Lessons From Afghanistan

Posted on August 16, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is new content behind the green door. If you are not signed up, please consider it as it will bring you happiness and save your soul. Sunday Thoughts covers the Afghan situation and some other interesting new items. The Taki post is up and it is about the Afghanistan debacle. There is a pattern here.

Over the last week, the world has watched the great project of the American empire fall to pieces as if it was a controlled demolition. The Taliban has swept across Afghanistan, facing little more than token resistance from the official government. In fact, the official government fled the country without even pretending to care. As of Sunday evening, the U.S. government was scrambling to figure out how to evacuate the people with American citizenship while begging the Taliban for relief.

This week, regime elements will be playing the blame game, no doubt settling on the previous administration as the real culprit. Faced with disconfirmation of their beliefs, the new religion of our rulers triggers a process whereby they are convinced that the latest setback is actually part of the great plan. It is a sort of test of faith and the only way to get past it and continue the flow of history is to believe harder. In time, this will become a bloody shirt in the way Vietnam was for a generation.

Putting that aside, the collapse of the Afghan model reveals some things about the ruling regime that are useful to dissidents. The big lesson is that the Washington regime never felt it necessary to subvert the culture of Afghanistan. Instead, they spent twenty years celebrating it. Sure, they did the superficial stuff like flying the flags of various sexual deviants over the embassy, but they never tried to impose it on the Afghans in the same was we see them do it to white Americans.

If the Afghans were white, the empire would have accused them of Afghan privilege or maybe Afghan supremacy then set about destroying their culture. There would have been gay imams in rainbow colored tunics preaching about how Muhamad was really into sodomy. Of course, there would have been a heavy emphasis on women’s sports, perhaps fielding an all lesbian soccer team. None of that happened because that would have been insulting to the Afghans and their ways.

The big thing that the empire did not do that they are doing in their alleged home base of America is replace the people. A big part of the war on whiteness is the importation of millions of nonwhites into white countries. It is part of the dialectic made real, where mass immigration is the negation of white culture. The empire could have done this in Afghanistan with no trouble. There are a billion Africans looking for a better deal, so they could have imported some of them to celebrate diversity.

That really is the telling feature of the twenty year occupation. The rules in place over there were the exact opposite of the rules in place over here. There was no systematic statue toppling, no mass media campaigns against Afghan culture and no chanting about diversity being a strength. One could be forgiven for thinking that the people in charge of the American empire have more respect for Afghan culture and Afghan people than they have for the American people and their culture.

These are things most people probably knew, if they took the time to think about it, but the events of last weekend provide a good reminder. In the weeks to come, the ruling class will care more about the fortunes of people in Afghanistan than the victims of their opioid crisis they inflicted on rural America. They will work harder to preserve the “rights” of collaborators left behind in Kabul than the rights of American being held in dungeons around Washington. They hate us that much.

The useful lesson in all of this is these people have once again revealed that they really do believe their own nonsense. The old paleos remain convinced that the elites know their preaching is all nonsense, but the Afghan debacle is proof that they do get high from their own supply. The plan was to celebrate the exit on 9/11 as “mission accomplished” and then forget about the whole thing. Biden would get credit for finishing Obama’s project and ending the Bush war.

Over the weekend, their lack of preparation was on display, as the regime media was not provided with a script to follow. Instead, they were allowed to think for themselves, a dangerous prospect under ideal conditions. They sent Biden out to take questions not vetted in advance and it was another humiliation. The sight of an eighty year old man struggling to do the basics is symbolic of the empire. Like Biden, it is old, senile, and operating on the fumes of past glories that never really happened.

This is not the first time the ruling elite have fallen for their own rhetoric. Back in the Obama years, they were sure the summer of 2010 was going to be “recovery summer” for the economy. They even had a campaign all ready to go. That ended the same way the Afghan withdraw ended. Recall that Biden promised this summer would be the end of the Covid panic. Everyone would get to party again. The prophesies of the new religion have a bad habit of never coming true.

Of course, the big lesson in all of this is that a small, dedicated minority can win against all odds if they refuse to surrender. The irony of the American foreign policy establishment not remembering the story of David and Goliath is one of those things that tells us something about the people in charge. They are just so sure they are on the right side of history, that they never take a moment to consider their role in it. They were the Goliath this time and the Afghans were the David.

Granted, the American military would happily abandon the rules of engagement they labored under in Afghanistan when it comes to whiteness. You can be sure General Milley has a speech ready about how white rage is really a part of some secret connected between white people and the Taliban. That said, men living as they did when Alexander the Great was in Afghanistan fought the mighty U.S. Military to a draw and then drove them from their lands. An inspiration to us all.

In the end, this is how dying empires look from the inside. The people at the top fear self-examination, so they commit to a zealous form of the mentality that made the empire possible in the first place. The empire and their place atop it are the center of their belief system and no disconfirmation will shake that belief. They will die with the empire that makes them possible. What comes next is up to the people who survive the inevitable collapse in order to fill the void of empire.

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The Revolution Part I

Posted on August 13, 2021 by thezman

Revolutions are often driven by events, but they are always, at some level, driven by ideas about how society ought to be organized. Since the beginning, radical revolution is about a small group of intellectuals who flatter themselves by claiming to represent the interests of the people. Their holy mission is to reorganize society for the benefit of the people, even if it means killing many of those people. This week begins an exploration into the ideas that motivate our current radicals.

One of the problems the good guys have is a poverty of language to properly frame the events of the day. The bad guys have six million ways to frame events, so they are the white hats and normal people are the black hats. Despite what many claim, this is not about convincing the public. It is about justifying to themselves their actions against the people resisting the revolution. For the people who see themselves as the vanguard of the people, this is important fuel to the revolutionary fire.

The poverty of language stems from a poverty of understanding. The typical conservative pundit has never read any of the radical thinkers who have shaped the minds of the present day radicals. They are happy to chant catch phrases like “socialist” and “communist” but those words just mean “bad guys”. Then you have people who reduce everything to a money grab, which is nothing but a passive way of endorsing the transactional nature of modern existence.

With that in mind, this week’s show is a look at three of the big topics that come up with the radicals in the current crisis. The idea here is not to give a lecture on the writers and texts behind these issues, but to provide a general framework for understand what the radicals mean when they say certain things. There is a lot here, so next week will be another show on the same general topic, but on other subtopics. Who knows, maybe it will turn out to be three shows of material.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Disrupt And Subvert
22:00: The Social Construct
42:00: They Might Be Fascists
57:00: Closing (Be Like Me)

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The Quest For Meaning

Posted on August 12, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is new content behind the green door. The plan is to have something new three times per week. Some of this is posted on BuyMeABear, but that platform has some limitations as far as what I can post. At some point they promise to have the ability to host everything. If you are not signed up, please consider it as it will bring you eternal happiness and save you from the pits of Hell.

Those over the age of forty or so will remember when people regularly went to see a psychiatrist to discuss their troubles. This was far more common in the upper class than the middle-class, but it was not unknown even among the lower class. It was a regular feature on television shows starting in the 1960’s. By the 1970’s, characters regularly talked about their trips to the shrink. Even today, the shrink is inserted into popular culture, as with the television series The Sopranos.

Psychiatry has fallen out of fashion as it has become obvious that you cannot talk someone out of mental illness. In fact, it sounds primitive and superstitious to think that talking about your troubles with a shaman can help cure them. There are people still clinging to things like Freudian psychoanalysis, but people with some knowledge of the human science know it is quackery. In fact, the entire enterprise of talk therapy is just pseudoscience, like astrology or tarot card reading.

Even so, Freudian quackery had a big impact on the West. It was tangled up with larger assaults on the culture, like the attack on the family. Instead of relying on the culture to cope with the inevitable struggles of marital life, women were encouraged to seek psychiatric help, which preached a form of women’s liberation. This encouraged the adoption of divorce, which swung a wrecking ball through society. It is fair to say that Freud was one of history’s great monsters, as well as a quack.

We have been conditioned to think that we live in the age of reason and that our ancestors were superstitious and irrational. This is a part of the cultural campaign to disconnect us from our past, but it is also a conceit. Our material existence is better, so we assume our technology is better, which means we have a more reasonable and rational understanding of the world. We no longer believe in invisible sky gods that control the natural occurrences we see from our cave.

In some respects, this is true, but in general, those old superstitions were more rational and practical. The unhappy wife spending more time at church did more for her wellbeing than hours with a quack and an eventual divorce. The peace of knowing that after this life, there is a next life of eternal bliss did more for the psyche of regular people than handfuls of anxiety drugs. Those old superstitious primitives in the family album did not try to turn their boys into girls.

Even though some of the nutty ideas like psychoanalysis have been dumped in favor of actual science, we have new crackpot ideas. Panpsychism, for example, is promising to introduce a fresh batch of oogily-boogily into the human sciences. Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is inextricably linked to all matter and simply grows stronger as a physical object become more complex. That means gravel in your driveway has a consciousness, just less complex than your consciousness.

If it sounds like something someone comes to believe after taking peyote during the bachelor party in Las Vegas, you would be right. It is right out of eastern religion, but it is being pushed by people with claims to science. This is how all quackery ends up in the general culture. People with claims to science dress up their new brand of Gnosticism with the authority of science. It may not be long before “science” is telling us Covid is mutating because it is offended by our vaccines.

The story of man is supposed to operate along the general plot line that starts with primitive superstition and works toward reason. Early humans thought the natural world was animated by spirits. Then it was the creation of the gods. That soon moved to a more complex set of rules imposed by one God. Then God was dropped altogether, and we are left with the rules of nature. That’s the official narrative, yet we are zooming back to the idea of the world being controlled by invisible spirits.

The IQ guys will argue that this is proof we are getting dumber, but modern quackery is always the product of elite culture. Freudian psychoanalysis was not invented and spread by rural mystics. It started in the cosmopolitan elite and then spread to the rest of the population. It was the lower classes that remained stubbornly skeptical about the guys with turtlenecks and pipes. The same thing will be true of panpsychism if it breaks from the laboratory like the Wuhan virus.

It may be that our elites are getting dumber and there is evidence of that, but that does not explain the rise of nonsense in the modern world. Marxism is obvious nonsense when you read it but it spread like a plague in the 19th century. According to the IQ guys, those elites were smarter than our elites, yet many of them fell for what amounts to monstrous quackery. They fell for it because they wanted to believe the glorious future free of conflict was an inevitable outcome of history.

It may be that in the fullness of time, the ape historians will look at what we call the modern age, the period kicked off by the Enlightenment, ending sometime soon, as the great quest for meaning. This is when Western man discarded his religious convictions and went on a long quest for the answer to the great question, but only managed to murder himself in the process. One bit of quackery after another until Western societies could no longer hold and they collapsed into ruin.

You Own You

Posted on August 11, 2021 by thezman

One of the few things that libertarians get right is that the foundation of Western civilization is private property. They claim this is a universal reality, which is clearly incorrect, but it is true with regards to Western civilization. The assumption that a man owns the produce of his labor is the main difference between Europeans and the other people of the world. It forms the foundation of law and the logic of political organization, in addition to being the bedrock of Western economic systems.

What libertarians get wrong is that you can create a society where government only protects private property and does nothing else. As with so many things, they get the causal relationship backwards. Like everything else about human society, the concept of private property is downstream from biology and culture. Therefore, the primary reason to have a state is to defend the people and their way of life. Private property is one attribute of Western people’s way of life.

Putting that aside, the ape historians in the glorious future will no doubt trace the decline of Western man to the decline in private property. It will not begin with socialism or other economic concepts. Those are far downstream from what really matters to a people and their way of life. The Nordic people made socialism work while at the same time maintaining the concept of private property. They simply struck a different balance between property and culture than other occidentals

The erosion of this key facet of the West starts further up the chain of causality at the cultural level. This is where the abstract concept of property exists, the platonic form of private property. This is where the wreckers and subversive have gnawed away at the concept in little ways, thus making it less clear downstream. As a result, the idea of private property has slowly receded from the public discourse with regards to politics and economics, even within socialist debates.

Take, for example, the internet. It exists because thousands of people working in government institutions invented a way to link computers into a network. This is why the internet is a public good. It is the creation of public institutions, in the same way the highway system is a public good. The internet was further built out by private companies seeking to profit from the exchange of information, much in the same way merchants use the highway system to profit from commerce.

This is true with regards to e-commerce. Jeff Bezos is able to hurl himself to the edge of the atmosphere in a giant phallus, because he got rich selling stuff on-line. Like all large corporations, he also bought indulgences from the government, in order to gain an advantage over rivals. First it was not paying sales tax and then he moved onto direct subsidies from state and local government for his supply chain. Like other big retailers. Amazon would not exist without government subsidy.

Amazon, however, is the exception. The rest of the tech oligarchs made their money stealing the property of others. Facebook, for example, sells the property of its users to companies looking for data on the population. They call this marketing revenue, but in reality, it is just theft. They steal the labor of their users and then sell it to interested parties without the knowledge of their users. It is a form of slavery in which the user base volunteers to give away their labor to the platform owner.

Many will push back against this characterization. After all, they will say, the service is free, and the real product Facebook is selling is their own creation. They use their technology to capture human activity. Then they make it accessible in a friendly format for their actual customers, the people paying them. The users, because they are choosing to use the platform, are choosing to abide by an agreement they never read and therefore agree to allow Facebook to steal their property.

That right there is how the concept of private property is eroded at the abstract layer of Western civilization. Most people, even classical liberal types, think what the tech companies are doing is legitimate commerce. They have accepted this degraded version of property that carves out an exception to the laws covering property to allow for what amounts to theft. If Claude-Frédéric Bastiat was sent through the time portal to this age, he would call the internet “legal plunder.”

That is what we are seeing, legal plunder. Property is the product of human labor, both physical labor and mental labor. The business owner, the man who organizes men and material to produce goods and services, sees the return on his intellectual labor in the form of profit. It is his ideas and organizational talent that makes the enterprise possible and maintains its operations. The Marxists always attacked this idea but could never get around the reality of intellectual property being the fruit of labor.

Instead, the way around this problem is to attack the concept that you own you and therefore you own your labor. If Facebook can watch you on-line, track your activity through your mobile device, then sell this activity to their customers, it means one of two things. Either you no longer own you or we no longer have private property. After all, your activity is the product of your labor, so if you own you, then you own your activity and Facebook is stealing. Otherwise, you no longer own you.

If we return to the original Western concept of property, then you not only own your activity but also your reputation and your defining attributes. If a company wishes to use these things in a product, then they would need to strike a deal with you in the same way they would if they wanted your physical labor. If Facebook wanted to sell your data, they would need to get your permission every time they sold your data. The mobile devise makers would have to pay you to use their phones.

Of course, this is not present reality. The assumption is that you do not, in fact, own you, so all of this is perfectly normal. The reason enterprising lawyers have not proposed a novel legal theory to the court based on the ancient concepts of private property is that no one questions the right of the tech companies to harvest your property. The state is acting on this new normal as well. New laws, for example, have been passed to require alcohol tracking devices in new cars.

A world in which you do not own you is called a penitentiary. The phrase “lock down” was quickly normalized, despite being a prison term, because the population has been habituated to the idea that they do not own themselves. Of course, the state can lock you in your home. After all, they can determine your associations and they allow private enterprise to spy on you in your home. You don’t own you. Like a pet, you are the property of powerful interests, and you must do as you are trained.

The point of the state is to preserve the people and their way of life. This is its primary reason to exist. The secondary and tertiary reasons, like crime control and tending to the poor are all dependent on the people and their way of life. The defense of property is one of those attributes of culture the state must defend. The failure of the elites to defend the people and their way of life starts with this Western notion that you own you and all that you produce. That failure is the death of the West.

The Real Pandemic

Posted on August 10, 2021 by thezman

It is very difficult to assess what is happening in a revolutionary moment, because things seem to change so quickly. Looking back, the French Revolution is easier to understand, because we know how it ended. We can look at the events in the context of Napoleon or the Terror. The same is true of the Bolshevik Revolution, that came to a similar end. In fact, putting the two together makes it possible to understand things about both that the people at the time could never know.

This is a useful thing to keep in mind in this age, as the radicals push the revolution forward, for reasons they don’t comprehend. Legacy conservatives will keep trying to jam these events into the obsolete world view, blaming things on the lust for power or a desire to take your money. Others will blame it on nefarious actors like George Soros, because that is the easy thing to do. Blaming a a single bad actor or groups of actors makes things simple for the simple-minded.

In reality, in revolutionary times, men are like people swept up in a great flood, carried along by the forces of nature. They look for things to hang onto in order to escape being swept away, like their own ideological mindset. The revolutionaries are no different in this regard but they convince themselves they are the ones driving the river, when all they have done is unleash the floodgates. They are as much a victim of their own zealous lunacy as the people they oppose.

An example is this story about the city of Charlotte. The city is passing a nondiscrimination ordinance that will protect “gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation and natural hairstyles.” Since all of those things are meaningless word salad, they have, in effect, banned everything and nothing. The term “natural hairstyles” is a cult-Marx term for black women with afros, but otherwise the rest of it just means whatever the mentally ill can conjure next.

The people behind this stuff know that these words and therefore the law is nonsense, but they also know that is the point. They have been trained up in the latest cult-Marx dogma which says they must subvert expectations and undermine the prevailing cultural orthodoxies. They may or may now know what any of that means, but they know enough to know chaos is the order of the day. These terms are all moral signifiers, justifying an all-out assault on cultural norms.

Again, the usual suspects will try to assign specific rational explanations for why they are trying to sow chaos, but that sort of reductionism misses the point. The chaos is the point of all this, as the goal is to smash the cultural orthodoxy. Essential to Nth wave Marxism is the belief that culture is what prevents the natural rise of socialism, so if you destroy the culture, a new socialist order will arise. More important, a new socialist man will rise from the wreckage of white supremacist society.

Like original Marxism, this is nonsense. It is worse than nonsense, in that it is an esoteric religion that flatters the believer by replacing their reality with the promise of special insight. Once you come to believe that wrecking the present order will usher in the great revolution of mankind, you are now in a special club of people who have found the answer to the great question. The irrationality of it is the draw. It appeals to that natural need to believe that is a key trait of man.

What we are living through is a revolution pushed along by people who are sure they are creating conditions for the great liberation. The details of that great liberation and how it will come into existence are just assumed. This was always the appeal of the original Marxism. It provided a childish vison of a glorious future, onto which the believer could project his fantasy vision of the future. Then it supplied a story of history that claimed the glorious future was an historical inevitability.

This the core of Cultural Marxism. Because of the demographic changes in the West, it has been repackaged along racial lines. Instead of destroying bourgeoise culture they are set on destroying white culture. This has obvious appeal to people who came to the West for the free stuff but find that the cost of that free stuff is the abandonment of their old ways. For blacks, of course, it means they get to taste the vengeance that has been promised to them since the last century.

In the lab, this stuff sounds appealing, but when you go around smashing the culture, there is no guarantee what will happen next. The culture tends to restrain the worst passions of the people who produced it. Once those restraints are gone, those passions are released to mix with the passion of the zealots who did the smashing. Imagine an Antifa rally without police protection. All of a sudden, the people who defunded the police discover a truth hidden in their revolutionary furor.

This is why making sense of the revolution is only worthwhile as a way to get a glimpse of what comes next. History shows that the people driving these events are like the coronavirus of the present moment. All efforts to mitigate it result in a mutation that gets around the mitigation. All you can do is prepare for what comes after it has done its worst to the host population. Then maybe you can have a chance to rebuild with an eye on preventing any future outbreaks of this pestilence.

Irrational Losers

Posted on August 9, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. The topic this week is something I hope to dive into on the podcast this week. The revolution from above will be a new favorite phrase. There is also the Sunday podcast up behind the green door.

One of the distinguishing features of conservatism is the habit of attacking its own side during conflicts with the Left. In fact, these self-criticism sessions are usually triggered by left-wing criticism of the Right or in anticipation of such criticism. Somewhere in the middle of the fight, usually when things are looking up for the good guys, conservatives will attack their own team over some small issue. The claim is that the people in error are undermining the fight against the left with their bad ideas.

A recent example is Heather MacDonald taking to the pages of a center-left platform to criticize vaccine skeptics as knuckle-dragging primitives. You see, there are people opposed to the Left who do not hold the same opinions as Heather MacDonald with regards to the vaccines, so those people must be corrected. Sure, things are going badly for the Left on the Covid issue but removing that fly from a friend’s face with a hatchet is too important to wait until after the fight.

There is no question that many people opposed to the strip-mining of what is left of our liberties over the Covid issue are wrong about a lot of things. Some think the vaccine changes your DNA. Some think the vaccines are entirely fake, part of some plot to control society. If you look hard enough, you can probably find people who think the vaccines are an alien technology developed at Area 51. Covid is a ruse to experiment on the public with this new extraterrestrial technology.

America is a big country, so you can find just about every crazy idea imaginable if you look long enough. Why does Mx. MacDonald think these people are worthy of a public tongue lashing? The stated reason is those vaccine skeptics are acting as irrationally as the people they oppose. Some of them think vaccines in general may not be all that safe and are refusing this vaccine. Imagine that? People in the middle of a heated partisan fight putting aside reason to score points against the enemy?

Presumably, Mx. MacDonald thinks these people are harming the cause in some way, so they must be silenced. The claim appears to be reason. You see, by tolerating the unreasonable on her side, it would harm her claims to being the most reasonable person in the room. Therefore, reason compels her to root around the ranks of the people opposed to the Covid madness, looking for the unreasonable. Tone police the unreasonable and then reason will triumph!

Of course, the question is, unreasonable to whom? Politics is always a partisan business, so the central questions are who? and whom? Only unreasonable people think politics can be a right answer business. In most cases, there are many possible right answers, as right is determined by preference. In a democracy, right is determined by convincing the people wielding power behind the scenes that the mobs will be sated with one approach or another. All politics is partisan.

Mx. MacDonald thinks these knuckle-dragging anti-vaxxers are making her look bad to someone, so who is it? That is the key to understanding conservative perfidy and failure over the last half century. What matters most to them is the people in the managerial class and their place in it. It is very important to someone like Mx. MacDonald to never be associated with someone like Alex Jones, who thinks vaccines are making frogs gay and lowering the sperm count of American males.

What reason tells us is that defeating the forces of darkness that have launched the revolution from above is the only concern. If that means siding with people who line their clothes with aluminum foil, so be it. Nothing can come before the destruction of radicalisms in all its forms. This is what reason demands. Otherwise, if the radicals get their way, these people fetishizing their rationality will be keeping the rest of us company in the reeducation camps.

Politics is an ugly business under ideal conditions, because people inevitably assume that the other side of the fight is filled with bad people. After all, they have the wrong opinions and refuse to change them. That means things are said that are not true and not very nice about the other side, but that’s just the nature of it. This is something the people who never stop talking about their rationality should know by now. Reasonable people understand the reality of the human condition.

In the case of the Covid war, there are people making wild claims about the vaccine, mostly to get attention for themselves. That is an argument against social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. These platforms made it easy for stupid people to get on-line and have an opinion. This drew in the sorts of people who look to exploit the mob for their own benefit. This is also the argument against democracy, as laid out in Federalist Papers 10, but here we are anyway.

The thing is, Alex Jones claiming the vaccine will alter your DNA is no nuttier than much of what is in the mass media. In fact, a ridiculous claim is far less harmful than the plausible, but inaccurate claim. Few people will think the vaccine will turn you into Big Foot, but most people will believe we need to make kids wear masks. Far more people have been harmed by official lies than by goofballs on the internet. Again, this is something the “rational conservatives” should understand.

None of this is to say that there can never be criticism of allies or even a break with people who harm the cause. This has always been the problem with outsider politics, which tends to get overrun with weirdos. The issue is timing and intent. Privately chastising an ally for screwing up is reasonable. Dismissing wackos who are harming the cause is prudent. These are exceptions to partisanship that are required in politics, but conservative have made them their purpose.

This is why conservatives always lose. The main principle of the conservative is to conserve their reputation at all costs. No cause is ever so dear as to lead them to spend a penny of their reputation on it. Put another way, for the conservative, there is never anything worth fighting for, so they are always willing to cede the battle to the other side, no matter the cost. The Left sends thugs carrying bats and knives, while the Right sends out dandies dressed like interior decorators.

The test in these matters is this. Is the world better or worse with a small group of people who think vaccines alter your DNA? The obvious answer is the world is not affected in the least by people with crackpot ideas. Is the word made better or worse by allowing the evil of progressivism triumph? The answer is obvious. People fetishizing their rationality should be able to grasp this. Instead, for generations they have come to the opposite conclusion and lost every fight.

The Neoconservative Persuasion

Posted on August 6, 2021 by thezman

The title of the show this week is taken from the title of a book by the guy most consider to be the founder of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol. He was one of the first far-left intellectuals to break with the Left and migrate to the new Right. He embraced the term neocon, in an “own the insult” way, which is probably why the term has remained with us, despite it originally being an insult. The Left used it as a way to criticize their former colleagues for their break with them over various issues.

Today, of course, our side uses the term as an insult. Even within what is left of mainstream conservatism, the term and the people associated with it is falling out of favor, especially as the neocons get nastier in their critiques of populism. David French now sounds like a less masculine version of Robin DiAngelo. That is not an exaggeration, as he sounds like Mickey Mouse, and she sounds like she has had one too many Pall Mall’s with her boiler makers.

Just as it is useful to understand the language of the Left, it is useful to know the intellectual history of the legacy Right. When the Left uses the slur “racist” they do not mean it in the way normal people understand it. This is why it is stupid to debate them on those terms. When you deny being a racist, you are legitimizing the term and their definition of it. If you try to own the insult, you do the same. Instead, when you know their definition, you can attack them from the moral high ground.

The same thing applies to the history of the neocons. Understanding why they say America is an idea, rather than a nation, is key to dealing with the claim. Someone like Ben Shapiro does not really know why he believes America is just an idea. He was simply taught that by his Straussian professors. The same is true of his chanting about Judeo-Christianity. You can strip away the intellectual authority of the claims when you know the source of it. Knowledge is power.

The other thing that we can learn from studying the neocons is how the conservative movement was so easily coopted by them. The reason is that the New Right, as it was called early on, had no moral philosophy of its own. The Buckley movement started from a disposition and then became a reaction to current events. They were not starting from a body of moral philosophy that contradicted the Left. The neocons supplied a morality framed by the founding documents.

It is why any genuine opposition to what is going on in the West must first start with a moral philosophy that stands outside of the prevailing orthodoxy. Only by being able to say, “this is who we are, this is what we believe, this is why we believe it, and this is why it is superior to the alternative” can a genuine alternative blossom. Simply starting with a laundry list of outcomes, desired or opposed, like the Buckley crew, means falling prey to the same sort of corruption that killed conservatism.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: The Origin Story
22:00: Leo Strauss
42:00: Never Right
57:00: Closing (Be Like Me)

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The Blood Feud

Posted on August 5, 2021 by thezman

A blood feud or blood rivalry is a long conflict between two closely situated groups of people, usually involving retaliatory killing. There is some event, real or imagined, then members of one group attack or kill members of the other group in retaliation for harms they suffered in that initial event. This leads to retaliation from the second group and we have a spiral of tit-for-tat. Until fairly recent in human history, the blood feud was quite common and often formalized in ritual and custom.

When people were more tribal, the blood feud worked to keep the peace. This seems counterintuitive, but the practice allowed for agreed upon compensation to the victim in the form of blood or money. The Wergild, in Germanic law, was the compensation paid by a person committing an offense to the injured party. If the victim was killed, then it was the value of his life. In other cultures, the concept of “blood money” was not uncommon, as a way to adjudicate disputes between clans.

This is something to keep in mind when looking at stories like this one. We have a 100-year-old man being charged with crimes that may or may not have happened at a place he worked over seventy years ago. He may have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp in the Second World War. According to the article, it is not all that clear what happened at that facility. His role in the running in the camp is also unclear. Yet, he is being ceremoniously charged with crimes at the age of 100.

This is not a new story. He is being charged because of the long running blood feud between Jews and Europeans over the events of the war. Jews believe they are victims that can never be compensated for the crimes against them perpetrated by the Europeans in the last century. It is not just Germans. They have claims against other European groups, even Americans, who saved them. The blood feud demands blood, even if it is the blood of an old man not long for this world.

These sort of witch hunts are uncivilized and antithetical to the traditions of the modern world, but they persist because Jews have tremendous amount of influence. Much of that influence, it is believed, rests on their victim status. That last part is mostly nonsense, but many people believe it. Anti-Semites think this is the magic key to Jewish influence, so they occupy most of their time trying to prove the Holocaust is fiction created out of whole cloth. Thus is the nature of blood feuds.

To be clear, no reasonable person can claim that Jews were not singled out by the Nazis for special treatment. The record is clear on that point. The Nazis also targeted other groups, like Gypsies and Slavs. There is no question that monstrous things happened in the war at the hands of the Germans and their allies. Much of it was the inevitable consequence of war, which is always a monstrous thing. When war is waged on the industrial scale, the results are horrific.

That should be the lesson of the two great industrial wars. The Great War was a blood feud scaled up and decorated with lofty rhetoric. At anytime, the sides could have accepted the futility of their blood feud and crafted a blood peace. Instead, they fought themselves to exhaustion. The Second World War and the horrors that flowed from it were the result of having learned nothing from the last war. Instead, the blood feud between the people of Europe continued and spread to the world.

The reason European societies evolved ways to mitigate the local blood feud or eliminate it entirely is they tended to spiral into mutual destruction. A blood peace was often stronger than one agreed upon out of convenience, for the simple reason both sides suffered real harm to achieve it. Two tribes that lost members over a feud that was eventually settled to the satisfaction of both, had a shared bond that transcended material concerns or present convenience.

Of course, individualizing crime and disputes was the way we eventually eliminated the blood feud entirely. Holding the individual accountable for his crimes and his crimes alone, regardless of the relationship between his group and that of the victim, settled the matter before it could spiral into a feud. When the Lord hangs the murderer, rather than forcing his people to pay the clan of the victim, it changes the relationship between man and tribe, as well the relationship between tribes.

In a way, the criminal code was a preemptive act. When the sovereign steps in to punish the guilty, he is short circuiting the natural tribal reaction. If the law is clear and the sovereign is even handed in his application of it, then the people not only accept his remedies but will seek his remedy before seeking their own justice. This is how the law is supposed to work in what we think of as civil society. At the heart of it is a sense of justice motivated by a desire to keep the peace.

What we see with the hunt for centenarians whose primary crime is of blood is a perversion of this principle. The reason to arrest this old man for crimes that may or may not have happened is to perpetuate a blood feud. There is no justice to be had in these cases, as the events happened so long ago. It is not as if there is a need for an example to discourage others. This is just a tribal cry for vengeance echoing through the corrupted halls of western justice.

Not to put too fine a point on it but look at the other example in the story. “A 96-year-old woman has also been accused of working as a Nazi, as a secretary to the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland.” They are going to put on a trial a woman whose crime was having worked for the Nazis. In this case, the tribe crying out for blood is the Poles, who suffered more from the Nazis than any other group. Even so, much blood was spilled to reach a peace, the Poles should accept it.

In the end, this is the test of civilization. Civilized people understand that you must close the books on the past, in order to avoid reliving them. The present is always a story of the past, but it cannot be a nightmare from which we never awake. Disputes are settled and they become a part of the story of a people and that people’s relationship to other people, as part of the blood peace. When one or both sides cannot accept that blood peace, accept the blood of the other as a sacrifice, the result is more blood.

Trivial Thoughts

Posted on August 4, 2021 by thezman

Sayre’s law states that “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” Another form is, “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” This is often attributed to Richard Nixon or sometimes Henry Kissinger. Intellectual history is full of famous battles between rival camps over small differences. For example, two warring camps of Straussians do battle over their understanding of the political philosopher Leo Strauss.

This is not just true of the academy. People within in any organization tend to give more weight to small issues than to the larger issues. The famous example of this is the people designing a nuclear power plant will have vicious disputes over where to place the employee bike shed. Anyone familiar with corporate life knows that the major source of tension between people is the trivial items. This is often referred to as the law of triviality, but despite the name, it is a big part of organizations.

This is something to keep in mind when examining the behavior of actors within the modern political drama. Since the end of the Cold War, the rancor has steadily increased, while the policy debate has steadily narrowed. If you had no idea which political party was ascendant, you just examined the policies coming from Washington the last thirty years, you would be hard pressed to identify the two prevailing ideologies that allegedly control both parties and the disputes between them.

This is where we see Sayre’s law at work. What emerged after the Cold War is a general consensus on the big issues. The ruling elite is in favor of open borders for both cultural and economic reasons. They favor a global trade and economic regime that places the management of these issues outside local legislatures. They embrace democracy as a sort of civic theater, a drama that is never intended to impact policy, but instead reinforces the prevailing morality of the elites.

Within this political structure, there is very little room for any dispute, much less disputes over consequential matters. Our political class, which includes the mass media, the commentariat and the donor class, is left to fight pitched battles over trivial issues, often invented for the purpose. In the case of the media, the selection pressure over the last thirty years has resulted in a collection of performers highly tuned to personalize trivial issues and express those emotions on the stage.

It is why the Trump years were a cacophony of hysterics. This is how everyone responds to everything. In the case of Trump, the entire dramatis personae just happened to be on one side. Note how none of the claims about his administration were rooted in policy. They never engaged in policy disputes with him. It was all highly personal and ridiculously petty. Seventy years ago, when Sayre made his observation about the academy, this was the sort of thing he had in mind.

One reason for this is that whenever serious issues cannot be discussed, the void is filled with heated debate of unserious issues. The result is everyone is looking for a boutique thought to distinguish herself from the mob. Everyone in politics at all levels believes they went into the game to change the world. Instead of accepting their role as another anonymous face in a chorus of actors, they embrace strange, but pointless ideas to distinguish themselves from the crowd.

This is a very feminine instinct, which underscores just how feminized our politics has become over the last half century. The reason the military is always adjusting its uniform policy for female soldiers is they are biologically tuned to signal their fitness to males in competition with other females. The male soldiers are happy to wear the uniform that is assigned to them. Females instantly seek to make small trivial changes. This is the nature of our politics, where everyone wants to be a special snowflake.

One result of this is that all political positions are positional goods. Positional goods are goods that people value because they convey standing within society. For example, South Asians like to wear gold as a way to advertise their wealth. In African cultures around the world, display items like expensive cars are common. In northern European cultures, counter-signaling wealth is a form of positional good. The trust fund guy who drives a twenty year old Volvo, for example.

In politics, especially left-wing politics, positions on issues and the hierarchy of one’s issue list is a positional good. For example, the forgiveness of student debt is an issue for those who stake out the far-left position today. There is no plan as to how to execute such a scheme. They do not appear to understand who holds the debt and what it is used for by the system. The impossibility of forgiving college debt is probably its chief appeal, as it lets them espouse something cost free.

If you go down the laundry list of left-wing political positions, what you find are aspirational and notional items. For four years the Democrats could have struck a deal with Trump on roads and bridges. They were too busy complaining about Hitler to engage in fruitful discussion. In other words, to transform the notional into the practical would have stripped the issue of its value. Something similar happened with immigration, where Trump was willing to give the store away.

Mainstream politics is entirely about positional goods. This is true to some degree of all politics, especially outsider politics, but we now live in an age in which official political discourse is nothing more than a personal spat in the faculty lounge. The difference between what goes on in the academy and in Washington is that the latter revolves around a central set of tenets that contain the ruling consensus. The disputes, however, are every bit as trivial and pointless.

The Death Of Burke

Posted on August 3, 2021 by thezman

A key contribution of neoconservatives to the conservative movement launched by Bill Buckley in the middle of the last century was the assertion that conservatism is a means justifies the ends ideology. Unlike the Left, the Right will accept less than optimal outcomes as long as they are the result of a just process. Further, conservatives are not reactionaries, instinctively defending order. Instead, conservatism is the defense of liberal processes against the assaults of the illiberal Left.

One reason that these former members of the Left and the emerging new Right found agreement is they both agreed with Edmund Burke on key points. One was Burke’s description of revolution. The liberals who would go on to become neoconservatives did not see themselves as revolutionaries. Like their new conservative friends, they viewed themselves as defenders of liberal order and the liberal process that is contained in and constrained by tradition and institutions.

In his observations about revolutionary France, Burke noted that revolutions seek to cut themselves off from the past. The desire for an entirely new beginning must lead to a repudiation of the past. This divorce from the historical timeline means they have no sense of themselves and their place in history. This is the source of their inherent instability, and why they become murderous. For those who see themselves as defenders of liberal order, this is what makes revolution dangerous.

The other broad area of agreement between these former leftists and their new friends on the Right was on institutions. Burke’s great contribution to the Anglo-Right is his defense of institutions and traditions as constraints on power. Traditions give meaning to daily life, but they also play a key role in shaping the people. The voluntary associations like churches, clubs and so on maintain and nourish the social capital of the people and provide a balance to sovereign power.

Even today, you hear the legacy conservatives talk about Edmund Burke as their ideal conservative stateman. Yoram Hazony, the ultra-Zionist political theorist, named his think tank “The Edmund Burke Foundation”. Modern neoconservatives like Ben Shapiro love quoting Edmund Burke. It is one of the few things upon which traditionalist conservatives agreed with the former leftists. They saw Burke’s philosophy as the center of their understanding of conservatism in a liberal society.

The idea that conservatism is the defense of the existing processes has had a powerful impact on the arc of American society. By elevating process over ends, conservatism built into their defense of tradition and order vulnerabilities that the radicals have been able to exploit for generations. In other words, the very nature off conservatism as the bulwark against radicalism has as part of its design a set of contradictions that must always lead to its retreat in the face of the radical onslaught.

The first of those is the unequivocal defense of process over results. What this has meant, in practice, is the conservative defense of every radical gain. Once the Left can find a way to warp the process to support their ends, they turn their opponents into the most strident defenders of this new order. Abortion is the obvious example. Once the radicals changed the law through the courts, the conservatives agreed that it can only change again through the courts.

This has been the motivation for conservatives to get as many of their judges on the court as possible. The trouble is, in order to be a conservative judge, one must pledge to defend precedent and the traditional functioning of the courts. It is why every conservative judge nominated to the high court must sit in front of Congress and swear to never question the precedents used in support of Roe v Wade. It is why this current court will defend radicalism against all challenges.

The other vulnerability that the radicals have exploited for several generations is that the conservative fetish for means over ends prevents them from questioning the morality of radical goals. Since Marx, the central claim of radicalism is that they are trying to achieve a more virtuous and moral society. Because a just society is such a worthy goal, it justifies radical measures, including violence. Those who stand between now and the better world deserve what they get.

By focusing solely on the means in which political goals are achieved, the conservative must accept the morality of those ends if they are the result of the liberal process, which is the root of their political morality. This is why the “conservative case for…” is an internet meme. Since compromise is always the goal of Burkean conservatism, the first step is in figuring out jhow radical goals can fit into the conservative process. If trannies can be the result of the liberal order, trannies are conservative.

More important, this myopia means the Right can never question the morality of the Left’s stated goals. In fact, they are allergic to it. You see this with the reaction to the Critical Race Theory issue. Conservatives recoiled in horror when it was pointed out that CRT is explicitly antiwhite. The idea of addressing the morality of radical ends is anathema to the conservative mind. Instead, they had to frame it is bad process in pursuits of a worthy goal.

Edmund Burke wrote from the perspective of a man standing on the walls of an old social order looking out over Europe struggling to maintain order. His defense of the British social order was perfectly rational, especially in contrast to the horrors that were unleashed by the French Revolution. Like the social order he once defended, the Burkean conservatism is no longer relevant. The current order is inherently immoral and at odds with anything that a man of the Right should defend.

Further, Burkean conservatism prevents the actions required to overthrow this current order and institute a new moral order. If one is prevented from declaring the current state of things immoral and the goals of its champions as grossly immoral, then there is no way to fight the gathering darkness. If the preservation of the West and the people that make it possible must be sublimated to an abstract process, then conservatism can never conserve anything. It is part of the problem.

This is why the first order of attack for the dissident is conservatism. As long as people are willing to accept “well we have to respect the election results” as an excuse for not opposing evil, there is no escaping the gathering darkness. It is only when the opponents of radicalism commit to its utter destruction through any means necessary that the tides of war will change. That necessarily requires consigning Edmund Burke and his followers to the ash heap of history.

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