Our Sound And Fury

Posted on August 4, 2020 by thezman

An old axiom is that the first casualty of war is truth. The facts of the matter stop being important, so both sides feel free to say what they like about the other and the issue at the center of their dispute. Similarly, truth is an early victim of partisanship, as the partisan is only interested in the interests of his group. By extension, one can say that truth is always an early victim of politics. The sides have their interests, which are tied to the people whose interests are being served.

Of course, what we think of as truth is tangled up in the language. In communist countries, the full expression of partisanship in their political struggles meant the language was often humorously dishonest. More than a few men were condemned to death for the crime of being “a bourgeois traitor to the proletariat.” In war time, enemies are described in the most absurd and grotesque terms. often, those epithets stick with the losers as we see with the last European war.

This connection between language and truth is useful, if we can step out of our own partisan sensibilities, in assessing the rationality of a society. North Korea is a good example of this. The gap between official truth and actual truth is so broad in many cases, it lurches into caricature. Iran is another example. Her leaders make claims that strike most people as deliberately ridiculous. This wild language is the result of a great gap between official truth and the actual truth.

Of course, this is turning up in our own society. We live in an increasingly unreasonable age, so the claims of partisans become increasingly unreasonable. The absurdity of calling Trump a dictator, for example, could be excused as fashionable exaggeration, but the people doing it are not exaggerating. Similarly, they are deadly serious when they claim he and his supported are racist, who want to bring back slavery. Their absurd language, reflects absurd beliefs by absurd people.

There is an argument that healthy politics will necessarily have a high degree of exaggeration, as the participants seek to persuade. Since persuasion is the key to democratic governance, the people coming up with these outlandish arguments are, in a fashion, displaying support for the system. They still believe in the fifty percent plus one model, so they pull out all the stops to convince others. Their over-the-top language is, in effect, a signal of their support for democracy.

Maybe there is some truth to it, but we have lots of examples outside the narrow realm of retail politics to suggest otherwise. Look at the great conflagrations on the streets of our cities this summer. Much of it has been organized by people who claim to be opposed to fascism. That’s their reason to exist. Like the communist of old, they oppose fascists and defend democracy. The fact that there are no actual fascists in America does not seem to matter much to them.

The closest thing we have to genuine fascist in modern America are the people claiming to be anti-fascists. The old commies considered capitalists and the middle-class as enemies to their cause. Modern communists have corporate sponsors, are loaded down with consumer goods and come from the middle-class. It’s as if they are on some weird vacation where they get to pretend to be left-wing radicals from a century ago, while not giving up their Wi-Fi access and vegan lunches.

Those corporate and political sponsors of the ant-fascists are defending a political-economy that would be very familiar to the old fascists. Our modern ruling order is a combination of political and corporate interests, with the welfare of the people being the stated objective of both. Large swaths of political power have been handed to corporate giants, in exchange for defense of their corporate interests by the state. It’s why every corporate ad tells us how much the care about us.

America is a fascist country now. It may lack the snappy uniforms and martial order one tends to associate with fascism, but the political-economy of the country is much closer to fascism than Marxism, Capitalism or Republicanism. It is feminine, bourgeois and passive-aggressive, but fascist nonetheless. It will not be long before the official creed of our liberal democracy is, “Everything for the community, nothing outside the community, nothing against the community.”

Now, it should be noted that there are people who occasionally hoist the banner of fascism, but their claims are just as disconnected from reality. Usually, they begin and end with antisemitism, as if that is the only characteristic of fascism. If their politics advance much beyond that, it looks much closer to a crude form of Bolshevism than anything one could classify as fascism. The fascists of a century ago would have viewed them as just another enemy on the street.

For example, one camp of the former alt-right that still goes in for the fascist language and aesthetic wants a centrally planned economy. They want one government bank to provide all banking services, like the post office. They have even flirted at times with the term National Bolshevism. Putting aside the historical partisanship, no fascist, when fascism was a real thing, would have embraced this type of economics. In fact, they would have rejected it as anti-fascist.

Then there is another camp that embraces the ethno-state. Richard Spencer gets the credit for popularizing the idea, but it was not his invention. The idea has been around in Europe since at least the 19th century. The Bolsheviks, of course, would have completely agreed with the notion of a unified people. They would have limited it to the proletariat, but they supported the end of the nation-state. The fascists, in contrast, completely rejected the elimination of the nation state.

Those are just the easiest examples. When you look around, our language is now disconnected from our political reality. The labels used to describe the various sides in political fights historically meaningless. Those saying they are defending democracy are in fact trying to eliminate it. Those who supposedly want authoritarianism really want something closer to a bourgeois civic utopia. Conservatives fight anyone actually trying to conserve anything and liberals oppose actual liberalism.

The madhouse nature of our political language has a lot to do with the rise of mediocrity to positions of power. Maybe nature has withdrawn her favor and we are an increasingly stupid species. Maybe our system rewards the ignorant. Maybe there is some other reason for the dominance of simpletons in our politics. Stupid people communicate in basic language, so they have borrowed the crude juxtapositions of the last century and repurposed them into new partisan labels.

This is what makes this age so maddening to the sober minded. Even accounting for the fact that objectivity must yield to partisanship, there should be some truth content to the partisan rhetoric. Their partisanship should actually be in furtherance of their interests or the interests of the group they claim represent. The lies and misrepresentations should have some purpose. What’s the purpose of “Anti-fascism brought to you by Amazon World Services”?

Another possible explanation for all this is Fukuyama was right in a sense that we have reached the end of liberal democracy. There’s no way forward, so people rummage around in the past for the outfits of the ancestors and then go out on the public stage and reenact old fights. Politics is now a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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What Comes Next

Posted on August 3, 2020 by thezman

In July 1936, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were brought to Moscow to be interrogated for being part of Trotsky-led conspiracy. The pair had been part of the ruling triumvirate, along with Stalin, after Lenin was incapacitated with a stroke, but they had sided with Trotsky in the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death. As a result. their status had declined in the party. In 1932, they were found to be complicit in the Ryutin Affair and were expelled from the Communist Party.

Stalin ordered Nikolai Yezhov, who later was head of the NKVD during the purges, to interrogate the two as part of a larger conspiracy involving Trotsky loyalists. Yezhov appealed to their devotion to the Soviet Union. They were, of course, subjected to physical and psychological pressure. Yezhov told Kamenev he had evidence against his son, which could result in his execution. Inevitably, they agreed to participate in what would be the first of many show trials against Stalin’s enemies.

The bargain Zinoviev and Kamenev struck with the Politburo was that they would testify against their comrades in exchange for their lives and their family’s lives. Stalin himself agreed to the deal in person, on behalf of the Politburo. They were tried with fourteen other defendants in the House of the Unions, which still stands today. All sixteen were found guilty of plotting to kill Stalin and other Soviet officials. They were promptly executed in the basement of Lubyanka Prison.

This would be the pattern throughout the Great Purge. Political enemies would be turned against one another through a combination of terror, torture and the promise of forgiveness if they cooperated. The real purpose of forcing friends to denounce friends and family members to denounce other family members was to create an atmosphere in which no one could trust anyone. As Montesquieu noted, the motor that powers every despotic regime is a general fear of the ruler.

In the West, of course, the Left defended the trials as proper and necessary. In America, Progressive big shots signed onto a statement celebrating the trials. “The measures taken by the Soviet Union to preserve and extend its gains and its strength therefore find their echoes here, where we are staking the future of the American people on the preservation of progressive democracy and the unification of our efforts to prevent the fascists from strangling the rights of the people.”

You’ll note the familiarity of those words. Despite being written 82 years ago, the sentiments are the same as those of the modern Left. Other than the reference to the Soviet Union, those words would sound familiar on the college campus on in the halls of the New York Times. Modern Progressives see themselves as the defenders of the people against the enemies of democracy, by which they don’t mean elections, but rather the cooperative society of equals they imagine.

It is therefore no surprise that as the woke revolutions rolls on, the Left is now dreaming of show trials of their own. Instead of forcing their opponents to confess to imaginary crimes against the revolution, they want to drag their victims in front of the television cameras and force them to confront their racism. Undoubtedly, they will want to force these people to denounce their ancestors too. For good measure, maybe denounce some friends and family members as racists.

It may all seem ridiculous, but that is the way it goes with ideological movements running unchecked through a society. The original Bolsheviks who were eventually murdered by Stalin never saw it coming until it was too late. The Ukrainian farmers who supported the revolution never imagined the Holodomor. The Girondins, who had been the radicals of the French Legislative Assembly in 1791, became the conservatives of the Convention in 1792. They were purged and executed in 1793.

In this revolutionary moment, we went from protesting the police to toppling statues within weeks. Words like “plantation” have been erased from the language and companies are demanding employees submit what amount to loyalty oaths to the new woke religion. If corporate monopolies feel free to fire those deemed insufficiently enthusiastic, how long before they are demanding employees rat out fellow employees for speaking against anti-racism?

Revolutions are not just the violent replacement of the old with the new. They quickly become purification rituals. As Joseph de Maistre noted, “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.” This is what leads the radical to go from revolutionary to executioner.

Make no mistake. The New York Times to did not commission that demand for show trials because they needed to fill space. They have gone through their own form of the Ryutin affair, along with the rest of elite media. The Bari Weiss resignation letter and Andrew Sullivan’s final column are repeats of the Boris Nicolaevsky’s Letter of an Old Bolshevik, in which a loser in the great struggle for the revolution describes the divisions that formed in the revolution.

Take the time to read that New York Times piece. The writer is barely literate. The text reads like something from a hip-hop performer or maybe a slam poet. The words are not intended to convey literal meaning. Instead, the column should be read out loud to the sound of jungle rhythms. It is a call to war by the savages of the revolution, who can only be satisfied by the sight of blood. It’s the woke revolution’s declaration of war against western civilization.

This being a feminized age, even the vulgar revolutionaries lack the stomach to follow through on their desires. The woke women of the revolution can bully the soft men off the stage, but they will not be hanging anyone. Instead, this revolution will be satisfied to humiliate and harass. Women are much more vicious than men, so they will not have the decency to execute their enemies. Instead, ritual humiliation will be the end point of the coming show trials.

The New Economy

Posted on August 1, 2020 by thezman

Something that has been brought to the surface by the recent economic shutdown is that classical economics seems to have run out of answers. More precisely, we are seeing things today that classical and neoclassical economics said were not possible, at least not in the long term. All over the West, but particularly in the United States, we are seeing contradictions for which there are no explanations. It’s as if we have crossed into a new world that operates by different economic rules.

The best example of this is the debt carried by governments. For a long time, it was assumed that debt levels approaching GDP were unsustainable. In war time or a national crisis, a nation could run up huge debts, but must immediately address those debts after the crisis had passed. This meant austerity or inflation. Today, Japan has debt over 200% of GDP. Greece is at 170% and Italy at 130%. The United States was at 110% before the recent economic calamity.

Those who cling to the old economics keep predicting that sovereign debt will be the downfall of the West, but that’s like predicting rain in Arizona. Eventually, the prediction comes true, but when is what matters. As the John Maynard Keynes famously said, “In the long run we’re all dead.” Maybe there is some point where these debt levels have to be addressed, but everyone used to know this was not possible. Within living memory, trillion-dollar Federal deficits were said to be impossible.

All around the modern economy we see things that should not be happening. America has seen 50 million people file for unemployment. The streets are empty during work days in most cities. It has been an article of faith that wide-scale unemployment would lead to unrest. Instead of marches by unemployed workers, we have riots by the delinquent children of the ruling class. They are not demanding jobs. Instead, the jobless are watching the shenanigans on television.

Similarly, the stock markets are doing the opposite of what economics has said should happen on the cusp of a long depression. Apple became the world’s first trillion-dollar public company on Thursday, as a rise in its share price pushed it past the previously unthinkable valuation. This is a company that makes luxury goods financed on retail debt. Their core market is now unemployed. How is it possible for a “Good Time Charlie” business to boom in a depression?

There may be ways to explain these and other phenomena within the old rules of economics, but those patches to the old theory just create new contradictions that have to be addressed with new patches. It may simply be that the West, having moved past scarcity, has entered into a new world of economics. Just as quantum physics takes over for classical physics at the atomic level, the new economics takes over for the old economics at the post-scarcity barrier.

An example brought up in this brilliant discussion (Video and MP3) on modern finance is the elevation of transaction-creation over capital formation. A company like Tesla has a ridiculously high valuation, despite its many problems, because it creates lots of transactions and creates potential transactions. Everything from government credits to complex financial instruments are spun off by the activity of the firm. As a result, it creates lots of downstream financial activity.

Compared to an old school car maker, Tesla makes little sense. The old school car maker was focused on building cars, which meant they focused on all of the processes to building a car, like supply chains and managing factories. As a result, they had massive balance sheets. The real value of the company was the massive array of assets it owned to build and sell cars. Tesla, in contrast, has a tiny balance sheet, as it is focused on generating economic activity.

The elevation of the transaction over capital formation is one of the unremarked aspects of the new economy. Wealth is now generated by either creating new ways to move information around the system or maintaining a gate through which information must flow to some other part of the system. In the new economy, information can be knowledge about some future transaction or the store of old information in a wealth containment vehicle, like money, assets, credit and so forth.

In the new economics, the demand for genuine innovation, the overcoming of scarcity in some way, is in low demand. Instead, the economy is dominated by middlemen who benefit from each transaction. Therefore, the innovator is one who comes up with a new way to accelerate the movement of information in the system, thus increasing the number of transactions. Facebook is worth billions not because it has a great product or service. Its value is in its ability to generate transactions.

Another aspect of the new economics that seems to contradict the old rules is the rise of credit as an asset. All over the global financial system credit sits on the books of banks, hedge funds and companies as an asset. The asset is taken at face value and often the nature of it is unknown. This was obvious in the mortgage crisis when debt holders had no idea what was in those mortgage pools. Credit is now just another store of information in the financial system.

In fact, certain types of debt are the preferred store of information. The financial system has an unquenchable thirst for US treasuries. Federal debt is now over 26 trillion, a number thought unimaginable just a few decades ago. When you add in unfunded Social Security and Medicare liability, the debt is multiples of that total. Despite this staggering debt load, United States treasuries remain the preferred collateral in the financial system. They are better than actual money.

An irony of this new post-scarcity economic order is that it seems to be evolving toward something closer to the old palace economies of the Bronze Age. All over the economy we see a great consolidation. Amazon is close to half the retail economy now. Five big banks control more than 90% of the financial system. The tech oligarchs are close to having a monopoly on the public square. In their respected spheres, everything flows into them and is distributed out as they see fit.

We have quickly moved from a situation where these new economic models were too fragile to regulate to a situation where they are too big to regulate. In fact, the phrase “too big to fail” is now just an accepted truth of the current age. Like the palace economies, these institutions are not here to serve society. American society now exists to serve these new institutions. As a result, these institutions are actively shaping our behavior to create transactions that serve their needs.

Whether or not this is sustainable is unknown. People who want to the think it cannot go on will find reasons to believe that. The answer though lies in whether this model can last in a world of informational symmetry. As automation takes over the economic system, will there be a way to create more transactions. After all, the robots will reach a point where they know the market value of all items before the market is set. No robot will be able to fool the other robots.

That is another aspect of the new economy that goes unexamined. It is just assumed that automation will idle the human assets the ruling class does not like. In realty, it will be the information class that suffers the most. In a world where financial transactions are conducted among algorithms on the block-chain, what is the need for guys working the phones in a brokerage? How would trades even happen if both sides know the future price of the item being traded?

As with anything new, there are more unknown things than known things. The new field of quantum economics is an effort to take methods and ideas from quantum physics to model economic activity. It starts from the observation that something like the efficient market theory contradicts the assumption that humans are rational and will attempt to maximize their utility. People know the odds, but they keep going to the casino anyway, buying sports cars and following new trends.

There’s also the possibility that reality has simply gone on holiday and will return to put all of this back in order. Some unknown crisis will reveal the massive cracks in the foundation of the current economic model. Everyone will suddenly snap out of the fog of plenty and rush for the exits. After all, the Bronze Age economic model was unable to hold up under the pressure of the Sea People. The current economic model may simply collapse under the weight of a billion Africans.

Media Update: The guys at Myth of the 20th Century had me on as a guest to talk about various things related to economics. I appreciate them having me on. They do a lot of interesting stuff, so I hope everyone will check out their material. Like so many, they have been condemned to the valley of the damned. That means no YouTube of Twitter, but you can download the latest episode here. They also have a Bitchute channel and a D-Tube channel.

Rhetorically Speaking

Posted on July 31, 2020 by thezman

It is a double feature weekend! In addition to the normal podcast, I sat down with the guys at Myth of the 20th Century to talk about modern finance, American economics and ancient Athens. They are a good group and do some very interesting stuff on their shows, so I hope everyone listens. I think they will have the show posted later today or maybe tomorrow. I’ll post a link here and all the other places I frequent. That means about three hours of me this weekend.

This week’s show is a bit of an attic cleaning. Whenever I think of something that could be useful in a show or post, I put it on the list. Once I get enough of them, in theory, I’ll do a post on them or a podcast on the general theme of the items. That’s the theory, but in reality, I often ended up with a bunch of stray thoughts that don’t really fit in with one another all that much. This week I took some of those that were very loosely related to one another and did them as segments.

The thought initially with these ideas was to do a long post or maybe a podcast on how to deal with that crazy lefty in your life around the holidays. All of us have at least one lunatic that we have to deal with whether we like it or not. A guide to dealing with the lunatic in your life seemed like a fun idea. Maybe I’ll do it one day, but for now I just wanted to clean up the list and so this week I have a show about the rhetoric we confront when dealing with lefty and his proxies.

Technical Note: The site was down for a good while overnight. It seems that traffic is going up faster than capacity. Last spring, I had to upgrade the server and bandwidth to match the demand, but demand keeps going up. That’s a good thing, but it means another upgrade is on the horizon. For now, there may be some outages from time to time until I get that sorted. I hope to fold this in with the planned site upgrade later this year, so I’m hoping to make the current setup work for now.

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.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Framing (Link)
17:00: Personalizing Politics
42:00: False Choices
57:00: The Opposite Rule
57:00: Closing

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/oALEvWW9WZk

Parable Of The Lizard People

Posted on July 30, 2020 by thezman

Imagine a strange world that is inhabited by a variety of intelligent life forms, rather than just one like on earth. These life forms are not just different tribes or races like here on earth, but different species. That means no interbreeding between the groups, so they remain separate and distinct. Here on earth, humans are the smartest beasts on the planet, so we sit at the top of the hierarchy. On this alien world, the top of the hierarchy is a crowded place populated with these different intelligent species.

One group evolved from a serpent-like ancestor, so they retain many of the features we would associate with reptiles. Unlike a lizard here in earth, they are like the aliens from the movie They Live, in that they can appear to be familiar to those around them. This is one of their main advantages as a species. They sort of fit in with the other species when they want to do it, so they are able to influence the other intelligent species. This allows them to avoid direct confrontation with the other intelligent life forms.

Another intelligent species evolved from something bird-like. Like birds and reptiles here on earth, this groups shares a distant relative with the lizard people, but it is too far back for them to share many similarities. One branch went the bird way and then a bird-like humanoid way in the distinct past. The lizard people went reptilian and the evolved into the smart lizard people of the present. The bird are much more efficient breeders, so they have the ability to increase and decrease their numbers quickly.

Another group went down the primate path like humans. They split into two branches at some point in the past. One group turned out to be a dumber, brutish ape-like creature that lives in caves and is prone to violence. The other branch ended up something closer to what we think of as humans, but still apish. They are like the apes from the Planet of the Apes movies. All of these species are smart enough and aware enough to grasp their relationship with one another.

The lizard people are smaller in number, but nature has endowed them with great cleverness as a force multiplier. The bird people are smart as well, but not quite as smart as the lizard people. They have greater numbers when necessary. The cave-apes, of course, are quite dumb, while the yard apes are pretty smart. They can be as smart as the bird people, but they are a notoriously individualist species. They tend to cluster in small groups while the bird people organized into large flocks.

Now, these are all species of varying intelligence, so instead of relying on the natural evolutionary processes to sort out their differences, they reason them through. The lizard people, despite being small in number, tend to control things. The bird people feel a natural kinship with the lizard people, for the most part, but they also compete with the lizard people for control. The lizard people will use the cave-apes as an ally in these fights, while the bird people will try to recruit the yard apes.

Into this system of interlocking loyalties and rivalries comes a new group of intelligent creatures from some other planet. These are much closer to humans, with a wide range of skills and intelligence. They are refugees from a nearby planet and settle onto this new world. Initially, they hope to reason with the host species to carve out a place for themselves in this complex set of relations. After all, these are all intelligent species that can solve problems and avoid conflicts.

What they find is none of the groups in these coalitions want to open up to them. The lizard people, in fact, dedicate their efforts to keeping the new group outside the coalition, even trying to oppress them. They encourage the yard apes to attack the new comers and organized the cave apes to harass them. The bird people see no reason to side with the newcomers, as they don’t want to go to war with the lizard people and their cave ape army. The planetary coalition remains closed.

The new people now face a dilemma. They can leave, but there is no guarantee they can find a new world that will welcome them or be able to sustain them. They can stay and allow themselves to be preyed upon by the apes. Maybe if they defend themselves well enough, they can win a long war of attrition and bring the lizard people to the negotiating table. Alternatively, they can go to war with the current system and find ways to shatter the current relationships.

Naturally, the first choice will be to find another world, as this is not a war-like species, but the facts eventually make this unreasonable. That leaves the long war of defense or the possible shorter war of offense. Either choice means violence. The only way to survive is to either smash the current arrangements or drive up the costs to the people at the top of it until they yield. That either means war on the lizard people or a long war against their ape-like proxies.

Fundamentally, this is the logic of political violence. The group committing the violence on behalf of their cause is assuming there is no other option. Muslim terrorism in the West is the long war of attrition. They don’t think they can negotiate with the West, which they see as the aggressor, so it is the long war model. The Civil Rights movement was the other option. The people behind it were using black violence to overthrow the natural order, controlled by a white elite.

This is a useful way to consider the current organized street violence. The people doing it have access to power. Many are the sons and daughters, sometimes both at the same time, of the people at the top. They have that initial option of petitioning for redress and negotiating for new rules. This is what makes them the cave apes in our fantasy world described in the above scenario. They may think they are revolutionaries, but they are actually tools of the prevailing order.

The people being assaulted and attacked, the white shop owners and residents in these areas are the newcomers in our scenario. It’s why there are no corporate sponsors for their side, as we see with the attackers. These riots are one step from having commercials from Amazon and Goldman Sacks. “This assault on an old white man walking his dog is brought to you by Amazon World Services.” It’s also why no one in charge thinks anything is wrong or this needs to be stopped.

The one difference between our reality and the conjured reality of the above scenario is the people under attack in our world lack self-awareness. They think they are in charge and that the corporations and politicians will respond to market pressure. You can be sure most of them think they will have their revenge in November. They think “get woke, go broke” is a reflection of reality. A big part of the war being waged on them is a psyop to reinforce this false consciousness.

Another important difference is the math of the situation. On the alien world, the existing species have the numbers on their side. In this world, the ruling coalition does not have numerical superiority. Once the people being attacked realize there is no negotiating with the lizard people and there is no escaping the situation, the math of the situation becomes the most salient aspect of the fight. The only question is how long will it take for the people under siege to grasp the reality of their situation.

Sports Entertainment

Posted on July 29, 2020 by thezman

Last week, the Wisconsin athletic director sent out a letter to supporters that the university would lose 60-70 million dollars this year due to the reduction in football games being played in the fall. If the season is cancelled, the losses will top 100 million just for the fall. That may be an exaggeration, but there is no question that a cancellation of the college football season will cost the big-time college programs tens of millions in revenue. It is a billion-dollar industry.

ZeroHedge pointed out that ESPN has a billion dollars in ad space to sell for this fall’s college football season. They also have ad space for other sports as well, but college football is the prime mover of ad space. It is unlikely that ad buyers will want to buy ads when ESPN is running replays of card games this fall. ESPN’s primary income stream is mandatory cable fees, they net close to nine billion in fees every year, but a billion dollars in ad revenue still counts for something.

Of course, everyone knows no one is watching ESPN at the moment, but that has no impact on the cable fees. The way it works is a service like Hulu of Comcast pays ESPN nine dollars per month for each subscriber to their service. These deals are not contingent on viewership. As ZeroHedge points out, the language in these deals does not require the content provider to deliver particular content. As long as ESPN is beaming something, they get paid for it.

Even so, the mass disruption of sports is going to have an impact on the economic model of professional sports. Out of work people will begin to look at that cable bill and wonder if it makes sense. Cable providers will begin to look for ways to get out from under their ESPN deal. For its part, ESPN will not be paying the leagues for content when the leagues are shutdown. Like the economy as a whole, professional sport is about to experience an unprecedented jolt.

Way back when the lock downs were on the table, the sober minded warned that you can’t lock everyone in their homes and not have consequences. The modern economy is a highly complicated balancing act that has evolved to produce increasingly efficiency, along with the retail excess. Even small disruptions can upset the balance within supply chains resulting in unexpected outcomes. Start turning off large bits of it and before long the whole thing starts to crash.

The first glimpse of this may be what is happening with sports. Major League Baseball is the first to re-open, but it is quickly becoming a disaster. The empty parks make the television product less than compelling and now games are being cancelled as players test positive for the virus. The NBA is struggling to keeps its knuckleheads inside the compound where they plan to play their games. The NFL is seeing droves of players sit out the upcoming season for fear of the virus.

The thing no one dares mention is the impact this lock down is having on interest in spectator sports. Being a sports fan is like being a smoker. Part of the dependency is the ritual and structure of it. The smoker takes a break every hour to smoke, collect his thoughts and get the nicotine hit. The football fan has their weekend in the fall, where they have scheduled social activities around games. Like the smoker, the sports fan builds their life around the habit.

People who quit a vice like smoking or drinking note that they also quit the social scene that goes with it. They lose touch with Sally from accounting who they used to take smoke breaks with every day. The people at the bar are no longer a part of their life. That’s what will happen with sports. Those weekends in the fall will be filled with other things and after the withdrawal pains subside, the habit will be lost. People who cut cable know this experience. In time, you don’t miss it.

This is not idle speculation. It has been known for a long time in the sports world that the recovery time after a work stoppage is very long. When a sports league shuts down due to labor strife, it takes years for the fans to return. It’s not because they are mad at the greedy players and owners. The fans simply find other things to do with their time and many of them drift away entirely. Millions have probably broken the habit already and that is before the hate whitey lectures were added.

There is one final piece to this puzzle. The growth of sports entertainment has tracked the arc of the Baby Boom generation. Look at attendance figures for sports in the 1960’s and 1970’s, before Boomers were dominating the market. Ball parks rarely sold out and the audience for televised product was limited. In the 1980’s as the Boomers took over the marketplace, sports boomed. When they could play tennis, professional tennis was huge. Then it was golf that had a boom.

The fact is, the sports entertainment model was built for and on the Baby Boomer generation, which is now entering its power down cycle. Boomers are retiring and that means down-sizing their lives. The major sports leagues are facing a demographic reality that cannot be overcome with happy talk about diversity. Non-whites don’t spend like whites and they cannot sustain an economic model built for whites. What happened to California is what is coming for sports entertainment.

This demographic cliff has been known to the sports leagues for a long time, which is why they happily throw in with the hate-whitey stuff. Sure, many of the principles really do hate white people, but much of it driven by the carnival barker’s belief in his ability to will an audience into existence. They really do think they can cast the same spell on the brown hordes that they cast on white people and get the same result. The virus panic and cultural revolution will put those theories to the test.

It is hard to see how the old sports entertainment model survives the current crisis. That doe not mean these leagues fold or that sports entertainment dies out. It’s just that the old model was built for an old America, one that no longer exists. On the other hand, sports entertainment has been a vital part of keeping whitey under control. Something will have to be done to reestablish the mind control device known as sportsball. Perhaps part of woke America will be mandatory sports watching by recalcitrant whites.

Our House Of Cards

Posted on July 28, 2020 by thezman

Adolf Hitler once said, “There is nothing new under the sun. There are just new ways of expressing the same ideas.” There is some truth to this, which is why we have so many ways of saying that history repeats itself. At least we like to think it repeats itself, as that’s a comforting thought. It means the answers to today’s problems, no matter how vexing, exist in the past. All we have to do is rummage around in the past for a similar time and take a look at the solutions from that period.

There are exceptions. The French Revolution is one of those novel happenings that had no precedent in the known past. The Bolshevik Revolution looked a bit like the French Revolution, but turned out to be something different, mostly because the Bolsheviks were students of the French Revolution. Sometimes things are different enough to be treated as totally new. We may be experiencing one of those times where the conditions are unique enough to feel as if there is no precedent.

Older pundits are fond of comparing the current cultural revolution to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s. They make the comparison because they were around for the first one and they go in for nostalgia. They also see that the people cheering it on in the halls of power are often people who participated in the cultural revolution of the past. You can be sure that many oldsters on the Left think what is happening today confirms their forever youth.

There are some big differences though. For one, the rebels of the past were actually rebelling against something. They did not have unlimited corporate and institutional support. The cops were told to beat the crap out of the rioters in the 1960’s by the political class, both Democrat and Republican. Today, the political class, both Democrat and Republican, is on the side of the rioters. We saw that in New York, Washington and now Portland and Seattle.

There’s also the fact that the rebels of the past had an agenda. It may have been childish and silly, in a college sophomore sort of way, but it was an agenda they could talk about in public. They wanted more personal freedom. They wanted the war in Vietnam to end. They wanted public aid for poor people and blacks. The current rebels talk about nonsense like social justice and privilege. All they can muster is pointless slogans they heard on-line.

A couple generations ago, the Silent Majority could look at the situation and imagine an end game. For example, they could connect ending the Vietnam War with ending the anti-war protests. That meant voting for Nixon in 1968. They could see a connection between loosening social mores and clearing the streets of hippies. On the other hand, they could imagine law and order politicians instructing the cops to clear the streets of the hippies and protesting students too.

Today, there is no silent majority. The great demographic changes that have been wrought by those ascendant rebels of the 1960’s has reduced the white population to about 60% now. About 20% of that population is on the side of the rioters, just as long as they stay away from their mansions. Some portion has walked away from politics entirely, due to the aforementioned changes wrought by the rebels. The Silent Majority is just a bitter minority now.

That’s an aspect to this that gets little attention and makes this very different from the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. The geezers cheering their grandchildren burning Starbucks keep expecting the jackboots of the Silent Majority to show up like they did the last time, but those jackboots are now on golf courses in Boca. No matter how much they provoke their imaginary enemy, there is no response. This reboot of the 1960’s is missing the thing that made it possible, that Silent Majority.

Another novel item is that the now silent minority has nowhere to turn for the solution to this cultural revolution. What is it that they can give to the people burning and looting the cities to make them go home? How does one answer the call for social justice or the end of systemic racism? What would those things look like? These chants and incantations have no practical meaning. They are moral signifiers borrowed from the grievance studies programs on the college campus.

More important, there is no electoral option either. The Democrat party is actively cheering on this lunacy. Joe Biden is running an extortion campaign, where a vote for him means an end to the violence and Covid lock downs. How realistic is that when his party is cheering for the mayhem, promising to take it to a new level after they win the final election. It is not hyperbole to say that a Democrat sweep in November means the end of elections. What would be the point?

Of course, the Republicans are revealing themselves to be entirely bankrupt. Their response to the unrest is nothing. They are too busy crafting yet another giveaway to their corporate paymasters. Trump is nowhere to be found. He occasionally tweets something stupid, but otherwise he looks like a beaten man. In fairness, he is a beaten man, beaten by a political class that is corrupt beyond reform. For that silent minority, there is no political option to end the current madness.

This is a novel problem for Americans. If you are a white person in a place like Seattle, what are your options? If you abide by the law, you have your property destroyed and possibly your life threatened. People are being shot in their cars now as they try to go about their business. Gun sales are booming, but the people buying the guns imagine themselves defending their life and property within a system of laws. What happens when they realize there is no system of laws?

If you read about the deliberations of the decision-makers in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the thing that stands out is their sober mindedness. They were very worried that America was on the cusp of social collapse. The decision makers of today, that means political and corporate leaders, seem to think American society is an indestructible object they can abuse without consequence. They are carrying on like reckless children, incapable of imagining any consequences to their behavior.

Social collapse comes when the majority stops accepting the legitimacy of the system and the authority of those in charge of it. The one result of the street rioters and their corporate and political sponsors is they may get what they want. The majority may stop accepting the legitimacy of the system. That silent minority may lose all faith in the system and the people running it. That would be us one step from the edge, when all respect for authority collapses and takes society with it.

Judas’s Priests

Posted on July 27, 2020 by thezman

It is popular in various dissident warrens to characterize mainstream conservatism as a collection of spineless sissies. Sometimes they are drawn as naive idealists who get taken by their more cynical opponents on the Left. Other times they are described as fools operating under a set of “principles” that make it impossible for them to fight the Left effectively. While some of that is certainly true, the reality is conservatism has been a cynical confidence game for a very long time.

Probably the best example of that truth of conservatism is Jonah Goldberg, formerly of National Review and now head of something called The Dispatch. For a couple of decades, Goldberg has played the role of affable right-wing dufus. He was the doughy, easy going every-man, who liked popular culture and goofing off, but was also one of those instinctively conservative guys. He was not going to quote Edmund Burke or even Bill Buckley in his posts. He would quote the Simpsons.

It was a great role for him to play, as he is no one’s idea of an intellectual, but he also has the disheveled goofball look popular in the movies. It was also an effective way to get people to overlook the fact that he was never a natural conservative or even much of a conservative. He was an actor playing a role. He started out in his acting career working for Ben Wattenberg, a far Left radical in the 1960’s and 1970’s, who got on the public television gravy train in the 1980’s.

Wattenberg was associated with the American Enterprise Institute, the symbol of conservative racketeering in Washington. This is the financial engine for the so-called neoconservatives, which means it is staffed with left-wing activists posing as conservatives, in order to promote an imperialist foreign policy agenda. They also peddle libertarian economics on behalf of their corporate sponsors. Ben Wattenberg was one of the first models to roll off their production line.

Goldberg was also a creation of AEI. It was his first job out of college, which is where he was paired up with Wattenberg to be trained as a subversive. Once ready for action, he was installed at National Review. He was then assigned the task of creating their on-line presence, which is where most people became aware of him. His frumpy every-man act became popular with a new generation of conservatives, looking for something more in line with the slacker culture than the Ivy League culture.

This is a good example of how a tiny group of people came to control the conservative establishment in the last century. In order for a conservative writer to get access to a conservative platform, it meant passing muster with a thicket of gatekeepers trained by and controlled by operations like AEI. If you wanted to write for NRO, it meant getting vetted by Jonah Goldberg. To write for the print side, it meant being vetted by some other think tank approved gatekeeper.

Of course, the main source of control was money. AEI and Heritage are the bottleneck in conservative fundraising. AEI brings in over 50 million in contributions each year, while Heritage hauls in close 100 million. They also control the flow of cash into hundreds of smaller, less well-known non-profits. These operations underwrite conservative publications and conservative book writing. They will bulk-buy a book, thus providing the writer with a nice royalty.

If all of this sounds like a racket, that’s because it is a racket. It is more cynical than that though, as the people running the rackets are terrible people. They lie about what they are doing, causing otherwise well intended people to support things that go against their stated interests. They con rich people into giving them money, which gets used to support the lifestyle of these grifters. They also use their power to attack anyone that challenges their hammerlock on official opposition.

A good recent example of this is something done by Jonah Goldberg. Back in 2018, a woman named Emerald Robinson got a scoop that many so-called conservative publications had been secretly taking cash from the tech monopolies. They were being paid to support the tech monopolies stranglehold on political discourse. Payola has always been a problem with Conservative Inc. and this looked the latest example of their penchant for pay-for-play shakedowns.

Now, Emerald Robinson was a reporterette for something called One America News Network (OANN), which is an independent media outlet that aims to serve the grassroots conservative. Their audience is the sort of people who support Trump because he is opposed by people like Jonah Goldberg. They are the talk radio crowd that skews more Huey Long than Bill Buckley. Robinson now works for Newsmax, another one of those types of operations.

Goldberg was dispatched to trash her, which he was happy to do. First, he trashed her personally on Twitter. Then he posted a piece on NRO, smearing her as a “failed-actress-turned-faux journalist” and an idiot. He also claimed she had no real evidence to support her claim. He finished by writing, “Look, I honestly suspect Robinson makes up many of her “sources” and that she’s a fake reporter while claiming to wage a war on “fake news.” That’s a serious charge.

It turns out that Goldberg was lying. Google was giving money to National Review and dozens of other so-called conservative operations. His paymasters at AEI were part of the operations to shower Conservative Inc. with payola, so they would do the bidding of the tech oligarchs. There’s simply no way Goldberg did not know this when he smeared Robinson, so his lies were conscious. They required forethought. He also lied when he knew all of his fellow racketeers knew he was lying.

The truth is, the people running Conservative Inc. are not just idealistic naifs being rolled by the bare-knuckled lefties in politics. They are not excessively principled ideologues playing by a set of rules that prevent them from winning. In reality, they are evil subversives grifting off the destruction of the country. They are selling out the people they claim to represent and they do it with enthusiasm. They are soulless grifters, willing to say and do anything to keep the con going.

What makes them especially evil is that they are preying on the most vulnerable people in the country. These are the average white people who have no representation in the halls of power. Mostly, they are happy to be left alone to live their lives. These are the people who trust the system. They are willing to trust others to look out for their interests in Congress and their state legislatures. The GrifterCons prey on these people like jackals, stealing their money and selling out their interests.

The thing that puts these people in a special category is the audacity of their conniving and grifting. When their perfidy is noted, they carry on as if they are the victims of some new pogrom. The American Right has been consumed by army of Judases swarming traditional America like a plague of locusts. Washington has been their playground, their Garden of Gethsemane, for generations now. The best the Right can hope for now is that these people are remembered as well as their inspiration.

A Sad Note: The proprietor of The Woodpile Report died last week. He was a great promoter of the sorts of content you find here. He had a big audience, so when he linked to someone, he sent a lot of traffic their way. I will forever be grateful for his support in linking to me on a regular basis. Rest in peace Ol’ Remus.

The Media Revolution

Posted on July 25, 2020 by thezman

In 2016, the Left was super confident they had the election in the bag. So confident, in fact, they got sloppy. It was around this time that the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign, assuming President Clinton would be cool with it. They are just as confident this time, but they probably don’t have the FBI and CIA spying for them. Given what happened in 2016, you would think they would be cautious, but instead they are overflowing with certainty. They know they will win.

One reason for this is they have purged almost all dissenting voices from their preferred media platforms. The Drudge Report is so over-the-top in his anti-Trump antics it feels like a parody site now. There is some speculation that he sold out to Silicon Valley grifters, but Drudge was always a creation of Neo-Conservative Inc. His sources and sympathies were always in that world. That whole scene has fired up the NeverTrump clown car for one more ride through the public square.

Twitter is just a far-left echo chamber. They have been purging so many people from the platform, even the most determined of trouble makers has grown bored with the effort it takes to get back on and stay on the site. Sites like Reddit and 4chan are muted for fear of being shut down like 8chan. That site was shuttered by the usual suspects and had to re-spawn as a weaker version of itself. Other than Gab and semi-private platforms, the internet is tumbleweeds and left-wing cranks.

One result seems to be a soaring confidence of the Left. They are carrying on like Dementia Joe will win every state twice in November. His vote will be so strong it will change the results of the last election. That’s an amusing exaggeration, but it is at the heart of their world view. Installing Biden in the White House will allow them to memory hole the 2016 election, as if it never happened. They will probably instruct textbook makers to skip the last four years of history.

Another result is some former enthusiasts of the Trump campaign are very depressed, certain that their guy will lose and that he deserves to lose. The anti-Semites, for example, are sure everyone is abandoning Trump, because the anti-Semites have been purged from the internet. It’s really weird how those guys on the one hand claim our greatest ally controls the media, but on the other hand they intensely follow the media and accept what they see at face value.

It is a good example of how the intensely on-line can lose perspective. When all of your inputs are from on-line media sources and people who agree with you, often two sets with great overlap, you get a warped view of the world. That’s the irony in what we are seeing right now. The former Trump fans who now hate Trump look at the media and see confirmation, while the people who hate those former Trump enthusiasts see the same media and also see confirmation.

The thing is, normal white people are getting really sick of the hate whitey stuff all over the media. During the last few months, whitey has been finding refuge in watching movies and television shows. Now they are being bombarded with explicit hatred of white people. If you circulate around normal people, it comes up a lot. When it does come up, the intensity is plain as day. These are people who would be Trump voters, so it is not as if this is changing minds, but it is pissing them off.

The puzzle is, with the lack of confirmation, will these people act on their anger and frustration this November. They don’t have anyone but Tucker in the media addressing their anger. They can’t get confirmation on-line, even from dissidents, as they have either been purged from social media, toned it down or now operate in semi-private venues like this one. Tucker having record numbers, however, suggests there is a deep reserve of pissed off Trump voters.

An important tenet of modern mass media is that these big social media platforms dictate public sentiment. The Left used to say, in the before times, that their control of the media was worth as much as 4-5 points in an election. That was probably an exaggeration, but it did seem to matter. They controlled what was discussed, thus always giving the Democrats home field advantage. They are now sure their control of social media is driving public sentiment.

Is the same true of modern media? The 2016 election could be used to argue both sides of that debate. Trump used Twitter to get around and control the media, by forcing them to respond to him, rather than the other way around. On the other hand, he was confronted by a wall of sound from the Left, but won anyway. It is easy to forget, but the Left was every bit as triumphant and nasty four years ago as they are right now, but the voters did not follow along as predicted.

He also had his rallies, which had to be covered by the media. This confirmed to his supporters that they were not alone. They saw lots of normal people enjoying the rallies and they saw the cranks in the media mocking those fellow normies. It was both confirming and infuriating. That’s the thing he needs to work around this time. He needs to let his voters see that normal people are just as angry at the revolution and that the way to express it is to support Trump.

One thing that has always been true about the American Left is they think rhetoric that works once will work forever and in all situations. The word “Nazi’ has been so overused that only far-left cranks respond to it with something other than laughter. Racist is heading in the same direction, as most normal white just laugh at it now. We may be seeing something like this with mass media. The Left has so abused their control of the media that it now amplifies sentiment, rather than alters it.

Paradoxes

Posted on July 24, 2020 by thezman

It is impossible to assess your age, at least in the context of prior ages, as you have perspective on those prior ages that you lack for your own age. There’s also the fact that you can’t really remember how something felt. You can remember that some event caused you pain or made you happy, but you cannot recall the feeling. It is why we have the expression, “Time heals all wounds.” Still, one cannot help but sense that this age is peculiar and paradoxical compared to prior ages.

We seem to be at the great confluence of several historical cycles. One cycle coming to an end is the story of the American empire, which itself is the final chapters of the the Anglosphere and the Industrial Revolution. Another is the closing of the post-Cold War interregnum. We’re also in the final stages of the Enlightenment. Of course, we are at the dawn of the demographic age. There are probably other historical cycles ending and beginning, but those are the obvious ones.

As a result, we live in a time of glaring contradictions. Just as physics seems to have hit a dead end, our own story seems to have reached a point where it seems impossible to resolve the contradictions while maintaining the old beliefs. The only thing everyone can agree upon is the present order is not working. That in itself is a paradox, because for most of our history, great material excess was the goal. Just as we have reached that point, everyone is unhappy with the result.

Of course, it is possible that people in prior ages had the same sense, which is what drove them to alter their trajectory. The great social and political movements that came into being in the 19th century did not spring from nothing. Industrialization and urbanization failed to live up to their promise. The bloody resolutions to those social conflicts in the 20th century got us to this point, so maybe this is just the natural cycle of human history. We resolve one conflict in order to confront another.

Still, it does feel like we are living in an age in which all of the old truths we have always accepted are being disproved. A third of the country is out of work, which we were told was an untenable condition, but no one seems to notice. Revolutions from the top were supposed to be a clever turn of phrase, not a real thing. Yet, here we are living through a revolt of the ruling class against the majority population. The weirdness of this age is something that cannot be dismissed.

That is the value of thinking about paradoxes. They cause you to reassess your thinking and reconsider old assumptions. The great test of any theory is reality. This is why libertarianism is nonsense. It exists only in theory and only in isolation. The defenders of the status quo have to deal with the fact that in many cases, the reality of liberal democracy has fallen short of what was promised. In some cases, the important ones, we seem to be getting the opposite of what was promised.