The Great Delusion

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Imagine you are the CEO of a large corporation and you have to make a big decision about a critical issue facing the company. Your team in the C-suites have been busy putting together all of the information they can about the issue. There have been meetings and presentations on all aspects of the issue. Experts have been brought in to explain various aspects of the issue. After having digested all of the information on the issue, it is now time to act. What do you do?

Obviously, the right answer, even without knowing any of the details about the issue in this hypothetical, is to put it up to a vote. First, you will have the various sides on the issue make their case to the employees. Maybe have a series of Zoom debates and let the parties put up posters around the offices. Perhaps the principles representing the various positions will have an all hands on deck meeting. At some point, you have the employees log in and cast their vote.

Of course, this is ridiculous. No company would ever do such an insane thing, at least not in this age. In the 19th century there were some efforts to create socialist companies, but they ended poorly. Usually, these democratic companies were part of a utopian society. In the modern age, no one thinks the principles of democracy have any place in something important like a corporation. The truth is the commies were right about American business. It runs on fascist principles.

It is not just major corporations that avoid democracy. There is no military in this world that embraces democracy. The nearest thing to democracy in warfare was the pirate ship, which often voted on where to plunder. Even on a pirate ship, there was a captain who made the big decisions. His men might “vote him off the ship” but they would quickly elect a new captain. Otherwise, every military on the planet has a vertical chain of command and no democratic principles.

A good rule of life is that when any organization reaches sufficient size to employ a full time leader, it employs a full time leader. A small group of men working to a common goal might operate from a consensus, but even in small groups someone is the de facto leader to whom everyone looks for the final decision. It is fair to say that an organization without a leader is unnatural. Human beings, even women, always organize around a leader, even when everyone is agreement.

This natural lack of democracy is most evident in science. If someone comes along claiming that he has discovered a new element, the science men do not call together a meeting and vote on the claim. The claim must be backed with proof and that proof is analyzed and challenged to verify it. Despite what the Gaia worshippers say, consensus only exists within science where proof is not present. The word “consensus” is a signal of doubt, not proof of the claim.

A good rule of life is that anything important is excluded from anything resembling the democratic process. No business runs on democratic lines. Armies do not run according to democratic principles. Those two areas are arguably two of the most important bits of any human society and they run according to fascist principles. Even family life avoids democracy as much as possible. The expression “head of the household” exists because households naturally have a leader.

If one wants to understand why voting is a pointless waste of time, you just have to ask why no important things are ever put to a vote? Immigration is arguably the most important issue facing the country. Politicians avoid it like the plague. Even the “good politicians” speak in tongues when the issue is raised. Meanwhile, they scheme in private to do what they know is against the interests of the people. No one voting for it will dare mention it when on the campaign trail.

The fact is our elections are meaningless. The candidates speak in vague terms about abstract items. It is all in-group/out-group signaling. “We have to secure our southern border” is just echolalic babbling used to titillate a certain population. “We need affordable healthcare for all” is emotive noise for different people. None of the things candidates say while campaigning has anything to do with how they will vote once in office or the policies that will become law.

You could easily replace the people with colored blocks of wood. How would the current Georgia senate election be any different if the choice were between red block of wood and blue block of wood? Alternatively, the candidates could be replaced with lights that flash different colors in response to different noises. Say the word “immigration” and one light flashes green and the other flashes red. The expensive humans could be replaced with cheap robots.

The reason our elections are meaningless, of course, is that no human society ever subjects important things to democracy. The old joke about if voting mattered, they would not let us do it was funny because it is true. There is no correlation between public opinion and public policy. This study from 2014 went through 1800 issues and found no link between what the people told the politicians they wanted and what the politicians eventually did.

If nothing important is ever subjected to democracy and democracy never results in the public will manifesting in public policy, then why are people hooked on the act of voting and why is democracy an object of worship. Based on observation it appears there is no argument that can be made to convince the bulk of the people to end this absurd charade we call voting. Suggest a boycott of the process and the typical suburban peasant gives you a sermon about democracy.

Compounding this bizarre worship of democracy is that most modern people live a third of their lives as fascists. The self-employed person has almost disappeared from the labor market. Small business is following the self-employed into the abyss as big business dominates the marketplace. That means most people work in companies that operate along fascist principles. If half of your waking life is committed to fascism, how in the world has democracy become an object of worship?

Societies can have moments of madness. The 1970’s saw America embrace leisure suits and disco, while cities were turned into war zones. Much of that period has been politely forgotten because no one can make sense of it. Maybe this age and its fetish from democracy is something similar. The chanting about democracy and obsession with politics is another fit of madness. Instead of afros and sideburns we have brain damaged hobos in the Senate and black Nazis.

Alternatively, this great delusion about the importance of participating in elections is a form of escapism. As people become more dependent on the system for the basics of their lives, they need to believe they have some say in how the big machine that is the modern society runs their life. Democracy and the various identity cults are a way to feel like you have control when you are effectively living as a prisoner. Democracy lets the inmates feel they are in charge of the asylum.


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213 thoughts on “The Great Delusion

  1. Amy Robach story make me think, are white women are natural born race traitor?
    Why white women are so traitorous, becoming such backstabbing whore?

    Any one give me some answers, it makes me crazy and great torment

  2. scrivener3 on December 6, 2022 at 2:47 pm said:
    Fascists organize people through force, police action compels compliance with the Fascist.
    Corporations organize people through agreement and consent.
    Very few corporations maintain substantial private police forces. Corporations do not call the police, public or private, to compel that employees arrive at work on time or produce work product.
    Corporations say come and cooperate and we will give you a position, support and pay. If you find a better place you are free to go there.

    Scrivener got a lot of hate for posting that comment.

    Thing is he’s not wrong.
    He’s also not correct.

    Businesses don’t use violence to achieve their ends. They are voluntary associations. In a free country it would be easy to disassociate from any number of them for any reason or no reason at all. And find ones to associate with that were more compatible.

    The problem is that requires a type of social, geographic and economic environment that existed on the east coast a couple hundred years ago.

    Modern America is more like some dusty dessert mining town where everything is owned by the company and everyone works for it. If you find yourself at odds with the company or one of its men, sure you can quit. And walk across a couple hundred miles of empty dessert to get away from them. Without any food or water or money or transport to help you on your journey. So you really aren’t free, even if you theoretically are.

    That’s the social and economic condition that many Americans find themselves in today.

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    • No, you are free. It’s just that your freedom has a high cost. This however, has always been true. The real problem is that most people have come to believe the foolish notion that “freedom is free”. It has always been much easier for people to sell their freedom for some perceived benefit than to pay that high price.

    • Or, you can walk across town and work for a “competitor” corp. that is exactly the same,or worse. These corporations are all the same. And they are nests of turf protecting narcissists and cliques for whom the supposed goals of the company come in second to their own agendas.

  3. Voting still matters in America and to Americans for a couple of big reasons.

    First: Elections and voting are an integral element of American culture (or cultures if you prefer). As much as sushi is to Japanese culture or worshipping cows is to Hindu cultures. Belief in the efficacy of voting is an element of the Americans having an internal locus of control. Which even if largely delusional is central to Americans self conception and individual success. Attacking the very concept of voting and elections will be reflexively rejected and reflect negatively on the person proposing it as anti-American – which t is. So it would be advised to stop pushing that tack as it is as counter productive at this point as holocaust denialism or some other modern cultural totem.

    Secondly, it matters because it matters a lot to the establishment. The establishment in systems where voting really didn’t matter that retained pro forma voting, as in the soviet block before 1990, did not act the way the US establishment does. Whether its genuine fear or just residual cultural affect or whatever else, the fact that it does matter to them is a point of weakness for them. That can be exploited.

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    • Im going to anticipate some rejections to the above comment and respond preemptively with a very broad brush.

      One of the reasons the right and especially the dissident right consistently lose is that we’ve come to believe that:

      The truth will set us free

      All we have to do is expose the TRUTH and voila we win.

      Bad news for you kemosabes.
      Thats bullshit. A flat out lie.
      The truth doesn’t matter for shit in politics and persuasion.

      A compelling lie beats the truth ten times out of ten.

      Accepting that is first step to stop losing.

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    • So….. let me make sure I understand this…..

      You’re suggesting that a belief which is “largely delusional”— “belief in the efficacy of voting”— is nevertheless “central to Americans self-conception”, and— although largely delusional— allows us to maintain the illusiory-but-comforting feeling of having “an internal locus of control”?

      And because this shared delusion of control is “an integral element of American culture”— like “worshipping cows is to Hindu cultures”— it should not be attacked?

      Really?

      Because our attack on it “will be reflexively rejected [by the deluded] and reflect negatively on the person proposing it”, it should not be done?

      Really?

      So….. you’re advising us to embrace this particular delusion, because it’s so popular, and because it gives us the comforting illusion of being in control, and because by doing so, we won’t offend the deluded? And because “it matters to the establishment”? And thus “can be exploited”?

      And the statement you quote at the beginning is “not wrong” but “also not correct”?

      Really?

      So…. would you advise that we also go along with the other shared cultural delusions? Like the perfect equality of all racial groups? Like the ability of a man to transform himself into a woman by declaring that it’s so? Because these also “matter a lot to the establishment”?

      I don’t think so…..

      • You’re suggesting that a belief which is “largely delusional”— “belief in the efficacy of voting”— is nevertheless “central to Americans self-conception”, and— although largely delusional— allows us to maintain the illusiory-but-comforting feeling of having “an internal locus of control”?

        And because this shared delusion of control is “an integral element of American culture”— like “worshipping cows is to Hindu cultures”— it should not be attacked?

        Pretty much.

        If you want to persuade people to your point of view or take some action.

        But go a head and do it anyway, if all you care about is proving that your smarter than normies.

  4. At this late date, how “joe/jane normies” can have any confidence that voting harder is going to accomplish anything is beyond me. The propagandizing brainwash runs deep.

  5. Fascists organize people through force, police action compels compliance with the Fascist.
    Corporations organize people through agreement and consent.
    Very few corporations maintain substantial private police forces. Corporations do not call the police, public or private, to compel that employees arrive at work on time or produce work product.
    Corporations say come and cooperate and we will give you a position, support and pay. If you find a better place you are free to go there.

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    • You appear to have very little reading on previous countries that had what is commonly described as “fascism” as a govt model such as Italy, Germany, Spain, Chile etc.

      Maybe do some reading.

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      • Nearly every country on the face of the Earth has corporations and business enterprises.

        Are they all fascist?

        In the European fascist States there was a merger of State and private business. There were Party members put on the board of all large enterprises. The government compelled the corporation with police powers just as it compelled the individual citizens. As the big M said:
        “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” Benito Mussolini

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        • You appear to be slightly retarded or infected with an infantile world view of history and social operations.

          Perhaps it is impossible for you to grasp as to how people in those systems actually lived and voluntarily acted within them because of the bad word your professor told you.

          Maybe put down your big coloring book of politics and read some actual real accounts.

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        • Are they all fascist? Better question is are they working in a fascist system and cooperating.

      • It’s nice to post an idea and get an insult in response.
        I think the Zman is wrong to say corporations are organized on a fascist model. Corporations are voluntary organizations. Under political fascism the State controls every aspect of the corporation, the corporation becomes an instrument of the State.

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        • Scrivener3 –

          I assume you are well intended. Fascism is an economic arrangement where the the means of production are held and managed by the private sector, but they are effectively controlled by the state via taxes and regulations. The GAE and late phase progressivism, can accurately be described as a fascist state it can also be described as communist in the sense that so much of the economic activity and the flow of money is dictated by the Central Bank. It is central planning via interest rate manipulation and

          As for your view of corporations, have you worked in a corporation recently? This utopic version of benevolent corporations and happy employees exchanging skills and time for money and stock options is naive. If you work at one today, you will be told that, “doing the work of diversity”, is your primary objective and that it is not optional but a primary part of your job where your performance reviews will be based on you showing what you have done to make the workplace more diverse and inclusive. If you are a white male, this means that you will prioritize hiring and promotion of all other races and females above you. You will be forced to sit and clap through humiliation rituals lest you be identified as a heretic who doesn’t embrace enthusiastically the entire progressive agenda.

          Is this the state imposing its will on the company? Is this the company’s power players forcing its will on the government? We don’t know. It could be either one or even both.

          In short, it is not at all inaccurate to describe America in degenerate phase Progressivism as fascist. In the first three decades of the 20th century, the ruling elites of Europe and America embraced fascism. All of the tenets of Progressivism were the tenets of Fascism. It was all the rage. It only became demonized to mobilize the American war effort. In the revolution of the 60s, Communism was grafted on to the Progressive project. Now, Progressivism is some bizarre hydra of Fascism here and Communism there couple with the lunacy, nihilism and degeneracy of a 1970s cult.

          If you are able to study and work in an environment as ideal as you describe, please tell all of us where and how we can join you. The happity dappity exchange of time and skill for labor and private company good you describe is a reality that has been shattered. People come here to relate and discuss the reality of our situation and to get away from the, don’t believe what your eyes see and your ears hear gaslighting of the ruling regime. The goal is to reason with the current reality and figure out workable copes and to identify paths to a world where the reality that we see and hear is in harmony with nature.

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        • They become fascist when they pay the gov’t o protect them. As the big companies did fine during the Covidcon, but small mom and pops were wiped out.

    • “…to compel that employees arrive at work on time or produce work product.”

      Nah, just submit to whatever medical treatments you want or you’re fired. Not coercive at all. This has literally been a point made thousands of times by normies and DR alike the past two years but you seem unwilling to draw the connection.

      If you cannot see it at this point it is because you do not want to see it.

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    • And in the United States, railway workers, ahem, might not agree with this rosy picture in current year.

  6. Are we are conflating “voting” with “universal suffrage”—as in everyone gets to vote. Most people are too stupid or duplicitous to vote, and therefore destroy whatever value there is to consensus as determined by vote.

    Z-man makes a pretty good argument under a premise of the unknowing having a inclusion in decision making, but I’m not sure that such is always the case. For example, large businesses are not always autocracies. The ones I am familiar with have a Board of Directors who are empowered to vote up or down on major decisions on company directions. One we often hear of recently is the Federal Reserve. They have regular meetings to decide just high an interest hike is needed to screw us over. From what I hear, in this matter they are not all of the same opinion and compromise—via vote—is common.

    • The Swiss have national referendums where the People can vote on the weightiest issues. We have the referendum process here in Cal and sometimes we do vote on critical issues like Prop 187 and against queer marriage but then the courts destroy these little rebellions quite nicely for the powers that be.

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    • @Compsci

      good post. Also, as our esteemed host has often pointed out, the question of “who are we?” needs to be answered as a people. It is impossible to do this now in the North American Economic Trading Zone. We do not have a nation of people who are united under what defines them. Instead, we have a mixture of people who do not share any common values, culture or even a language.

      When simply asking, “Who are we?”, I don’t think that question can be answered.

      • Depends who you define as “we” within a geographic boundary occupied by multiple groups.

        The trick is probably to reduce in one’s mind the scope to your own aligned group and not worry abut the wider historical definition that no longer exists, but we all sort of carry around in our heads as a formed idea from earlier life

        If there is no nation left as we, then do as the other groups do and redefine nation for yourself. Then work from there.

  7. “Instead of afros and sideburns we have brain damaged hobos in the Senate and black Nazis.”

    Caligula’s horse in the Roman Senate was a more honest exposure of the farce we are faced with today.

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      • And from the last election, I gather we’ve come full circle. To me the “hobo election” means quite plainly that the politicians are simply paid actors who perform as per the direction of “others”. But we knew that already.

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    • I would prefer to have Incitatus in the Senate than the mess we have inherited. The damage any single Senator horse can do is limited to where and on what he can shit, who he can kick, etc. Small stuff. Maybe a lowly stay at home senator gets his face kicked off. Not so bad!

      But these people? Not good.

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  9. A Fascist knew how to die-Il Duce

    Democracy is soldiers voting or it’s Fraud. – me, and all of history from Athens forward.

    I’m glad you found something to believe in, although top down leadership has limits even (especially) in the military. Also military leaders must know how to die, or there will be new leaders.

    Now in terms of working with who we’ve got, I don’t care for the present crop of kiddy raping thieves, so we must think carefully about what we do, assuming anyone does anything, present company excepted.

    Good news is Oligarchs are defecting to America, even if at present its an emerging open military Empire, its better than kiddy rapers in dresses.
    The bad news is war all round, foreign and probably domestic.
    ———-
    Help has come
    I’ve Found reason to fight.
    American Elites are defecting to America.

    https://future.com/building-american-dynamism/

    Real tech wants a real America.
    Real tech is not Social Masturbation.
    Real tech is for example DOD companies.

    The military as ally means seriousness, and the military only has one move, ever.

    Reindustrializing America , the gain for the nation is war requires real leadership, the other kind will pass away or be shoved aside.

    https://reshorenow.org/

    Lattice- the OS for war (ISR).
    Many such cases.
    https://www.anduril.com

    The military as ally means seriousness, and the military only has one move, ever.

    This is real help, real leadership, real hope. Cold, Hard, Real – and so reason to fight.

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  10. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. The passive observer problem.

    Most Americans recognize that the country is off the rails, headed for the ditch, and the train wreck is just a matter of time. How can it be otherwise with a dementia patient in the White House and PA just elected a stoke victim retard to the Senate? But Normie stays on the couch because it’s soft, and he can still watch sportsball while drinking beer and eating Cheetos. Until he has gone 3 days without a meal, he will remain a passive observer of the Crazy and pray for a messiah to save him.

    What fixes this? A collapse does. And a return of real hardship. And a natural culling of the weak. And a rise of the pissed off. And a man-made culling of the corrupt. And a return of religion. And the enabled jockeying of freedom of association. And the devolution of massive Federal power back to the States and local communities. And none of this can happen unless we outsmart the elite corruptocrats and their Jackboot enforcers. Smarter, not harder.

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    • TomA,

      Excellent comment. May I share the text of the comment on other platforms? I will crop out your screen name, but still attribute it to an anonymous post?

    • Just as we remark that Christianity was not meant to be a suicide pact, so too must we insist that masochism needn’t be a necessary prerequisite for Dissent.

      Jimmy Carter was a masochist.***

      Ronald Reagan was a dissident.

      ==============

      ***Or at least Jimmy Carter pretended to be a masochist.

      We know that Tater Joe is a sadist [with a particular penchant for tweaking the nipples of pre-pubescent little girls]; I don’t know what the group photo was supposed to have symbolized [everything is symbolic with these molochists], but it’s creepy as hell:

      https://tinyurl.com/35yk2dh7

      Maybe that was the entire purpose of staging the Psy-Op in the first place: To signal to the herd that Masochism is Out, and Sadism is In?

      Masochist ??? / Sadist ???

      https://tinyurl.com/4wuhf5pf

    • … headed for the ditch, and the train wreck is just a matter of time.How can it be otherwise with a dementia patient in the White House …

      Dementia patients don’t actually run things. Biden etc are merely the puppet. Perhaps his cabinet makeup explains who is running things. I think it does explain, do you?

      To point to the puppet, misdirects attention away from those are puppet-mastering. The puppet-masters are few, their power is the power to do misdeeds in the shadows. Exposed, their power wanes.

      As much fun as the cold dark meanness of a collapse may seem, the solution then will be the same as the solution is now. And then, our position will be weaker than is now. Today, our position is the best it will be. Name the puppet musters. Name the Jew.

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      • What I’m worried about now is the extent to which an obviously sadistic leprechaun like Tater Joe is all too happy to play the role of the puppet.

        There isn’t a doubt in my mind but that Tater Joe’s first wife [ Neilia Hunter Biden] attempted to kill all of her children [via motor vehicle collision] in order to save those children from any further molestation by their father.

        Every time I see a story about the immigration floodgates being opened at our southern border now, in my mind’s eye, I see myriad jesuits giggling sadistically at us.

      • First, a close family member suffered from dementia, so I know it when I see it. Biden is a clinical case study in dementia and is likely being treated as such by the White House physician.

        Second, there have always been people behind the scenes pulling the strings of politicians, so that is nothing new. The key point is that a large cohort of the electorate voted for Dementia Joe. That is not a trivial problem because you can’t fix stupid.

        Third, the collapse will create a fog of chaos which is an essential element for quick and successful remedy.

        • The biggest benefit of collapse is the alleviation of penalties for “removing” the scum from our society.

      • @(Bourbon, TomA)

        The Traitor Tator seems to enjoy sabotaging Americans, seeing us struggle, while subsiding the replacers.

        In the beginning of his reign, sitting at his desk, a document was placed before him. Biden says, “I don’t know what I’m signing.” An off camera voice says “just sign it,” and so he did.

        He seems demented at least sometimes and happy to do us wrong when he is lucid. And All the time he and his family are crooks. He and they could all go to prison except for Biden doing the bidding of the bad-ones. His proclivities towards children may well be another leash. He only got to be president, because it was made so by the puppet masters.

        The more people learn about the nature of the puppet master, and especially the faster they learn , the more likely we are to achieve a favorable outcome.

    • I don’t disagree, but unfortunately, we cannot discount the possibility that a collapse could be just as likely to empower a more totalitarian government than the one we already have.

      What do you think Joe Normie is gonna do int he even of a collapse — get his kit and become a Max Max road warrior, or beg for a stronger government to provide his needs?

      The problem with collapses is that they are not always as total and as freedom-inducing as we’d like to believe. Our current Leviathan got its origins in the Depression, when the public happily gave FDR and the Federal government a blank check to “do something” — anything.

      Tsarist Russia collapsed, Bourbon France collapsed, Austria-Hungary collapsed, Wilhelmine Germany collapsed, Yugoslavia collapsed… the results were not always positive. The people simply traded one set of criminals for a worse set of criminals.

      Probably the best we can hope for is a Soviet-style collapse where the republics mostly went their own ways, but even then you had the rule of the drunk Yeltsin, the rule of oligarchs, and the Chechen War.

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    • @TomA,

      I don’t disagree with you and I want you to be right, but I don’t think you’ll see that happen. TPTB are just clever enough to prevent normie from losing THAT much. Sure, he will have a lifestyle decline, but not one to where he is completely destitute. Look around you – The football stadiums are full, Thanksgiving saw the most watched NFL game in history. Consumerism is still in full swing, Disney’s parks are still full, etc. etc. All the while normie is still waving his flag shouting that we’re all one race. Hell, my own conservative friends think I am crazy for making race realist comments or telling them that voting is for morons. It is astounding how impossible it is to get through to them. I also believe that more of the country is mentally deficient than we think. I am willing to be that 50% of the country is left wing and absolutely wretched beyond belief.

      The elites know that if they can make life suck for normie, but not suck so bad that he loses his ability to eat, that he will bend over and take it, and they are correct.

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  11. No argument, just notes, maybe food for thought.

    I’m wondering what the connection between voting and democracy is. As far as I know, the United States has always been representative, i.e., hierarchical. The US has never set policy by plebiscite, again as far as I know.

    Some states will have referenda, but mostly we’re voting to establish hierarchy. It’s more legalistic and civilized than open combat, supposedly less corrupt than informal means. Critically, voting is baked into our political culture, probably the most-well founded element of American culture. Maybe the only well-founded one.

    Otoh, there’s the delusion of equality, which has tried and failed to democratize hierarchy. We’re still represented, but in an informal— even corrupt— way. There’s still hierarchy, even if it’s rotten to most people’s sensibilities, as Z notes.

    We get the government (and everything else) we deserve, and Americans are very pain-avoidant nowadays, in the broadest sense. Have you noticed how stoned drug commercials have become? I think they sum it all up well. It’s not insanity, it’s the opium dreams of a nation of addicts.

  12. ” Human beings, even women, always organize around a leader, even when everyone is agreement”

    I’ll be using that.

    I suspect I’m not alone.

  13. Zman’s post today highlights the prevailing issue that most people who embrace civic nationalism, and a belief in the infallibility of Democracy. That issue acts as blinders to the reality on the ground. They continue to hold the faith that if they “Just, Vote, Harder,” then eventually all will be restored and made whole.

    This is not criticism against them, only an observation. I am not judging, especially since I used to believe in the system as well. It was not until around the age of 30 that the picture began to fully come into focus on the political realities (and fantasies) of where the US stood, and where it is headed.

    Here is National Review making the claim that China just needs Democracy and presto! All problems solved.

    “On democratic stirrings in China and Iran…”

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/china-wakes-c/

    While many will never see the leviathan for what it truly is, some will open their eyes. It all starts with a simple question: Why?

    Charley Reese (1937-2013) wrote a lot of great columns over the years. I read the one below in my early 20s and it attributed to the beginning of the evolution of my viewpoint and perspectives regarding the whole political kabuki theater.

    “545 people are responsible for the mess, but they unite in a common con.”

    By Charley Reese

    https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-ed-charley-reese-545-people-1984-073111-story.html

  14. Pingback: The Great Delusion | American Freedom News

  15. But “could” democracy, in some shape or form, work? Suppose some future country is racially, culturally, ideologically and religiously homogeneous. Suppose, furthermore, that this nation has a comparatively small population and that voting is limited only to citizens who have demonstrated beyond question that they have good character and are contributing members of society rather then social pests or economic liabilities. The electorate might be no more than 20 percent of the adult population. Would such a set of dynamics change the nature of democracy and render it viable?

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      • That’s beside the point. In the scenario I outlined, the voters would be far more qualified to vote than any children and adolescents. And they would be greatly more qualified than 90 percent of people currently voting in Western nations.

        • Not really.

          It comes down to ownership of power, not qualification.

          The measures you outline must be created and enforced by a smaller set than those voting by necessity, so the owners of the power to decide must decide the voting population.

          The owners and the minimal voters are then smaller than the larger population. It comes down to power to enforce such a decision.

          The question of who is the owner of the power is the actual one.

          Its no different than in the children case.

          • The question is not who has the power but whether there is some flaw in the scenario I outlined that would make that form of democracy dysfunctional. Obviously, there are disparities in power. Always is it thus. But if the ideals and objectives of those with power are substantially aligned with those who have little power, then the system could, it seems, work. This is not an argument for democracy as a reified form. It is a pragmatic argument.

          • @Ostei

            Perhaps I am not explaining myself.

            You propose a limited franchise for some small percentage who are the better percentage of the population and the rest are effectively children.

            Who decides these people (not the 80% -so themselves? someone else? some selecting commitee? peers? some form of competition?

            What is the actual criteria?
            war? business? some other achievement?

            who physically ensures this restriction against the rest of the population’s power base?

            In a pragmatic sense you have described a pre-modern English gentry/aristocracy model or a similar higher class/citizen oriented system a la Athens or Sparta, not a democracy.

            that was my point. The practical matters as to how it is achieved not just hand waving as to a set of magic conditions that everyone agrees on because reasons.

            It just comes down to power groups and an elite (parental role). You don’t need voting to complicate it.

          • @trumpton

            I am speaking of a hypothetical future nation, just as one may have spoken of a hypothetical future United States in 1756. And just as a set of highly intelligent people coalesced and created the schema for the future US, and a sufficient number of colonials went along with it, so it could happen for a future Whiteland. Keep in mind, furthermore, that the US franchise in the late 18th century was extraordinarily restricted compared to today and may have been even more restrictive then what I have roughly proposed for Whiteland, yet the those excluded from political power accepted this reality and the US political system proved viable for quite a long time. There is no reason an aristocratically-tinged (or better yet, elite-inflected-) democracy could not work.

    • Ostei: ‘could’ democracy work given those parameters? I think so.
      However, given the current crop of humanity on planet earth, I can’t envision any society that meets more than a very few of the parameters you posit.

      • Possibly, SISL. But I am envisaging a future self-selecting nation of intelligent, industrious white people. No freeloaders, felons and fruitcakes (more or less coterminous with Leftists) allowed. The human capital of such a nation would far outstrip any current nation with the possible exception of Switzerland.

    • There are two underlying assumptions in the original pre-oligarchic American system. First, most people are incapable of intelligent much less wise decision-making when it comes to civilizational issues. Allowing them to directly decide (democracy) is a terrible idea because they will always get it wrong and oligarchy will flourish, followed by tyranny. Second, ruling governments ALWAYS go bad and need personnel refresh.

      Our system was set up so that factions within the ruling class would compete for power within the federal system and that a restricted electorate drawn from the masses of an intelligent and moral people (white men with skin in the game) could be trusted enough to remove from power via elections a ruling class faction when it screwed up badly enough. The restricted electorate in a republic doesn’t need to be capable enough to design civilizational architecture, but only needs to be capable enough to figure out when someone else’s plan is not working.

      How does an electorate assess when the plan of those who govern is working well enough? This is where ‘democracy dies in diversity’. Once race, ethnicity, and religion become factors, then the best choice for a voter ceases to be what is best for the civilization as a whole and becomes what is best for his race, ethnicity, or religion. Most Africans and Jews thinking screwing us over is ‘best’, even if they will be much worse off after. They hate us more than they love their own children. The rest aren’t as bad as that, but are incapable of the deferred gratification necessary to forgo gibs now to invest in a future which would benefit everyone.

      The modern Democratic Party is a coalition of those who have decided that what’s best for them is to mercilessly loot America until it dies, in the hope that the unhappy day of last looting will come in the distant future, after they have died with a joint in one hand and an uncashed welfare check in the other. The establishment Republican Party is the party of sustainable looting. (the money guys behind deSantis) Those like myself who want to be entirely free of the looters pray for ‘collapse as the cure’.

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    • That’s a start, but as Trumpton points out, even then we’d have those with little understanding, perhaps emotionality, and limited intellect voting.

  16. From the schemer article ZMan referenced:

    “Half a dozen Republican members have privately expressed the need for farmworkers to fill jobs in their rural communities, but know that even that bipartisan measure will probably face a blockade by staunch conservatives.”

    Tens of thousands of people have been laid off from Twitter and other tech companies. Most if not all of them surely parasites engaged in valueless or even outright destructive work.

    Perfect candidates to pick strawberries. Send the sinecures to the farms and the migrant laborers back to their homes.

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  17. North Korea is a democracy. Says so right in the name. China is a republic. Says that in the name too. What we are in America is United. Again, check the name.

    And we most definitely are. When the regime propaganda system which unites us gave the word, everyone put masks on! From coast to coast! Never tell me we aren’t united.

    When I went to vote in 2020, the voting precinct was in a public building where the sign on the door said masks were required. And everyone, regardless of who they were voting for, put one on. Even me! For if I didn’t put the mask on they might not let me vote. That’s unity! And democracy!

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    • No, it’s not true that “everyone put masks on from coast to coast”.

      In the place I live— a small town in the mountains of western Colorado—many people never wore masks.

      At the local grocery store, some had them on, and some didn’t; but nobody gave anybody any shit about not wearing one. And in the social circles I hang out in, people were not only not masking and not social distancing, they were still hugging each other and passing joints around.

      But when I went to Denver for a weekend, everybody there was masked, with no exceptions; so, of course, I wore one too.

      I wonder if the masking thing wasn’t divided along urban/rural lines, like voting is: the city people accepting the mask-mandate craziness, the country people a lot more skeptical?

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      • During the lockdown my wife and I left our metro area to spend a few days in a rural small town just to get away. The city we left behind was 90% masked, even outdoors. In the small town, over the course of 3 days, we didn’t see one masked person.

    • There was a joke back in the 80s, maybe from P J O’Rourke, that any country with “Republic” or “Democratic” in its name, was neither. In addition to your examples, don’t forget the German Democratic Republic, no less: aka East Germany.

      This joke was popular among those who also said that “social” meant “not” as in social science, social work, etc.

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      • West Germany was “The Peoples Republic of Germany” or in German “Bundesrepublik Deutschland.”

    • People here, in AZ where I live, were offered to option of maskless, curbside voting—but I get your point.

    • Ja, and at the end a guy handed me one of those “I Voted” stickers, which I tossed in the trash on my way out. I only came out to vote against my current Member of the House of “Representatives” (unsuccessfully, natch).

  18. “Democracy” is a propaganda term for the technocratic oligarchs who wield power. For the great masses who have no power, “democracy” is primarily a cope. It’s a way of convincing themselves of the “palpably not true” (to borrow a phrase from Mencken). Better to face the reality of one’s own powerlessness.

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    • Yep: if they can supply a narrative, where people can feel good about themselves, many (most?) people will go for it.

  19. If someone comes along claiming that he has discovered a new element, the science men do not call together a meeting and vote on the claim. The claim must be backed with proof and that proof is analyzed and challenged to verify it.

    The COVIDiocy fiasco is what you get when you let democracy into science. Same as 4 out of 5 dentists agree they want to shill for this toothpaste.

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    • > The claim must be backed with proof and that proof is analyzed and challenged to verify it.

      Well, unless you’re Dr. Watson making a forbidden statement, then you’re cast into the void for violating consensus, expertise be damned.

  20. Only one man controls the Nuclear Football, and those who run the show make sure it isn’t John McCain.

  21. Twelve Republican Senators just gave us federal-level gay “marriage”, and why? Because their voters back in Missouri and West Virginia so desperately wanted it? No – because the everyone inside Versai– erm, the Beltway has the same opinion on the issue, and they don’t want to go against it.

    And this is where we are now, in our crumbling empire. It’s no different from every crumbling empire, really. It’s what I call the Versailles Effect. Same though, with the Forbidden City in Beijing or the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The elites live, work, and see only what is inside the gates. Over time, the consensus inside the gates and the consensus outside the gates about what issues are important and what to do about them end up having little to do with each other. Often, mid-level viziers work tirelessly to make sure that no genuine news from the outside ever reaches the ears of the King or the Inner Court. (This, of course, is why our current elites are panicked that the virtual Versailles of Twitter is now in the hands of someone who might let the peasants speak inside their echo chamber). Louis XVI was genuinely shocked to find out the peasants were starving.

    This arrangement can go on for a long time, but its long-term prospects in the modern age are dim. How long can Versailles-on-the-Potomac keep going? I guess we’ll find out. I just hope we end up with a Sun Yat-sen instead of a Robespierre.

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    • The act is not for gay marriage.

      It is worse. It is entirely structured to allow federal agencies to persecute, change the tax status and revoke licensing for organizations that will not support it.

      It is a compelling behavior act, not an enabling act.

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    • Saw a video of the former commissar of Trust and Safety at Twitter. I believe his name is Yoel Roth. He is a dangerous psychopath.

      At some point, even Kings dealt with some reality of nature – hunting, fishing, animal husbandry, some aspect of farming and livestock. I don’t know if the 17th century Bourbons had to. It kept them at least somewhat grounded in reality.

      A guy like Yoel Roth – has he ever done anything in his life other than try to avoid reality? Zero Hedge posted an interview of him hosted by the Knight Foundation. If you can stomach two minutes of it along with the interviewer, you will see a psychopath who is wholly convinced that he must suppress the bad guys. Given his attraction proclivities and background, it is likely he is wholly convinced that everything about his existence and every ounce of his energy must be bent on keeping a fictitious band of venal evil down.

      There is no greater potential for evil than a person whose entire life has been lived in the halls of power, who is wholly disconnected from the realities of the world and who is convinced that he is not only a victim of the world, but that he is the great and irreplaceable champion of all other such victims who must stand up to all of the forces of evil in the universe that his imagination sees as closing in on him. Magnify it tenfold when all of the society’s incentive structures encourage and reward the pursuit of his messianic mission.

      Welcome and become the warrior who wants to keep evil at bay. We have welcomed the wolves cast in the sheepskin of perpetual victim hood who marshall unlimited power in order to destroy evil.

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      • A couple of online commentators I saw called his interview proof that Twitter was banned people based on “rule by theater kids.” It shows you how much power a certain group has that Musk had to keep him around after firing the Indians and continue to suck up to him while simultaneously trying to alienate him to the point with Roth quit. Almost like the stereotypes are true.

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        • As Steely Dan put it in a lyric of theirs, “Show business kids making movies of themselves, you know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else”.

      • I saw that interview as well. Even the Mrs. – who sometimes is a little too middle-of-the-road for her own good, or mine for that matter – said out loud, “Who the hell is this faggot drama queen and who let it near the levers of power!”
        Truer words were never spoken. Don’t get me started!

      • Reality Rules: “There is no greater potential for evil than a person whose entire life has been lived in the halls of power, who is wholly disconnected from the realities of the world and who is convinced that he is not only a victim of the world, but that he is the great and irreplaceable champion of all other such victims who must stand up to all of the forces of evil in the universe that his imagination sees as closing in on him.”

        We make an existential Error of Category when we place the chicken before the egg.

        Yoel Roth is the result of a very intentional, purposeful, extraordinarily disciplined experiment in breeding [specifically psychological husbandry] over the course of three to five THOUSAND years, the purpose of which was precisely to produce exactly the shape-shifting personality with which Yoel Roth was endowed.

        There is no possible environment – no possible “Nurture” – which could have altered the personality that Yoel Roth possesses; Yoel Roth is necessarily of the “Nature” which the 3-to-5 THOUSAND year breeding program intended for him to be of.

        And the Nature of Yoel Roth is to devote his entire time on this Earth to removing your ancestors’ DNA from the Tree of Life.

        tl;dr == In Darwinian Nihilism [and this is Meta-Darwinian Nihilism we’re talking about now], there are no Marquess of Queensberry Rules.

        There is only eat, or be eaten.

        PS: For devout Christians [and especially the poor simpleton rubes who were mesmerized & hypnotized by the Schofield Heresy], this idea, that some [and, quite frankly, a very large portion of all] hominids are simply irredeemable, is simply too much to swallow.

        Many devout Christians can’t seem to force themselves to stare into the Abyss and ponder the horror of it all.

        They want to hold hands and sing Koom-Bye-Yah and magically everyone will somehow manage to live happily ever after.

        But it doesn’t work like that.

        Before it’s all done, there will be much wailing and gnashing of the teeth…

      • I’m not sure that’s the case.

        I remember how puzzled all the TV ‘pundits’ were after Trump won in 2016. They were genuinely baffled as to why anyone would vote for him.

        Clearly they had no idea how ordinary people thought. But it was also clear that— prior to Trump getting elected— they *thought* they “had their finger on the national pulse”.

        Trump’s victory proved otherwise: forced the realization on them that people did not think like they did. It was a revelation that left them baffled: they now realized that ordinary people had a different mindset than they did; though they still couldn’t imagine what it might be.

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        • “…they now realized that ordinary people had a different mindset than they did; though they still couldn’t imagine what it might be.”

          …but whatever the dirt people might have been thinking in 2016, their betters vowed, “Never again”.

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    • Such as when Californians voted to ban gay marriage but the establishment felt they voted the wrong way and ignored the result?

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      • As I understand, prior to the Supreme Court finding “a right to gay marriage” in the Constitution, there had been 33 state referendums on the question, and all but one had voted ‘No’.

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        • (If I understand correctly) The Court did not find a right for Gay marriage as we understand Roe vs Wade was decided, but rather decided it under the 14th Amendment. The reasoning being that many States had Gay marriage laws on the books, so “unequal rights” were at issue.

          • That may be the case; I don’t recall all the details. But in any event, didn’t they end up announcing the gays have a legal right to be married?

      • Immigration in California too. In the 90s, the California voters passed what I think was a citizen’s initiative to deny public services to illegals. Then the same voters elected Grey Davis and he said that he would not defend the initiative against the inevitable court cases.

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  22. I don’t know why disco gets such a bad rap. A lot of it is good and most of it is better than what’s on the radio today. The fashion and decor of the 70s was awful, I’ll give you that.

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    • Neither disco nor leisure suits deserve this kind of rough treatment.

      The disco orchestra, especially, is a wonderful, but mostly forgotten art form. If not for streaming music services making those old recordings available, it would probably be completely forgotten.

      • Hooked on Classics? A Fifth of Beethoven? ELO even. Is this what you are talking about? I was just a kid in the 70s, so anything that was esoteric, I wouldn’t have been aware of.

        • I was speaking more along the lines of the Salsoul Orchestra, MSFB, Montana, the AC Soul Symphony, and the Love Unlimited Orchestra

          Don’t especially care for that Beethoveen rendition. Or ELO for that matter.

    • As a coming of age in disco person, my impression is that disco was following/ending a time of hippie free for all and rebellion and therefore was seen to be “retro” and pretentious in nature. A swing of the pendulum to the opposite side so to speak. In the end, we got a music scene something more towards the middle.

      • IMHO, the 70s music (in general, not just Disco) holds up much better than the 80s music I came of age to. Plus, 80s music has been in constant play since the 80s, while most 70s non-classic-rock music died in the 70s.

        • An astute observation and one I see enacted on our local,”oldies”, station. “Oldies” they all may be, but 80’s they mostly are.

        • I love the pop of both the 70s and 80s. The former was smoother and the latter more frenetic, but both were very good, certainly the equal of the more ballyhooed 60s music.

    • Correction–disco was better than ‘everything’ that is on the radio today. That’s not to say it was Beethoven, but disco players were generally good musicians and singers, their music was usually appealing and even sometimes exciting, and the rhythms and melodies were pretty good by pop standards. By today’s appalling musical standards, disco pretty much ‘was’ Beethoven.

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  23. I have never been to a city council meeting which is readying to vote on some local matter in which the decision hasn’t already been made. They let us vent, thank us for doing our civic duty and then stick it to us and take the corporate money.

    I quit two citizen committee assignments when even when the committee voted a certain way the decision by the government member over rode us. If I seem too jaded you can understand why.

    Btw, what was that proposition in California decades ago about that the citizens overwhelmingly voted for? Immigration? Only to be dismissed by on judge immediately. Tells everything.

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      • KVH

        The bureaucracy also prevented a propositional vote from making it onto the ballot that would have allowed the voters to decide if the state should be divided into 3 states.

        While I have lived in California for 15 years, (actually hit the 15 milestone this month. Ugh.) I am a native Texan, born and raised. That said, I have a perspective of still being an outsider looking in when it comes to the policies and politics of Cali.

        The history of the people of California trying to contain and repel the influx of illegal immigrants proves Zman’s post today. Time and time again, voters in this state declared their interest in sensible immigration policies, only to be thwarted by judicial fiat. Prop 187 was one of the last gasps representing those attempts. Governor Grey Davis won the election in part due to the public’s concern on immigration.

        Still, tired of hearing “Welcome to California” everytime I ask a native resident why certain things are the way they are in this state. Empty platitudes such as that are not explanations, merely a pithy statement on the problems that plague California.

        Leaving this state as soon as the last kid is out of the house and headed back to Texas…

        • The strongest anti-AA law was passed in CA. It was—and still is—simply ignored by one and all in authority.

        • i am (was) 5th generation californian, and left for florida last year. not happy about leaving, but relieved to be out of there. it is impossible to convey how insane the majority of people there, are.

  24. I think you are using “fascism” in the colloquial sense of “something I don’t like.”

    Having worked on MilSpecs, in both filling and writing (most people probably do not know that the suppliers write the specs, and are tailored specifically for their product, hopefully something patented that cannot be copied by another potential supplier), economically the US military is actually strongly mercantilist, not fascist. And organizationally, it’s much closer to our elementary school version of continental feudalism.

    Apart from that, great article. Might I suggest someday including something along the lines of the qualities of leaders and specialists? The aphorism that a specialist is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. The exact opposite is true of the leader.

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    • The use of the term is intentional. Leftie mean it that way (stuff leftie does not like), but that does not mean the term indicates things that are bad. If you analyze things as they are in reality, much of what our society does correspond to the definition of fascism. The issue here is that many terms and ideas have been made taboo and you risk looking bad to the normies if you phrase things in a certain way. But if you follow definitions and logic even the normies are happy (and leftie is extremely happy) with our fascist corporations and schools. They just have been programmed to worship democracy as a goddess even though nothing important is decided that way even in our government.

      • I would view corporations closer to a constitutional monarchy, or perhaps a “constitutional dictatorship” if there is such a thing – something like a strongman but answerable to a politburo or similar high level small group. The CEO would take the position of monarch/dictator, but he is answerable to the board of directors who can yank him/throw him under the bus if need be (e.g., shareholders po’ed and they need a fall guy). For the most part, the CEO reigns with a free hand as long as the BoD is ok with it.

        The monarchy metaphor works well because you have lower level execs like dukes and earls that run things on a more local/departmentalized level.

  25. Jesus asked his disciples who the people thought He was in an attempt to figure out a system of governance for His church here on Earth but all He got were multiple incorrect answers. Which explains democracy pretty well. So in the course of like three sentences He determined His Church was gonna be run by one guy, Peter a pope.

    Although the Pope has the advantage of making some decisions that are infallible it’s rarely invoked and most of what be does is limited by doctrine.

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    • ” … but all He got were multiple incorrect answers.”

      Nope. You’d better re-read that passage. The correct answer is given quite clearly.

  26. The idea that “voting doesn’t matter” is overstated regarding the local and state level. It makes a hell of a big difference on issues like gun control, taxes, abortion, and welfare if you live in a state that votes GOP, like Idaho or North Dakota, as opposed to a state like New York or California.

    Where voting matters a whole lot less is on the federal level, where you have the inertia of a Leviathan that is $30 trillion in debt, spends $6 trillion a year, and has a global army. Elected officials go to Washington and run up against the impregnable fortress of the Deep State and the bureaucracy and the courts and the Fed and the Pentagon, where people who hold real power are appointed, not elected.

    The problem of course is that as Leviathan has usurped many of the state and local functions since the New Deal, it has reduced the impact of the local vote as well.

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    • Yes: the federal government intrudes into our lives in a way that the founders never intended.

      And it seems to me, that in addition to the process you point out— where well-intentioned legislators run into the brick wall of entrenched interests— another process also occurs, in which they see what a sweet position they’ve landed in: all the perks, all the attention, a decent salary for very little actual work— and they become fixated first and foremost on getting reelected.

      And they quickly realize that that involves substantial sums of money; and raising substantial sums of money involves recruiting and pleasing donors.

      So even if they came into it intending to represent their constituents, their main focus quickly becomes, enhancing their prestige and staying in office.

    • In practice the local politics has proven to be as immune to change as the federal government. We cannot even keep perverts off the school board.

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      • Well, there are some localities in which the local people are prevailing over the school boards.

        My sister and her kids and grandkids live in Loudoun County, Virginia, where that battle has been raging. And where are the parents have been winning.

        At some point, the teachers and the teachers union realized that they had pissed-off the wrong group of people: this particular group of parents was well-educated, well-informed, well-connected, not afraid of a fight, and unwilling to stand for any woke bullshit being taught to their kids.

        Unfortunately, I expect that’s not the usual situation. As you pull it out, typically the perverts prevail.

        • The real Bill: Get back to us on when those ‘winning’ parents get placed in charge of teacher certification and hiring, as well as textbook writing and purchases.

          • I hear you. I haven’t been keeping up, but last I heard a lot of the parents were taking their kids out of the public schools, and starting private schools where they had control over those things. Which they could do, being relatively well-off.

            But as I pointed out to my sister, that may end up in a bifurcated system: where the public school teachers can continue to preach woke doctrine, since all the parents who objected had jumped ship.

      • You CAN keep the perverts off the school board if you’re as committed and activist as they are. The problem arises when school administrators decide to teach kindergarteners anal fisting, and when normal people object they get overruled by some appointed federal judge.

        (Of course it’s always a possibility then when the perverts win school board elections, their victory is a genuine reflection of the will of the community… i.e. San Francisco).

      • Here is AZ, the real answer has been to make the school boards obsolete. Private and charter schools abound and funding follows the student. We shall see if this situation will be challenged successfully under the new Democratic regime that stole the current election.

    • Xman: So great to see that voting kept Somalis out of Wyoming . . . and that there are neither Jevvs nor pride parades in Idaho.

  27. Kings had accountability. The buck stopped there.

    Our current rulers are unknown to the people so there’s never any accountability to the people. If the peasants get a bit restless, our rulers throw one of their actors under the bus but not so much that the other actors get too nervous, i.e., no one ever goes to jail. Their punishment is a very cozy life out of the limelight.

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    • “Kings had accountability. The buck stopped there.”

      Agree with the rest of your post but what accountability did kings have? If you were incompetent in matters military or foreign, your country might be invaded. In matters domestic, if you acted against the interests of the nobility, a group of powerful barons and earls, headed by some challenger, might contest your throne. But of course if you were a villein or serf, you had no say in any of this.

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      • Plenty of accountability. They could be killed, and fairly easily to boot. Sure, serfs couldn’t touch the monarch, but the monarch couldn’t really touch the serfs either. Problems and complaints were hierarchical.

      • Montesquieu would argue that monarchs either rule according to fixed and well defined laws/customs, OR by being despots.

        The former could work quite well, despots tend to lose control quickly.

        Separately, monarchies/aristocracies derive their legitimization through reciprocal obligations flowing both ways.

        The single king ruling via absolute whim and with terror (think N Korea) are incredibly unstable and tend not to last.

      • Richard of York, Richard III, Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI – all weak kings. Those early kings (at least of England) were flawed, but they were tough, smart, and of incredible vitality. The above listed group lacked that. The weakness of a King immediately affected the land, and it was often dealt with in short order.
        Certainly one may reference John, Stephen, Henry III, but they were actually not as bad as people may initially say. The nobility and peasantry did respect the Great Chain of Being, and its antecedents, but there did become points where the king’s actions were untenable, where he so obviously abused the order he was to respect (such as Edward II and Richard II clear favoritism of lesser nobles) that they were removed.

        • The contesting of the throne is actually rare, at least in English monarchy. Generally, contests only arose out of the weakness or wickedness of a particular monarch. And only really a potential claimant to the throne ever stepped forth, with the exception of the War of the Roses. There, the Tudors, Welsh ne’er-do-wells, only lightly related to Edward III and Henry V (Henry V’s widow was the mother of Henry Tudor’s grandfather upon remarriage), and, again, this was the result of the gross weakness of Henry VI, who was probably strangled for his weakness.

        • “The weakness of a King immediately affected the land, and it was often dealt with in short order.”

          Agreed. But dealt with by by a group of dukes, earls, and barons. In a sense the king was “primus inter pares.” This was the ruling class of yore. The feudal hierarchy — villein, freeman, squire, knight, baron, earl, duke, king. As the cities produced an increasingly wealthy merchant class, who wanted a say in politics, the House of Commons gradually became more important. But I digress. The king was principally accountable to the oligarchy of noblemen. Only much later, with the rising prominence of the Commons, did he become accountable to a broader swathe of the population

          • Absolutely correct. But I would point out that this is the type of accountability that one would desire. You have the duchies and their subdivisions striking a balance between national (as much as “nation” as a concept applies) and regional interests, in contrast to the too regional peasant whining or the pressures of the international community. Those dukes, et al. represent knowledgeable people who can help balance those concerns; in short, they are qualified critics (generally, broadly, and simplistically speaking).

      • “what accountability did kings have?”

        Ask Charles I or Louis XVI. And you say “you might get invaded” like that’s no big deal. When a foreign ruler conquers a nation, the first order of business is to exterminate the former leader and his family.

        But there’s more to it than that. Z Man has discussed this before. When a land is ruled by a king, the king sees the land as “his.” Thus he feels a sense of proprietorship and stewardship over the land. When you own something, you take care of it, plus he wants to preserve something good to pass down to his heirs.

        Under democracy, our leaders are in for a few years and then gone. Why should they worry about what happens after that? The logical course of action is to loot everything they can as quickly as they can, and then jet off to some tropical retirement location (or Israel).

        The US is actually TOO strong, militarily. No one could possibly invade the US, thus the leaders feel no compulsion to adhere to reality. They can run any pie-in-the-sky utopian scheme without fear that by weakening the country they will invite foreign attacks.

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        • Many politicians have been in office for their entire lives.
          Many are the offspring of politicians themselves.

          Europe has the same problem and it is not in the middle of 2 oceans.

          Yet the looting, wanton destruction of society and boot on the face control is the same.

          10
        • “Ask Charles I or Louis XVI.”

          If you’re au fait with European history, you’ll know this came pretty late in the day, and this is “early modern Europe” we’re talking about, The conflict of Charles 1 with the Parliamentarians led to his beheading. Likewise, the deposing of Louis XVI was only possible because France was no longer a feudal society but was increasingly a bourgeoisie one. In a feudal society the king is only really accountable to the group of leading nobles who have fiefdoms of their own.

  28. (Thrilled, he was, to hear the barkeep had the same irritation in mind!

    But now, the skinhead freezes, then slowly lowers the chair. Nonchalant- none are fooled- he oozes to the bar; if he can cop a pint, he might sulk in a dark corner.

    He grouses, nursing his Carly. How in bloody ‘ell is he going to raise a pile of quid? Not one of the daft knobs he talked to had even heard of Alex Jones.)

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  29. I think that most people remain committed to voting is because it’s easy. We have been too affluent for too long, and laziness has become an addiction. I call it the Comfort First Imperative. Voting is much, much easier than doing the right thing. And this cannot change until real hardship returns.

    For example, if the local DA turns pedophiles loose in your neighborhood, and one of them rapes and murders your 11 year old daughter, then the “community” will attempt to solve this problem via voting; which almost never works because most voters are stupid and most elections are rigged. And this is why social trust has nearly evaporated.

    You’ll know we’re on the road to redemption when the above plays out and then a few weeks later the DA disappears, never to be heard from again.

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    • “I think that most people remain committed to voting is because it’s easy.”

      Democratic process and stuffing a piece of paper into a ballot box every few years have been conflated. Attempting to be democratic involves active participation — if that is possible. If you’re a suburban peasant, it’s usually not possible. Your “community” consists of other people in your development, with whom you have no real ties (assuming you’re even acquainted with them). You drive to work in some fascist organisation. You drive to shop. The structure of American life makes active participation well-nigh impossible. As a suburban peasant you’ve been atomised — probably deliberately. The democratic process only has some possibility in terms of a small community that not only resides in one place but also works together — i.e., is self-sustaining.

      • “The structure of American life makes active participation well-nigh impossible.”

        Important insight. Well stated.

    • The problem with democracy is two-fold. Not only must the stupid be filtered out, but the constituents must be homogenous. Not just racially but culturally as well. They must want the same things.

      The blue haired, cat lady who lives on welfare and has had ten state sponsored abortions has the exact same amount of political power as you.

      This piece hits the proverbial nail on the head. Voting is a waste of time. I will never vote again. One needs to look no further than the public opinion about entering WW2 and see what happened anyway.

      Now you’ll see it again where zero will be done about the Biden crime family.

      We saw a brain damaged derelict get elected to Congress and a low IQ savage get appointed to the highest court who couldn’t define a woman and hates white people. We live in a ridiculous country with a vast number of people whose only possible positive contribution to society would be to throw themselves off a cliff.

      27
    • The corruption of the local CJS is something to behold. We literally have cops robbing people on the side of the road while the criminal class roams free to prey on us. Everyone involved has immunity. Cops shoot up the neighborhood like it’s the OK-Coral with no regard for anyone. They engage in 120-150mph chases for trivial offenses and shoot up highways with total impunity. The DAs refuse to charge any of them. The criminal class largely just float between short stays at the county jail. No matter how much evidence they have against the criminal they are always willing to plea down a case.

      The CJS is every bit as dysfunctional as everything else in clownworld.

      14
    • Universal suffrage exposed out modern “democracy” to be the sham it truly is: both easily manipulated while simultaneously unable to remove bad actors because of the overwhelming number of low information, low outcome invested voters.

      With serious talk of expanding the franchise to illegal aliens, children, and convicted felons, one wonders if the PTB haven’t gone a bit to far and tipped their hand on just how ridiculous they believe voting is….along with their incessant craving for faux legitimacy bestowed from the masses.

      Voting is retarded.

      13
      • In the last stages of its collapse Rome made everyone a citizen. Things can get even crazier then they are now, buckle up. Wait until they create laws stipulating you have to work in the industry your father worked in……….

    • TomA: To add to your Comfort First Imperative – l suggest also the Everyone’s Smarter Than Average assumption. Each voter is convinced he/she understands the issue, or knows/trusts the candidate and/or the process. They feel large and in charge when they go vote because they will make their voices heard. You know, all those ‘We The People’ boomer comments. And all those here who still think that local voting (where local can mean anything from a rural township to a state with millions of diverse cretins) matters – totally contradicting the experience of anyone with any character who has ever served on a committee or town council.

  30. Corporations may operate along fascist principles, but that is not necessarily the lived experience of most people who work there.
    Middle managers regularly put things to vote. Some out of incompetence and others set up the vote in a way that any possible result leads to what they wanted in the first place. It’s a great (and cheap) way to skirt responsibility and to make low-level employees feel like they are “stakeholders”. They can’t complain if they vote for whatever was asked of them, right? Just like in real democracy.
    I am sure there are plenty of people here who have experienced this while they worked for big corporations.

  31. I see that voting does matter, but only in the sense of “one vote, one time”, as in Weimar Germany or third world states like Venezuela, California or the US.

    In theory, the US is still governed by a document which was agreed to and accepted by people born in the early to mid 18th century.

    If you don’t care to live under that document, you can ask the Confederate States of America how to unwind things.

    • Your document gave you the government you have, or was powerless to prevent it…

      If so great, explain Liberia…

    • Mow,

      I think the case can be made— I believe Robert Bork made it in a book many years ago— that we have long ago departed— “deviated” may be a better word— from the government specified in the Constitution.

      The 10th Amendment, which was meant to function as a hard limit on the powers of the federal government, has been gradually negated, starting with the Reconstruction following the War of Northern Aggression. (Which— perhaps not coincidentally?— was also the beginning of the elevation of Blacks, and the first attempt among many to make them equal to Whites.)

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    • { I see that voting does matter, but only in the sense of “one vote, one time” }

      Only if you get it right. If not, they’ll do it again until you see the light.

  32. Many observers have noted the strong tendency among us human beings to deceive ourselves: to tell ourselves things that make us feel good, but which we don’t have sufficient reason to know are true. We’re very adept at fooling ourselves, and the urge to do so is often very strong.

    Hemingway summed that tendency up nicely, in the words of one of his characters in The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so? ”

    speaking of which: it should be clear to anybody that your one vote can’t possibly make any difference; so the notion that the act of voting is somehow meaningful, is clearly an act of collective self-delusion.

    That would be true even if our elected representatives were doing their best to discern what “the people” wanted, and to bring in about. *The fact that there’s no connection between what people want, and what politicians do, makes the act of voting that much more of a charade*

    But it’s not hard to see how it’s in the interest of the ruling elite, for people to believe that they have a meaningful part in governing themselves.

    And yeah: the human achievements which together form the foundation of our civilization were not democratically achieved; they were not the work of committees made up of random collections of average people. *Rather, they were the work of individual geniuses*

    And there’s also a tendency, clearly present in some people, to resent excellence: an urge to pull down anyone who rises above the mean. It amazes me how much hatred is currently being directed toward Elon Musk. It’s hard for me to see that as motivated by anything but envy and resentment on the part of people who— in their heart of hearts— know that they’re in every way inferior to him.

    > Could it be that there’s a tension, an antipathy, between democracy— the celebration of the common man— and meritocracy— the elevation of the uncommon man?

    Could it be that the attacks on meritocracy we’re seeing today are a natural expression of democracy’s egalitarian impulse?

    Could it be that you can have democracy, or you can have excellence, but you can’t have both?

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    • Democracy is the same as activism in its poison effects.

      No one apparently asks these activists “why don’t you just build the thing you want to see instead of constant attempts to destroy the things other people have wrought.”

      The drive is always towards vandalism and destruction internalized as if it is a form of moral achievement.

      Mass democracy is the same in that it cannot seemingly create anything or be turned to a build mentality for society as a whole..

      Everything in the west of use that still functions was created pretty much prior to any modern democracy and those since by a few men with vision. Since its inception it has led to nothing but destruction of those things.

      One can only conclude it was intended as a tool of destruction in and of itself by those agitating for it at the start of the 20th century.

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    • Musk was the darling of the ruling regime. In practice, his genius for business was really the result of identifying industries that get huge government subsidies. He also had the timing of the fiat regime heaping paper wealth anticipating future gains on technology companies and levered up through stock market speculation in a negative interest rate environment. In that sense, he is the poster child of the regime. Moreover, his businesses entrance two key constituencies – Gaia worshipers and technology star struck boys-regardless-of-age.

      For those who understand the workings of the regime and Musk’s role in buttressing its core premises, Musk is rightly criticized. This is not envy. It is insight and disgust in response to the fact that he knows not only how destructive the, “green energy”, project is, but that he promotes it. He is rightly loathed for this.

      To his credit, he bought Twitter and is ripping up the basement floor and turning on the light as the critters crawl. More important, he is bringing banished voices back. Very powerful people have committed multiple acts of treason, (Hunter Biden laptop; Russian collusion hoax and many more), and Musk is exposing it by allowing banished voices to come back and expose it.

      This is why he went from being the darling of the system to being its top enemy. Even those, like myself, who see Musk as the icon of the regime that he is, have to acknowledge that so far, his acquisition of Twitter and how he has handled it is a great step towards some semblance of redemption. He has some top security around him, and he is going to need it.

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      • PeriheliusLux,

        I’m not really following your train of thought:

        When you say that Musk’s “genius for business was really the result of identifying industries that get huge government subsidies. He also had the timing of the fiat regime heaping paper wealth anticipating future gains on technology companies and levered up through stock market speculation in a negative interest rate environment. In that sense, he is the poster child of the regime. Moreover, his businesses entrance two key constituencies – Gaia worshipers and technology star struck boys-regardless-of-age”

        it strikes me that you’re simply not aware of the magnitude of his achievements.

        He single-handedly accomplished something which none of the publicly-funded space agencies of the worlds three major nations— America, China, and Russia— were able to envision, much less pull off, when he develope the worlds first reusable rocket; and along the way, designed and built the most efficient and powerful rocket engine ever made.

        That was an amazing feat. I’m guessing I could give you all the government subsidies he got, and you couldn’t come close to doing that. The man is definitely a genius.

        When he was asked how he learned about rocket engine technology, he said, “I read books about it.”

        And according to his accounts— you can find video interviews online where he describes it— he was using *his own money* to finance his rocket engine development program.

        He claims that after the first three rockets blew up, he was on the verge of bankruptcy when the fourth one finally succeeded; and that had the fourth rocket not succeeded, he would’ve been bankrupt.

        Was he lying about that?

        Do you have information that proves otherwise?

        Do you have evidence for your assertions that it was “the fiat regime heaping paper wealth anticipating future gains on technology companies and levered up through stock market speculation in a negative interest rate environment” and “technology star struck boys”
        which accounted for his success?

        How did that allow him to come up with revolutionary rocket designs?

        Please explain exactly what you mean.

        6
        3
        • But was it him, or the people whom he hired? Granted, recognizing and promoting talent in and of itself requires intelligence.

          • Yeah, as I understand it, it was both:

            He obviously hires great engineers, but he also seems to be very hands-on in his approach, intimately involved in the engineering, design, and fabrication process.

            He describes himself as “Chief Engineer” of SpaceX— that’s the job title he’s given himself— and from what I understand, he is very involved in the details of what they’re doing. He spends a lot of time on the factory floor, and is able to converse with his engineers on their level, regarding the technological details of what they’re doing.

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          • This is a critical thing to remember whenever one is inclined towards CEO worship. Tech companies in particular seem to follow a pattern whereby a sociopathic extrovert latches himself onto an autistic weirdo with high IQ and uses the weirdo’s genius to launch a new product. Once the company gets big, history is retconned into the sociopath being the “nerd genius” and the actual nerd is forgotten.

            Elon Musk’s proclivities as an attention-seeking fuckboy with scads of illegitimate children tells you all you need to know.

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        • Hi Real Bill,

          My weakness is being succinct, but I will try.

          My biggest criticism of Musk is his promoting the premises of the CAGW thesis – that man’s CO2 emissions are making the planet uninhabitable. That is a demonstrably false thesis. Musk in his genius should know that. Musk has made absurd statements – claiming that you can generate just as much energy using solar panels on the same amount of land as nuclear energy. That is irresponsible. In fact, I think it is criminal. I think very recently he has started to acknowledge the value of nuclear energy. That is a good first step.

          There are other absurdities like proposing to terraform Mars as if it is a certainty and then selling the “green energy” company of Tesla as necessary for Gaia. Why not terraform earth if you can terraform Mars and invest in something other than transforming the car fleet to run on a far less dense form of energy with huge amounts of entropy between the energy source and the wall socket?

          As for Tesla, it remains to be seen if the EEV is a project that can scale. Mark Mills at Manhattan Institute, the guys at GWPF (Mark Kelley in particular) have done extensive research, on the near fantasy of converting the entire worlds transportation fleet to remote powered battery vehicles. The materials required may not even exist, and if they do, the costs will be sky high. Then there is the battery storage part. To back up the entire US electric grid for just, I think, 7 hours, would, according to Musk’s own calculations require building battery storage costing $400 trillion dollars. Then, in 10 years, we would have to replace all of the batteries. There may not be enough material for the first installation. That doesn’t sound like a sane or beneficial engineering project to me.

          As for SpaceX to be certain that company has made significant achievements. The re-usable rocket is not however, an invention of Musk. It existed, but was underfunded and underdeveloped. To Musk’s credit his people at SpaceX productionized that technology. Even in SpaceX’s early days, he had a customer – the government. That is still his customer. Did Musk read a book and teach himself to build rockets by himself while running Tesla and programming robots on the factory floor and running the Boring Company and SpaceX and NeuraLink? Maybe.

          My beef with the entire space project, not just Musk and SpaceX, is the fascination with going to Mars because wouldn’t it be neat. Or, because someday we will need to leave earth. I am all for space technology that has utility and some legitimate payback. For me, that means developing cost effective ways to extract minerals and resources found in the solar system in such abundance that our life on earth is radically improved. I have not once heard that as a justification from SpaceX or any other government contractor involved in aerospace. As the taxpayer, I deserve to know. Are you doing this because it is neeto, or is there some legitimate, tangible benefit to us that justifies spending on space versus something else?

          For my money, I think the big investment with the best returns that is equally as technically awesome if not more so is developing nuclear technology.

          Back to Tesla to wrap the point about Musk’s wealth being from subsidies and government largesse. SpaceX makes money from government contracts though it is private and we don’t see its balance sheet.

          Tesla in the aggregate has burnt through billions of dollars. In the aggregate it has never been profitable and the losses in 18+ years far outstrip the profits. This is despite collecting many billions in, “zero emissions”, credits from ICE manufacturers because Teslas don’t emit CO2 from the tailpipe. That is the confiscation of profits from or inflicting deeper losses on your competitors. That is deeply immoral especially since the justification for it, “zero emissions”, is false. The embedded energy/emissions in producing a Tesla may be more than the emissions over the lifetime of an ICE car. The materials footprint of a Tesla is 5x higher than an average ICE car. Where is the benefit in using 5x the materials and pushing emissions and energy consumption farther up the supply chain? Maybe we could use that diesel to heat our homes this winter for less.

          Tesla has a market cap larger than all of the other auto manufacturers combined. His wealth is derived from the value of that stock. I don’t think any serious person would say that that kind of valuation for a company is not related to the distortions in the market that the Central Bank has created.

          SpaceX has done some cool and admirable things. I like that Musk is at least trying to do things in the physical world. I question that they have as much value and utility as other things we could be investing in. The jury is still out on whether or not solar panels, battery storage and electric vehicles at a global scale is even a feasible project because of EROEI and materials requirements and costs. We do know that solar panels, windmills and battery backup is a massive step backwards in energy density and reliability. I have a hard time cheering for the person at the vanguard of a project that is taking man backward in the use of his most important resource – the energy that power all of his other machines. Time will tell as the jury is still out on Tesla.

          I prefer Kirk Sorensen and the nuclear energy community that is trying to get nuclear energy and technology decriminalized. If Musk could help with that effort or invest there, I would have a reason to admire him that I don’t have now.

          • Hey Peri,

            I’m pleased to see that there’s much we agree on.

            I agree that America is not yet ready for “green energy” on a large scale. And I agree with all the practical pitfalls you point out, of imagining solar ever meeting America’s energy needs on a large scale.

            But it also seems incontrovertible that— carbon emissions notwithstanding— at some point, most of our energy will have to be coming from sources other than fossil fuels. It likely won’t be anytime soon; but sooner or later that will have to be the case, as eventually fossil fuels are going to run out.

            So I appreciate Musk’s forward-looking, out-of-the box approach to exploring possible alternate solutions. *The fact that he may make some wacky statements on occasion doesn’t detract from the overall usefulness of his approach, IMO*

            America’s energy future may include a significant component of solar-generated electricity, provided a breakthrough can be made in battery storage technology; it may be mainly nuclear; or it may involve some new, as-yet-undeveloped technology. In any case, Musk’s push towards developing alternate, “greener”, more sustainable energy sources seems like both a wise and a practical orientation towards the future.

            I agree that nuclear is very likely the best way forward. I’m not familiar with Musk’s stance regarding nuclear-generated electricity; though as a rational person informed by a scientific outlook, I assume he’s open to it, and realizes that, of all the presently-available alternatives, nuclear represents the most practical possibility.

            And although I’ve listened to quite a few interviews with Musk, I’ve never heard him mention carbon emissions. I’ve certainly never gotten the sense from him that he’s a “global warming” fanatic. My sense is that his drive to develop sustainable energy sources is not propelled by a fear of carbon emissions, so much as it’s driven by an understanding that eventually fossil fuels are going to be exhausted.

            And yes: I agree that Musk’s plan to colonize Mars seems a bit far-fetched, to say the least. And, like you, I question the practicality of it. But for a man whose brain is as obviously fertile as his is, I’m inclined to cut him some slack in that respect.

            And re: SpaceX: there’s a crucial difference— which you seem to be missing— between receiving “subsidies” from the government, and “having the government as your main customer.”

            NASA hires Musk to launch their satellites because he can do it cheaper than they can. That’s free enterprise at work; and it’s very different than the government “subsidizing” his company.

            In fact, one could argue that by doing it cheaper, Musk is not only not receiving a subsidy, he’s saving American taxpayers money.

            So yes: SpaceX makes money from government contracts. Is there something wrong with that?

            Is that what you’re referring to when you talk about “government largesse”?

            Because the dictionary definition of “largesse” refers to “a generous gift”. Which doesn’t seem like a very accurate characterization of Musk’s relationship with the government; which would seem to be more one of mutual benefit, rather than largesse on the part of the government directed toward Musk.

            While you might could say that the government is giving Musk the gift of their business, couldn’t you also just as reasonably argue that Musk is giving the government the gift of his services?

            In any case, Musk’s working for NASA would seem to be mutually benefiting everyone: Musk, NASA, the forward progress of science, and the American taxpayer.

            And yes: I agree that the production of electric cars is not a “zero emissions” process; and that characterizing it that way is not accurate. Although I’ve never heard Musk claim that his cars generate zero emissions. Clearly, no vehicle is ever going to be “zero emissions”.

            And I agree that “the jury is still out on whether or not solar panels, battery storage and electric vehicles at a global scale is even a feasible project”; for all the reasons you mention.

            And while I acknowledge that solar panels and batteries are a “low-density” solution, best utilized in a decentralized scenario, on individual peoples homes— and will likely never produce electricity on a large scale— I don’t concludes that that focusing on them is “a massive step backwards”. I believe they represent important part of an overall energy strategy.

            Regarding his well: I do think it’s notable that all of his wealth consists of stock and his companies. As he has pointed out, if Tesla and SpaceX ever go broke, then he will be broke as well.

            So while it may be that Tesla’s market share is to some extent, the product of the Central Bank’s machinations— I confess to being woefully ignorant regarding economics— clearly that’s not the whole story.

            Tesla the company is succeeding only because people are buying Teslas. And people buy Teslas— not because they’re starstruck with Elon Musk, and not even because the government is subsidizing electric vehicles— but rather, because Tesla is producing desirable vehicles which people want.

            To sum up: I do think Musk is a genius, on a par with other “industrial geniuses” like Edison and Tesla. For a 42-year-old College dropout to have accomplished what he has, is in my opinion a truly extraordinary achievement. And who knows what is yet to come?

            He’s certainly not perfect, but I don’t think he deserves all the criticism he’s getting; which I do think, derives from envy more than anything else.

          • I don’t think we agree. We already have the energy source of the future – nuclear energy. We just need to decriminalize it.

            As for the battery storage, “if”, is always the word used.

            Here is Musk in ’18 advocating for shutting down California’s nuclear power plants. Why? He has solar panels to sell. I think lowering peope’s living standards and dismantling your energy sources is criminal.

            https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/12/28/elon-musks-tesla-calls-for-killing-californias-largest-source-of-clean-energy-diablo-canyon-nuclear-plant

            For years he said things like this:
            ‘In fact, here’s a little tidbit. If you take a nuclear plant and you took its current output and compared that to just taking solar panels and just putting solar panels on the area used by the nuclear power plant, the solar panels put on that area will typically generate more power than that nuclear power plant.’ – Elon Musk

            Now suddenly he says:
            https://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/elon-musk-says-shutting-down-nuclear-power-plants-is-anti-human-and-insane-for-national-security/

            Why? And why specifically say anti-human? It is because of the work of the Human Flourishing Project and guys like Alex Epstein who coined the term have pointed out the fallacies of the CAGW scam and the massive step backward for human kind that Musk’s energy schemes involve.

            Epstein is relentless and has been challenging Musk to debates on energy. Palmer Lucky has been suggesting it too. Lucky recently said, “It is clear that Elon Musk is very good at identifying an industries that are about to get a lot of government subsidies. I wish he would debate you, but I don’t think he wants to.”

            California got into trouble with energy production. Now Musk is changing his tune since his lies about energy are being exposed. California is having blackouts and can’t close that power plant. That reality can’t be hidden. Moreover, Schellenberger, Epstein, Michael Kelley, Mark Mills and many other people who have analyzed this “green energy” project based on solar, wind, battery backup and battery cars have pointed out the absurdity of it as an engineering project at scale. That truth can’t be hidden forever.

            Musk is not an honest person. He’ll say anything to pump his stock or generate controversy to push his brand. I think the term is, “carnival barker.” I think another apt description I have heard is, “government subsidy truffle hound.” I could go on here. I would encourage you to do more research from an engineering perspective.

            Musk is an icon of the ruling regime. Our future is lower energy density, high cost energy machines and energy poverty if Musk’s vision is realized. It is untold abundance from our vast stores of fossil fuels and nuclear energy

            We need serious men. Like our movement, many of them have been pushed to the fringes. If you want to find a legitimate, real life technological genius who is a visionary, he won’t be found in the hype machine of Silicon Valley. Have a look at Kirk Sorensen who built a nuclear powered Mars probe and in doing so discovered the long abandoned research on LMS nuclear reactors. He is on the margins organizing scientists and trying to get the government to de-criminalize nuclear energy – the safest and by orders of magnitude the most dense form of energy mankind has ever discovered and harnessed.

            We have serious work to do on earth, and we need honest and serious men of great integrity to lead the way.

      • C’mon, P-Lux: flesh-out that word salad:

        “He also had the timing of the fiat regime heaping paper wealth anticipating future gains on technology companies and levered up through stock market speculation in a negative interest rate environment.”

        I’m assuming you must have had something in mind….

        • Well, actually, while this “word salad” is rather laconic, it is actually pretty clear if you but deconstruct it into intelligible units, and follow the logiic.

          He breaks it out in considerable detail right above your comment to which I am responding.

  33. I tried to think of something clever to contribute to the thesis this morning, but I came up empty. The idea behind this post has been perfectly stated, needing no more and no less. Would it be instructive to look at history and examine how different eras and regimes around the world made use of the franchise? In times where the franchise was far more limited and infrequent, was it more effective? Or has voting always been a mere fig leaf for any given ruling class?

    • In the early days, voting was limited to male property owners in most States, and Senators were elected by the State legislatures, and answered to them…It was a very different, and much more effective system, because elected officials had skin in the game…

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  34. “The old joke about if voting mattered, they would not let us do it was funny because it is true.”

    It is funny how concise quotes delivered generations ago capture an entire argument. I do not know who said this (I had a feeling it was either Twain or Wilde, but who knows, eh?), but it surely does ring truer every day.

    But society in general does not seem geared – any longer – to handling serious issues. It is all obfuscated by reams of mass-marketing and jargon peddled by Evil Managers, of course. Often to justify themselves. I’ve seen it for fifteen years now in my field, for example.

    You have a software application that needs a bit of an overhaul and some optimization to get it to run nice and sweet… but these days companies want “Digitial Transformation” or “Cutting Edge” or “Disruption”; so they build an entirely new product that’s much crapper. But it has bells and whistles and is new. This lack of severity and obsession with looks and dazzle has led us to Hell, and it looks like we’re speeding up.

    At the weekend I was speaking to a relative about political subjects. We’d spent an hour talking about race differences and The English and our homeland… but the fellow will still be voting Tory! After all the government overreach courtesy of the Shamdemic, all the jogger-worship and after laying out all of his concerns to me, he’ll still vote for people who are nowhere near making the right noises. Nothing he is concerned about will be addressed by adding a new “Green Tax” in the suburbs of London.

    That’s just how it goes, I guess. May The Most Mighty Lord have mercy on all of us – we most certainly will need it.

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    • And where did that person get the ideas that they have internalized?

      how have they arrived at apparent firmly held e with no intermediate stages of support?

      why does no reasoning in person ever affect the embedded loops?

      We have to start accepting that all the literature and endless words about human free will, self interest and rational understanding is completely and utterly false in the age of mass social conditioning via saturation moving pictures and sound. That age has passed long ago.

      You are making faint noises barely perceived while the conditioning is blaring at 120 decibels in their eyes and ears 24/7.

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        • I agree.

          A bicameral bronze age has been recreated on a gigantic scale and media is the constant commanding voice.

          The phone is the hand idol and the TV/computer the likeness of the city God that used to be in every house as the hallucinated voice of authority.

          Modern conscious humans are now a minority and have mostly ceased to exist as we have understood them for the last 200 years or so.

          Its not going to get any better.

          12
          • And, should Y. Harari and his ilk realize their vision, you won’t care it’s no better, or will have no concept of ‘better, or you simply will never have existed.

      • It stands to reason that lower IQ renders free will more susceptible to conditioning, and lowering the IQ seems to be the raison d’ etre of modern education.

        The other side of that is coercion – so even higher IQ folks can be overcome by either punishment or reward. Truly takes heroic efforts not to be overcome by all this.

        5
        1
        • The coof surely puts pay to that idea?

          Those in the middling IQ to mid upper were all on board.

          Indeed, look around, that segment is the most genetically prone to this for any conditioning vector one cares to name.

          • Probably has more to do with socio-economic status. The masks, hand sanitizers, and clot shots were all pushed using peer pressure and the desire to maintain social respectability. Recall all those news articles during the pandemic where they interviewed people in the hospital with covid, invariably it would be some ugly working class conservative. The point wasn’t to scare you with the idea of getting sick, the point was to scare you into thinking if you didn’t get your vaccine then people would think you’re a gross blue collar person who votes Republican.

          • trumpton: My husband’s aware of only 1-2 other people in his office who did not get the vax. Many of his vaxxed erstwhile coworkers have worked from home for the past 2 years (husband has gone to the office daily). Many of them are also sick right now.

            A casual high school friend of my husband – not necessarily higher IQ but definitely earned a lot more money over the years somewhere in the IT field – is now facing a year of intense rehabilitation therapy after open heart surgery (multiple blocked veins), a subsequent stroke and brain bleed and being on a ventilator. All because he was experiencing shortness of breath while exercising. He had one prior condition (diabetes) but we are convinced the rest was the result of his multiple vax/boosters.

            IQ represents potential, not final product. While I have never had patience with sheer stupidity, I’d much prefer people with wisdom and common sense than purportedly high IQ and today’s inflated credentials.

  35. Not sure about the GA election, but a blue block of wood won the Senate seat in PA.
    We are doomed.

    12
      • Karl would govern better.

        Karl did govern better:

        He understood the situation he found himself in, identified the problem with it, understood and articulated the inevitable result if the problem was allowed to continue, and then acted selflessly and ruthlessly to extirpate it.

        How many Karls would it take to reestablish our national sovereignty?

        No so many, I think.

      • “I like dem der french fried potaters, mmm, hmm. I reckon I’ll have me some of the bigguns.”

        More profound thought than anything that came out of the mouth of that turnip they elected.

    • No different in Georgia, a black grifter preacher running against a black brain damaged football player. Clown world dialed up to eleven.

      11
      • Yeah, but come on now, the one function of representational democracy is to assure folks get their kind to represent them. It appears to me that Blacks can’t lose in the Georgia election. 😉

    • So … is there a choice of some kind in the Georgia election today? If so, what is it?

  36. Well, you cannot discuss the “democracy problem” without addressing the Scale Problem. What might work in a tribal group or a small town doesn’t work as well in a huge country. This is true for business enterprises too, as endless professorial and consulting firm ink has been spilled over “agency effects” and “managerial slack” in large business organizations versus lean start-ups etc.

    Warren Buffett famously advised folks to “buy stock in companies that an idiot could run, because one day, one will”. I think this probably applies to government too, in the sense that complexity is the enemy of good government and good business. A government 1/4 the current size would be less threatening to white people even if Maxine Waters were running it.

    24
    • Captain Willard,

      The scale problem is indeed one of most pressing. I rarely see it discussed in the MSM, although The Evil have a way of addressing it: use phoney events to push for the reduction of the overall standard of living; sow despair and degeneracy, too, then the buggers won’t want to breed!

      Complexity is to be expected. We have some of the most complex systems around but are spiritually spent. This complexity, in almost everything now, is horrendous and I’d say a direct cause of incredible aggravation in most peoples’ daily lives.

      14
      • the complexity is a consequence of concentrating things into a small coterie of incompetents.

    • Captain Willard,

      Yes, I think the case can be made that our republic as constituted could only work in a relatively small, and relatively homogeneous, population; and that at some point along the line, we’ve become so diverse, that the common ground necessary to achieve anything, no longer exists.

      21
  37. Democracy doesn’t even work in small scale of unions. I belong to a local union of about 300 guys. The union presidents are always boobs or loudmouths. The really good, intelligent men that would be best at the job never run. They say, “eff that. Why would I take that thankless job. I have better things to do.” This clearly happens at the larger scale of democracy as well. Plato remarked on this phenomena as well when he noted that those that desire power are precisely those unfit for it.

    43
    • In earlier times there a plenty of stories of monks, aristocrats, military leaders, etc. who don’t want to rule, but then a mass of people beg to lead them when times start to get hard and current leadership has proven to be ineffectual. Mind you, many of these stories are just humility narratives for a person who actually wants power, but at least it signifies a better public morality.

      Frankly, the current way of politicians making grandiose speeches on why they would be a great political leader sounds just plain tacky. One’s leadership chops should be obvious for anyone worth his salt, and should already have a gaggle of loyalists willing to die for him.

      11
      • Yes: somewhere in his writing, CS Lewis points that out: that the logic behind the ancient leadership of kings and aristocrats— “nobleman”— was that they truly were noble: the best among us. They understood that leader ship was service, and they were the people most capable of doing it well. Obviously, at some point along the line, that ceased to be the case; if it ever was.

        But it seems to me that that was still true to some degree, when America was founded: that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were noble and aristocratic in a way that modern politicians are not.

        Now we have Ignobles like Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff, Joe, Biden and Kamala Harris, “leading” us

        10
    • ‘Member when America’s founding politicians had to all feign disinterest in holding office until compelled to do so, by the party or the people?

      I think up until the 20th century, it was considered bad form to be “ambitious”.

      Now whoring for the teevee and the donorbux are expected.

      • Presidential candidates would refuse to go on the hustings; wouldn’t attend the early nominating conventions, in order to appear sufficiently humble in their ambitions.

    • The Greek,

      Yes, and it strikes me that with the rise of television, and celebrity culture— where public figures and politicians are now also celebrities— that narcissistic attention whores are being attracted to politics in a way that wasn’t the case before.

      11
  38. The bit about politicians being lights attached to speech recognition software is true and a great image. The same is true of the electorate.

    We know that lawmakers do not write, or even read, the laws. Attorneys write them and the flashing lights vote yay or nay after consulting the party voting guidelines. The laws at that point in the assembly line are not letters of the law but, “guidelines.” Then the bureaucracy takes them and another group of lawyers fill in the blank to make the letter of the law.

    Now that I think about it, we know who is responsible for this mess. It is the attorneys their law firms and the companies, individuals and foundations that employ them.

    19
  39. This is all true. And also quite obvious. What’s bizarre is how it has become a mass cult. Perhaps because of the barrage of mass propaganda. Maybe voting made sense in the late 18th century when the USA was composed of just 13 seaboard states and the vote was restricted to white men of property: they needed to reach some sort of consensus on how to further their common interests, particularly when there might be divided opinions. But the mass “democracy” of today is nothing but a carnival.

    What I’ve noticed in “intentional communities” is that even though there is an an egalitarian principle operating, it’s just a handful of people who end up doing the actual debating and deciding among themselves — what Michels called the “iron law of oligarchy.”

    The reason why the myth of democracy is so heavily broadcast is that the oligarchs themselves wish to remain anonymous and operating behind the scenes through their minions, the elected politicians. The public itself is given a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee — both of whom are owned by the same group. On the exceedingly rare occasion that a populist comes on the scene and prevails at the ballot box — such as Trump — he is rendered ineffectual and then hounded from the political scene.

    On a personal note I would rather be governed by Putin than by Biden or Macron, both of whom are bum boys for the same oligarchs.

    43
    • Yeah, that’s pretty much a great win for Evil-Aligned Actors: operating behind the scenes whilst giving the plebs the illusion of control.

      Very difficult to assign proper blame in a democracy, very easy to find a patsy.

      12
    • The coof unified worldwide action in suppression of their “own populations” in 120 countries in lockstep is the obvious signal of a wider control system.

      For those that can’t bring themselves to accept it, you are living in a dreamworld created by the chaos noise in the media of fake events and fake opposition.

      14
      • ” … .you are living in a dreamworld … .”

        We are living in a James Bond movie. There really IS a cabal of villains trying to take over the world.

    • Quite true. Democracy is the perfect cover for the people actually running the show.

      Control the chokepoints: media, finance, academia and political donors/organization along with backing everything up with some Mossad alumni on the ground to blackmail and intimidate. Then just trot out whoever the people want to entertain themselves while the real decisions are made behind the scenes.

      If you vote, you are giving your stamp of approval to this system.

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      • “If you vote, you are giving your stamp of approval to this system.”

        Exactly. Your vote is essentially an indication of approbation for the system, a signal that you believe the system works, and in your favor. it demonstrates that you’re a complete chump. But I’m saying nothing new: probably everyone in the alt right says the same.

        If you really want to have a say in governance in the USA, you buy politicians, you employ professional lobbyists, you create or become an influential member of a lobby (pharma, military industrial, media, tech, Israel, whatever).

        • You do what the scientologists did when the IRS started trying to revoke their tax status.

          They used their own people to monitor, infiltratet the IRS, investigate the agent;s personal lives and in a couple of cases set up entrapment for the actual IRS chain of command assigned to their case. They did this in tandem with front groups bringing multiple law suits over a span of decades.

          Instead of arguing their tax position, they rocked up to the meeting with a whole load of blackmail material that they shared with the investigators.

          They ended up paying 12.5 million to settle a billion dollar tax bill and got their exemption put back in place in a secret agreement with the agency.

          The lesson is make it personal, there is always a lever if you are prepared to use it.

          14
          • Bingo!!!

            A thousand times this.

            These CivNats who think this is a college debate are insane. You need your own group that bands together and pushes back as hard as needed.

            As Z has mentioned, you make the cost of occupation too high. That’s how you win, not by showing another graph or appealing to the other side’s sense of generosity or, heaven forbid, their sense of dignity and fair play.

  40. > There is no military in this world that embraces democracy.

    It’s even worse in that the modern military is actually far less democratic than some historical militaries, in that small squads now have very limited to no flexibility in how to achieve their objectives.

    There was a military historian who told the whopper that American soldiers defeated the Germans because the American soldiers knew how to make decisions democratically, which anyone with the slightest idea of German vs. American command structure in WWI and WWII knows is complete nonsense.

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    • No kidding. In Europe the US tactical advantage stemmed from “time on target” artillery+ logistics + tactical air support. Until very late in the war, Heer NCOs were vastly better trained and focus of German squad level tactics on maneuver around MG-42 fire support was much superior to American and British squad level tactics.

      13
      • The Wehrmacht was much more flexible and faster adapting than the US Army during the war. They had an uncanny ability to almost instantly counterattack with ad hoc kampfgruppen after being driven out of their positions.

    • “There is no military in this world that embraces democracy.”

      I lived in Germany for most of the 1980s, and at that time, anyway, if not now, the German Army was unionized. I’d bet the rent that it still is.

      But NATO is pushing hell-for-leather for a war with Russia.

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