The New Bogeyman

Posted on October 21, 2021 by thezman

Last week, the media was buzzing with claims that the Chinese have mastered hypersonic technology. They had flown a hypersonic glider around the globe and then delivered it to a target. Supposedly the glider was capable of carrying and therefore delivering a nuclear weapon. Additionally, the US military claimed to not know how they managed to pull it off. The implication being that the Chinese have now surpassed the American empire in military technology.

The official outlet for the Washington regime promptly put out an essay warning about the threat China now poses. Th point of the essay is to frame the debate over how best to wage the new cold war. One side will be dovish and seek to negotiate, while the other side will be hawkish and want to keep pace with the Chinese. The compromise will be both sides get what they want. This means jobs and cash for the army of managerial class flunkies and military contractors.

The one thing the ruling elite agrees upon is that they need a new enemy and the best one available is the Sino-Russian alliance. On the one hand, the Russians reportedly have magical powers that allow them to muck around in the domestic affairs of the United States and its allies. The Russians are well known meddlers. They are also known for their hacking. The proof of that is Washington has been complaining about Russian meddling and hacking for years.

While the Russians are the brains of the operation, China is being cast as the muscle, supplying the men and arms to threaten the world. Until now everyone understood that Chinese military technology was not cutting edge. China has always been a land-based civilization, so that means no blue water navy and no ability to project power too far beyond her borders. That is why these Chinese hypersonic stories are being planted in regime friendly media outlets.

Even in a cynical age, the power of the mass media is real. The steady beating of the drums about China even has the antiwar people alarmed. The American Conservative opposed all of the wars against the Muslims, but it is now hawkish on China. They are even going in for the “we must defend an abstract concept” ploy that has always been popular with the regime. In this case, China threatens the “alliance system” which is suddenly the most important thing ever.

Interestingly, none of the newly minted China hawks have shown any interest in alternatives to another pointless cold war. America could use economic tools to put pressure on the Chinese. There is no way the Chinese can continue to operate without trade with the US. It is a two-way street, of course, but America outsourced its manufacturing base to China so a handful of men could get richer, not because we lacked domestic resources to make our own stuff.

More important, the American empire controls the very basis of the global economy, which is the money supply. China and Russia can make a show out of trading with one another in their own currencies, but the rest of the world is never abandoning the dollar as the reserve currency. Every wealthy Chinaman has reserves of dollars stashed away in Western banks. As a result, America can put an enormous amount of pressure on the ChiComs without a single carrier leaving port.

Of course, no one seems to be interested in the absurdity of having a tense military stand-off with China yet simultaneously conducting massive amounts of business with her at the same time. Imagine if in the Cold War American business was outsourcing critical supply chains to Russia. How about in the last great war, key industries were sold off to the Germans? That is what is being proposed, in effect, with this stand-off with the Chinese over Taiwan.

Then you have the fact that the people rolling out this new campaign to create an enemy for the regime are the same people who told us that Saddam was the new Hitler and a threat to the world. They told us they were bringing democracy to Afghanistan, and they have been telling us Syria uses chemical weapons on its people. They are the same people who said Islam was a threat to the West then massively increased the number of Muslims settling in the West.

It should not take too much cynicism to think that maybe the people who have lied before are possibly lying now. After all, they lied about the nuclear program in Iraq in the face of technological reality. Building a bomb is very hard, requires massive resources and lots of smart people. Iraq had none of those things. Similarly, the West has been working with hypersonic gliders for generations. So far, they have proven to be expensive toys without much military use.

The fact is the threat from China is not really from China but from the pirates that run the economy who like doing business with China. The threat is the Western scientist who are willing to take Chinese money to perform forbidden research. It is the American tech companies willing to sellout the country for the opportunity to make money helping the Chinese communists. China is a symptom of a much graver problem, one that exists in the ruling class of the American empire.

There is money to be made in the next hoax, so everyone with the dream of living in the clouds will be happy to jump on it. Conservatives will be allowed to pretend they matter again, so they love this idea. The military industrial project will get new batches of cash to buy new toys. The think tanks around DC will get cash to write papers that no one will ever read. Meanwhile the middle-class will continue to shrink, and millions of barbarians will keep pouring over the border.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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The Reality Of The Show

Posted on October 20, 2021 by thezman

If a man had fallen asleep in 1980 and woke up in this age, he would be amazed at many things. We can easily think of the technological stuff like social media, Zoom calls and mobile devices. Then you have the cynical stull like the failure get back to the moon, much less Mars. One less obvious change is the explosion of entertainment and the public obsession with being entertained. Forty years ago, people did not expect to be constantly entertained throughout their day.

One aspect of the saturation of entertainment is how public affairs transformed into something like Vaudeville. People dream up new acts and new characters to play on-line and on television. If the act works, we get a flood of imitators. Once that runs its course, someone cooks up a new way to separate from the rest of the performers and they have their run on the big stage. Politics in this age is pure theater, centered on various acts making claims to certain audiences.

Unlike jugglers or sword swallowers, political theater is not transactional. In the conventional form, entertainment is about the performer getting your attention, which causes you to pay to see their act. There is no connection between the audience and the performer, beyond the implicit agreement that he will do his best to entertain you and you will applaud when he does. In political theater, you are supposed to care about the performer and do what you can to boost his career.

This post over at American Greatness gets at this odd nature of political entertainment with regards to Conservative Inc.. The post is a takeoff on something Michael Anton said about the conservative rackets. Wealthy people lavish conservative rackets with cash, despite the fact they accomplish nothing. In fact, it is fair to say that Conservative Inc. is just an enabler of the things they pretend to oppose. In other words, they lose on purpose, and they know they are losing on purpose.

The post goes on to talk about how easily conservative donors are duped by people like Jonah Goldberg or Ramesh Ponnuru into handing over cash. National Review just raised $100,000 on-line despite having no audience outside the institutions of Conservative Inc. and even that is debatable. The Bulwark and Dispatch have billionaire support even though they have no audience. Why is it that smart people with money are easily fooled by these hustlers?

One reason is the nature of political entertainment. When you watch a movie or television show, it is a passive act. There is a clear divide between you and the performers on stage. In political theater, each member of the audience is drawn into the act, feeling like they have an impact on the performance. Even when it is not interactive, the person watching tends to feel like his caring about what he sees and hears can change what is happening in the show.

Jonah Goldberg is a useful example in that he is one of the more successful political entertainers of this age. He is also a creature of the new political entertainment that emerged in the 1990’s with the widescale adoption of the internet. He started out fetching coffee for the far-left extremist Ben Wattenberg, who had a long running show on state television. In prior times, this would have been about as far as Goldberg would go in the realm of current events programming.

Instead, he landed the role of internet slacker for National Review’s new on-line venture that was aimed at a younger and hipper crowd. Goldberg’s role required him to blend official dogma with snarky pop culture references. Early in his role, he often made jokes about his slacker lifestyle. He invited readers to e-mail him, and he would often post about the exchanges. Later, comments were added to the site, and he would respond to them from time to time.

Goldberg got famous and very rich despite being as dumb as a goldfish and peddling boilerplate neoconservatism. The reason for this is his fans felt like they were a part of his act and there were having an impact on what he was saying. Despite the fact that he and his neocon cronies have slithered back to the Left, many of his fans still follow him at his new venture. In other words, even after it is clear that Goldberg would happily gas his readership, many remain engaged with him.

The main result of the relationship between political performers and their marks is that they are able to transfer their interests onto the audience. That is, the audience for this stuff cares about things that are good for the guys who they follow. The donors who get to have dinner with the team at the Dispatch are not thinking about the issues being promoted so much as the people promoting them. They feel like they are part of the show and have some input on the performance.

Conservative Inc. is a long sophisticated confidence game. It was not always this way, but it evolved into a racket in the 1990’s. It coincides with the explosion of mass media and the emerging entertainment culture. Going back to the Rip Van Winkle at the start of this post, he would be baffled by how people identify themselves by the types of entertainment they consume. Putting your sports teams in your social media profile would seem bizarre to a man from the 1980’s.

This is something Ryszard Legutko noted in his excellent book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. Legutko is a polish politician who was involved in the Solidarity Movement. Among many excellent observations, he notes the lack of seriousness in liberal democratic politics. Everyone is consumed with leisure and being entertained. Adults are encouraged to act like children, even in areas like politics which should be the domain of the sober minded.

In this light, the boiling off of serious political actors from the large public stages is perfectly rational. The serious critics of the war machine, for example, may be correct in their observations, but they get marginalized because they do not offer the larger audience the thing they crave. They are the party poopers who yell at the people at the party for not caring about some cause. Worse yet, they remind adults that they are acting like children, so they are shunned.

The same can be said for the fringe on the other side. Immigration patriots are not littering their commentary with pop culture references. They are not flattering their audience with the promise that if they care enough, the ending of the show will be just as they imagined. Instead, they warn about demographic collapse and that is just a total downer, and no one wants to hear it. The most hated man is the serious person in a room full of silly people looking for a good time.

What this suggests is that outsiders have two choices. One is to put on the grease paint and get out there and please the crowd. The people demanding Medicare for all need to make it fun to care about such things. The Straussian critics of conservatism have to put on a better show, out-clown people like David French. Otherwise, the alternative is to work the small stage waiting for when the times need serious men and the people in charge are not up for the task.

Those are not pleasant options, but adults are supposed to accept that often the choices are not very good. Serious people know that the best you can do sometimes is play a bad hand so you can play the next hand. They are also supposed to know that society is a big complicated thing and you cannot easily alter it. often, you just have to let things play out and prepare for it. The antidote to frivolity is not more frivolity but a sober-minded acceptance of reality, no matter how unpopular.

The Really Big Lie

Posted on October 19, 2021 by thezman

One of the unexamined parts of the current crisis in the West is that much of it is related to an opposition to nationalism. It is an axiom of the ruling ideology that nationalism is the worst thing ever and that stamping it out is a primary concern. In Europe, there are laws against the concept. People are jailed for promoting it. In the United States, nationalism is linked to the deadly sin of racism. The term white nationalism has become a synonym for racism and antisemitism.

Without much evidence, it is asserted that nationalism is the cause of the great horrors of the modern age. For generations now children have been taught that nationalism was the cause of the two great industrial wars of the 20th century. Paradoxically, they also are taught that nationalism is to blame for colonialism. Today it is claimed that white people being themselves as a people, currently called whiteness, is the cause of everything that ails nonwhites in the West.

The supernatural quality of nationalism is often aided by the people who promote what they think of as nationalism. They try to “own the insult” by parading around as the bogeymen the ruling mythology associates with nationalism. This serves to reinforce the mythology around nationalism. Others argue in favor of nationalism by first accepting that it was a real thing in the past. They say we need to return to a past state in order to avoid the fate of internationalism.

The reality is that nationalism does not have much of a resume. It has no roots in the ancient past. The Ancients certainly understood the concept of a people in the natural sense of it. They did not have a concept for a political entity tied to the natural concept of a people. Linking a people to the land they occupy in the way that modern Zionists would define a nation did not exist. People could claim territory, but the territory was not defined by the people in the way nationalists imagine.

Of course, after the fall of the Western Roman empire the land we think of as Europe was divided up into kingdoms. These kingdoms were made up of various people with their own language and their own claims to the land. The armies of these kingdoms were made up of various ethnicities. The King of People X could Fight the King of People Y using soldiers from the kingdom of his opponent or from kingdoms not involved in the conflict. They were mercenaries.

The first real hint of nationalism in Europe, or anywhere for that matter, was in The Hundred Years’ War, fought between the kingdoms of England and France during the Late Middle Ages. When it started in the 14th century, both sides used armies of mixed ethnicity, often from each other’s territory. By the end it was much more of a war between people united around their identity as a people. Historians argue this was the first flicker of nationalism in Europe.

Even so, nationalism did not catch fire in the late Late Middle Ages. The Thirty Years War had a strong nationalist overtone. It is generally framed as a religious war, but the partisans were also distinguished by their ethnicity. The Bohemian Revolt was as much about not wanting to be ruled by a foreigner as it was a revolt of Protestants against a Catholic monarch. Even so, it was mostly a struggle between the Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties, rather than a national struggle.

You have to get into the 20th century before nationalism is a real thing with real power to unite people. The current mythology says that nationalism, especially German nationalism, was the cause of the Great War. The conflict between Germany and France drew in the rest of the great powers, including America. After the war, nationalism was blamed for the horrible destruction of the Continent. This is the origin of anti-nationalism that is central to our ruling ideology.

Yet a brief examination of Europe at the start of the conflict makes rather clear that nationalism was not the issue. The nation-state was not a real thing. The Central Powers were the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and a collection of small kingdoms. There was the French Republic on the Allied side, but the British Empire and Russian Empire made up the other two parts of the Triple Entente that was the basis for the Allied side.

Of course, we now see that America was already an empire by the time she joined the fight in Europe. Yankeedom had conquered the South in the Civil War, then spent the rest of the 19th century conquering the continent. She chased Europe out of the Americas in the Spanish – American. It is fair to assume that America would have annexed Canada and much of Mexico if not for the opportunity to conquer Europe and Asia in the two world wars.

Putting that aside, the Great War was not a war of national identity or a war between national identities. It was an industrialized version of all previous imperial wars in Europe, waged between empires over resources. National identity played a role, but the primary cause was internationalism and what we call globalism. One of the great first acts of modern propaganda was turning a war between empires into a brief against the antidote to empire, which is nationalism.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Wilsonian post-war project to bring peace to Europe was not rooted in one-worldism. The League of Nations was built on the premise that people had a right to exist and have defined territories. Disputes over trade and boundaries would be adjudicated peacefully through an organization of nations, rather than war. It is not unreasonable to say that the seed of democracy was that the default human organization was the nation.

The only bit of history the anti-nationalists can point to for their forever war against nationalism is the rise of fascism. Fascism was a rejection of the internationalism of communism and the pluralism of liberal democracy. Because of certain events that happened in this time, nationalism has become synonymous with a particular brand of fascism that no longer exists. This is what gives nationalism its supernatural quality that is so vital to the liberal democratic project.

The trouble here is that this flicker of nationalism in the heart of Europe was met with overwhelming force by the great internationalist coalition. International communism linked arms with international liberalism to smash nationalism. As a practical matter, the influence of nationalism is only as a bogeyman that was once a real thing, but now exists only in the imagination of the current ruling class. Opposition to fascism is a mystical version of internationalism for stupid people.

To add an additional layer of irony to all of this is the fact that the proponents of various forms of Marxism and liberal democracy claim that the failures are due to the imperfect implementation of these ideologies. In other words, after centuries of effort, real Marxism has never been tried. Real democracy has never existed. Nationalism, which has never been tried, killed in the cradle by internationalism, is condemned as a failed ideology of the bygone era.

That said, history says that there is something compelling about internationalism that allows it to thrive in spite of its body count. They say that 100 million have been murdered at the hands of Marxists. How many have been murdered by liberal democrats is never discussed. Tens of millions for sure. Awash in the blood of the innocent, sacrificed to the various schemes of internationalism, the dream of the great universal utopia of man remains alive.

Further, history suggests that the mundane realty of nationalism lacks that special something that compels men to not just die for it but kill for it. Dying for a dream is easy, because it is usually involuntary. Killing for the dream takes courage and the internationalists have never been short of it. Nationalists, in contrast, have never been able to match it. It lacks the transcendent quality, the promise of something beyond the daily reality of the human condition.

That said, even though the resume of nationalism is scant, its power to inspire the enemies of humanity as it does suggests there is something to it. Perhaps locked inside the undeveloped concept of nationalism is something that can truly inspire. Maybe that is the great secret of internationalism, the really big lie at the heart of it all. If Western man ever truly explored his nationalistic impulse, internationalism would be wiped from the planet and peace among nations would be achieved.

Boycott The Vote

Posted on October 18, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Taki post is here and the topic is related to this post. In fact, this post builds on the ideas in the Taki post. For those in search of audio stimulation, the Sunday podcast is up behind the green door.

Donald Trump finally got the attention of Republican leaders the other day when he said that unless they addressed the 2020 election shenanigans, his supporters will not bother to vote in upcoming elections. This got the usual suspects out to denounce him as a Hitler plotting to do Hitler things. Regime media was flooded with boilerplate articles about how there was no evidence to support his claims. Some Republicans were sent out to denounce him for his dangerous rhetoric.

This little bit of drama is interesting in that it suggests that some portion of the electorate is making the next logical step. If you cannot get what you want at the ballot box, either because the vote is rigged or the choices are false, then why vote? If those conditions are true, then voting becomes self-sabotage. When you vote, you are endorsing the process and its results. Voting in a rigged election is, in effect, validating the rigged process and the people rigging it.

The fact that it has taken close to a year for anyone to reach this next logical step in evaluating the last election shows the power of conditioning. Everyone has been conditioned since childhood to believe that voting is a requirement of citizenship and not voting is therefore an abdication of duty. You cannot complain about the system if you do not participate in the system is the logic of democracy. The only acceptable participation is voting for one of the two parties.

It is a bizarre logic when you consider it. Popular entertainment is full of plots where the star is faced with two bad choices and refuses to accept them. Instead, he creates a third choice to save the day. Every business school trains students on how to think beyond the choices on offer. “Thinking outside the box” is considered to be the hallmark of the modern entrepreneur. People like Elon Musk are celebrated because they allegedly refuse to accept the conventional answer.

Only in politics is it that no one is ever allowed to question the options put forward by the two political parties each election. This exception to the rule of thinking outside the box is necessary because the system requires it. For example, if “none of the above” was an option in most elections, that would often be the winner. This is why it is never an option on the ballot. Otherwise, even the dullest Republican voter would begin to think that maybe he should have another option.

Of course, one of the weapons that the system has always used to prevent people from thinking outside the box regarding politics is hyper-partisanship. “If you don’t vote for more of the same, the other side will win.” This was the standard line from people like Jonah Goldberg in the Bush years. Staying home was a vote for the other side, so you had to hold your nose and vote for the Republicans. It was effective until 2006 when the odor was so bad that no amount of nose holding was possible.

The neocons conveniently forgot about that in 2016, but they went to great effort to avoid saying they would boycott the election. Even they saw the danger of unleashing that option on the system. Conservative Inc. was mortally wounded when they could not explain how their boycott of Trump was not an endorsement of Clinton. They were either voting for what they said was evil or they were boycotting the election, something they said was morally unacceptable.

That last bit has always been a lie. Boycotting elections has been a part of democratic systems since forever. During the Cold War, the United States government would encourage boycotts in places being subverted by communists. Alternatively, the protest vote has always been a part of the American system. Organizing people to throw their vote away on a ridiculous option is just another form of boycott. You are forcing onto the ballot the words “none of the above”.

Getting back to Trump and his boycott claim, he was never more than a wrecker, which is what the times require. He will never organize a boycott or even completely endorse such a campaign. He will talk about it. For good or ill, if he talks about something it becomes news. Just mentioning the idea of boycotting the midterm is more than enough to normalize the idea for unhappy voters. Sitting out, perhaps loudly sitting out the election, becomes the best way to participate.

If you look at the upcoming midterm, there are maybe 25 seats that are genuinely up for grabs with another 25 that might tip that way. The Democrats currently hold 220 seats and the Republicans 212 seats. The seats that will decide the House will be won with just over 50% of the vote in those districts. In other words, even a poorly organized boycott could prevent the Republicans from getting the House. It is a low cost, high reward strategy to send a message.

Now, even a highly organized national boycott of the midterms, where Democrat voters join in will change little in terms of policy. The people who control the two parties will remain in control. What changes is public perception of politics. This system requires the broad public to think voting matters. If they come to see that voting is just ceremonial, a play put on to keep them pacified, then the system cracks. At the minimum, it brings the system to crisis.

There are no easy answers to generational problems, but normalizing the idea of a boycott helps create a morality outside the prevailing orthodoxy. If 20% of people think that boycotting the system is the moral choice, they are in effect rejecting the morality of the established order. It is a peaceful revolt. Once people get used to revolting in their minds, they can revolt against the system. Normalizing the revolt of the mind is a prerequisite for any challenge to the prevailing order.

The Death Of Fringe

Posted on October 15, 2021 by thezman

While putting the show together, something that came to mind is how people on our side seem to be getting wise to certain things. The old gags are not working, at least not as well as they did in the past. Those coming over the great divide have learned some hard lessons about politics in the process. This is why Conservative Inc. has not been able to spin the events of the last five years into new fundraising. Many people really have caught onto their tricks.

Part of it is a greater awareness of the political grifter. Way back in the Obama years, I would drop the word “grifter” into the comment section of a conservative site and most of the responses were asking me what the term meant. Ten years ago, no one used the term and very few people talked about politics as a confidence game. Today the word grifter is used all the time. There is a much greater awareness of the political conmen and the tricks they play on the unsuspecting.

One result of this is people are less willing to get behind someone who steps forward to present themselves as the next face of the cause. The stories about groups like Proud Boys and Oaf Keepers being run by the FBI has opened a lot of eyes. Increasingly, the default assumption is that whoever the media is trying to elevate is not on the level or is just an agent of the state. The FBI shenanigans over the last five years has made many people into cynics when it comes to activism.

This is an example of unintended consequences. The best tool the system had was to herd normal people into these false alternatives. For generations conservatism was the place where normal people rallied to defend themselves. It never worked, of course, but that was the point. Without the Potemkin movements, it is going to be much more difficult for the system to organize the resistance into dead end causes or have them rally around fraudulent leaders.

It will make genuine organizing more difficult, but that is probably a good thing as it will require better people. If you can easily get a mob together online, and no one cares to check out the people in the mob, it is easy pickings for the bad guys. When an organizer has to work hard to gain trust and build his organization, you get a better class of organizer. He is going to be much more circumspect about the sorts of people he lets into his thing he worked so hard to build.

This is something that happened in Tsarist Russia. There was widespread unhappiness with the system in the middle of the 19th century, but the people organizing against the Tsar were low quality people. It took time to move past that phase and to a place where you had serious men building serious organizations of other serious men. The last decade of the Soviet empire had a similar transition. Perhaps resistance must be born of cynicism for it to be genuine resistance.

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

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Why Outsiders Fail
22:00: Examples
42:00: Failure Avoidance

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Lessons From Collapse

Posted on October 14, 2021 by thezman

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it did not descend into chaos or have a long period where no one was in charge. It was a process that began with the power struggle between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. This power struggle undermined the power of the party and eventually the government. Into the void flowed a new source of power and authority, the oligarchs. These were men with control of key assets who backed Yeltsin’s privatization plans for the economy.

Those oligarchs did not spring from nothing. Some were key party figures who had controlled aspects of the Soviet economy, but most were privateers who operated in the shadow economy of the Soviet system. They held posts in the Soviet system but had extensive contacts in the criminal underground. As the power of the state declined, the power of the underwound economy grew. When the system collapsed, they became the power centers providing control of the country.

This was not unique to the Soviet system. Whenever power begins to wane, alternative centers of power begin to flourish. There is a period in which the real power exists in these distributed power centers, but the façade of the old system remains. Collapse is merely the formal recognition of reality. Germany in the interwar years is another example of what happens when there is a power vacuum. The fascists did not spring from nothing. They had roots in German history and culture.

The Western Roman Empire is probably the best example of the process of collapse and what follows. For a long time, the empire was mostly a fiction. The daily life of the people was controlled by the local powers, the large landowners. These local authorities had power through ownership of land and authority through the administration of the law and regulation of local economics. They even supplied local security in addition to providing men to fight in the legions.

The latifundia was what we would think of today as a plantation. It was the closest thing to agribusiness in the ancient world. It was a large parcel of land worked by slaves for the purpose of export. By the late stages of the empire, these enterprises were common throughout the empire. After the empire, they became the basis of what we understand to be feudalism. The slaves became peasants, and the landowners became the feudal lords controlling the administration of Western Europe.

There was a lot more going on at the end of the Western Roman Empire, but a critical and necessary element was the rise of distributed power centers. Like the ethnic gangsters in the Soviet Union, these agricultural enterprises initially filled in the gaps of the system to keep it functioning. In time they began to rival the power of the empire and when the empire collapsed, they filled the void left behind. The resulting system was built around those local centers of power.

Just as there is a point at which a number of grains of sand becomes a pile of sand, there is a point where the decentralized power centers go from subservient to the central authority to rivaling the central authority. There is a paradox at work in that we can know this point exists but can never identify it with certainty. How many grains of sand constitutes a pile? At what point do people look first to the oligarch for leadership rather than the central authority?

It is a useful question to consider, because there was a point of no return in the Soviet Union just as there was in the Western Roman Empire. Many of those oligarchs in Russia were just the guys who noticed it first. Mikhail Fridman was active in the underground economy in the later years of the Soviet Union and quickly moved to the newly privatized economy as soon as it was possible. Like most of the oligarchs, he was an early adopter who saw the writing on the wall.

In other words, the men who would eventually become the oligarchs after the fall of communism were the first to see that the old system was doomed and something else was coming to replace it. They did not know or care what was coming. They just wanted to profit from the chaos. In fact, when the opportunity arose, they promoted the chaos, backing Yeltsin over Gorbachev because it was good for business. They profited from the collapse before anyone saw the collapse coming.

In current year America, this is relevant because it suggests that the American empire has been in collapse for a long time know. The rise of the financial oligarchs in the late-1980’s and 1990’s was one sign. The rise of Silicon Valley oligarchs as a rival power center to Washington is another. The assault on small business and the middle class by the combined power of the oligarchs and the political class is analogous to the late years of the Soviet system.

In other words, the American empire may already be in collapse. The geezers in Washington are allowed to pretend they are in charge as it benefits the oligarchs, but they have no real power. Legislation is written by the army of scribes known as lobbyists and think tanks, underwritten by the oligarchs. Elections are determined by the money and media supplied by those same oligarchs. The real power lies in boardrooms and villas, while the political system is just a show.

The Soviet and Roman examples suggest such arrangements never last as reality eventually forces its way to the front. In Russia, the oligarchs were brought to heel by the one universal source of power. Vladimir Putin, with the support of the intelligence community and the military was able to reassert civil control of Russia. The oligarchs still exist, but enough have been killed, exiled, or jailed to make sure the rest know who wields the real power in the country.

This is the other shoe to drop in the American empire. The intelligence services have real power, as we saw with the FBI efforts to overturn the 2016 election. The military has real power but lacks real leadership. Their willingness and ability to thwart Trump’s efforts to get out of Syria and Afghanistan should be of concern. Somewhere in the officer ranks there is a man with the skill and desire to change the relationship between the military and the decaying civil control.

Historical analogies are never perfect and are useful only in comparing the broad outlines of times and places. A smooth landing for the empire is not guaranteed any more than Caesarism is a certainty. The military could blunder the empire into a war it cannot win and destroy its credibility in the process. A financial collapse could lead to a popular revolt against the oligarchs. Of course, there is the looming demographic crisis that will bring unimaginable social upheaval.

Even so, what history is telling us is that the American empire is well past the point where reform is possible. It is past the point where the decaying system of imperial control can expect to outlive its current operators. The system is on life support and powerful interests are evolving in response to this reality. The collapse is now certain, but the timing is what is unknown. Another lesson of history here is that no one saw the Soviet collapse coming. The end is always a surprise.

State Of Fear

Posted on October 13, 2021 by thezman

There are many theories as to why the managerial class of America enthusiastically embraces the nutty social fads. California now has a law requiring “gender neutral” toy aisles in stores, for example. One crazy putting this into a bill is understandable, but why did everyone else go along with it? Why does anyone go along with the loopy idea of gender at all? It is not a real thing. Humans are male and female. Everyone has known this for thousands of years.

This is just one example, but the pattern is always the same. Certainly, some do it out of fear of losing face. The oriental nature of the managerial class is easily missed, but the whole face saving thing is where you see it. That is not a normal quality of Northern European people. It is what you see in a small, tightly knit people, but it is a real thing in our managerial class. They fear being seen as outside the current cultural norms of their class, so everyone plays along.

You can really tell this when you run into someone who is in the habit of announcing her pronouns in her workplace. The low level people are most prone to peer pressure, so they jump on these fads with as much enthusiasm as they can muster. The trouble is she still interacts with normal people. When she breaks out the pronouns around a normal, she has the look you see with people struggling with mental illness. She is not sure if what she is saying is what she is thinking.

This is how a minority within the managerial class is able to exert so much power over the rest of the class. That California requirement on toy aisles is no doubt the product of a lone crazy, but fear of exclusion prevented everyone else from speaking out against an obviously insane idea. No one wants to be the one who is seen rejecting the morality of the whole. In a world where the most insane ideas get embraced, who wants to risk opposing this nutty idea?

Even so, the managerial system selects for conformity, but it also allows for the crazies who cook up these ideas. In other words, it selects for a conformity that makes exception for anti-social behavior and it selects for people who are always looking to undermine the dominant culture. Put another way, the personality type most prized is the sadistic subversive with a passion for enforcement. The most perverted people are the most highly regarded in our ruling class.

Another angle to this, perhaps, is that the general belief system of the managerial class is highly conformist. The reason is the people at the top have no natural authority to legitimize their positions. The result is a rigid culture that allows for very little creativity and originality. The exception is when it comes to offending the normal people of society, which is what separates the managerial class from everyone else. You can be weird as long as it offends the normals.

The resulting culture is one that is extremely intolerant of deviation, yet desperate for innovated ways to undermine tradition. The reason these cultural fads are increasingly ridiculous is they are running out of things to smash. When you have already put gay men in jock straps on parade floats and made everyone remain silent about it, finding something more offensively ridiculous is not easy. They jumped on drag queen story hour out of desperation for something new.

The austere conformity is not seen by those who operate outside the domains of the Cloud People, so the quiet desperation is not obvious. Venture inside and what will be most striking is the humorlessness. People smile and laugh a little, but there is an uncanny valley quality to it. They laugh like people who read about how humans laugh from time to time. Say something intended as a joke and they will look at one another for permission to laugh at what the alien said.

The state of fear within the managerial class cannot be underestimated. The ritualized sacrifice of that football coach over his heresy is not intended for the Dirt People the NFL preys upon. That was for the Cloud People. In a world where ritualized human sacrifice is accepted as normal, fear of violating the rules, even by accident, is a very real concern for these people. The threat of exile works the same as Stalin’s gulag worked in the Soviet Union.

This is why no one in the media ever asks the obvious questions when the various talking robots are put out for question and answer periods. A group of normal people in the White House press room would cause the face plate of Jen Psaki to fall off by coordinating their questions and tangling her up in her lies. This never happens because normals are never allowed inside. The people allowed inside know they can easily be replaced by actors if they get out of line.

That was the point of the Kamala Harris video. Not only did they use child actors, but Harris also clearly performed like a well-trained actress. To normal people it is just more evidence that these people are sociopaths and liars. Inside the world of politics, it is a message. There are plenty of unemployed actors willing to play politician, reporter and so on, so make sure you know your lines before filming. Democracy is just the theater portion of the managerial system that rules America.

A ruling class rooted in fear of deviation but permitted to undermine that which makes their existence possible is not one that can last. We are seeing this with the growing economic crises. No one dares suggest anything other than what is being done, so they are frozen in place, hoping for a miracle. The Afghanistan debacle is another example of how extreme conformity results in disaster. No one dared question the plan or adjust it on the fly, so the plan just slammed into the rocks of reality.

The is the crisis of today. The ossified geezer class at the top of the system have insulated themselves against all possible reform. They rule their system through fear and manufactured consent. The only relief for the people in it is the orchestrated subversions like gender neutral toy aisles. Like starving men fighting for crumbs, they jump at these opportunities at something resembling life. Subversion is the bit of sunlight that comes through their prison windows.

The Microcosm Of Sport

Posted on October 12, 2021 by thezman

Like most things in the current age, professional sport has become a degenerate mockery of itself. The presentation is a high-tech vaudeville act that is now mostly advertisements and propaganda. The people in charge of the various sports are the worst this age can muster. The participants are vulgar carnies. Despite the best efforts of this age, however, sport continues to provide an insight into our times. It is a microcosm of the larger society in which it operates.

For example, football was always the second sport in America, up until the explosion of mass media in the 1980’s. In fact, football was probably behind sports like boxing and horse racing, not just baseball. The explosion of television rocketed football to the top of sport entertainment because it was a natural for the medium. It provides a stage that fits the screen, has breaks for ad space and is a weekly happening. The NFL quickly became a lightly scripted television sports drama.

The mass media culture made the NFL in particular, and football in general, the king of the sports entertainment industry. Like the culture as a whole, the apparent success of the league masks the problems. Ownership has given way to a class of mercurial operators with no loyalty to the local communities. Their greed has resulted in a steady decline in the product. While ratings have seen a boost so far this year, general interest has been in decline for the last decade.

A big reason for that is the product. Kids are not playing football at the youth level, like they used to, so the number of young males moving through the system is in decline, meaning that the quality of player has declined. You see that with the quarterback position, which is the most challenging. The sudden decline in the number of white kids playing youth ball means a decline in the positions requiring smarts. One result is the position has become more “athletic”.

Of course, modernity destroys social capital, and youth sports are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to social cohesion. When America was based on strong white communities, it had lots of white fathers volunteering to coach sports, run youth leagues and so on. As the white population declines, white volunteers decline. As society becomes more diverse, which brings deracination and alienation, the organic structures that make youth sports possible decline.

The men running the sport are not concerned about that as they are not the sort to invest in society. They just assume they can pack up their stuff and move onto the next society once all the life from this one has been drained. These are post-Americans who operate as pirates. Like the global economy that spawned them, they ride the waves of globalism. America is just the place where they can operate at the moment, a pirate’s cove that means nothing to them.

The NFL is also riddled with scandal. Its team in Washington is owned by a degenerate who is one scandal after another. To distract from the latest scandal, DEA agents raiding their facilities, the league instructed their media to focus on manufactured crises involving coaches. For a while, the media was obsessing over the coach of the Jacksonville franchise. They keep making up stories about him, relying on imaginary sources and manufactured internet chatter.

The coach of the league’s Las Vegas franchise was just forced to resign when it was learned he held normal opinions about gays and blacks. His e-mails magically appeared in the media just when the DEA came calling. It was an orchestrated hit, probably with the help of that team’s owner, in order to get out of paying the contract. It could also be part of the effort to distract from the looming narcotics scandal. The DEA does not raid famous people because of a paperwork discrepancy.

This stuff is a microcosm of the ruling class. They got these e-mails from a previous investigation of their Washington team. Then they used those e-mails from that prior scandal to distract attention from the current scandal. Those e-mails were handed to a reporter, who did not bother to mention the source of them. Once the coach addressed the issue another batch of e-mails was delivered to the New York Times. They did not mention their source either. Imagine that.

Like the political media, the sports media is owned by the system. They are the ministry of truth blasting out what the league tells them to say. If one of them gets froggy and does genuine reporting, he is dismissed from his post. YouTube and Twitter are full of people who would be happy to play the role of jock sniffer. Everyone in the ministry of truth knows this, so they play along. To borrow a phrase from Theodore Dalrymple, the media is a collection of emasculated liars.

Right there is the last five years of Washington politics. The system manufacturing fake scandals in order to hide real scandals. The media, which still claims to be impartial observers, plays along because they have not choice. They are servants. The result is the real crimes get pushed to the shadows, while nonsense stories fill the air, often used to discredit people asking too many questions. This is rule by sociopath. It is a reflection of the ruling class as a whole.

The Gruden affair is a perfect moment to see the reality of this age. He is a person who holds normal opinions about things like race and gays. In private he talks like what normal people would expect from a sports coach. He is being hurled into the void on a morality charge by people who lie on spec. The relatively normal guy is condemned by the carny trash as morally unfit. That’s America in a nutshell. Our moral arbiters are vulgar degenerates and sociopaths.

The problems we see with professional sports in America reflect the problems of the West in general. Sport is a Western thing. Other people compete in small ways, but organized sporting activity is part of European man. There is a reason there is no equivalent of the NFL in Africa. Big time sports need big time societies and those societies will always be European societies. The other people of the world simply lack the capacity to produce these cultural artifacts.

As the West declines, sport has now declined with it. The people running pro sports, active in the destruction of the West, are operating under the delusion that they can survive the decline of Western people. In fact, many are driven by a desire to create a post-European world. This is what you see everywhere in the ruling class. You also see that it is unsustainable. Without the necessary human capital, these manifestations of Western culture cannot last and they will not last.

Fruit Of The Poisoned Tree

Posted on October 11, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki column is up. The topic this week is the increasingly familiar and obvious Jim Snow laws of America. Behind the green door we have the weekly Sunday podcast where I rant and rave about the world.

In every form of human organization there are layers of responsibility. The simplest way of expressing it is that at the top there is always the boss who is the guy making the important decisions for the organization. Everyone else, in one fashion or another, takes orders from the boss and carries out the orders. Always at the bottom are people who just do what they are told. The vertical arrangements are one of the truths of work life that everyone just accepts without much thought.

More formally, at the top layer of an organization, like a business, are the big decision makers for the organization. Below them are the policy makers. They take the big initiative and turn it into rules and plans. Below them are the people who make those rules and plans into reality. This is the layer most people inside and outside the organization see. They instruct the bottom layer of the organization, train them and making sure they follow through on their orders.

The important part of this arrangement is that everyone in the organization understands their role within the organization. The private in a rifle platoon has to understand that his role is to follow the orders given him by is squad leader or platoon leader. His job is not to determine strategy or decide on objectives. Similarly, the guy on the shop floor has to know his duty is to perform the role he is assigned at a workstation. Otherwise, the organization breaks down and fails to operate as intended.

At the bottom this is rarely a problem, as the people at the bottom are well aware of their status in the hierarchy. The people at the top, of course, know they are at the top of the hierarchy and what that means. The trouble comes in the middle layers where the people tend to be the most ambitious and most prone to overstepping their bounds, hoping to impress the boss. They can also be overly cautious, fearful of getting blamed for doing something wrong and losing status in the organization.

This is where the culture of the organization plays a decisive role. A company with a good corporate culture will have a management layer full of people who not only know their roles but embrace them in the context of the larger organization. A good military culture is one where the officers respect the chain of command, but also understand mission priorities and the need to improvise when necessary. Good organizational culture is what makes or breaks an organization.

This is also where we see the inherent problem of democracy. The basic premise of democratic systems is one man one vote. That means every vote is equal, which is another way of saying that every opinion is equally valid. In the political sense, it means the opinion of the bum counts the same as the opinion of the businessman who volunteers at the church on weekends. The bum’s vote counts for the same as the vote of the man committed to his community.

Democracy flies in the face of everything we know about human organization, because it rejects the natural hierarchy we see everywhere. Worse yet, it gnaws away at the basic understanding of human relations. Those middle-managers in a well-run company are happy to be in their roles. They may have ambition, but they also accept reality and know that their ambitions are linked to that reality. The morality of democracy undermines the very basis of their relationship to the whole.

This is why modern democracies are full of people confused about their place in society as well as the role others play. There is a whole genre of videos on-line where people confront store managers about things no reasonable person should expect them to know or control. We have the opposite, as well, where people at the lowest ranks of management carry on like they are shot callers, pushing people around and going well beyond the limits of their role.

Imagine a factory where everyone thinks they should have a say in what the factory makes and how much they make of it. The guy who cleans the workstations gets the same vote as the sales manager and the plant manager. Imagine a platoon where the men vote on their missions and collectively decide on their targets. It sounds like madness because it is madness. That factory would go out of business in a hurry and that military unit would quickly become a criminal gang.

This is, however, how the West has decided to run their societies. Now, it is true that the real shot callers hide in the shadows, using the institutions to manipulate public opinion and coerce people into their positions. They do so, however, while promoting the idea that everyone’s opinion is the same and every opinion counts. On the one hand they promote chaos, while on the other they try to maintain order. It is no wonder that the liberal democracies are shaking themselves to pieces.

The temptation is to blame the internet for allowing the stupid to have easy access to the public square, but in reality, the internet is just a facilitator. According to the tenets of democracy, Twitter is the goal, not a terrible accident. Imagine the town square full of howling lunatics and you get the prefect image of democracy. Social media made real is a public riot but is also exactly what you get when everyone stops accepting their role in the hierarchy and thinks they are a king.

Fundamentally, all forms of democracy are as hostile and contrary to the nature of man as all forms of communism. Both communism and democracy assume something about people that can never be true. That is, all men are equal. This is obviously false in the simplest organization and even more so in the most complex. Just as communism has always ended in disaster, democracy has always ended in murder. Both delusions are the fruit of the same poison tree named equality.

Economic Stuff

Posted on October 8, 2021 by thezman

If you look back to the early days of this site, a lot of what I posted was about economics or government economic policy. These days, it is rare that the topic comes up unless it is in references to communism. In fact, economics is no longer a big topic of discussion anywhere, even with the silly libertarians. It comes up, of course, but it is no longer the big issue. Up until recent, economics was the centerpiece of conservatism and their brief against their alleged opponents.

Thirty years ago, the big change in politics was Bill Clinton using the catchphrase, “It’s the economy stupid” to attack George Bush. From then on, official politics was about taxes and fiscal policy. It was all a show, of course, but it framed the political debate and turned economists into TV stars. The site Marginal Revolution was a big deal for a while because Tyler Cowen was a star economist. Today the site is covered in tumbleweeds because no one cares about libertarian economics anymore.

Even now with the economy having problems at the retail end, people are more focused on the less tangible stuff like CRT or Covid policy. The massive Build Back Better bill stuck in Congress gets little attention. Regime media talks about it as a magic elixir so the crazies have something to chant, but otherwise they have left it alone. Twenty years ago, Conservative Inc would have been organizing a campaign against it, but today they cannot generate much interest in the thing.

One reason for this is that people have come to realize that caring about the economy, tax policy or government programs changes nothing. Those who vote Republican have come to terms with the fact that none of the things they want in terms of taxes and spending will ever happen, so they have lost interest. The far-left still dreams of the socialist paradise, but it is mostly a show of piety. Medicare-for-all may as well be unicorns-for-all and they probably know it.

It used to be an axiom of politics that a good economy was good for incumbents, but the strong economy was of no use to Trump in 2020. He tried to talk about the stock market and jobs for black people, but no one cared about those things. What mattered was his personality and how the righteous felt about it. With Biden, the issue is his growing dementia and the weirdness of this administration. They built a fake Oval Office for him to do live shots for some reason. Why do that?

The lesson here is that if caring about something makes no difference, people will eventually stop caring about it. Caring about immigration, for example, does nothing to change policy, so eventually people will stop caring about it too. You can run through all the issues this way and before long you get to the point where caring who wins the next election no longer matters. That’s why politics is getting so personals. It is the only thing people can care about, so they care about personalities.

Even so, economics still matters. If the economy turns sour, people will care about economics, if only in a general sense. The Cloud People have big plans for the post-human economic order, so it is worth discussing. This week, the show is about some of the issues that come up in dissident circles related to economics. A little change of pace from the normal ranting and raving about the culture. A call back to the days of green eyeshade conservatism.