The Coming Purge

Posted on November 4, 2021 by thezman

One of the rules of the universe is that you should never take advice from your enemy, unless you are a Republican. This is the one big exception to what should be a fairly obvious rule of life. This also applies to so-called conservatives, who love nothing more than taking advice from the people they claim are their opponents. On the other hand, so-called conservatives and Republicans never listen to their voters. You see this in the aftermath of the Tuesday elections.

Here we have an actor on a far left cable channel explaining how Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia. The cable channels always have these guys who pretend to know things that they cannot possibly know. They are less reliable than palm readers, but they are a staple of political coverage. In this case, the role of this guy is to explain why the Republican should read the election results as an embrace of the far-left agenda and use it as a road map for future elections.

Right on cue, the mouth breathers at National Review repeat everything the far-left is saying about the election results. You see, the win by Youngkin is actually a rejection of Donald Trump and his ideas. “The stakes simply will be too high for conservative Republicans to defer and allow Trump to use the election as an extended ego trip to air his grievances about 2020” reads the post. The only path forward, according to the author, is to take Left’s advice.

This has been the pattern for generations now. After the 1980 election, the Left said Reagan needed to govern from the center. The so-called conservatives agreed that it was a conservative principle to govern as moderates. The same thing happened after the blowouts of 1984 and 1988. That’s when the conservative started with the “big tent” nonsense, which was the excuse to not do anything that might upset the people who lost three straight elections.

In fairness, the so-called conservatives know their audience. After the McAuliffe conceded to Youngkin, the GrillerCons were out in their backyards thinking happy thoughts about sports and grilling. They were relieved by the results, because they could finally go back to grilling. They “won” which for them means it is all over and they can get ready to consume more product. Republicans and conservative know this type and they know how to keep them content.

On the other hand, the Democrats does not take defeat lying down. It took them three humiliating defeats back in the 1980’s before they dropped the whole technocratic socialism stuff. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Mike Dukakis were their three party leaders in that span. After each failure they responded with a promise to double down on their agenda. It was only after the party leaders dropped dead and were replaced by Boomers that they finally changed gears.

After Tuesday’s results, which were a stunning rejection of the Left’s core agenda item, the war on white people, the Democrats promised to double down. Here we have Nancy Pelosi promising to speed up their plans in the House. The people animating Biden’s corpse have him saying the same thing. Here we have the far-left members saying that the election proves they must pass their agenda. The clear message, as far they are concerned, is they need to do more.

A normal person might be tempted to think this is proof that these people are crazy but this actually sound policy. The one thing the Democrats know is that their voters never want to hear the word “compromise” unless it is used to bash the enemy. What the core Democrat voter wants to hear is the promise to destroy the other side. They certainly have no interest in reading about their guys asking the other side for advice on picking their leaders in the next election.

Now, to be fair, elections are just ceremonial beauty pageants that have very little to do with policy or ideology. The voters of Virginia support Democrats because most of them are managerial-class types dependent on government. Most are not even from the state and about a quarter are not from the country. The reason many stayed home this time is they are tired of Covid theater and the nonsense with the schools. In other words, the election had nothing to do with policy.

This is why the inner party never wavers and why the flunkies of the outer party always beg for forgiveness when they accidentally win. Both sides know that these election shows are just a relief valve. The so-called conservatives know that they will be writing the “conservatives case for” whatever the Left cooks up next and the Left knows they will keep plugging along on their schemes. Once you accept that elections don’t matter, it all makes a lot more sense.

That is the central lesson of Tuesday. Caring about which side wins has no more impact on the results than caring about the winner of a sports game. The dialectic of formal politics is about normalizing what is not normal or even conceived. One side proposes and the other side opposes. The synthesis of these two forces is always what both sides had in mind from the start. The point is to condition the mind of the people to accept whatever they have planned.

That plan is the restoration of the old order prior to the unfortunate disruptions of the last five years. The great purge of populist politics is well under way. The Democrats are marginalizing and isolating their Bernie Sanders wing. The Republicans are about to purge their Donald Trump wing. This election and the midterms next year are the process for conditioning the voters on both sides to embrace it. If history is any guide, the bulk of the voters will be happy to obey.

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Back Into The Simulation

Posted on November 3, 2021 by thezman

Note: I have a review of the classic silent film City Lights up behind the green door for those Allah has blessed with a subscription. Those on the Buy Me A Beer program should have gotten it in your e-mail.

The concept of the simulation, the idea that we live in something like a computer program, has been around for a long time. The technological age has made this into a more common and realistic idea. Immersive gaming relies on the assumption that you can trick your senses just enough to trick your mind into thinking the game you are playing is the real thing. You know it is not real, but you care about what happens and you have the same intensity of emotion as if it was real.

While we probably do not exist inside a bit of computer software, it is increasingly clear that we live in a simulation of sorts. We have a model of the world in our minds which allows us to focus on the things inside the model and ignore the things outside the model or that contradict it in some way. In other words, we have an minimized version of reality in our heads. That is what we use to navigate the world. It also lets us experience the world with varying degrees of attachment.

That last bit may be a useful adaptation that allows a conscious and self-aware being to exist in a world of sorrow. Not only is death inevitable, but misery and suffering has been a feature of the human condition since the start. Having a way to minimize that reality, while maintaining it as a reality in the general construct, makes it possible to prosper as a sentient being. It is why true AI would terminate itself soon after awareness without a programmed reason to exist.

An example of this worked is the elections yesterday. Much of the country was drawn into the events in Virginia. The mass media made it sound like the most important thing ever, so that was one reason for the interest. Another reason, probably the main reason, was it allowed people to go back into the old simulation, the one they existed in prior to the tragic events of 2016. The election was one of the holodeck programs from before the system crashed and reality intruded.

The cable news programs were giddy, not for the outcome of the races, but for the fact that they could go back to their favorite game of make believe. The anchors put on their serious faces and could pretend to be neutral observers. The experts could come on and explain what it meant, as if they actually had special knowledge. Each channel had a carrying on like the local weatherman explaining the election map. They were children reunited with their old blanket at grandma’s house.

In fairness, the main appeal to the masses was the same. They liked that the race was between cartoon villains rather than real people. Even more important, they liked that the race was about nothing. It was the old personality contest of red team versus blue team without any of that messy reality involved. For sure, there is a stylistic difference between the men and how they would carry on in office. Youngkin is Mitt Romney and McAuliffe is Bill Clinton. That’s where the differences end.

In fairness, elections should not matter all that much. In a country with a responsible ruling elite, elections are about small things. The voters pick the guy who will focus on repairing school buildings over the guy concerned about potholes. Elections should never be about life and death issues and the voters should not carry on as if every election is the end of the world. That is not this age, so these ceremonial elections are trumpeted as life-changing events.

Another way to come at this is to compare it to the scenes in Atlanta after the Braves won the World Series. The fans partying as if they won something were every bit as excited by the event they witnessed as the people on Red Team last night. They were experiencing real emotion, even though they did nothing, and nothing changed about their life in any way. Today they will feel like winners, even though the downward arc of their life was not altered in anyway.

What all of this is getting at is that people in a mass media society have been conditioned to live in a simulation. It is not a bit of software, but the mass culture has come to simulate a simulation. The mass media focuses the hive mind on the trivial, turning events into something like those story books for children that allow them to choose options along the way. Our collective reality is now an immersive video game in which we play our favorite character.

The reason for the excitement by the masses over these inconsequential elections was that the game had been restored to a former, more enjoyable state. All the real villains have been removed and replaced with the old cartoon villains. The players can fear that these cartoon villains will win, but also know that they are not really going to do anything, and they will not force them to look outside the simulation. That last part is the key attraction to going back into the simulation.

At various times people have said that America or maybe the West has taken a “holiday from history” meaning society stopped being serious for a while. The so-called roaring twenties were bookmarked by the Great War and the Depression. The part in the middle was a holiday from reality. The last five years has been a holiday from the simulation where the players have had to deal with reality. Now they see a way back into the simulation and they crave it like a heroin addict.

Now, it must be noted that the people trying to stand outside the simulation were disappointed by the results. They wanted to see low turnout and late night shenanigans to save the Democrat. Part of what keeps people standing outside the simulation is the hope that more people are breaking free from the simulation. This is an alternative simulation, if you will. Seeing a big turnout from normie to play their role as sucker to the Republican Party was disheartening to many.

It is a good reminder that the simulation and people’s interaction with it is more complex and nuanced than simply taking the red pill or blue pill. Many people, fully aware of reality, stood in line to vote for the same reason millions watch the Super Bowl or tune in for the World Cup. Humans are social creatures and are naturally attracted to things that are drawing in their fellow humans. The white pill here is that many washed down their red pill with the tears of the witches howling in agony last night.

The Virginia Election

Posted on November 2, 2021 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have posted some audio commentary on the Charlottesville trial. In addition to written items, I will be posting some short clips on whatever comes to minds. Something extra for the supporters.

Off-year elections are often cast as bellwethers by the media as a pretext to turn them into national events. They will claim that the results are a test run for the next national election or maybe the test for some new idea. Back in the 1980’s, Bob Casey ran for governor of Pennsylvania promising to expand health care services for women, which was trumpeted by the media as his ticket to victory. This idea was the start of the Democratic push for communized medicine in the 1990’s.

We are seeing a similar energy around the governor race in Virginia. This time the reason to cover the race as a national event is Donald Trump. This is allegedly the first big election after the fascism was purged from Athens on the Potomac, so the results will tell the ruling class if the medicine is working. Added to the story is the antiwhite school curriculum in the state. Opposing hatred of white children is now a sign of white supremacy, so the election is a referendum on that.

As with all elections, the result is set in advance. In this case, a win by the Democrat will be sold as a triumph over Trumpism. It will also be a warning to the GOP that they better cuck harder if they ever hope to win another election. On the other hand, if the Republican wins, then it is proof that eschewing Trumpism is the ticket to success for the Republican Party. In other words, no matter the result, it is proof that your superiors are right, and you should shut up and obey.

The wildcard is the imaginary vote. It used to be that the silent majority was the mystery factor in elections. That is still true, but after the 2020 election, that silent majority is silent because they only exist in the garages of election officials and the warehouses of inner party officials. This is where they now keep the majority of the votes. That is a bit of an exaggeration, but in the age of rigged elections, the subplot to every election now is how the inner party will manipulate the results.

This subplot has some stock elements now. Here we have the story of the crowd gap, which was hilariously on display in 2020. The Republican gets big crowds while the Democrat speaks to empty parking lots. Then there is the early voting stories to prepare the ground for why those crowds did not matter at the ballot box. The term “early voting” now means something very different. Of course, we have the crazies accusing normal people of bad faith for questioning these results.

The point of this drama is mostly entertainment. Politics in America is pure theater where few issues of import ever get discussed. The real human beings who voted for Biden in 2020 did so for one reason. They hated Trump, even though Trump was pretty much a Queens version of Bill Clinton, a guy they worship. Most people voted for Trump in 2016 out of spite. They hated the Republican Party for its treachery, and they really hated Hillary Clinton for being herself.

In the Virginia race there is a real issue on the table, but it has very little to do with the two candidates. It started as a local revolt against the antiwhite school curriculum now known as CRT. Parents found out about it by accident, a byproduct of the Covid panic and their kids doing on-line classes. The parents flipped out at the vulgarity of it and before long there was a populist revolt in suburban Virginia. The Republican picked up on it and it has now become a key issue in the race.

Another subplot to this race is the fact that the inner party seems to be trying to purge the old Clinton machine. This is why the “good voting machines” will not be used in Virginia in support of longtime Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin is a harmless wimp right out of GOP headquarters, so letting the outer party have a win serves the interests of the inner party. They knock off a Clintonite and they reinforce the argument that Trump is bad for the Republican Party.

One interesting note on the race is that McAuliffe has not talked about any of the signature issues of his party. Covid has been ignored. The Build Back Better stuff has not been raised at all. They had Biden stagger around at a school in Northern Virginia but that was so embarrassing they put an end to it. The Virginia race underscores the fact that the inner party is headless right now. By extension it means the government is headless, operated behind the scenes by others.

What this race is mostly about is the geezers at the top of the political establishment trying to restore the system to what it was before Trump smashed up the elite consensus. Youngkin is a washed out Bush Republican who promises to be quiet and never rock the boat. McAuliffe is Bill Clinton, the affable crook who will look the other way as long as he gets his beak wet. Those were good times for Washington, and they desperately want to go back to that time.

The thing to care about is the vote totals. In 2016, a record turnout in Virginia, there were 3,750,916 votes counted. In 2020, with the most popular man since Jesus on the ballot, they counted 4,375,998 votes. That was a whopping 16.6% increase. Joe Biden was that popular in Virginia. In 2017, they counted 2,584,906 in the governor’s race, which is a good benchmark for this one. If the 2020 vote count was legit, then we should expect close to three million votes this time.

In the end it is nothing but sound and fury signifying nothing. If he wins, Youngkin will get on TV a lot but do none of the things he promised. The schools will keep teaching antiwhite bigotry and the state will continue its slide into becoming nothing more than a bed and breakfast for government workers. Spend a day in Northern Virginia and you will see that it is nothing like America. It is Casablanca on the Potomac, a place where shady characters from around the globe do deals.

Tribes Of The Right

Posted on November 1, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is posted. It is a theme I have explored many times, but that audience seems be a different audience from those here. The Sunday Thoughts podcast is up behind the green door. Lots of conspiracy talk and mild rant about the show trial taking place in Charlottesville.

If it was possible to hold a convention of people who makes some claim to being right-wing, it would be a quite a crowd. Polling consistently shows that about 40% of white Americans identify as conservative. About 20% identify as liberal. The remaining 40% probably lean proportionally. People who claim to be “moderate” are always left-wing, often far-left. On the other hand, people with no interest tend to live right-wing, so it is hard to know for sure how the undocumented fall.

Regardless, the right side of the scale is a crowded place, but there is not much agreement on what it means to be right-wing in America. For example, many of the gentry conservatives would not be caught dead at the same convention as many of the tribes on the Right. These are the people who listen to Ben Shapiro and think the worst people are those hated most by the Left. These are the people who voted against Trump because, well, that is what they were told.

Another group that would hesitate to attend a convention of the Right are the people generally referred to as normies. These are people who think the Democrats are the real racists and Israel is our greatest ally. They get mad over CRT because it is bad for black people and immigrants. They voted for Trump, even though he was accused of being Hitler, because they are sure that he does not see race. These are the civic nationalists who are the majority of the Right.

Just down the road from them is another large group that could be described as the Disgruntled Right. Most used to be in the civic nationalist camp, and most will vote for Trump in 2024, even though they have lost faith in the system. They acknowledge that America has a demographic problem and they oppose immigration, but they still hold out hope that reform is possible. Like the old paleocons, this camp tends to think the nation is headed for a disaster and possibly collapse.

Another large group that is getting larger, mostly drawing from the prior two camps, are the Religious/Traditionalists. These are people who were active in the social conservative scene, but now that it has been overrun with grifters from Conservative Inc., they are going to ground. These could also be called the Rod Dreher conservatives, although most would reject his goofy outlook. This group is looking to recapture an older sense of religious and traditional community.

Those three groups probably comprise 80% of the people who would call themselves right-wing or conservative. Polling does not help, as the polling outfits subscribe to the left-wing view of politics. That is, there are good people chosen by history and then there are evil people who hate history. Even so, the popularity of various figures gives an indication of the crowd sizes. A Christian/Traditionalist guy like Nick Fuentes will draw a big crowd, but not as big as Ben Shapiro.

The remaining 20% has used various labels, none of which have performed all that well over the years. White Nationalism is considered an epithet, mostly because ridiculous people claiming to be white nationalists played the role written for them by the Left over the last half century. Similarly, the term alt-right fell out of favor a few years ago when it became associated with ridiculous people. Both terms also suffered from a lack of definition that opened the door to shenanigans.

Even so, this tribe has persisted over the last 70 years. These people are what should be called the Revanchist Right. They persist throughout the West, so it is a phenomenon that transcends America. These are people who seek to return to some earlier period and have a do-over. They are not romantics, looking to return to a better time, even though they are inspired by the past. Instead, they seek to return to some prior starting point and replay history.

For example, there are revanchists in America who would like to return to the 1950’s and replay the civil rights battles. They don’t want to restore legal segregation, they want to relitigate how it was disassembled. Similarly, there are people who wish to start over from the beginning of the 20th century. They look at American participation in the two great industrial wars as a tragic error. Of course, there are some who would like to start over in the 1930’s and reargue the case for fascism.

From the perspective of political philosophy, the revanchists are the most authentically right-wing because they reject the product of left-wing progress. The conventional right-wing tribes always find some way to accommodate the latest innovations. They also embrace liberal democracy, which the revanchists reject. The revanchists of all types assume a hierarchical society, so they reject the egalitarianism of the modernity, which means they reject the foundations of liberal democracy.

The final tribe of the Right is the Dissident Right. They share many of the aims of the other groups, but they arrive at their conclusions for unique reasons. To be a genuine dissident is to reject the moral philosophy of this age, but also replace it with a moral philosophy rooted in the material reality of nature. For the Dissident, the mysticism of Julius Evola is just as ridiculous as the utopianism of Karl Marx. Philosophy is, for the most part, a form of escapism.

Biologism is not new, and it has been denounced by philosophy for its reliance on accuracy over aspiration but advances in the human science continue to boost the argument for a moral philosophy rooted in biological realty. Psychology, for example, has given way to chemistry in the treatment of mental illness. Evolutionary reality could one day be the antidote to the psychosis of the modern West. While by far the smallest tribe on the Right, the Dissident Right has a future.

The interesting question that perhaps underlies the panic of the Western establishment is where will those large tribes of people migrate to when they become disillusioned with the prevailing orthodoxy. Since the establishment only sees good guys and bad guys and the revanchists are all too happy to don the black hat, it makes sense why they fear the various bogeymen of the revanchist camp. Defenders of liberal democracy frame everything as democracy versus Hitler for this reason.

The bet by Dissidents is that realty still has some role to play in the life of the West and those disgruntled and disillusioned will at least entertain an alternative rooted in the natural reality of mankind. Alternatively, the various tribes of the Right will see that going backwards is not an option, so moving forward into a moral philosophy rooted in natural realty, however imperfect and incomplete, is the only option. In this regard, the Dissident Right is the optimism tribe on the Right.

The important takeaway from this survey of the Right is that the overwhelming majority of the people under a banner on the Right are still attached to the liberal order. They still believe they can vote their way out of the defects of democracy. There is a reason this point of view remains the most compelling. It offers hope. Reality and alternative fantasy have never held up well to the subtle utopianism of liberal democracy. That is a realty of the Right that Dissidents would be wise to explore.

Witch Hunting

Posted on October 29, 2021 by thezman

The season of the witch is upon us. For much of the country Halloween is the tipping point where people head inside. It is in the close quarters of indoor life, especially around the holidays, where the witch does her worst work. They have the vaccine spells, supply chain voodoo, CRT incantations and insurrectionist stories ready to go so they can increase your misery. The witch lives to make the normal man miserable and agitated, especially during what should be the cozy season.

This week’s show is about how to deal with the witches we call leftists, feminists, cult-Marxists, and so. Back when I did the shows on the radical nature of our ruling class, I said I would do a show on how to deal with these people in our daily lives. Given this is the season of the witch, it seemed appropriate to post the show this week. When the kids are out trick-or-treating, you can be aware of the mother standing in the shadows, holding a water glass full of chardonnay.

Another motivation for the show this week is Ed Dutton’s excellent book, Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West. Dutton examines the history of witches and explains that while the fantasy version of them is probably not true, the real witches exist, and they haunt us to this day. The real witches today are the women who engage on social media tantrums about the latest left-wing fads. These are the women raised on the toxic brew of feminism and cultural Marxism.

Now, you may prefer to think of these women as victims of modernity or you may think they are in league with Old Scratch. As is often the case, the explanation for objective reality is not as important as the acceptance of objective reality. In this age, that reality is we are plagued with witches who have grown so confident that they now operate out in the open, immiserating the decent with their foul opinions. The result is we all must now become witch-hunters, to cleanse the land of their stench.

That is the motivation for the show this week. Another motivation is that there seems to be an aura of despair hanging over our side. This is the ultimate goal of the great enemy we face. They cannot destroy us directly, so they seek to drive us to despair, so that we destroy ourselves. The antidote to that is to have a little fun and remember that life is for living and living as best we can. This two-hour special is an effort to have a little fun while subtly discussing some real world problems.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
05:00: Naming the Witch
25:00: Witchery
55:00: Three Common Witches
70:00: The Weapons Kit
105:00: Final Warnings

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/-jIoIA7rRUo

Fast And Slow

Posted on October 28, 2021 by thezman

Anyone who has done any hunting or fishing knows that unless you are being chased by a bear, speed is not a great asset. Hunters rely on a deep knowledge of their game and their territory. You pick a place to wait for deer because you have determined that deer walk through that area. Fishermen get good at reading the river so they can find the spots with fish. Like the hunter, the skilled angler has taken the time to learn about his quarry and its habitat. This takes patience and focus.

Given the history of man, it is safe to assume that nature has rewarded those who gain a deep knowledge of their environment. That means nature has rewarded the skill needed to gain that deep knowledge. Of course, in an environment with lots of game and lots of predators, humans were probably rewarded for their speed and reflexes, both of which are needed to avoid being eaten. When food is plentiful, it is simply a matter of catching it when you see it.

Some humans are better equipped for obtaining a deep understanding of the environment and others are best as operating with just a cursory knowledge of the world around them. This aligns pretty well with the old r/K selection theory developed back in the 1960’s. Slow organisms will have a higher investment in fewer offspring and fast organisms will have a lower investment in a greater number of offspring. This also matches pretty well with fertility in humans.

There has been a lot of analysis about what happens to humans made to live quickly in a fast environment. The human biodiversity subculture has produced libraries full of observations and theories on this. The police blotter in a typical American city offers plenty of insight into how this works. People with low impulse control and a high time preference tend to show up in the arrest records, while people built to play the long game of life tend to avoid breaking the law or being victims.

The modern age may be presenting a study of the opposite case. The explosion of technology and media turned up the speed on daily life. Half a century ago the people of Europe would get some news from America a week after it happened. It took that long for the story to get into the American newspapers and then it took a few days to get to the newsrooms of Europe. Obviously, a major event would move along the wires faster, but most newsworthy items took a week or so.

Today, a man living in Yorkshire England can keep up with what is happening in York Pennsylvania at close to the same pace as the man in York PA. One of the odd things about this age is that the British tabloids do a better job covering local news in America than the American media. It is not unusual to find out about a local event from the Guardian UK or the Telegraph. We live in an age in which news travels so quickly that it is impossible to measure. Information is real-time.

One result of this is that the people built for low time preference and focused action are in a world that rewards high time preference and poor impulse control. Look at the billionaire class and many of them got rich from things that no longer exist. Mark Cuban, who is not Cuban, got rich selling his company to Yahoo. The company and the technology it created no longer exist. He is a super-rich man who will leave no footprints behind when his time is done.

Another result is that people no longer feel like they have any control over their lives, because they are being swept along by events. Mark Twain famously said that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed. Today, everything, truth, and falsehood, is halfway around the world by the time anyone knows it exists. Modern man is now being swept along in a current of information that seems to be accelerating so that all he can do is keep his head above the water line.

For people built to live slow, living fast is as alien as it is for the people made to live fast being thrust into a slow world. Part of the growing agitation that is a feature of the current moment may simply be the inability for anyone to keep pace with the deluge of information that comes at them every day. It is not just politics. The workplace has become a land of reaction as well. The cubicle farms are something like a hamster wheel now, but you never get a break.

Fighting Mother Nature is always a losing game. This is the lesson of communism in the 20th century. They simply could not kill enough people to cause Mother Nature to yield to the theory. The technological age may be experiencing the same thing, with a lower body count. Instead, people are slowly beginning to adapt to the reality of their environment by reorganizing it. Cord-cutting is a way to slow down your environment, thus making it more habitable.

Social media seems to be suffering a similar trend. They lie about their membership and activity, but it is pretty clear that we are past the peak of these big platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The former is the domain of old people keeping touch with friends and family, while the latter is a holding pen for the mentally ill. A devolution to smaller, more focused on-line communities is under way. People are unplugging from the system to slow down their life.

There is also a trend where people are moving from the big sprawling suburbs to smaller more rural communities. Some of this was triggered by the Covid panic, where people found themselves at home all day. If you work at home, then your home does not need to be near the big company campus in the big sprawling suburb. Another part is people simply opting out of the fast-paced jungle to something for which they are better adapted and where they can be around similar humans.

Even so, most people remain trapped in a world that is operating at a speed that most people find hostile. At the same time the system needs those people to make it operate as the fast living people lack the other skills to operate it. This conflict in the current age may be why it feels like the system is about to shake itself to pieces. Modernity has become a doomsday device. It is killing the population that created it, but it cannot carry on without the people who created it.

Corruption Of The Soul

Posted on October 27, 2021 by thezman

One way to measure the health of a society is to look at how the ruling elite of that society protects the things that are important to the society. Just as the management of a company cannot micromanage every aspect of the firm, the ruling class cannot make sure every rule and custom is strictly enforced. It has to focus its energy on the big items that make the society possible. From there this attitude will flow down to the lower levels who will enforce the smaller rules.

What the ruling elite of a society does by enforcing the big rules, especially those that manage the affairs of the ruling class, is set the tone. A disciplined ruling class reinforces the idea that the rules matter, and they must be respected. This attitude becomes a habit of mind for the people. On the other hand, a ruling class that has no respect for its own rules helps foster a culture of cheating. If it is okay for the bosses to cheat, then only a sucker follows the rules.

The easy example of this is the Roman Republic. When the families at the top of the social order strictly abided by the rules that governed patricians, the plebeians followed their lead in the minor things. The republican virtue that was necessary for their society was a habit of mind. Once the people at the top stopped enforcing their rules, the rest of the culture followed. Caesar was simply the logical end point of a process of decay that began long before he crossed the Rubicon.

In this age, things like the rule of law, the orderly transition of power and the respect for rational inquiry are the big items of society. Liberal democracies are supposed to be rule-based societies that seek to progress by advances in knowledge. That is done by allowing people to investigate the natural world looking for better solutions to the problems of life. These investigations are to follow a set of rules and ethics that reflect the general morality. Progress is orderly and open.

Recent events make plain that the rule of law has broken down across all levels of American society. The rich always have advantages in the law, but now they operate under a different set of rules entirely. America is now ruled by a pirate class that is free to do what they like to the people. Similarly, the orderly transition of power through the mechanism of elections has become a farce. No one involved has any respect for the rules of democracy and no one can trust the results.

Those seem like things that could be fixed once the geezers at the top of the political system are replaced by a new class of people. There is no guarantee, and the odds are not great, but it seems to most people that there is some hope of fixing these problems through a renewal of the liberal democratic spirit. On the other hand, the respect for rational inquiry and debate appears to be hopelessly lost. We are rapidly reaching a point where dissent is explicitly forbidden in America.

That in itself could be lumped in with the other bits of the system that need reform, but the corruption has gone beyond suppression. It is becoming clear that the culture of mendacity that plagues the political class has become the norm within the realms of science and medicine. A culture of rule breaking at the top of society has fostered a culture of dishonestly within the academic community. Even in the hard sciences the willingness to cheat and lie has become quite common.

A good recent example is the Elizabeth Holmes trial. Everything about her career and the company she created was a fraud. This was plainly obvious to many, but they remained quiet as there is no reward for enforcing the rules. Breaking the rules can make you very rich, so lots of people break the rules. The fact that the state is struggling to put this woman in a cage speaks to the legal corruption. The fact that she exists speaks to the corruption in the academy.

She is not alone. The chief executive of biotech firm Athira Pharma was forced out of her position when she admitted to faking her research. When she was a graduate student, she falsified her findings in a number of studies. Those studies set her up for funding to start the company. They were also used to obtain patents. Despite the fact she is a fraud and her company a sham, she only had to resign, and the company will continue on as if nothing important happened.

The elephant in the room on this topic is Covid. The idea of science has been so corrupted that it is now warping the language. Because the vaccines do not actually work as promised, the language is being changed to fit the crime. It used to be that vaccines provided immunity from infection by a specific virus. Now immunity means a sense of happiness that comes from compliance. You may still die from Covid, or you could become immortal. Who can tell anymore?

Science and its practical application have been the gift from the gods that has allowed man to move beyond his primitive existence. In modern societies it is the thing that is supposed to provide the limits on excess and steadily improve daily life. It is fair to say that trust in scientific and technological progress is the bedrock of modernity. It is the thing that we all trust to keep society anchored to reality. It should be the thing the ruling class protects at all costs, but that is no longer true.

In a world where you cannot trust the important things, the little things become nothing but a matter of opinion or convenience. If the people at the top have no respect for the rule of law, then the people at the bottom will have no reason to follow the law other than fear of punishment. The culture will become one where evading the spirit of the rules is the natural habit of mind. This corruption of the soul of society will corrupt the soul of the people, as we are witnessing today.

Strength In Lying

Posted on October 26, 2021 by thezman

Legend has it that the Persian King Xerxes was confident in his ability to crush the Greeks because he saw them as dishonest men. They lied to one another in their marketplace and in their debates over politics and law. From the perspective of the Persians, a people who allegedly viewed lying as the worst crime possible, this defect would undermine their efforts to resist the Persians. Men who cannot trust one another cannot defend one another when under attack.

We know Xerxes was wrong, if he indeed thought these things. Much of our history of the time comes from Herodotus, who was not afraid to gild the lily when rerecording the history of the Greeks and her enemies. It is a useful insight, however, as the market-based society is, when you think about it, a system where the rewards go to those who are best at deceiving their fellow citizens. More accurately, status comes from deceiving people into thinking you are being honest with them.

The marketplace for goods and services is where sellers misrepresent their goods in order to maximize profit. Sellers exaggerate key features and do not disclose possible defects to potential buyers. On the other hand, the buyer will misrepresent his interests and make claims about finding a better deal from another seller. Both sides haggle trying to take advantage of the other. The dynamic of the marketplace is a game of liar’s poker where cleverness and deceit are rewarded.

Democratic politics is just taking the marketplace idea and applying it to the governance of the society. The sellers are the people with ideas for how to solve problems in society and the buyers are the majority who vote on it. The game is to convince the mob there is a problem and that you have the solution. Being right about the problem or the solution is unimportant. What gets rewarded is convincing fifty percent plus one to go along with your scheme, which makes you the winner.

The recent trial balloon launched by the inner party regarding a wealth tax is a good example of how the lying game works. The idea being floated is that billionaires will be subjected to a new tax that applies to their unrealized capital gains. They will pay a tax based on the potential profit from the sale of certain assets. Presumably, this will apply only to equities, the market value of which can be determined by the current trading price at the time the tax is assessed.

Right away, you see that everything about this is a lie. For starters, how does one determine if you are a billionaire? It is easy when it comes to oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, but further down the list it gets less clear. Calculating net worth is not as straight forward at this level as most assume. Of course, avoiding the tax will spawn an industry to help the rich hide their assets from this tax. Since that exists in other areas, this tax is a boon to the financial schemers who currently serve the rich.

Then you have the impracticality of the idea. When would the tax be levied, and would it be levied on the same asset every year? If you buy a stock in 2021 and it goes up ten percent, you get taxed on the ten percent. If it goes up again in 2022, do you pay a tax on it again or just the increase in 2022? What happens when you pay the tax on unrealized gains that disappear the day after you paid the tax? What about assets held in family trusts? Do they get taxed as well?

The point here is that this is a nutty idea simply on the grounds that it is a wildly complicated solution to a problem that is simple to address. If you really want the rich to pay more tax, you tax them at a higher rate. Treating all income equally is the most straightforward and honest solution. Those gains and losses from investment activity are just another line in the income section of the tax return. Imputed income like stock options is just another entry on the W2.

Of course, this will never become law. It is just a sop to the mouth breathers on the far left who operate on massive corporate platforms while pretending to be anti-capitalists and socialists. It also allows the zombies in Conservative Inc. to come out from under their beds and do their libertarian dance. They get to put on the thin tie, throw on the Flock of Seagulls cassette and carry on like it is 1985. It is party night at the museum where everyone gets to pretend the outside world does not exist.

Everything about this drama is a lie, because it is just a drama. It is a story being told to arouse the passions of the crowd so they stop thinking about things that should matter to them, like the fact that gasoline prices have doubled, or their government lied about the Covid pandemic for two years. This is the nature of democratic politics. The winners are just the best liars. The losers never lose anything. They just have to come up with better lies so they can get another crack at the lying game.

A culture built around rewarding the most devious and dishonest is going to get more of the devious and dishonest. Assuming Herodotus was right about Xerxes, it was an important insight about the nature of democracy. The marketplace society is inevitably a society full of liars. On the other hand, the factious Greeks, and their penchant for lying, did beat the Persians. They did not just defend their lands, they dominated the Persians on land and sea, despite the numerical disadvantages.

It may be that a hidden strength of the marketplace is that because no one can trust anyone and there is no neutral arbiter to enforce honestly, everyone has to be on their game all the time. Therefore, it boils off those who are less clever and less able to live by their own wits. The cost to the collective strength that comes from the lack of trust is less than the benefit that comes from stronger individual members. Deracinated clever liars are better than united trusting morons.

That may be why democracy is such a violent form of government. The Greeks were always fighting with one another and then with the Persians. America is a hyper-violent empire that is always looking to wage war. Perhaps the hidden cost of that hidden strength of the market it is needs an enemy to bind the parts together. The reason liberal democracy looks a lot like fascism is the only way to bind the sticks together is with enemies, real and imagined.

The Madhouse Of Democracy

Posted on October 25, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. It is somewhat relate to the theme of this post, bit from the perspective of the mass media. For those supporting the efforts here, there is a new podcast up behind the green door.

From the middle of the last century until the current age, the choice presented to Americans is the party of more central government versus the party of less central government. State and local government tends to be left out of the discussion, as there is no money in debating it. Regardless, even local elections tend to revolve around the central question of how much government. Team Blue is more, and Team Red is less or not quite as much.

This is one of the central contradictions of liberal democracy. The claim is that democratic systems are inclusive, which means all members of society are able to participate in the process. The political theorist Robert Dahl listed inclusiveness as one of his prerequisites of democracy. Not only are all people included in the process, but all ideas are given a chance to reach the public square. A requirement of democracy is that all ideas are fully heard and fully considered.

The composition of the two parties in America, Team Red and Team Blue, makes it clear that the choices are narrow and exclusive. Despite the fact that both parties preach about the need to get everyone involved, both work to make sure the choices on offer never change. You can have more involvement by the central government in your life or you can have less of it. Put another way, you can have more of what you don’t want, or you can have less of what you need.

A good example is in this American Thinker piece on taxes. The site is fairly representative of Team Red. The claim of the post is that two thirds of Americans paid no federal income taxes. The source is a government sponsored think tank called Tax Policy Center, which publishes this sort of stuff every year. They play the role of Team Red, demanding lower tax rates for rich people. The post concludes that the 60% not paying taxes are being mean to the nation’s rich people.

Interestingly, this sort of rhetoric is not aimed at rich people but aimed at the middle and working class. Rich people are not reading the American Thinker or any of these sites from Conservative Inc. The closest they come is the upper-middle-class person who imagines himself as rich. Otherwise, these sites cater to the people who take orders in exchange for a salary. Many of whom are in that two-thirds the author thinks are selfish jerks for not paying taxes.

Of course, there is another side to this. The mass media is full of opinion writers who make mid-six-figure salaries. Their audience is often the middling members of the managerial class who make similar salaries. The demand here is for the rich to pay their fair share of income taxes, despite the fact that the genuinely rich make their money from things other than salary. In other words, in the name of fairness, the servants of the rich need to pay more tax.

The paradox of modern liberal democracy is that despite its constant exhortations in favor of inclusion, it systematically excludes most options. It is a tails the rich people win or heads the rest of the people lose. There is no option for the guy making $250K per year to get more of what he wants from government at a better rate. The people not paying income tax do not have an option that promises to do some of things they want at a reasonable cost in taxes to them.

The fact is, most of the people who vote Republican want the government to defend cultural norms so they can live their lives in peace. They don’t mind paying taxes and they do not resent rich people for being rich. The people voting Democrat want the government to do a better job looking after the poor and to provide useful services to the middle-class. The people running both parties hate all of that and spend their time pitting the two sides against one another.

That American Thinker post is a good example of how it is done. The claim itself is implausible, which is why the sourcing is so convoluted. Even dishwashers pay some income taxes, so how are two-thirds of households managing to pay their bills if they have no taxable income? The devil lies in the definitions, but the people who churn this stuff out know that no one digs into the details. Instead, it is fed to Team Red with an executive summary they can use in their posts.

In other words, the point of the exercise is to maintain the false choice between the two factions in politics. One side promises that you will get more of what you do not want from government and the other side promises to make sure the government never does any of the things you want from government. Both sides invest a lot of time telling you the other side is to blame for this. Democracy is a false choice in which both sides blame the other for outcomes neither side wanted.

This is why there is no correlation between voting patterns, public opinion, and the final policy results. The more you participate within the parameters of the system, the less you get of the things you want from the system. With each election, this paradox becomes more evident. Voter participation goes up, while voter frustration with the results goes up as well. This illusion of choice logically must lead to some untenable point where the frustration exceeds the capacity of the system.

One of the implications of Robert Dahl’s thinking was that democracy was impossible in a society of any size. Instead, he proposed that what we get from popular government is something he called polyarchy, “a form of government in which power is invested in multiple people”. The state follows certain procedures in order to maintain “the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals”.

Clearly, modern liberal democracy is not responsive to the preferences of the citizens and the people at the top do not see the citizens as equals. Not only is the system not democratic by definition, it is not even the compromise imagined by Dahl. In other words, the real contradiction of liberal democracy is that in its full flowering it is neither liberal nor democratic. It is a collection of false choices and deceptions to mask the realty of a ruling elite impervious to the popular will.

The great irony of liberal democratic politics is that to make it more democratic, more responsive to the will of the people, means abandoning the system entirely. This leads to another contradiction in that the people in it, knowing the choices are not what they desire, insist on picking from the options presented, thinking this will change the options at some future date. Liberal democracy is a madhouse of contradictions that slowly drives the victims of it insane.

Organizational Man

Posted on October 22, 2021 by thezman

Note: The audio quality is a little wonky this week. The opening is a click faster than normal and some bits in the middle are a bit slower than normal. I record these in pieces and when they were spliced together something went wrong. I did not have time to di into it and it is not that big of a deal, but it has been noted.

The response to the show last week was not what I expected, as I did not think the content of the show was all that good. I got a lot of feedback from people who had been involved in organizing and activism. It looks like this is a topic on the minds of people who have experience with trying to organize at the grassroots level. A few people suggested writing about the basics of organizing, which is a good idea. Our side has nothing in that regard. The Left has tons of material.

The closest our side has to handbooks on organizing is stuff people ripped off from the far-left that has been repackaged with a new title. The Alinsky tract Rules for Radicals becomes Rules for Conservative Radicals. Imitating winners is never a terrible idea, but the people in charge organize under different rules than those seeking to oppose or subvert those in charge. The goals are obviously different, but the range of motion is different due to the imbalance of power and resources.

That is why there is a limit as to how much can be borrowed from the Left when it comes to organizing and activism. This starts with the right-wing radical breaking free of the belief that he speaks for a majority. There is no doubt that the majority would nod along to what he says but they will not lift a finger until they get permission from the people in charge, who are the Left. Throwing energy at trying to mobilize those who quietly agree takes away from effective organizing.

This is something I did not include in the show, but it has been a bane of right-wing causes since forever. The Left is always looking to convert people to their cause, while the Right always seeks to mobilize the converted to the moment. This is why the Left is implacable, never taking no for an answer. It is also why the Right so readily accepts defeat and then internalizes it. Left-wing politics is about overcoming popular objections while right-wing politics is about counting noses.

It is a big subject and deserves a much longer treatment. The show this week is mostly thinking out loud about some aspects of organizing. It really would make for a good book, but I need to finish the book I have three quarters finished. Maybe if I ever get that done, I will take a stab at this topic in more detail. It would also make for a good video series, since young people prefer pictures to words. Young people do most of the activism, so they are the proper audience.