blood is drawn or to the death. It’s their business not ours and not the state’s DC’s.
The duelists could also decide that satisfaction had been attained and call the whole thing off. I agree that things should be more personal and local. Your example of dueling is only one of many such examples.
In the local inner city they have a, “Punch 4 Peace,” program that lets guys settle a beef in the boxing ring.
Not a time for too much moralizing, but boxing and similar contact sport is a curious phenomenon. It’s perfectly legal for two (usually) men to physically assault each other. Sometimes permanent injury or even death results. Yet it’s permitted because it’s consensual. In any other context, such behavior would likely be major felonies.
In my opinion, it’s sort of a softer form of the duel. In principle, then I’d have to agree that fights to the death be legal too, subject to certain rules.
I agree about dueling. When I was a Country/Western honkytonk musician in the Deep South starting about 50 years ago, and going on for decades, almost all of those good ‘ol boys were carrying concealed guns in the bars that I played. While there were indeed plenty of testosterone-driven, female-induced, alcohol-soaked fistfights that I observed, nobody ever actually pulled their guns, much less fired them off. Also, because everybody knew everybody else was armed to the teeth, there was often sort of an exaggerated politeness in the air. There were no “Don Rickles” or “Alan Bergs” spewing personal insults all over the place, for comic effect, or otherwise.
If dueling again became a thing, everybody’s manners would improve dramatically.
Oh no my friend. I agree. With one caveat…
Example: The scenario with the black “Barry Washington” and white “Ian Cranston” individuals who got into a fight over Ian’s girlfriend. If we lived in a high trust, homogenous culture, without the tensions between races, such a dishonorable occurrence could easily be settled with a gentleman’s duel. Not that such a disagreement should end with anyone dead. Or with the woman becoming the “spoils” of the victor. Might doesn’t always make right. However, at least Mr Cranston would have had an opportunity to save face by fighting in a fair fight, and that fight didn’t have to end with someone dead or in prison.
The only caveat I have about that is that I don’t think that blacks should be hitting on whites or whites hitting on blacks. I think that is a dishonorable thing to do, period, and no white guy should have to “save face” (or Vice versa). In a sane society, all the white men in the room would have stood with Ian and chased the black boy back down to the Bay Area where he came from. I have no problem with bruthuhs in the hood standing their ground the same way. Things worked much better when this line wasn’t crossed.
In a freer society, the race mixing question might be managed better. While the majority of us may be against miscegenation, in a truly free society, the State would not have the power to enforce that, necessarily. But neither would they have the power to prevent private property owners from choosing their clientele. In other words, there would be a market for whites-only bars and perhaps, in the bad part of town, for bars that allowed “those people” in. 🙂 Absent Old Testament level justice, there will always be fallen women and unclean races, but at least civilized society would have the legal freedom to separate the wheat from the chaff.
No system of management or government is going to be satisfactory to everyone, no matter how successful it is. However, if it is, those running the show, need to keep it on the straight and narrow and refuse to deviate in order to placate troublemakers and agitators. They must have the intestinal fortitude to call the shots, period – otherwise degradation will set in and ultimately failure will be the result. I’d say we’re a lot closer to the failure part now…
That’s what happens when fools shouting “tolerance” and “diversity” are listened to instead of lynched.
“This is what makes the sudden lack of deception in the war on white people a strange and possibly dangerous development.”
From your Taki column. This is also why the UFO ‘disclosures’ had (have, really) worried. They are now comfortable doing things only a moron who can’t bang two rocks together, would believe. We are so safe to harass that harassment is becoming persecution. Don’t fail the harassment shit test…
“The people at the bottom are well aware of their status.”
I’m not so sure if that’s even true anymore. The other day my husband who is CEO of a medium sized company (around 600 employees) told a secretary (excuse me, I meant executive assistant) that he needed her to reschedule a Board meeting. Apparently she gave him some sort of attitude because he told me she seemed “irritated”. I was all WTF! and probably would have demoted her to cleaning toilets on the spot. It’s her actual job to do stuff like that and without pulling a face or letting out a big sigh about it. But he’s a “people person” so let it go which is why he’s in the position he is and I’m bitching about everyone thinking they’re the Queen of Sheba on the internets. It sounds harsh, but we’d all be a lot happier if people accepted and understood their place in life. There’s no shame in that. Doesn’t mean people can’t move up or improve their situation. On the contrary. But it has to be earned and takes effort and time. And I also believe the unreality of tv has contributed greatly to the current epidemic of discontentment and bad attitudes in the workplace. What a cursed invention that box turned out to be.
The entitlement mentality has been programmed into most via years of brainwashing in the government schools.
The disguised it a bit by telling kids, “live your dreams, all of you can be astronauts, neurosurgeons, and rock stars!”
As a grade schooler, most of us don’t have the mental tools to evaluate that claim and correctly determine that it’s preposterous versus reality.
Medieval society was the ultimate environment in which people knew their place. Generally speaking, there were those who fought (the nobility), those who prayed (the clergy), and those who worked (the peasantry). Now, I’m not saying there wasn’t some disgruntlement, but as a rule, having a rather fixed station in life prevented the sort of meddling and social malfeasance we see in liberal democracy where there’s putatively no difference between rappers and physicists, janitors and CEOs.
Yep, that’s why there were never any peasant revolts in medieval times. They know their place and never stepped out.
There were peasant revolts, of course (Wat Tyler, the Jacquerie, Razin, Bolotnikov, Bulavin, Pugachev in Russia), but when one considers that the medieval period lasted 1000 years, the number of revolts was comparatively small. The medieval world was actually quite stable. Far more stable than the modern and the postmodern.
Medieval revolts also only happened in cases of total breakdown, when the guys at the top of the feudal pyramid couldn’t or wouldn’t perform the basic duties of their class….
….so, obviously, no parallels to the Current Year at all.
Theoretically feudalism was a two way street. The peasants owed the lord service and fees and the lord owed the peasants protection and a bit of respect.
The peasant revolts were usually cases where they felt the lords weren’t holding up their end of the bargain. And revolting was their only means of enforcement. Which did sort of work in that it imposed costs on the lords even in suppressing them.
You’re old enough to remember medieval society, congratulations grandpa.
She probably does for the most part. As you observed, your husband’s tolerance of an occasional human display of irritation is an example of his fitness for the leadership position. Literature is filled with examples of the wisdom of authority tolerating the jester or cantankerous subordinate, cultivating and maintaining a proper level of humility.
From your Taki post:
“The Justice Department has now declared white parents are domestic terrorists.”
Some of the parents protesting are non-white though it could be that the DOJ is only interested in terrorizing white parents.
In my very woke academic neck of the woods, an indigenous artist objected to a piece scheduled to be included in the region’s annual outdoor art show. The indigenous artist objected because he deemed the piece insensitive to indigenous sensibilities. Instead of canceling the allegedly insensitive piece, the committee running the event canceled the entire show.
A Facebook friend mooted, “Isn’t this overkill?”
Overkill? What word to use in an indigenous context! In a long and profuse FB thread, outraged progressive whites leapt to the indigenous artist’s defense and more or less declared that far from just canceling the show, whites themselves, except for us of course, should be canceled.
Today is Indigenous People’s Day. An indigenous friend of mine, who’s actually indigenous, said to me, “On all other days, Black Life Matters. Today our Life Matters. You whites are unbelievable.” As in “disgusting.” By the way, this indigenous friend, a welder with two girls to raise and a wife to support, voted for Trump. “Why not,” he said, “he’s offering a better deal that what’s-her-name.”
“Indigenous” As if God came down from the heavens and placed his people here, rather than, you know, his ancestors murdering off whoever was here before them. Apart from readers in Europe, we’re all as “indigenous” as that jackass.
I know that progressives just laugh at arguments based upon double standards.
But I still can’t help but ask: If the Indians were killing off their rival tribes in the most gruesome manner then how can they object when a superior tribe from over the sea bests them?
These kind of arguments are useless because most people simply believe, “white bad, non-white good.”
imbroglio: Yes, progressive Whites are a curse. No, your ‘based’ indigenous friend doesn’t earn you any points, and will ultimately side with his own regardless of how he tells you he votes.
People today are too rich, too secure, too well-fed, and have WAY too much time on their hands. The “problems” we have today are those of rich, idle, and, really, worthless people.
The human organism requires struggle–not merely to thrive, but simply to stay in one place: to avoid atrophy and regression. But when everybody is well-fed and nobody has to worry about where his children will sleep tonight, then they manufacture “problems,” and the longer the cushy conditions maintain, the weirder the manufactured “problems” must become.
I seriously doubt that parents in Syria have gender fluidity on their radar. They have REAL problems.
To suffer and to struggle against suffering is human nature. And when there is no real suffering, it must be invented. The struggle against the invented suffering then begets genuine suffering. So much for utopia.
I like to say Mongolian migrants.
Living in a modern liberal city like Los Angeles, San Francisco, or NYC makes that reality quite clear. In order to function, cities need lots of functioning people. I am talking about people who do their jobs, pay their taxes, engage in the city’s civic and economic life, and follow the law. Yet, they have been entirely pushed to the side by modern big city liberal politics. They are seen as paypigs and nothing more. The city governments and activists who set the agenda take that money and reward the functioning people by blaming them for everything, doing nothing for them (not even a floor of basic security at this point) and demanding more. A homeless drug addict who spends his days pushing normies into trains has more representation and at the city government level than a middle manager at a Fortune 500 company in the city limits.
Obviously the elections are a big cause of this, they are complete rackets where politicians compete to offer up the most gibs and activists “deliver” the votes to the one who offers the most. There’s no way that normies can vote themselves into a functioning and hardworking San Francisco city government that works for them – the very idea is ludicrous.
Field report from coastal California around 2011: I was fighting to stop high density, low income housing in my area.
Most of my allies were older, rich white women. I believe that they opposed the projects for the same reasons that I did, but they could not admit this to themselves.
Instead, the game was always to present oneself as the most compassionate. The best argument that they could come up with was that it was terrible to put all the immigrants so close to the freeway, where they would breathe pollution.
Ten years later, there are hispanic gang shootings in the downtown during midday. I coldly laugh from a distance.
and who is always for loosening voting rights? do gooders. they are the death of any society they become numerous in – like ours. do-goodism is the gateway mental illness to the more rabid variants, as well.
I wonder at what point the AWs will actually begin disenfranchising whitey? Yes, I know, flooding AINO with PoC is a form of disenfranchisement, but I have in mind something more direct and formal. Perhaps signing a loyalty oath to BLM will one day be a precondition for voting.
Both the Taki piece and today’s post are excellent expositions of hard truth that no one else wants to talk about. To summarize, the war on whites is very serious and must inevitably become deadly, and the fallacy of a democratic form of government is that grifter politicians will purchase the votes of the stupid, remain in office for life, and steal everything including the kitchen sink because they can.
But we cannot stop at lament. At some point, you have to take the initiative and solve the root problem or die. And there are smart ways to go about this. A bloody civil rebellion is no guarantee of success, just lots of dead bodies. The cancer cells are few in number, and in the modern technological age, focus & precision is the name of the game. From the shadows, only from the shadows.
Food
Water
Shelter
Energy
Security
Wealth preservation – Gold, Silver
Bartering
Indeed, those are practical skills for surviving the collapse, and is the first imperative. More will take this path as the economy declines and the storm clouds grow darker. But a second skill set will be needed when the time for remedy is upon us. And that requires both education and practice. Cameras are everywhere nowadays, as well as tracking devices. Those are obstacles, and need not be impediments. The next generation will all be gamers and LARPers, and those skills can be redirected and refined to good purpose.
Everything–no exceptions–that “those people” want to do depends upon an UNFAILING supply of electricity.
We are going to place the whole world and everybody in it under surveillance, with vax-passports, etc., For that, we need an unfailing supply of electricity. How do we get that? Why, by shutting down nuclear power plants (Germany) and oil pipelines and coal mines (US)! We stop using ALL fossil fuels! Then we can have electric cars! We can build one in my dad’s basement! Yeah, man, kewl!
THAT is the enemy.
Today’s media performance includes the official explanation for the cancellation of South West Airlines’ flights: not enough air traffic controllers. No mention of the OTHER airlines.
We do have the great advantage of having abject idiots for enemies, so there’s that.
I would add productive tangibles such as, in my family’s case, a water well drilling biz based on no-debt equipment investment. It generates significant returns and has a sizable client backlog.
If you haven’t read it, please consider reading Stafford Beer’s ‘Designing Freedom’ (1974).
It has many things to take away, but relevant to what you say here is the two ways management can delegate tasks: one is to say what you want, and also tell underlings how to achieve it; the other, to set the goal and provide resources, but allow the team to work out the best way of using those resources.
I expect many of us have seen multiple examples of the mess-ups caused by the first approach. Also, I’d venture to suggest, there’s much more job satisfaction for the taskees in the second.
This hierarchy always works well in German organizations where management, middle management and the shop floor all understand their roles and responsibilities. In fact for most small and middle sized companies, it’s still the shop foreman who determines who will be hired as an apprentice. Upper or middle management has absolutely no say in this decision.
In Germany approximately 33% percent of all companies with 250-499 employees, and 31% of those with more than 500 employees, are privately owned, family run businesses and operate in the hierarchical approach. Owner-managed companies represent 86% of the total number of companies which are privately owned and 53% of all employees in Germany work in these companies. We call them “Mittelstands” and they have strong local roots and have often been handed down through many generations.
Just as one example, Rincker Bell Foundry is more than 400 years old and has been in the same family since the 17th century. Herr Hanns Martin Rincker is the current owner and is the 13th generation to run the company. (http://www.rincker.de/)
Unfortunately just like in the American organizations, most larger German companies like Siemens, Volkswagen, Krupp, etc. rely on the HR department to hire people based on quotas, rather than skills, ability or aptitude.
Interesting comment, Karl. Thanks for the link, although the page didn’t render in my shoddy browser. I always like hearing about long-standing companies that have roots going back hundreds of years. It’s lovely to see.
In England, we too actually have quite a large number of smaller, family run businesses that have such pedigree. And they seem to be going strong, from those I speak to and what I read. This despite it being ‘doom and gloom’ regarding trades and highly skilled labour.
That local heritage you mention is a marvellous thing, but too many see it as just something to throw away. Forget about. As they pursue their dream career crafting PowerPoint slides. Guess it’s hard to keep a young kid in the sticks from wanting to follow ‘something better’. Still, that a man can pass a trade down to a son or nephew is just beautiful.
Makes me feel bad that I binned off the family trade for ‘something better’… then again, IT does pay well and my knees aren’t shot to bits; so there is that.
This hierarchy always works well in German organizations where management, middle management and the shop floor all understand their roles and responsibilities.
In Denmark the hierarchy is much flatter and much, much blurrier. Middle managers rarely give orders, except in very general terms. What they do is hold meetings all the time, were everybody and his fucking dog needs to have their braindead ideas heard while everybody nod sagely. Then everybody gets to give their braindead comments on those ideas, and when the moment of maximum confusion is reached, the boss says “okay, let’s run with that then.”
Such meetings can easily take up four hours every week for everyone down to the janitor and the only purpose I have ever discerned for them, is they give people a feeling of being heard.
Managers, all the way up to the CEO, are expected to be polite and attentive when a random kitchen wench tells him how he should run the company.
Such meetings can easily take up four hours every week
Closer to two, truth be told, but it feels like forty.
“random kitchen wench”
Now that’s a job title.
Yeah, we have that whole ‘being heard’ thing in our offices too. I guess it’s a bit like over-extending the franchise to the plebs: you want them to feel heard – as you say – and wanted. Always seemed odd to me, as I doubt anyone ever said what was truly on their mind. So in that sense, I suppose it really is a microcosm of soft tyranny.
The other day, in order to welcome a new colleague (some Chinese born here in The Isles) some other bloke suggested having a ‘group lunch’. So I went along. This consisted of six or seven people, two of which were white South African ladies. The ladies began to talk about dressing their children up for ‘International Day’ at school…
What’s ‘International Day’? Well, basically the kids get to wear a uniform that celebrates their heritage. They decided that their white kids should adopt some Zulu insignia. Zulu stuff. For white heritage. I had to stifle a roaring laugh. I wanted to say that if they felt a need to link with current black SA culture, then perhaps the burning tyre around the torso would be more apt.
A cringe-worthy white English colleague then proceeded to apologize for the South of England being ‘massively white, I’m sorry to say’. The swine. Again, I had a snigger, but I was quite disgusted. To be expected I suppose. Self hatred isn’t the term I’d use; but these folks sure ain’t proud of their blood.
What’s ‘International Day’? Well, basically the kids get to wear a uniform that celebrates their heritage. They decided that their white kids should adopt some Zulu insignia. Zulu stuff. For white heritage.
Yes, it’s crazy.
8-10 years back a back-bencher from the nationalist-populist Danish People’s Party was on a parliamentary junket to New Zealand, where they visited a naval base. There’s she’s greeted with “a traditional New Zealand welcome”, when half-naked white officers perform something akin to a haka in a temple adorned with giant phalluses.
She wrote a humorous little fluff piece about her adventures amongst the Kiwiniggers, and New Zealand flooded onto an English-language Danish website to explain how offensive she was and how this was absolutely authentic New Zealand culture.
Apparently, they really believe that shit. Their national rugby team perform a ritual chimpout before each match, the only team allowed to indulge in such antics. One time, the English team responded by mooning them back and was disqualified for a number of matches.
www. dailymail. co. uk/news/article-2305577/Right-wing-Danish-MP-Marie-Krarup-offends-Maoris-describing-welcome-greeting-grotesque.html
A nice detail about the Kiwi-story is that her guide warned her beforehand not to laugh during the “ceremony”.
They know they’re ridiculous.
Have you ever seen the video of the wedding between a white Kiwi and his Maori bride, in which many of the male guests do a haka? You have to shake your head at these white men. Yes, over the centuries there were white explorers and frontiersmen who would “go native” but it was always a one-off and never reflected poorly on white culture as a whole. But the way the Kiwis adopt a completely foreign culture as their own, and one that is quite frankly savage, is deplorable.
How much more appropriate it would have been, when the last members of the British armed forces departed New Zealand, for them to play “The World Turned Upside Down”.
Have you ever seen the video of the wedding between a white Kiwi and his Maori bride
No, but I watched Prince Harry’s wedding, where they had some kind of Commie witchdoctor blessing the royal union. That was pretty strange and outlandish.
https://webtopnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Bishop-Michael-Currys-Royal-wedding-speech-Video-768×403.jpg
You really should have laughed out loud at all three of those women.
“Poseurs” is the word you want.
Are the bronze statues of Africans? Sure looks like it.
I’m really interested in the whole competence question. I can’t fully wrap my head around the idea that there is some worldwide conspiracy or even one in what’s ironically known as the “united” “states”; the ruling class is all part of an ideological-spiritual bubble and they actually believe their bullshit, despite all historical and experiential evidence to the otherwise.
Which is why (at the risk of being a pollyanna) I tend to think we’re at the end of a process that began with Lincoln’s “refounding” of the US based on abstract egalitarianism rather that at the dawn of a new and darker tyranny. The current lot lacks the ruthlessness of the Bolsheviks and the intelligence of the Germans. It’ll be an ugly collapse, but a collapse is certainly in the making.
Similarly, the reason there’s no black crime is because they’re too dumb to invent guns.
Everything is so half-assed anymore. I also expect collapse, but even that will probably be half-assed
My sense is kind of a long weird decline, a continual erosion of competence, a hysterical ruling class issuing edicts that are skirted or ignored. Irish Democracy. Brazil meets late imperial Russia.
Our ruling class, pedophiles and grifters, are chosen and run by the real ruling class, you know who. They print the money. They mesmerize the braindead with tv. They stuff kids heads with shit called education. Now they got a jab for you…are you ready?
There is no conspiracy. The WEF did not have a Global Leaders for Tomorrow programme. They did not have a small intake every year of lower level functionaries that just happens to pick the very ones running lots of countries and large supra-national entities like BIS and the world Bank a few years later. They just all happened to implement similar policies in each country they were involved in.
Its just a coincidence that Sanna Marin, Macron, Justin Trudeau, Larry Summer, Benazir Bhutto, Jens Weidmann, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Yuriko Koike, José Maria Aznar, José Manuel Durao Barroso, Angela Merckle, Sarkozy, Viktor Orban…. all were part of the programme who were in run of the mill positions for the most part just happened to all rise to prominence in their respective countries. (There are many more but you get the idea)
What fool would believe that?
Imagine a factory where everyone thinks they should have a say in what the factory makes and how much they make of it.
It worked so well in the worker-run factories of the Soviet Union.
The Soviets quickly figured out that such a system was insane.
Yes.
Some of the early Soviet policies built on quite revolutionary ideas about human nature. In some provinces, sex was considered a basic right: denying a horny comrade access to your pussy was like denying a thirsty one a glass of water.
Felix: Hate to sound like a broken record, but someone has to go there. The majority (note – not all, but the majority) of those who pushed the ‘free love’ and more radical social ideas about the communal raising of children, etc., were Juice, not Russians.
These same precepts were used to found Israeli communal farms. There, too, the anointed (upwardly aspiring middle class intelligentsia) were surprised to learn that mothers preferred to cuddle and raise their own offspring rather than their neighbors’.
Because human nature does not change and there is nothing new under the sun, these same ‘insights’ regarding human nature seem to reappear with each generation. Yet another reason I am in favor of an authoritarian right government, at least for a generation, in any future White homeland. There ought to be no ‘toleration’ of these Satanic inversions of reality.
No, the races are not equal; neither are individual Whites.
Juice
Fair point and good post.
But free rape didn’t work in the SU, it was abolished almost immediately, like worker-managed factories.
And if you have a white ethnostate, authoritarian government will not be necessary, just like it wasn’t necessary back when Europe was 99% white.
Don’t blame the Jews; some of those ideas go back to at least ancient Greece. Witness Plato’s vision of the ideal City-State (“The Republic”). Abolition of the traditional family structure was part of it. In fairness, I don’t think he ever considered it any more than a thought experiment. Many of his suggestions are probably completely unrealistic (entire segments of society will be content to live with only the bare necessities of life. Really???) He did discuss a few themes that governments do widely use: rewriting history to taste, censoring private speech and legitimizing lying for the good of the State.
It’s not rape when you shout “to each according to his needs” first.
I read that book you recommended “Red Plenty” about the struggles in the old Soviet Union by the Communist planners to come up with mathematical formulas that would determine inputs and outputs in order to “scientifically” out produce the Western Capitalist societies. It’s hard to imagine now, but back in the 1960s & 70s, there were sincere and dedicated Communist mathematicians and scientists who struggled mightily to bring about the Socialist Paradise. Deluded all.
The trouble is when the Jacobins and other revolutionaries divorced the whole idea of a egalitarianism away from its Christian roots. Theologians of all skirts and stripes hammered away on the fact that we are all equal but this was all fit into an overall Christian hierarchy where the Big Man was up on top and we the poor sinners had but a hair’s breath of a chance not to be cast down to the fiery pit for all of eternity. Essentially, the message was all of you are crap and deserve to be crap but some of you might possibly maybe get saved if you listen up and obey the man upstairs. Overall, this system preserved hierarchy and trumped any dreams of equality while the kings still sat firm on the throne.
As soon as political thinkers began to consider that the kingdom of heaven could be brought down here to earth, all the trouble began. The egalitarian ethos has killed millions and will kill millions more before getting stamped out again.
I can remember who was the political philosopher who said, “all modern-day political problems are in the end theological problems…”
Basil Ransom: But are the roots of Christianity truly egalitarian? I will defer to someone better read than I, but my understanding is that there are different ranks of angels in Heaven. Satan was one of the higher ranks and the most ambitious, and thus pride his downfall (because the “Big Man” is in charge). Even upon death and ascension to heaven, humans do not take on angelic status.
The only genuine sense of Christian ‘equality’ is in equality of sinners (which itself does not seem to be adhered to by official Catholicism, with the separation of sin into various categories and Hell into various levels – or is that just a human invention?) and in presumed equality of love by one’s Creator, which doesn’t seem to end regardless of the created’s behavior. Does this not then seem to indicate God still loves and hopes for Satan’s repentance, or has he committed the unforgivable sin of challenging the moral basis of the heavenly hierarchy?
Your note of the problem with bringing the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth is sound (and might I add, seems to be the motivating principle of the infamous ‘tikkun olam’). The Puritans had that same impulse, as did all the ‘noble’ social reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus the Wilsons and Roosevelts, etc., although a love of social reform always seems to go along with a love of money and status (AOC the Neiman marxist, anyone?). And, of course, it’s the same today, world without end.
Your posts are consistently the best of all. It’s interesting that you should mention, in passing, the unforgivable sin. The Scriptures make clear that there are numerous unforgivable sins, but the one that is actually called that is in Matthew 12:31. And it’s what the lunatics abroad in the land do all day every day: invert the truth. Say that the Lord’s works are actually those of Satan and vice versa.
Revelation 22: 15 gives a list of other unforgivable sins, although they are not called by that name. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that that is what is meant. Murder is one.
Infant: There are many here wiser, better read, and far more practically experienced than I, but thank you for generous compliment.
Nietzsche explained much in his conception of master morality vs. slave morality. Now, before you condemn his ideas, consider that at least what I recount here is more “descriptive” than “prescriptive.” (I don’t know if he was the first to describe the concept, but I’ve not seen them anywhere else.)
His ideal man, the übermensch, was prototyped in the ancient Greek hero, the man who lived by his own code. In more modern times, his ideal might come closer to the noble in a feudal society. Major point: the noble lived by his own morality and laws. This is the “master morality.”
In contrast, the peons, the serfs, the underlings, had to live by a “slave morality.” They suffered from “resentiment” — frustration, alienation, being unable to improve one’s lot in life.
The commoners devised their own morality, even religion, as an inversion of the values of the Master. Relevant to this discussion, the Master would have laughed himself until he soiled his breeches if it’d been suggested that all men were equal. Thus, in the slave morality, they had the opposite concept, that all were equal. This also is reflected in the inversion of what constitutes “good” or “evil”; it depends if you are viewing those terms via the Master or the Slave point of view. In modern slang we would call this a “cope.”
Knowing that equality among all was impossible in the present world, it was promised in a world to come, ruled over by a just ruler (God).
Many major religions sprung up as “slave religions.” Among those most influential to the West have been Judaism and its bastard spawn (via Platonism) Christianity. Largely these same arguments (e.g. inversion of reality and attempted escape into fantasies) are traits of modern social movements, including today’s cancer, Liberal Democracy.
So yes, to answer one of your questions, the roots of Christianity are egalitarian.
“Men are not equal, neither shall they become so.”
Fantastic article! Equality may well be the worst delusion ever conceived by wily humans. It is in diametric opposition to Nature. Those who wage such conflict with Nature sooner or later pay a bitter toll.
In ANIMAL FARM, George Orwell captured the central paradox of both communism and democracy: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The only equality in Nature is Death. To pursue such an illusory ideal among the living requires endless tinkering and interventions by social engineers who forever seek to expand their personal powers. How can those social engineers ever not be more equal than everyone else?
It takes tremendous inequity to accomplish equity. Because equity can never be accomplished, it is a gift that keeps on giving for petty interlopers and tyrants.
I posted over the weekend about this in pointing out that the whole point of egalitarian initiatives is precisely that they *can’t* be realized. Thus there will forever be phony make-work jobs for all kinds of otherwise useless people. The problems really start to multiply when an attempt is made to actually implement some of the ideas they come up with. Because not everyone, even in a democracy, is crazy or stupid, these objectives get watered down through compromise with some of the people still grounded in reality. The resulting mishmash of half-measures does nothing but increase social friction, increase costs, and make just about everyone angry. The best exemplar of this is of course modern California.
This also explains why the bourgeoisie radicals never seem to learn anything and always say that the only problem was that their nutty schemes were not fully implemented. The true power of the people was not fully unleashed, comrades! We must crush the counter-revolutionaries and fascists even harder! Indeed, I’m told that there are still a few streets in the Bay Area that are not full of shit and urine. Obvious something they need to get working on.
At my job they have all these various “diversity” and “affinity” groups you can join. Many people are in several. The managers tell us openly that if we are not attending one of their meetings our job is too fill-in for the staff wasting time bitching about Whitey. Since our jobs are virtual, you might ask why I don’t just join them all and sit there quietly working on my own projects with the sound turned down. Sadly, you are expected to participate, and if White, male, and straight, to apologize continuously for all of that. Some of the people join these groups for cynical reasons just so they can get paid for goofing off but most are True Believers. Those are your “petty interlopers and tyrants” right there and there is always a danger that of the schemes they dream up will actually be adopted.
OT @Pozymandias: your blog needs a smidge of work, it’s stuck with the “install/demo” content.
Poz
It sounds suspiciously like you could “accidentally “ put some sand in the gears of your company, especially if you’re expected to do other people’s work. Maybe they made that transposition error?
Oh the possibilities…….
When you push people on whether or not they believe in equality, which is so ridiculous on its face that nobody really does, they quickly move the goalposts over to “equality of opportunity” But at the center of equality of opportunity is the notion that we are all equal. That is where our equality falls apart as well. Even if equal opportunity was possible, it would still lead to unequal outcomes among groups.
That is why we are always screeching about their being too many black people in prison or not enough women in this field or that field. We even have absolute absurdities like “good schools” and “bad schools” to explain the deficits of equality of outcome.
I have long despised the phrase “equality of opportunity.” It assumes that Opportunity is a simple matter than can be equalized when, in fact, Opportunity is a massively complex issue that involves dozens of elements that would require a totalitarian dictatorship to even attempt to equalize (and, of course, they would still never come close to being equalized). A better concept might be equality of standards. Nevertheless, even that represents an ideal that can only ever be partly achieved. Besides . . . it’s waycist!
Yes, I fully agree and that is what I was alluding to when I said even if it were possible to have equality of opportunity. After all, is an African-American child in the ghetto truly getting an “equal” opportunity to become educated if he is smart enough when he has to attend a school where the average IQ is 85? Or the simple fact that he has to live in a neighborhood where his peers will have, on average, an 85 IQ?
It is nothing short of amazing that the myth of equality is so persistent despite all of our own personal experiences.
> Imagine a platoon where the men vote on their missions and collectively decide on their targets.
In computer science project management, this is the theoretical protocol for deciding work in 2-3 week sprints. In small groups of competent people, it works fine, but quickly falls apart when there’s a lazy guy/deadweight who pads all the estimates or the too eager to please sycophant who can’t push back on unreasonable wants.
Basic democratic structures can work with a cohesive, trusting group of reasonably even skillsets. Scaling democracy is always going to involve less cohesion and less equality, which is why extra-democratic means end up taking over the veneer of equality.
The whole sprint thing makes me laugh. It works when there is someone in charge to make it work. In my observation, that means a strong personality who guides the process. The rest are both competent and willing to accept leadership. Of course, they would be effective under any system, so the system is cognitively meaningless. Swedes can make socialism work while Ethiopians can’t make anything work.
Democracy requires a cohesive moral people.
There is always at least one dirt bag in every crowd. Add Diversity, damn screwed.
Now what?
From my perspective, trust – as you mention – ability and knowing your colleagues strengths are invaluable things. In small teams of coders, we don’t need no management. All like (as much as possible) the work they do, and all are longstanding employees of the company (a huge benefit for the ‘trust’ factor). Just tell us roughly what you need, we’ll draft and refine a spec, divvy the labour up, allot time and get to work.
Unfortunately, and this seemed to start with the large corps (but I could be wrong), much smaller businesses no try to emulate their practices. One of the first things our newest ‘Project Manager’ said to our small team were words to the effect of “I could get a bunch of Indians in to do this quicker and cheaper”. He’s right. But there are so many issues with this approach; I shan’t go into details as we’re all familiar with this situation. But one key thing it does is slightly whittle away at the trust framework previously built. Not good.
It’s sad that even small companies cannot wait to offload older experience and cohesion for that cheap, cheap labour. But then again, in a world of declining expectations and goldfish like memories, who cares if ‘X’ is shit? ‘Y’ will be out in three months time! ‘Y’ will fix everything.
Like so much in the West, the best times really are gone. Got to gear up for what follows it.
> One of the first things our newest ‘Project Manager’ said to our small team were words to the effect of “I could get a bunch of Indians in to do this quicker and cheaper”.
Quicker? Good luck with that.
He might as well have just given you all the middle finger.
When manager said roughly the same, I responded with “We are the legs that hold up your table.”
A few years later, manager was purged along with us workers.
Ah, yes, the “agile” nonsense. Like wearing masks, this is another thing that was adopted as if its value was self-evident to anyone. The upper-middle class seems particularly prone to this kind of “thinking”. Of course, someone needs to devise these managerial fads in the first place and at least attempt to justify them. Probably the reason for adopting a lot of the Agile cult was simply that if was different from traditional project management and therefore better. After all, we ALL know that anything traditional is bad, right? Nuclear family? Traditional, bad. Three lesbians and a gorilla raising a kid, Novel, therefore good.
There’s also probably a more cynical reason for adopting the latest screwball management cult – it alienates older, more experienced people and creates a new set of “job requirements” that, by definition, someone who has an established role is unlikely to be able to fill. You actually see this in ads for IT jobs. Many of them have the requirement for Agile/Scrum experience first and the technical skills listed almost as an afterthought.
Heh. I have ‘Agile/Scrum’ experience. It consisted of tedious daily stand-up meetings, markers and stars on a whiteboard, talking too much, and being egged on by our ‘Scrum Master’ (some raghead importation who was given the boot six months into the job) to ‘be the best we can be’/’We are all a team’.
Just give me the spec, and I’ll see what I can do. No, you can’t have all the bells and whistles in three months. No, you can’t keep cutting deadlines short and expecting more stuff. No, I don’t want to ‘pair program’ with Ranjesh.
I suspect one factor in my short-lived career in software engineering was suggesting at the weekly meeting that we could really do some serious team-building if we spent the meeting sitting in a circle watching each other scrum.
It does not work. Its a religious position from stupid people who displace the product with the process and can’t even see they are doing it.
Yet another magic dirt theory that teams of fuckwits will produce reasonable outputs by adopting the “magic process”. Its just more endless micro-tracking from parasites that achieves fuck all.
Decent output is produced by competent people despite, not because of process.
“There are two possible reasons why the mask has dropped. One is incompetence”
Entirely possible consider the many failures of this government elsewhere — the economy, the border, foreign policy. Here’s a further example of the building incompetence within the ruling class: the woke CIA is suddenly getting destroyed by overseas intelligence agencies these days, and no one seems to know why.
“The CIA sent a top-secret cable to its agents telling them to sharpen up as too many informants were getting killed or turned”
https://www.businessinsider.com/cia-cable-tells-agents-informants-being-killed-or-turned-report-2021-10?op=1
It’s a mystery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrUSBAzQMD0
In my Sunday show I talked about this a bit and I have written about it in the past. Credentialism is a natural hiding place for mediocrity. Credentials should track accomplishment, but that is no longer the case. Part of it is required by diversity. Part of it is just the result of easy living. Of course, there is a compounding effect. Once the MBA gets rewarded, everyone runs off to get one, so then people start looking for a new credential and on and on it goes. Before long, nobodies like General Milley are festooned with a chest for of decorations, despite having done very little other than brown nose.
“Credentialism is the natural hiding place of mediocrity”.
Another one for Z-man’s future Little Red Book.
Seriously, I hope someone is keeping notes or at least archiving the posts.
More: a US nuclear sub just crashed in the South China Sea
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/nuclear-submarine-crashes-mystery-object-25170836
Was the ‘mystery object’ Taiwan?
OrangeFrog: Perhaps Laquisha wasn’t on speaking terms with Juanita, and since neither understand basic principles of sailing (surface or below) thus an ‘accident’ just ‘happened.’
3g4me: Even if they were master seemaaanz, I doubt Laquisha can speak Spanish.
I did think that this was another diversity blooper, but who knows? USN in decline like everywhere else, white or otherwise?
No you mention the diversity, I would like to see a remake of The Hunt for Red October with a fully diverse cast. If done true to life, the drama would provide a solid two hours of entertainment: Laquisha’s beef with Juanita, a young transgender seaman’s struggle with the implications of cold war… and xzher’s gender, Captain DeShawn wearing a flat peaked USN cap at a jaunty angle, the long-suffering white navigator berated by diverse elements fo’ privilege, and engineer Lav’ AnTray’s storing his weed in the torpedoe tubes…
Da Hunt fo’ Red Octoba
“Was the “mystery object” Taiwan?”
Sitting listening to the rain, my dogs all snoozing around the family room….and I blow hot coffee through my nose.
Well, they were quiet!
Thanks Frog; well played.
It is a puzzlement. It’s almost like our institutions are becoming more incompetent, but the TV tells me that’s unpossible.
Conjecture: It’s probably much more likely that agents are getting killed or compromised not due to their own ineptitude, but from having their identity blown via espionage higher in the hierarchy. If writers like Ron Unz are correct (actually, earlier writers he cites), if the FDR administration had Soviet agents in it, up to and including Cabinet positions, we can pretty well assume that our entire government system, to include intelligence, is infiltrated like Swiss cheese. Not just the usual suspect ( * cough * Mossad) but other major powers.
I’ve even heard it said a few times, that if you were ever in the unfortunate position of having to choose between a long prison term and “helping” government intelligence, choosing to do time was probably the safer choice. 🙂
The only way anything approaching democracy can work is with a robust property qualification for voting. Real property, not paper wealth – you must present the deed to your land in order to vote.
It’s amazing how fast the system collapses if you don’t. In 1879 Congress passed the Arrears of Pension Act – a huge, supposedly one time payout to veterans of the Union Army. As the US was in depression for pretty much all the later 19th century, this was in effect a huge vote buying scheme – $20 a month (or whatever), guaranteed, was a big deal. Soon Union veterans were the biggest pressure group in the land; there’s a reason a former Union General was on both parties’ tickets every election. They kept voting themselves bigger and better pensions, and that’s all she wrote.
Note, please, that all this was done by Republicans. They have *always* been feckless, short sighted shit weasels.
Just look at fast strong property requirements gave way to universal suffrage. Every democratci system started with one and quickly gave the vote more and more people.
The expanded franchise is where democracy went wrong. Just as the Swedes and Danes can somewhat make socialism work, the founding generations were able to make democracy work because of their biology and, more importantly, they understood how to reasonable limit participation. With the explosion of suffrage after 1865, all the flaws of raw democracy were exposed.
Technically, Scandinavians are social democrats: big welfare state, lots of freebies, income taxation to the hilt, but free markets rather than a command economy (outside welfare services) and low corporate taxes.
Denmark is actually a tax haven for capital funds – or was a few years back at least; capital funds are pretty footloose.
zman: Searching online is now all but useless, but I seem to recall that more than a few of individual states’ laws requiring office holders to be Christian (which remained unaffected by the adoption of the Constitution) were first challenged by Jews (later by some Jewish atheists). Can you (or anyone else here) recommend a solid text on when various expanses to the franchise and the holding of office (both nationally and at state level) were adopted, and in response to what specific legal challenges? All were subsequently overturned (at least in theory) by Lincoln’s war and the legal ramifications thereof.
Obviously I’m presuming said challenges were brought by a mixture of Christian idealists, socially aspirant Juice, and the usual odd mix of spiteful mutants. I read a series of murder mysteries set in the late 18th century in New England (can’t recall the state or the author or title) that details the early restrictions on voting rights that still held sway in most villages (by a female author but fairly well written overall).
Think you have to account for scale and culture. Read an interesting piece on Union volunteer regiments in the western armies during the CW. Most were raised in specific locales and elected their officers. While there were some notable “duds”, most of these units overperformed relative to Regular Army expectations. But the soldiers came from the same place and knew their officers personally or by reputation. Fast forward to a society that dumps millions of “residents” into a country, expects nothing of them and no adherence to the prevailing culture, then makes them “citizens”. Well, then democracy collapses.
Plato lived in a small world. Z Man’s thoughts resembled Plato’s on the subject of the Democratic man and state in The Republic.
Unfortunately, most of the people reading Z Man’s blog will be of the age where we taught we were superior people for having a liberal democracy. I admit when I first read The Republic, I was blown away by Plato’s opinion.
Democracy does not scale up. It does not scale at all. It is decay and disorder even with merely thousands, rather than millions. A **republic** may work at smaller scales. The Founding Fathers hated the idea of a democracy, which is why they worked hard to try to avoid today. At our modern scales, democracy is a way for the oligarchy to avoid responsibility and has been since I’ve seen alive.
If we created a new branch of government, a legislative body composed of the 100 richest Americans and gave them some exclusive powers, like approving tax policy or the annual budget, the world would change instantly. If you ware one of the 100 rich, then you must serve in the chamber of oligarchs or forfeit enough of your wealth to remove you from the top-100. All of a sudden, the burned of responsibility would be real for these people. Jacqueline Mars is no longer in the shadows donating secretly to far left causes. She is on TV as a member of the Chamber of Oligarchs.
It would not solve everything or maybe anything, but it would clarify our relationship to the plutocrats.
This actually is a pretty good idea. The problem of course is the wealthy can and do hide their wealth. Instead of giving political careers to people like Stacy Abrams and Lady Graham, the elite would give them massive but highly restrictive trusts while the real wealth stays in foundations.
It’s a horrible idea. Back when we had 90% marginal tax rates the nation was not dominated by megafirms. We had much more small and medium sized businesses and MUCH more capital investment. This was all to avoid 90% tax rates. Nobody paid 90% other than athletes and such. Google and amazon aren’t really viable at 90% tax rates.
@Tars A big piece of the current wealth disparity comes from ultra-low interest rates. All one has to think about is how careful they have to be with their finances when they can only borrow 20% of their yearly wage at 10% interest, and how wise they have to be if they’re given an open ended credit card that charges 0% interest. There is room for a lot more malinvestment in the latter scenario.
@Evil_Sandmich
You have brought forth a, or the, key point. Banks create money by loaning it into existence. It is virtually impossible to out compete free money that bankers can make available to their relatives.
A loans cheaply to B. B buys a corporation and sells the assets to C. Later, the corporation defaults, bank receives bailout. B gets indirect benefits from C.
Loaning at below inflation means the bankers will generation by generation own it all.
We need to take it from them.
“Both communism and democracy assume something about people that can never be true. That is, all men are equal”.
Talk about hitting the nail on the head.
I’m respectfully stealing it and using it.
I’m guessing I’ll be hearing a lot of “RAYSIS!!!”
That’s all right. If the loonies don’t hate you, then you’re doing something wrong anyway.
two sides of the same coin. there is a similar problem with tv and movies showing the lower classes what the people above them have (and the proles don’t). this of course leads to envy and social divisiveness. best to keep each layer of society apart from the others.
Or what I call the “Friends” apartment syndrome. A group of people with subsistence jobs in the most expensive city somehow live in an apartment 4x normal size and live fabulous lives with lots of free time.
There are also a host of tv shows and movies these days which deliberately stoke racial division, or more specifically pit it against “Bad White” Caucasians. Here’s one example among dozens I could list:
“[Antebellum] follows a 21st century African-American woman who wakes to finds herself mysteriously in a Southern slave plantation from which she must escape”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antebellum_(film)
Nothing is served by making a film like that other than to increase racial animus against our people, which I’m sure was the point.
Others: HBO’s Watchmen (blackwashed), Candyman 2021 (evil white racists), Django Unchained (evil white racists), Get Out (evil white racists), The Hateful 8 (evil white racist), 12 Years a Slave (evil white racists), …
Other movies stoke class division, usually pitting urban progressives against rural whites (the same evil racists mocked in the list above). One example: The Wrong Turn series. It depicts rural whites as inbred cannibals hunted and eventually outsmarted by progressive urbanites.
Netflix and Amazon Prime are full of such fare, with new series being announced almost weekly.
I always try to remember that it’s our special friends in NYC and Hollywood who are always trying to promote racist themes against Whites, especially Southern Whites and Appalachian Whites (squeal like a piggy). The gratuitous violence in (((movies)))) about the holocaust or slavery where insanely evil and bad Whites do insanely evil shit at slightest pretext. Of course, they derive sadistic pleasure from doing it.
Every slave movie has some psycho who whips slaves nearly to death on the slightest pretext..
It is all designed to make you hate the person and what they are associated with. It’s why people become emotional when they hear something they perceive as racist.