Who Says?

Posted on May 6, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the odd neo-romantic subculture that exists among the young online right, a post about how the Germans were right about the liberating nature of work and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

There is a famous line from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which one of the characters asserts that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. This has been resaid many ways and attributed to many people, but the original is from Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist. For most of human history, the answer to the question, “Who says?” has been God, maybe the gods or perhaps a holy man who everyone agrees has some connection to the gods.

When someone said you should not do something, that question, “Who says?” was baked into the statement, along with its answer. You should not speak ill of the gids because the gods will exact revenge on you or maybe the authorities, fearing the wrath of the gods, will punish you. The answer to the question of who says you should or should not do something was always the same. it was some concept of the supernatural or its manifestation in the natural world.

In modern times, we do not appeal to the gods. You should not drive your car recklessly in a school zone because the government says you should not do that, and they have men with guns to arrest you if you do it. The answer to the question, “Who says I cannot speed in a school zone?” is the government. Every prohibition in our lives comes with an assumed answer to the question, “Who says?” That answer is almost always the government or its agents.

The government is not a god or claims connection to the gods, no matter what the politicians have to say about it, so who says they have the authority to decide how fast you can drive and where you can do it? In theory, it is we, the people, who decide these things through the democratic process. We created government and the process by which men hold power and they make the laws. The answer to the question, “Who says I cannot speed in a school zone?” is us, the people.

Of course, it does not stop there. If the government enacted a rule that says you must beep your horn when you see an orange-colored vehicle, no one would be satisfied with the answer “the government says you must do it.” It is a stupid rule and people would want more than that as an answer. In fact, some people might argue that the law is invalid because it requires people to do what they would otherwise would not do and for no reason that can be deemed in the best interest of the people.

In other words, the horn beeping law would fail to satisfy the question of “Who says?” because there has to be something more than just “because we say so” as an answer in order to satisfy the question. In the case of speeding around school zones, the real answer to the question is the safety of children. We prohibit reckless behavior around schools because we value the lives of our children. More important, we feel compelled to protect the safety of children.

Instead of something ridiculous like beeping the horn when you see an orange-colored car, pretend the law says you cannot teach women to read. The argument is that once women learn to read, we end up in the Aristophanes cycle. That is a good and valid reason for the law, but some would argue that it is more wrong to deny women the basic rights nature grants all people. Women have a natural right to exercise their minds by learning to read and using that knowledge to improve their lives.

What the critics of the prohibition on female literacy are saying is that it is not enough that the laws reflect the general will and have a practical purpose. There is some universal standard of justice against which the laws are measured. The horn beeping law is not just invalid because it is ridiculous. It is invalid because it unjustly compels people to act for no reason other than the state has the power to force them to beep their horns whenever they see an orange car.

A more serious way to think about this is with the waves of laws being pushed by Republicans regarding prohibited speech and thoughts. It is the official policy of the Republican Party that you should not think poorly of Israel, and you should not be permitted to criticize Israel. In fact, Republicans now think the one group of foreigners that should be deported are critics of Israel. The question they are never asked is, “Who says we should ban criticism of Israel?”

Most people would say it is rude to say mean things about Jews or Israelis, just as it is rude to make fun of fat people or homosexuals. No one suggests we deport people for telling jokes about fat people. In other words, there must be some other reason for the extraordinary emphasis on being rude to Israelis. It cannot simply be that we have all agreed that it is wrong. If there is no reason given, then it must be assumed that no reason exists, so there is no answer to the question.

Obviously, everyone knows the answer here. The massive Israeli lobby is bribing these people to pass these laws. Marco Rubio owes his political career, and thus his luxurious lifestyle, to a Zionist billionaire car dealer named Norman Braman. Rubio has been in the pocket of the neocons his entire career. Most Republican officials have a similar backstory, so this is why they want to strip what remains of your speech rights and ban large swaths of the Christian Bible.

None of that changes the basic problem. This crusade against anti-Zionism and antisemitism have to answer the same question that all prohibitions must answer, which is “Who says?” Being anti-Zionist might be viewed as rude to Jewish people and anti-Zionist are often rude to everyone in their presentations, but whoever says they must be muzzled must answer the question, “Who says?” Who says these people must be silenced and by whose authority are they being silenced?

This is a long trip to the basic question that lies at the heart of the current crisis and that is the question of authority. In the anti-Zionism debate, the problem is the same as with the horn blowing example. The answer to the question of “Who says?” is “the government says so” but that is not adequate because who says the government has the right to police your opinions? The only possible answer to that question is us, the people, and no such authority has been granted.

The question of authority always resolves to two possible answers, which is the collective will or the supernatural. The natural rights crowd will say the authority is nature, arrived at by reason, but that is just a way of blaming God while pretending he is no longer around. Once God is removed from the set of possible answers to the question “Who says?” we are left with our collective will, which means whomever we choose to be the final authority.

In the end, the response to all new demands for censorship and prohibitions against thoughts or actions must be “Who says?” Who decided that being rude to Jewish people is the worst sin? When was this decided? Who says we have to pretend crime is not what it is? Unless and until the scolds can answer these basic questions of authority, they have no legitimacy. An unjust prohibition is no prohibition at all, but merely an invitation to social conflict to the benefit of outsiders.

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Zero GOP

Posted on May 3, 2024 by thezman

For as long as anyone can recall, the offer from the American political system to the typical white person was a choice between a party that wants to harm you and your interests or a party that will work to prevent it. It was never explicitly stated this way, but it was always the subtext to Republican Party marketing. Vote Republican or risk being subjected to the tender mercies of the Democrats.

Note that the Democratic Party did not market itself this way. They did make wild claims about the Republicans wanting to do things like bring back slavery or roll back women’s rights, but they were always couched in the assertion that the Democrats were going to advance the goals of their supporters. The choice was between progress and regress, never stasis as with the Republican messaging.

Since the end of the Cold War, this dynamic has become grotesque. The Democrat Party invents increasing bizarre goals it seeks to achieve, things like letting men in dresses chase your kids around the park, while the Republican messaging has become feebler and more subservient. Republican messaging has been reduced to “Vote for us so the man in the dress chasing your kids is not a racist.”

It is clear that the people in the white working and middle class no longer have any options at the ballot box save for one. That option is to abandon the party that claims to represent their interest and thus abandon a system that mocks the very notion of representative government. Zeroing out the Republican side of the equation is the only way to break the cycle of madness.

That is the show this week. A big part of it is about how the system works and why there is no voting your way to a better result. The two parties, in collusion with the donor class, have rigged the game in such a way that voting no longer matters, other than to confirm to the parties that the rubes continue to be fooled. Negating that last part may be the only peaceful way of initiating a reform cycle.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

The Argument For Republicans
The Slow Death
The Math Of Congress
The Math Effect
Zero Seats

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Burn Baby Burn

Posted on May 2, 2024 by thezman

For the last few weeks, protests have raged at some elite colleges between anti-Zionists in support of Gaza and Zionist in support of Israel. At Columbia University in New York City, the protests essentially closed the college. The cops were finally sent in yesterday to clear the pro-Gaza camp, but at this point there is probably no point in trying to resume the spring semester. At other colleges, police continue to battle with protestors in an effort to restore order.

The protests provide some insight into what is happening among the Cloud People and also some insight into how the Dirt People see the Cloud People. It has been a long time since factions of the anti-white coalition that makes up what we call the left have squared off against each other. As a result, the Cloud People are struggling to grapple with what is happening. Usually, it is easy for them to pick sides, as the protestors are always targeting Dirt People.

The first thing worth noting is that the pro-Gaza protestors are not white. It is anti-Zionist Jews and nonwhites, with a smattering of upper-middle-class white girls from the grievance studies programs. The pro-Israel side is primarily Jewish students organized by the network of anti-BDS organizations that exist on every campus. As a result, the pro-Gaza side uses the antiwhite language they have been trained to use against the mostly Jewish protestors on the other side.

One result of this is the bellowing about antisemitism has had no effect on the protestors or their supporters among the faculty and media. This is has been the most powerful magic in American politics for so long that no one remembers a time when it was not otherwise, but the magic seems to be fading. Amusingly, this has the conservative commentariat chanting “antisemitism” even louder, sort of like how English speakers shout at foreign fast-food workers.

One reason for this is the youth are not as white as they used to be due to the deliberate demographic changes over the last half century. This is especially true on the college campus where antiwhite activism is now admissions policy. Those nonwhites and post-whites trained up to hate whitey now look at the people carrying Israeli flags and repeat the classic Jared Taylor line, “They look huwhite to me.” It would take a heart of stone to not laugh at this development.

There is a serious element here. Young people are nowhere near as supportive of Israel as in the past, due mostly to demographics. Support for Israel remains strong with old white people, but support declines rapidly after the boomers. There is also an antisemitism fatigue setting in with whites. Decades of crying wolf has had the natural impact on the culture. People are tired of the complaining from people who have done better in America than any other group.

There is another angle here. The shuffling husk that is the conservative movement has been trying to do what it exists to do, which is get white people to focus on the how and why, rather than the who and what. They shout about the pro-Gaza side being communists and antisemites, so their aging followers will focus on that rather than the fact these people do not belong here. They do not want you to notice the two alien tribes from the Levant fighting it out on the college campus.

That is why they jumped on the image of the “frat boys” supposedly “defending” the American flag at UNC. It was a staged photo by the usual suspects because this sort of boomer bait always works to distract middle-class white people. The “frat boys” were part of some anti-BDS operation. They were also waving around an Israel flag, but that was trimmed from the scene. This sort of thing is a reminder that conservatism exists to distract white people from what is happening.

The fact is none of the people involved in these protests should be in the country and that is what people should notice. Thirty percent of the undergrad student body in Columbia is foreign. Less than half of the student body is classified as white and half of those identify as Jewish. If you are the typical white person, Columbia University may as well be located in another solar system. It is not just a foreign place. It is an alien place that rests on hostility toward you.

These protests not only suggest fractures in the antiwhite coalition, but they suggest the Potemkin opposition in American politics is losing its grip. The Republican response to these riots was to pass a bill banning parts of the Christian Bible and stripping you of your right to criticize foreign governments. The Antisemitism Awareness Act is probably the most vulgar and depraved piece of legislation to ever pass the House, and it passed with overwhelming support from Republicans.

The Republicans passed this, in part, because they are trapped in 1985. They still think their voter base cares more about Israel than anything else. The idiot who dreamed up this monstrosity is right out of central casting. He is the typical clueless zombie that gets recruited into Republican politics, because he is biologically incapable of noticing what is happening all around him. The GOP is the party of feckless, clueless goofballs who can no longer play the role for which they exist.

In the end, these protests matter to Dirt People only in so far as they indicate problems among the Cloud People. None of these people are on our side and all of them would lock shields with the other side if asked to put on their Antifa and BLM outfits in order to terrorize white people this summer. The hope is that both sides of these protests are committed to the theory of escalatory dominance. After all, revolutions often grow out of the cracks in the ruling coalition.

The Politics Of Failure

Posted on May 1, 2024 by thezman

One of the eternal truths of human society is that the people with real power are those with control of the economics of society. Whether the society is ruled by a king or a committee of girl bosses, the people who have the final say on all matters are those who control the wealth of society. The golden rule of human organization is “the man with the gold makes the rules.” Without much fanfare, we may have seen this rule work its magic in the big neocon funding bill.

The first thing to note about the money for Project Ukraine is most of the money will never turn up in Ukraine, at least not in the form of weapons. If you read the text of the bill most of the money is for slush funds the White House can use to replenish weapons taken off the shelf and sent to Ukraine over the last year. It appears the White House has been shipping weapons to Ukraine that were not paid for by Congress, so this created a debt to the Pentagon budget that is now repaid.

The number of actual weapons going to Ukraine as a result of this bill is a fraction of the sixty billion allocated. Ukraine needs advanced air defense systems, artillery tubes and artillery shells, but none of this is coming from Washington. The main reason for this is none of these things exist, at least not in surplus quantities. You cannot send what does not exist, even with billions to spend. Instead, Ukraine is getting what is available which is wheeled vehicles and surplus arms.

It is not all that clear that supplying Ukraine with what they need would make much of a difference, as Ukraine has another problem. The Ukraine army is running out of men and there is no money solution to this problem. It takes time to draft and train men to fight this sort of war. According to Ukraine sources, they need two hundred thousand men right now to be made whole. That deficit grows bigger by about a thousand men a day and there is no way to solve this problem.

The reality on the battlefield raises an important question. If there is no money solution to the problems facing Ukraine on the battlefield, then why spend sixty billion on this project when it must inevitably fail? That money could be used to other foreign policy adventures like the planned war with China over Taiwan. Of course, they could spend the money on Israel. There is always an appetite for that in Washington. Instead, they chose to shovel sixty billion into the Ukraine furnace.

The first clue is all the money allocated to the Pentagon for various undefined things supposedly related to Ukraine. It is clear the administration sent far more to Project Ukraine than Congress authorized. What most likely happened is something like the old arms-for-hostages game played in the Reagan years. Military contractors sent men and material to Ukraine on the promise they would be made whole with interest at some point in the future. The future arrived in that bill.

The other clue is the money being sent to Ukraine for economic support. It is so tangled up in the language of government that it would take years for an outsider to figure out what any of it means. This is how Washington launders trillions of dollars through and for friends of Washington. Billions will go into obscure programs administered by the administrative state and then those funds will end up in grants to NGO’s or contracts to vendors with obscure business models.

Of course, some will go to the Ukraine government, but with very specific instructions on how it is to be spent. There are many friends of Washington that have unpaid bills for services rendered to Ukraine. The vendors must be paid in dollars, not the worthless currency of Ukraine. Some of this money will be directed through Kiev to those friends of Washington. It would be a total coincidence if those vendors just happened to employ friends and family of important people in Congress.

Most likely this was the main reason for the sense of urgency. Over the last two years big players have been making deals with Ukraine for economic development, on the assurance that Ukraine would win the war. BlackRock, for example, made a number of deals with Kiev. BlackRock and JP Morgan have created a bank for rebuilding Ukraine, by which they mean looting Ukraine. Large global operators have been cutting deals with Ukraine since the start of the war.

What this means is heavy weight players have been given exclusive access to Ukraine in exchange for economic assistance now. Much like how the Pentagon “borrowed” from military contractors, the regime has been promising the usual suspects first rights to loot Ukraine after the war, in exchange for “investments” now. This is all done informally, but no one is hiding it. War has always been good for business, especially the banking business.

In other words, another purpose of this bill was to repay economic elites who had been talked into going along with the project. Keep in mind that players like BlackRock and JP Morgan have money in Russia as well. Now that it is clear that Ukraine will lose the war, they need to think about how the world looks after Project Ukraine. As you always see with a failing enterprise, the insiders are getting their money out before it becomes obvious to everyone that the enterprise is doomed.

This is all speculation based on the available data, but the facts on the ground are making it clear to everyone that Ukraine is finished. The text of this spending bill and the announced weapons transfers that are part of it all point to a rush for the exits rather than a new commitment to the project. The smart money just jumped out the window, carrying your tax dollars with them. That means the next phase is finding someone in Washington to blame for the failure of the enterprise.

The Right-Wing Coffeehouse

Posted on April 30, 2024 by thezman

Last week Keith Woods posted on his Twitter a video montage of a guy going about his daily routine somewhere in America. Woods captioned the video with “One of the most disturbing videos I’ve ever watched.” What followed was a chain of thousands of comments back and forth, either trying to explain what Woods meant by that tweet or why he missed the point of the video. The video is worth watching and the comments are worth reading to get a sense of the debate.

The video itself was posted by the guy you see in it, and it turns out that he is a reasonably successful man. He has an advanced degree and a nice job. He is obviously doing well in the material sense. He is also married to a professional woman, and they are expecting their first child. Reportedly he posted the video without thinking much about how people would react. As is often the case with “viral” content, this one is about the people reacting to it, not the content.

The first thing it reveals is there is a segment of the on-line right that looks at normal life as something to be avoided. For Woods and many of his fans, a life like the man in the video enjoys is a nightmare. The reason for it is they see his life as having been reduced to material goods. He is not “living” in any meaningful way. He labors in a tedious job inside a sterile office in order to pay for things that are as sterile as the life he lives in order to obtain those things.

For this side of the on-line right, the point of life is not material prosperity, but something else that they are never very good at explaining. Keith Woods is not a hardy guy who is going to go off on dangerous adventures. He is not signing up to be a soldier of fortune or sail the seas as a merchant marine. In all probability his life is as routine and boring as the man in the video. Yet, he thinks that life should be about more than material comforts and should have a higher purpose.

Romanticism like this is associated with the people we call the left, but there has always been a strain of it on the right. This is especially true in Europe, where the terms left and right used to mean more than tomorrow and yesterday. In America, the people we call the right have always embraced the sterility of material existence. The point of life is to get a good job, work yourself to death to buy stuff and then die before you become a financial burden on the next generation.

Note that Woods was not universally denounced for his post. There was another divide in the responses and that was the age divide. His younger fans were right there with him in condemning the traditional definition of success, while the old guys like Matt Walsh were baffled by the response. From his point of view, the old American right’s point of view, the video guy is living the best life. It is impossible for Walsh to grasp why people like Woods reacted negatively to the video.

No doubt hoping to benefit from the debate on Twitter, Nick Fuentes posted this video of himself mocking people with jobs. Unlike the Keith Woods reaction, Fuentes is crude and self-indulgent, but the point of view is the same. He is rejecting what most people would consider a normal and happy life. It is important to him that the world knows he rejects the conventional life. His critique of women, heterosexuality and marriage all come from the same rejection of the conventional.

This new romanticism is not entirely new with the Zoomers. Richard Spencer should probably get credit for introducing this to the alt-right. Much of his appeal was to the sorts of young men who suspected that the middle-class suburban life they have always known was missing something important. Spencer was never able to explain what was missing, but he was able to tap into this longing in order to make himself a cultural phenomenon for a brief time.

The superficiality of this new form of romanticism is what gives it the coffee house radicalism vibe. By any reasonable standard, Richard Spencer lived a boring life, even when he was at his peak fame. Other than a few publicity stunts, he spent his days drinking and playing on the internet. The next generation of online romantics does even less living in the romantic sense. Woods and Fuentes, for example, are teetotalers who primarily exist as avatars online.

Even so, there does seem to be a change among the young right-wing with regards to their view of what constitutes a good life. Read the comments to that Fuentes video and they are more slobbering than normal. The new counterculture forming up is on the right and it is exclusively male. Having been raised online, they want nothing to do with the mundane life that makes the physical world possible. They may not know what they want, but they do not want what is on offer.

Athenian Lessons

Posted on April 29, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about what is now considered a classic children’s film, a post about joining the Gaia cult via battery powered tools and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

There has always been a fascination in the West with ancient philosophy, especially the Greeks, as it is assumed Greeks gave us philosophy. Studying the Ancients used to be a central part of liberal education. You could not be a well-rounded, educated person without at least some exposure to Greek philosophy. That has died out in elite circles, but it continues in less elite circles. The internet is full of philosophers without portfolio talking about and teaching the Ancients.

The funny thing about this recent fascination with the Ancients is that it tends to ignore the part most relevant to our age, which is the Peloponnesian War. The internet is full of people interested in the pre-Socratics and, of course, legions who want to talk about Plato and Aristotle, but few hipsters are into what is arguably the most important war in human history, or at least Western history. Similarly, Thucydides is the one Ancient who seems to be on everyone’s ignore list.

One reason for that is despite the greatness of Athens, she was on the losing side in this great battle in the ancient world. Not only did Athens lose to Sparta, but she also lost her democracy for a period when the Spartans imposed an oligarchy. This was eventually overthrown, but the aftermath was the Golden age of Greek philosophy, which suggests maybe it was not Athenian democracy that gave us Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle but the failure of democracy that produced these men.

That is open to dispute, obviously, but given the times, it seems that the place to start, if one is hoping to find answers to the current crisis in the ancient world, is not the time after Athens lost the war, but the period before it. The heroic ideas that come from the Ancients are in the period prior to the Peloponnesian War, when the Greek world struggled to unite in order to defeat the Persians. This was the time of Thermopylae, Marathon, and the great sea battle at Salamis.

It was after the stunning defeat of the mighty Persians that Athens was at its peak politically and militarily. This is where to start when thinking about what went wrong leading to the defeat at the hands of Sparta. Athens was economically, culturally, and militarily stronger than Sparta, so what happened that eventually led to Athens losing the war to Sparta and her allies? More important, what does this have to do with the American empire in the current crisis?

The first thing to consider is Athenian democracy during the wars with Persia evolved into a wartime operating system. The focus of all internal debate was toward the goal of beating back the Persians. More important, the great success over Persia validated this way of organizing Athenian society and how it approached the world. Her identity was created during the victory over Persia. Put another way, the telos of the Athenian way of life was making war, not making peace.

It is why Athens wanted to continue the war with Persian after the Battle of Plataea, which was the final victory over the Persians. In the process of beating back the Persians, Athens had become a war machine. Sparta, on the other hand, wanted no part in what would be a foreign adventure. For the Spartans, the defeat of Persia changed nothing about how they engaged with the world or organized their society, so it was just another successful defense of their homeland.

Put another way, the lesson the Spartan rulers gained from the victory of Persia is that you should always be vigilant in defense of the homeland, by making sure to never get tangled up in a foreign adventure. Athens, in contrast, came away sure that their culture and political order were morally superior. The proof of this was the victory over the competing moral order of the time, what the Athenians saw as tyranny. The Athenian way of life was morally superior to the alternatives.

Now, this is a topic that could fill a library, but the very general point is that the reason Athens became so warlike after the defeat of Persia is that Athens was morally defined during the Persian war. While it did not think of itself as an empire or a war machine, it did come to assume it was the morally superior moral order. It beat back the Persians because it operated on a higher moral plane. This sense of moral superiority inevitably led to the aggressive behavior toward the Greek world.

There is a parallel for our age. The American empire has become a belligerent and reckless giant in geopolitics. Like Athens, the American empire projects power over the seas and through control of the financial system. Also, like Athens, the American empire is hell-bent on picking fights with the great land powers. Instead of Sparta it is Russia and now China. The American empire today looks a lot like what the ancient world faced with the Athenians before the Peloponnesian War.

To continue the comparison, we could look at the American victory in the Cold War as something like the Athenian defeat of Persia. From the perspective of both sides of the Cold War, the struggle was not an old-fashioned fight over resources and status, but a fight between two competing ideologies. Ideologies are about how men ought to organize their societies, so an ideological war is a war over competing moral systems and the winner can claim the moral high ground

The United States, after the Second World War was the defender of freedom, not simply the winner of the war. The eventual defeat of Soviet Communism was proof the American way of doing things was the only proper way of doing things. It is why the end of the Cold War did not result in a long-earned peace dividend, but rather one crusade after another to impose liberalism on the world. The so-called end of history was the start of the great liberal crusade to set the world right.

The other angle here is that the American empire, like Athens during the wars with Persia, evolved into a war machine during the Cold War. The great engine of war making that was created to beat the fascists quickly converted to a way of life seen necessary in defending against communism. For close to half a century, the American empire was a war society. Everything was organized for that purpose, so after the Cold War, that purpose needed a target.

Of course, you can probably start this parallel back further and compare the defeat of the fascists with the defeat of Persia. In this version, the Cold War is one part of what will be seen as the American Peloponnesian War. The first half was the Cold War and the second half, which will lead to a final end of this democratic empire, will come at the hands of the Russians or Chinese or both. It is not a perfect parallel, as historical parallels are never perfect.

If you prefer, you could drop the parallel to the Peloponnesian War and just focus on the fact that Athens evolved morally during its war with Persia. Similarly, the American empire has evolved in wars against what it has viewed as anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian organizing systems. The birth of the American imperial mindset was Gettysburg and for over a century since the Civil War, this imperial mindset has found one monster to slay after another.

In the end, the reason America is now seen as a global bully and troublemaker is it is what it evolved to do which is find wrongs to right. The America that evolved to become the global superpower, the final superpower, did not evolve to keep the peace, but to defeat enemies of its moral order. Like Athens after the defeat of the Persians, the American democracy needs an enemy to exist. As with Athens, the rest of the world now must figure out how to disarm a global belligerent.

A Derb Tribute Show

Posted on April 26, 2024 by thezman

Toiling in the fields yesterday, it occurred to me that this weekend may be the last time I get to hang out with the great John Derbyshire. The only public events he does these days are VDare events and this may be the final one of those due to the lawfare they have suffered through for the last few years. John is also nearing the time when retirement is on the agenda.

Oddly, Derb does not get much credit for being the first right-wing podcaster way back in the before times. When he was at National Review, he started doing his show and it was a novelty at the time. After a while, many others got into the game, often copying the style used by Derb. The “review of and comment upon the news” podcast format remains a staple of the podcast ecosystem.

You can also credit Derb for coining the term “dissident right” back around the same time he launched his podcast. The concept was largely in response to the nutty neocon-evangelical conservatism of the Bushies. Unlike Gottfried’s “alternative right”, the dissident right started from empirical truths about the human condition. Dissident right has outlived alternative right, at least for now.

We spend a lot of time thinking about what went wrong and who is responsible for what went wrong, but it is good to think about what went right too. One thing that prevents the dispossessed from falling into despair is the network of dissident audio content that reminds us that we are not alone. The show this week is a tribute, in the tribute band sort of way, to the guy who kicked off the dissident podcast space.

This Week’s Show

Contents

TDS (Link)
TikTok (Link)
Lawfare (Link)
Imagine My Surprise (Link)
Standing Head (Link)
RoboCops (Link)
Flying Cars (Link)
Deep Fakes (Link)
Aliens (Link)
Taylor Swift (Link)

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Dr. Strangelove

Posted on April 25, 2024 by thezman

Note: I have something to attend to this morning, so what follows is a post from behind the green door that everyone hated. In this review of what many consider the greatest cinematic satire ever, I reveal that I have no sense of humor.

Human communication rests upon a vast set of shared assumptions about the world that are just assumed by speaker and receiver. When the speaker says, “I am low on gas”, the receiver responds with, “There is a gas station at the next exit” because he assumes that the driver mentioned the gas level because he will soon need to gas up the car, so he is asking for the location of the next gas station. In that simple exchange lies a lot of shared assumptions.

This is why comedy does not travel very well. In the old days, comics would do bits on how they travelled to other countries to do their act only to confuse the audience with jokes that made no sense to them. Bob Newhart did a bit on how Germans could not understand why a bald man was called “Curly” and a fat man was called Tiny”, which played on the idea of shared assumptions. The joke itself relied on the American audience’s shared concept of the German personality.

Today, jokes about the Germans being exacting fanatics would not make much sense to young people as Germany has no meaning to them. If they have ever met a German, it was online, and he spoke perfect internet gibberish. The shared assumptions about the cultural differences between Germans and Americans has been lost over time, so jokes based on those assumptions stop being funny for the same reason jokes about phonebooths make little sense to a Zoomer.

That came to mind while watching Dr. Strangelove, a film many critics claim is the greatest comedy in the history of film. It was released at the height of the Cold War and is a satire on the fears and assumptions about the Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis was still on the minds of people, so a satire on nuclear war would have relied upon the shared assumptions regarding the issue at the time. For someone not alive when this was made, those assumptions are a mystery.

I did not laugh a single time during the whole film. I was never hostile to it, but I could not get any of the jokes, no matter how hard I tried. I even stopped the film and read the wiki page hoping for some clues. I wound up reading a number of old reviews that did not provide much help. They just assume you get the jokes and never bother to explain any of them. The closest you get are mentions of Sellers making sport of Adlai Stevenson in his role as President.

For those who have not seen the film, it is about a rogue general in the 1960’s who launches a wave of B-52 bombers armed with nukes at the Soviets. He does it in such a way that no one can recall them without his code. The rest of the film is about the President and his advisers debating about how to stop Armageddon. Peter Sellers plays three roles in the film. He is the aide to the crazy general, the President and a weird Nazi scientist who is the President’s science advisor.

The central conflict in the film is how to stop the bombers. The plan is to tell the Soviets so they can shoot down the bombers, but we learn that the Soviets built a doomsday device that will go off if even one bomb lands. I would like to say at this point hijinks ensue, but there are no hijinks. The closest we get is when the crazy general tells his aide Mandrake (Sellers) that he believes the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans.

Again, the film did not make me angry. It is just that the things being mocked are outside my frame of reference. Making sport of the nuclear protocols of the 1960’s may have been outlandishly funny in 1964, but not now. I am not even sure that was what was being mocked. I did pick up that they were mocking country people, as Slim Pickens plays the role of the main bomber pilot, and he plays it like he played the role of overseer in Blazing Saddles.

That brought to mind something else. Jewish comedy falls into two broad categories, mockery of majority social norms and self-defeat. The comedy here was of the first type, but those majority social norms were killed off a long time ago. That is why this film no longer works as a comedy, unless you were alive at this time. The one bit that you can still pickup is the mockery of normal white people like the character of Major Kong (Pickens) or General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott).

Otherwise, the jokes not only fail to land, but they fail to register as jokes. Even Peter Sellers comes off as if he is playing it straight, despite the fact he is best remembered for his over-the-top performances as Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films. I did sort of get that he was making fun of Nazis in the role of Dr. Strangelove, the crazy German scientist who is the President’s science advisor. As President and aide to the crazy general, he comes off perfectly normal.

In the end, it is a well-made film. This may be why it is ranked so high. Kubrick managed to get three great performances from Sellers, who was known for being a bit unstable and an alcoholic. He tricked George C. Scott into playing his role in a way that Scott never would have done otherwise. Reportedly, he did this by first having Scott ham it up as practice, then film it the way Scott wanted it done. Kubrick then used the film from the hammy practice sessions.

Interestingly, Sellers was slated to play four roles. The studio only agreed to back the film if Sellers was in all the major roles, which is crazy. Sellers got hurt so he could not get into the bomber to play Major T. J. “King” Kong. The role was initially offered to John Wayne who ignored the offer. Then Kubrick got Slim Pickens to do it, but without telling him the point of the film or giving him the script. He wanted Pickens to be Pickens from the many Westerns for which he was known best.

The film is made in black and white. Even though the satire does not work on me, I can see why they did not do it in color. It would have come off as farce rather than satire if it were in color. That may be why it does not hold up. The jokes were probably subtle for the time, so after sixty years they are impossible to spot, especially being shot in black and white, which has the effect on a modern audience of projecting seriousness, rather than lightheartedness or silliness.

In the end, I did not hate it. Frankly, I am not sure what to make of it. It is well put together and the acting is first rate. If there was a bit more character development, it would be a solid drama. It was intended to be satire, so the characters are intentionally two-dimensional, but they are well-written and performed by great actors. Otherwise, there is nothing here to love or hate. It is one of those films you probably love if you are a film historian, but as a regular viewer is nothing special.

The FUD-Packer’s Ball

Posted on April 24, 2024 by thezman

Throughout the Cold War years, it was a standard claim from the people called the left in America that the intelligence services manipulated domestic politics. This did not come from the mainstream left, but the fringier left-wing activists. For its part, the right in all its forms simply ignored the claims. Eventually, the mainstream right became the primary defenders of the intelligence agencies. They were viewed as the first line of defense in the Cold War and thus were lionized.

Of course, the claims about the intel agencies were not without some merit. In the late 1960’s a communist student publication called Ramparts reported that the National Student Association, which was a federation of student governments, was funded and controlled by the CIA. Later it was revealed by the Church Committee that many newspapers were cooperating with the CIA. Operation Mockingbird was one of the CIA programs used to manipulate the media.

The Church Committee is an interesting bit of history as it might be the last time Congress did anything useful in terms of oversight. The final report was massive and you can still access it on the Senate website. One reform that resulted from this event was the establishment of the permanent US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which has been thoroughly captured by the CIA. Members of this committee participated in the Russian collusion hoax, for example.

Putting that aside, the headline item at the time was that the intelligence agencies were spying on Americans, experimenting on Americans, and manipulating the media by placing assets at media companies. In the fullness of time, the important revelation was that this practice was thoroughly normalized in the agencies. The intel agencies saw nothing wrong with what they were doing. That means we can assume they continued doing it despite the revelations.

Again, the Russian collusion hoax is a good starting point. If the intel agencies were comfortable in trying to overturn the 2016 presidential election, then it is safe to assume this behavior is normalized inside these agencies. That returns us to the Church Committee and the scale of operations fifty years ago. In the analog days, the intel agencies were comfortable with subverting newspapers, so what sorts of things will they be comfortable doing in the digital age?

For example, would the intel agencies pay social media influencers? If they were paying student groups in the 1960’s how opposed would they be to paying social media characters to push certain themes? It is not as if anyone bothers to look into the background of bigfoot influencers. These characters seem to appear from nowhere, gain a big audience and join the ranks of influencers. Inserting intel agents into this space is a low-cost, high reward activity.

Look at someone like Michael Tracey, who is a bigfoot influencer on Twitter with over a quarter million followers. According to Twitter, about 15% of their users have more than one thousand followers. Only one percent of American users have more than three thousand followers. That means someone with a quarter million followers is in a ridiculously small club of users. This assumes the follower counts are accurate and the followers are not purchased from a bot farm.

Michael Tracey has no job and no obvious source of income. He lives in New York City, one of the most expensive places in America. He regularly travels the world to pester government officials at press gatherings. His Substack mostly gathers dust, in terms of readership, and he never posts monetized content on Twitter. Maybe he has a rabbi that underwrites his activity, which is not unusual, but maybe that rabbi is tied to one of the intel agencies, which would not be unusual either.

Note that Tracey spends most of time doing FUD-packing. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Right now, he is flaming the Trump world right now with claims that Trump is responsible for the war funding bills. It is a weird claim, but coming from a major account it does seep into the public consciousness. This is new for him, as he usually spends his time attacking progressives. In fact, he built his following on the right by FUD-packing the people on the left.

Now, Michael Tracey is probably on the level, but there is no way of knowing it, which is the point of this example. In a world where people are more likely to get their information from anonymous and unexamined characters on social media, how hard would it be for the intel agencies to manipulate this system? Build up a network of influential FUD-packers and you can control the unhappy portion of both political parties by saturating them with misery.

Here is something else to consider. These days, the intel agencies do not have to actually buy the FUD-packer. They can simply manipulate him though the various donations options most people have these days. When they like the FUD-packing from an influencer, they can send a bunch of small donations. They can also use their bot farms to boost that guy’s FUD-packing. In other words, a FUD-packer could be compromised without even knowing it.

The point of thinking about FUD-packing is that we live in an age where it is much easier for the intel agencies to do what they habitually were doing fifty years ago, so it is wise to assume it is as common now as it was back then. The digital information space is now a wilderness of mirrors manipulated by people who are drawn to the work because they love FUD-packing. As a result, our information space is a FUD-packers ball where nothing should be taken at face value.

Everyone Believes It

Posted on April 23, 2024 by thezman

The mostly online wars over what has come to be called “woke culture” obscures a reality that lies behind the fads and programs. That reality is an ideology that evolved in the last century and now defines the ruling class of America in a way that the people in the ruling class do not understand. It is just an assumed part of the culture they were selected into and conditioned to accept. They believe what they believe because everyone they know believes it.

That ideology begins with egalitarianism that has its roots in Protestantism and eventually gave birth to the progressive movement. The claim that all men are equal in the eyes of God became simply all men are equal once God was dropped from the thinking of the ruling elites. Since all men are obviously not equal, the blank slate evolved as a solution to this dilemma. The inequality we see is the result of society, so the great and the good have a duty to fix it.

What many now call the civil rights revolution is the most recent and damaging manifestation of this urge to level society. In his pamphlet on the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown versus Board of Education, professor Jesse Merriam explained how this case revolutionized the law by transforming the Constitution from a rights based political system to a civil rights political system. What is now called antiracism is actually the point of our political order.

This interview with Merriam is interesting for a number of reasons. One is the exchange he had with the interviewer over the case of an Alabama eatery that had separate seating for whites and blacks. The interviewer tries hard to get Merriam to say the restaurant should be allowed to set its own policies, even if these policies violate what is, in reality, the ruling dogma of this age. It is a long game of verbal chess as Merriam deftly avoids the trap set for him by the interviewer.

That exchange is a good example of the prevailing orthodoxy at work. The interviewer, most likely without thinking about it, tries to get the interviewee to say he would tolerate discrimination, which is the chief sin of this age. The interviewee, knowing this, carefully avoids stating this by refocusing the discussion on the legal dynamics behind the court case that arose from this situation. Imagine this going on in elite offices every day and you get a sense for how ideology rules our elites.

The case in question, Katzenbach v. McClung, is another good example. The restaurant did business only in Alabama so it should never have been subjected to the interstate commerce clause and therefore immune from the new civil rights provisions recently enshrined in federal law. The court acknowledged this, but then imagined a scenario in which the restaurant bought goods that at some point originated out of state, so therefore it was now subject to federal regulation.

What the court did was reason that since the primary evil against which the Constitution stands is discrimination, it is logically impossible for any part of the Constitution to stand against overcoming discrimination. Whatever “the words on the paper” say, as Barak Obama once put it, they can never be read to oppose what is now assumed to be the spirit and point of the document. Belief and righteous commitment to that belief are now the litmus test of the ruling class across all domains.

We are about to see the flipside of the civil right revolution in the federal case launched against the Sheetz store chain. The feds are quite open about the fact that they do not think the store is using race to discriminate. In fact, they are not even claiming the policy is leading to fewer black employees than what would happen without the policy against hiring convicts. They simply say it could happen, because of upstream discrimination in the criminal justice system and the economy.

This strikes normal people as madness, and it is madness, the madness that naturally arises from ideology. The ethical model of the world that arises from the belief that all men are equal must inevitably target reality as the ultimate obstacle to achieving the promised goal of the ideology. It is why ideologues always end up in a life and death struggle with the reality of the human condition. It is also why they usually kill a lot of people before reality finally defeats them.

It will not be long before the zombies that dominate the late-night comedy circuit begin to make jokes about Sheetz not hiring blacks. Jon Stewart is now practicing his funny faces in the mirror to go along with his new Sheetz material. This provides the social proof needed so that everyone in the managerial class will adopt this assertion as a part of their shared reality. No one will think of the lunacy at the heart of it because there is no benefit to questioning the belief.

This ties back to that exchange between Klingenstein and Merriam over the choice involving the Alabama restaurant. There was nothing but danger for Merriam in defending the ancient right of free association. For Klingenstein, there was nothing but accolades awaiting him for defending antiracism. The cult of antiracism that arose from egalitarianism selects for those who are loyal to the cause and weeds out those who question the logic of the cause or its underlying assumptions.

This is why we have a ruling class that seems to be at war with not just the culture and traditions of America but at war with reality itself. The American ruling elite has evolved to serve the needs of the civil rights revolution and what Professor Merriam calls the antiracist constitution. Happening as it has over generations, the people in it are unable to see that they are operating within an ideological framework. They believe what they believe because everyone they know believes it.

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