Burn The Boats

Posted on March 11, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the Super Tuesday results and a post about my thoughts about moving from Lagos. The Sunday podcast was posted late, as I was tied up on some projects. Subscribe here or here.

One of the things the paleos missed when they began to flesh out managerialism in the last century is how it assumes the qualities of democracy. This is something Robert Dahl picked up in his analysis of American government against the standard of democracy he developed. While the institutions of America were not democratic and could never be democratic, the people in these institutions were motivated by a democratic sense in that they wanted to act according to public will.

This explains, in part, how our institutions have grown increasingly authoritarian over the last three decades, while the people running them have become obsessed with defending what they call “our democracy.” They do not view democracy as a process, but rather as a goal. The truly democratic society is open, and the people freely exchange the right ideas. Defending democracy in this sense means dragging the people to this place, by force if necessary.

This democratic sensibility within democracy is important in understanding the reckless behavior of the people running the institutions. If one were to pick a single word to describe the cause of the current crisis it would be “reckless”. Whether it is reckless foreign policy adventures or poorly conceived domestic fads, the ruling class seems to take pleasure in reckless projects. They operate like gamblers with unlimited credit that they assume will be repaid by others.

The Ukraine war is the latest example. When the Russians threatened war, it was over the Minsk agreements not having been followed. They had a specific set of claims against Ukraine, and they wanted help from the West to enforce those claims, but instead they got bellicose threats from Washington. In retrospect, we now know that the West wanted war with Russia. Deliberately picking a fight with the world’s biggest nuclear power is about as reckless as it gets.

For two years the West has steadfastly refused to have any dealings with the Russians, instead demanding total surrender. Every few months the West seeks some new “red line” to cross, hoping to provoke the Russians. Now the French are recruiting the micronations of NATO to send troops into Ukraine. The whole point of this is to bait the Russians into responding in a way that will then let NATO pretend they are being attacked by Russia so they can invoke Article 5.

Project Ukraine is a pointless and risky adventure, but even as the Russians gain the upper hand, the Western managerial elite remains addicted to it. Like drug addicts, they crave only the next hit of foolish risk in this thing. So much so that they look for new ways to make it so they cannot change course. There is a burn the boats mentality to this project, where they seek out policies that further commit the West to the project in such a way that no one can apply the brakes.

This burn the boats mentality is everywhere. The immigration crisis is not simply about border management, something that could be fixed. It is aimed at making it a permanent crisis, a permanent project for the managerial class. Tens of millions of illegals now roam the countryside, raping and killing Americans. Even if a new president wants to fix the problem, he will still be left with the tens of millions of criminal aliens unleashed on the cities and towns of America.

One of the defenses of aristocratic rule is that it is naturally cautious. The king has an investment in his country and people in that he directly benefits from them. Who he is as a king depends upon the health and welfare of the people and the land on which they live, so he is not going to be quick to risk either of those for novelty. In fact, he is going to be cautious of change, especially in domestic affairs, because he has everything to lose and little to gain.

This is not true in democratic systems where the rulers have no investment at all, as they can be replaced at the next election. Hans Hermann-Hoppe noted that in democratic systems, the people holding office often despise the office they hold, as they gained it only as a steppingstone toward some other goal. The people have nothing but their vote, so they are willing to take great risks. The result is a system that is willing to take enormous risk for theoretical and ephemeral gains.

America is not a democracy, but a sense of democracy is there in the institutions controlled by the managerial class. What we have is a managerial polyarchy, where the elites use the institutions to chase the mirage of the democratic society. Because the goal is not real, it is maximally alluring. This is why the elites are willing to trample the democratic process to defend “our democracy.” What they are defending is not a real thing but the imagined end point of history.

It is that democratic spirit that makes them so risk happy. This burn the boats approach to public policy comes from the sense that this condition of society is temporary and therefore the positions held by the elite are temporary. In a real sense, those positions are temporary, as all managers keep their resume up to date for a reason. Throw in the fact that failure never comes with consequences and the result is a ruling elite that operates like a desperate gambler looking for a score.

The great lesson in democratic risk taking is Athens in the Peloponnesian War where the Athenians were determined to spark war with Sparta. It was the Athenian decision to roll the dice on an invasion of Syracuse that led not only to the end of the war but the destruction of Athens. Given the similarity between America and Athens, it is fair to assume the same fate awaits the American empire. Democratic empire will turn out to be a suicide pact crafted by people addicted to risk taking.

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Robots & Retards

Posted on March 8, 2024 by thezman

The show this week was pre-recorded as I am probably swinging from a truck as you are reading this. Moving day(s) has arrived. Through it all, I have had to deal with a lot of people I would not otherwise interact with and I kept noticing that the quality of people has dropped sharply. I will post about my experience renting a moving truck, which will cause even a sunny optimist yo have dark thoughts.

Anyway, that is the show this week. It is about how the decline in intelligence will impact our live and society. The people who think AI will solve it or that robots will pick up the slack have not thought about the problem hard enough. All of those things will make the decline worse for the people with anything on the ball. Imagine Idiocracy by terminators are in charge instead of morons.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Introduction
The Great Dumbing Down
Short Example
Long Example
Society Example
Authoritarian Anarchy

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Three-Legged Blob

Posted on March 7, 2024 by thezman

The abrupt retirement of Victoria Nuland caught everyone by surprise as she was just recently in Kiev promising to blow up the world. Naturally, everyone assumes there must be a clever reason for her sudden departure. The statement put out by Anthony Blinken reads like the statements that come from ball teams when they fire a manager, which has led to speculation that she was sacked. Alternatively, some suspect she is just the first rat off the sinking ship that is project Ukraine.

As is always the case with regime-ology, the answer is going to be a guess from a set of possibilities, rather than a clear answer. In this case, Nuland is a senior member of the Kagan cult, by virtue of her marriage to Robert Kagan. The entire foreign policy establishment is controlled by neocons. Her now former boss, Anthony Blinken, is a neocon, and her replacement is also a neocon. Whatever the reason for her departure, it is not because the administration has turned on the neocons.

The place to start is with the reality of American foreign policy, which is not controlled by the political class but by three distinct parts of permanent Washington. The most important part is the foreign policy establishment, centered around the State Department, which is where the Kagan cult is based. They control the foreign service and the thicket of think tanks and quasi-academic outposts that recruit and develop those who will serve in the foreign policy establishment.

Nuland’s career is a great example. She started out working for Strobe Talbott in the Clinton administration then worked in the Bush administration. She got bumped up in the Obama admi8nistration where she ran Ukraine policy. She took a holiday during the Trump years, but came back when Biden was installed. Notice that the changing of administrations had no impact on her career. Note also that her replacement is also a protege of Strobe Talbott.

Next you have the military industrial complex which is based in the Pentagon and represents the interests of the military and the vast array of companies that make weapons for and supply services to the military. Their primary concern is to keep the flow of money coming from the taxpayers. If war is good for business, they are in favor of war, but if war is bad for business, they oppose war. Unlike the foreign policy establishment, the MIC is mostly free of ideologues.

Finally, you have the intelligence community. Like all bureaucracies, they have succumbed to Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy. Their primary concern is with maintaining the flow of money and avoiding political oversight. They are happy to help the Pentagon and the State Department in their endeavors, but always do so in a way that serves the narrow interests of the intel community. Like all intelligence services, this is the most cynical and calculating of the three.

Project Ukraine has always been a State Department operation. The Pentagon has gone along with it as it meant more money, but the events of the last two years have strained this relationship. The flow of weapons to Ukraine has drained the armories but has not resulted in new cash for suppliers. Similarly, the spooks have supported the project because a return of the Cold War is good for business. No one writes novels about James Bond spying on MAGA people.

Until now, the three legs of the blob that controls American foreign policy have been working together on Project Ukraine. They were happy to tell the political class what they needed to hear, at home and abroad, in order to get the political cheerleading they wanted for the project. Six months ago, the Pentagon told the pols that the great counter-offensive would smash the Russian lines. A year ago, the spooks said the Russian were in political disarray.

The events of the last six months have put the lie to all of it. The Russians have broken through Ukrainian lines and have the initiative everywhere along the front. Ukrainian losses have spiked higher as Russia gains control of the air space. We are now hearing Ukrainian leaders talking about evacuation of major cities this summer, expecting a major Russian offensive. Two years of grinding away at the Ukraine army is showing results and the tide is now turning strongly in favor of Russia.

The first sign of trouble was the stalled package of aid which House Republicans refuse to pass that would hand sixty billion to the Pentagon. This money would be laundered through Ukraine back to the Pentagon and then the arms dealers, but the MIC’s favorite political party has been stalling. The reason is the cupboards are bare, so the MIC is not going to get much from this scheme. The only reason the Republicans are stalling is they have the full support of the MIC on this.

Last week, the CIA planted a long piece in their favorite regime outlet, the New York Times, in which they made clear that they have gone well beyond what should have been expected with Project Ukraine. The article detailed all of the great work they have done inside Ukraine going back to 2014. Not long after, we get the leak of the German military plotting a strike on Russia. The source of that leak is probably based in Asia and could very well have ties to American intel.

That leaves the foreign policy establishment, which remains committed to the project for ethnic and ideological reasons. The trouble is they are now left holding the bag for a project that could turn into a massive political crisis. For two years the politicians were told this will be a huge win for the good guys. Instead, the bad guys are about to win, and it is putting the political future of the collective West in jeopardy. Losing the first global conflict of the 21st century will not go unnoticed.

That brings us back to Nuland. Given that she is part of the Kagan cult, which is a subculture within the greater neocon subculture, it seems unlikely that she was fired for performance, even though her departure is out of the blue. Further, she is a fanatic and fanatics see only that which supports their fanaticism. It is unlikely that she looks at what is happening and sees failure. At every failure in the project, she and the rest of the neocons have found reasons to plow ahead.

Instead, what this suggests is that things are much worse for Project Ukraine than anyone is letting on in public. Anticipating political panic in Washington this summer, the neocons have decided to stash the architect of the disaster in retirement, thus making it hard for the Republicans to subpoena her. This makes it tough for the Republicans to lay the blame at the feet of the White House. The new guy will be given some latitude because the Republicans are this dumb.

On the other hand, there may be some unknown unknown at play. In politics, people who suddenly retire do so for a cash grab or to avoid scandal. The fact that someone was able to put that recording of German officials in the hands of the Russians suggest there could be other material of a similar nature. It is not as if Nuland has ever been careful about talking about her schemes. It may be that she was caught on surveillance again, perhaps when she was in Kiev last month.

There is always the possibility that she looked around at the politics in Washington and decided that there was nothing more to gain. The neocon war against their historic enemy is a long-term project. It is a forever project and Ukraine was always just one chapter in the long story of their struggle. They could have decided that all the juice was squeezed from this lemon, and it was time to move on. She will return to the hive and begin plotting the next project for a future administration.

What all of this suggests is that behind-the-scenes things are far bleaker for Project Ukraine than has been revealed to the public. The game now is what we always see in managerialism and that is blame shifting. The CIA fired the first shot with that Times article and now the neocons are scurrying for cover. As always, the goal of this blame game will be to leave the politicians holding the bag. Perhaps Biden’s usefulness all along was to be the fall guy.

Oriental Managerialism

Posted on March 6, 2024 by thezman

Saving face is a phrase we tend to associate with oriental cultures, but it is an expression used in the West. The idea is that one wants to avoid being publicly disrespected in order to maintain your dignity. This means either doing something in response to a slight or committing a ritual act when you fail. Famously, committing suicide is an act of saving face in order to avoid the shame of public humiliation for having failed in your duties.

Even though the concept is oriental it is not entirely alien to the West. In fact, face saving has become a cultural aspect of the managerial elite. We just saw this with Victoria Nuland resigning her post. She had failed to destroy the ancient enemy of her people, so she was allowed to resign and save face. If she had been fired, it would be a public acknowledgment that she had failed. Her standing and that of her cult would be lowered as a result, so she was allowed to save face and quit.

This idea of face saving is not entirely alien to the West, but it is not a natural thing the way we see it practiced by our elites. Western societies are moral societies, held together as much by a set of agreed upon codes, passed down from one generation to the next. Publicly shaming someone for his failure to live up to the prevailing moral code is part of reinforcing that code. Letting someone save face undermines this so it is not natural in Western societies. We punish the sinner.

This oriental idea of face saving is behind the phenomenon of failing up which has come to define the modern managerial class. Someone like Victoria Nuland, for example, has been a failure at every stop in her career, but at every stop she has been allowed to save face and move to some new position. You can be sure she will assume a spot at a think tank or university. If Trump wins in November, she will get a media gig to criticize his handling of Russia.

The norm for Western society, with regards to someone like Nuland, is she would have been flushed out of the system as a warning to others. Go back far enough and she may have been killed or exiled. Maybe after she had demonstrated enough contrition she would be rehabilitated to a limited degree. That would include publicly admitting to and accepting that she was a failure. This is now alien to the managerial elite, even though it remains the norm with the Dirt People.

This idea of face saving is behind the cancel culture stuff that soon became a pogrom against normal people who held normal opinions. For our elites, simply being exposed as having broken the new rules was enough to compel a self-imposed exile of some sort, in order to save face. The accused was allowed to depart and save face, without suffering more than a minor loss of social standing. This offered the hope of rehabilitation once everyone forgot about it.

Since this is alien to normal people, it did not work this way so tougher measures were rolled out to punish the hooligans and running dog obstructionists. Banning people from Twitter, for example, was viewed by the people we call the left as an extreme punishment, because the victim lost face. The fact that the victim just respawned as a new character was seen as proof of their evil, because good people wish to avoid losing face and would have accepted their punishment.

People have noted that the response of the West to the Ukraine war is a globalized version of the cancel culture and censorship pogroms. Most of what Western leaders did over the last two years was about “isolating” Putin. It was as if they thought excluding him from the cool kid table would humiliate him to the point where he would either resign or be deposed. It never occurred to them that he and his government did not understand what any of this meant.

The question is why has face saving crowded out the old, natural way of policing the ranks of the elites? Part of it, obviously, is the way in which the managerial elite now see themselves individually and as a group. Many still see themselves as a minority and they brought the minority viewpoint into the elite. Minorities are always aware of their standing with regard to the majority, so saving face is important. Many originate from face saving societies, so this comes naturally.

There is also the bourgeoise nature of the elites. Our ruling class is not filled with an aristocratic sense of position. Instead, they view themselves as having scored the better on the test, relative to others. In other words, they are a system dependent elite, while an aristocracy is an independent elite. The former are full of angst about their position in the system, so they obsess over it. The latter sees the system as an expression of their natural position atop their society.

Like all middle-class people, our bourgeoise managerial elite is riddled with self-doubt about their standing. As you see in any middle-class suburb, the primary obsession is with noticing what everyone else is doing in order to make sure you are seen as part of what everyone else is doing. Conformity is a defining feature of bourgeoise culture and is thus the defining feature of the managerial elite. The so-called “Karen culture” is a natural product of an elite harvested from the middle-class.

The formation of a middle-class is most likely a lagging indicator. The independent farmer is something that arises late in an agrarian society. The urban middle-class was a late development in the industrial age. Our bourgeoise managerial elite with its oriental outlook probably signals a late stage of managerialism. The committee mentality and face saving are all part of a general decline in competence, which also suggests we are in the late stages of managerialism.

Reality, Politics And IQ

Posted on March 5, 2024 by thezman

One of the stranger parts of fringe politics is the fetish by some who deny the accepted view of Ashkenazi intelligence. Long before empirical support for the claim was available, Americans assumed Jews did so well because they were smart and they worked hard, avoiding the vices that can lead to failure. For the last half century or so, psychometry has provided another primary cause. Ashkenazi Jews have, on average, a significantly higher intelligence than the rest of us.

There is a subculture within the anti-science subculture that denies this. Much like those who deny the reality of evolution, they spend their time picking nits at the claims by the HBD people with regards to Jews and intelligence. More often than not these are people who have only a superficial understanding of the material, but they are sure there are gaping holes in the Jews-are-smart argument. This post from a person calling himself Academic Agent is a good example of the genre.

The argument in that post is not original. Some versions of it have been kicking around for a long time among antisemites. For some reason, they cannot accept that their favorite enemy is winning because they are smart, among other things. Perhaps losing to a tiny minority of morons feels better for some reason. Here is a more sophisticated version of the same argument. Here is a much less sophisticated version of the same argument from Vox Day.

Putting aside the motivations for this line of reasoning for a second, the question at the core of it is what is the proof of Ashkenazi intelligence? The HBD people have been responding to these arguments against Jewish intelligence for a long time as well and it turns out that the answer comports with observation. Here is one that goes through the test data and here is an updated version from the same author. The person called Thuletide linked above has admitted his error here.

While the data supports the argument that Jews are the most intelligence ethnic group this leads to another question. What is the gap? This matters as the general claim is that Jewish success is primarily driven by a large IQ edge. Some have argued it is a full standard deviation, while others say it is closer to half that. Here is a post diving into that debate and the data supports the lower figures. Genetics is also pointing to a gap of roughly half a standard deviation.

None of this should lead one to believe that the only reason Ashkenazi Jews perform so much better than everyone else is intelligence. The fact is, IQ is roughly half of what determines life outcomes for people. Personality traits, culture and dumb luck all play a role in the success of a person. Naturally, this applies to groups of people. It is just that having all of the good behaviors is never enough. One has to have the right genetic stuff, so to speak, in order for the other stuff to make a difference.

If the parsimonious explanation for Jewish success is high intelligence, plus things like Jewish culture and clannishness, why are some antisemites determined to “debunk” the claim that Jews are smart? Again, if you think your enemy is a blockhead and your enemy is winning, it does not speak well of you. Logic says the antisemites should be embracing the Jewish IQ narrative, maybe even using it as a reason for excluding Jews from their proposed societies.

The most likely reason here is the need to think of politics in purely moral terms, which is what Carl Schmitt observed with the friend-enemy distinction. Friends and enemies are not determined by the facts of the various political positions. Those political positions indicate moral positions. Friends are the good guys, striving for the good moral ends, while the enemies are the bad guys, those who either seek to prevent reaching the promised land or have evil intentions.

Another way to see what is happening here is to look at the news coverage of a new book called “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.” The authors have been making the rounds, peddling their brand of bigotry to the entirely sympathetic media figures interviewing them. Replace “white” with “Jewish” and these guys would be famous antisemites. They are making the same argument, just swapping out the ethnicities and their relative roles in the moral drama.

In other words, the reason the antisemites keep attacking the Jewish IQ stuff is they associate intelligence with good things, but they cannot allow their enemy to have good qualities, so they have no choice but to strip this from their enemy. The antiwhite bigots do the same thing, but instead assign what they view as negative qualities to their enemies, things like rage or closed mindedness. You cannot hate people you respect, so politics requires you to demonize your enemies.

What all of this points to is the impossibility of the diverse society. Those guys peddling their antiwhite act to like-minded media drones are telling us that they cannot live in the same society as rural white people. The antisemites are a bit more candid about it, as they have been marginalized for a long time. Even so, when they argue against Jewish IQ, they are saying that they cannot live with Jews. Repeat this with more groups and you end up in a war of all against all.

Putting the purely political, there is a larger different reason behind the IQ-denialism you see in posts like the one from Academic Agent. Intelligence as a biological fact strikes them as determinism, which contradicts their liberal conditioning. For most of human history humans knew the apple to did not fall far from the tree, so the idea of men having superior genetics would not be shocking. In fact, it is the assumption that is the foundation of inherited rule, the norm for mankind.

Liberalism, however, assumes both equality and malleability. In order to have a liberal society, everyone must be able to participate in it. This means everyone must have the ability to participate. Since we can see that all men are not equal in talents, the only acceptable explanation is systemic. This means a genetic basis for intelligence or identifiable human qualities is intolerable. If we are our genes, then the liberal project comes crashing down under the weight of biological reality.

Given that most of the liberal skeptics have liberal priors, it stands to reason that some of them will embrace views that seem to contradict their anti-liberal claims. That is what you see with the people arguing against Jewish intelligence. They are not necessarily antisemites or even anti-science. It is that that they cannot accept the fact that you cannot will yourself beyond the limits of your biology. They do not accept the Jewish IQ claim because they cannot accept it.

In the end, this is the great struggle of this age. On the one hand is the reality of the human condition and on the other is the liberal assumptions about the human condition, which are crashing into biological reality. What science is telling is that our ancestors were right about the human condition. The differences in people, individually and collectively, are immutable. That may be inconvenient for the liberal mind, but reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing it.

The Bunglers

Posted on March 4, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the color blue and a post about the generational revolution that is coming. The Sunday podcast was posted late, as I was tied up on some projects. Subscribe here or here.

Last week the media outlet Russia Today, which is analogous to PBS or the BBC, released an audio recording of what it claimed were senior German military officials planning how to launch a strike on Russia. Specifically, they were discussing how to attack the Kerch bridge in Crimea with German Taurus missiles, but doing so in such a way that would not implicate Germany. Later, the German government acknowledged that it was German air force officials, and the audio was authentic.

This should be a massive, government toppling scandal in Germany, but that would require government officials capable of shame. It would also require a free media, which no longer exists in the West. Instead, the German government ordered social media companies to ban people who posted the audio on their networks. The German media, has declared that the leak is part of a sinister plot by Putin to discredit the West and draw attention away from the death of Alexei Navalny.

Of course, this comes on the heels of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz blabbering in public about the French and the British having people on the ground in Ukraine to operate the long-range missiles they have supplied to Ukraine. That recorded conversation among German military officials confirms this. The Germans also admit that there is no way for the Ukrainians to use the German version of these missiles without German personnel doing the bulk of the work.

The fact that NATO people are providing direct support to Ukraine is one of the worst kept secrets of the war thus far. The United States has been providing targeting information to the Ukrainians from surveillance drones operating over the Black Sea and from satellites stationed over Ukraine. Most likely, American techs have been operating the Patriot missile batteries stationed around Kiev. The French have sent their mercenaries to Ukraine with many of them being killed.

Aside from the scandalous nature of the call and the fact that someone, presumably Russia, was able to capture the call quite easily, there is the question as to why the Russians would publish this audio. If you have the ability to listen in on your enemies without them knowing about it or caring about it, you have an edge. Now that this is public, every European country will be doing a security review and making sure to plug any holes they have in their communications.

Of course, there is the strong possibility that the Russians did not do the recording, but a third country was involved. Some of the principles on the call were in Singapore, which is known to have a first-rate security service. They may have recorded the audio and sent it along to the Russians. On the other hand, it could be someone inside the German government who is unhappy with Scholz. In the wilderness of mirrors, there are many potential suspects in this case.

However the Russians got the audio, they thought it was more important to make it public than to conceal the fact that they have it. The reason is they want the Europeans to know that they are not fooled by what is happening. If Taurus missiles hit Russian territory, the Russian will consider it an act of war. Technically, supplying the Ukrainians with the ability to strike Russia is an act of war all by itself, but providing the technical support to use the weapons seals the case.

Further, by releasing this audio, the Russians are letting the Europeans know that the Russians have been restrained to this point. They have known from the start that NATO people are on the ground helping Ukraine, but they have not raised the issue or responded to it with force. In other words, the Russians are telling the Europeans that they should not press their luck. This is especially important with the rumors of basing “Ukrainian” F-16’s in Romania.

There is some irony here. Ten years ago, the Russians captured audio of Victoria Nuland plotting with the American ambassador to Ukraine about how to topple the Kiev government and install a puppet regime. Nuland was just in Kiev to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the coup. She was also bragging about secret plans to strike Russia in the near future, so maybe the Russians took the opportunity to celebrate the tenth anniversary in their own way by releasing this audio.

Putting all of that aside for a moment, the truly shocking thing in this call is the fact that these complex weapons do not work very well. According to the Germans, they would need six months to get them ready to use, but then would need months to program them for specific targets. The lead time for getting them into Ukraine is not the issue, but the programming time is shocking. The Germans also admit that the Russians will quickly figure out how to defeat them as well.

These missiles cost between one and two million dollars each. The plan was to use two waves of fifty missiles on the Kerch bridge. The reason for so many is the dense Russian air defense systems in Crimea. Even assuming they could hit the bridge, there is no guarantee they would knock it out. The Brits used a truck bomb on it last year and the Russians rebuilt it in a few months. In other words, it will cost the Germans one hundred million dollars to maybe damage a bridge.

This is not a sustainable approach to war fighting. Another point in the call was that the Brits and French are now out of these missiles. It turns out that the missiles are not just expensive to produce, but it takes a long time. If this public relations stunt went forward, it would change nothing as the Russians would still be dropping thousands of rounds of artillery on the Ukrainians every day. The Russian air force would still be dropping massive bunker busting bombs on Ukrainian fortifications.

The other point worth mentioning about the call is the participants were strangely comfortable with lying. The point of the call was to devise a plan where Germany could launch missile attacks on Russia but do so in a way that would make it look like the Ukrainians did it. The casual way in which they discuss this scheme suggests these are men who are comfortable with lying. The call offers a rare glimpse into the sociopathic nature of the ruling elite of the West.

The primary takeaway from this affair is that it will have no impact on Western leaders, who are simply too incompetent to learn from their error. The German government will eventually go forward with this scheme. Maybe they get a public relations boost from it or maybe it fails completely. It will have no impact on the war. The institutional incompetence of the West is irreversible. The only question is whether they bumble the world into a nuclear war.

Moral Disorder

Posted on March 1, 2024 by thezman

Since I liked yesterday’s post so much, I decided to do a show on the topic, but from a historical perspective. Since the end of the Cold War our ruling class has gone off the rails and it is not a coincidence. We have the combination of two factors that are at the heart of this sudden shift into madness. One is the generational changeover and the other is the end of the Cold War moral order.

The show is about that last bit. It turns out that “winning” the Cold War was the worst thing for the West. The Russians and to a lesser extent the Chinese came out of the experience of losing the great ideological war better than they would otherwise have been if not for the collapse of communism. China is the biggest economy on earth and Russia is a fully modern country of the 21st century.

Meanwhile, the post-Cold War experience for the West, especially America, has been a descent into madness. The inflection point is the 1992 election when the Boomers officially took over and began to shape the post-Cold War world. The trouble is they had no idea what they were doing. They did not understand why the West won the Cold War and lacked the historical understanding to see their own folly.

Compounding it was the fact that the Cold War was the moral framework in which politics was conducted for a couple of generations and it rested on a moral consensus based on the goals of the Cold War. When the Cold War ended, so did the moral framework and the moral consensus. The result is the newly ascendent baby boomer generation was operating without a moral compass.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
Moral Consensus
The Cold War Consensus
After The Cold War
The Post-Liberal Order

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The God Of The Clouds

Posted on February 29, 2024 by thezman

One of the things about the current age that gets little attention is the contradiction we see every day in the political system. On the one hand, most people think the political system is captured by minority interests like corporations, the military industrial complex, ideological fanatics and so on. At the same time, the political class puts an enormous amount of time and energy into convincing the public. If public opinion plays little role in policy, why do the politicians care what we think?

First off, there is the question of whether public opinion matters. Paradoxically, many of the people who claim government is controlled by minority interests put a lot of time into convincing people of this theory. They also make claims about the nature of the minority interests that are absurd. For example, white men are claimed to have special access to power, when this is clearly not true. For this class of critic, “minority interests” are whatever bogeyman haunts their fevered dreams of utopia.

Ten years ago there was a big study to determine if public opinion matters when it comes to the making of public policy. By the standards of social science, the data set was massive and comprehensive. The result was that economic elites control public policy, not majority will. If rich people want something from government, they tend to get it barring overwhelming public opposition. If the people want something but rich people oppose it, then the politicians are happy to ignore the people.

To the realists, this makes perfect sense. In every area of life, rich people have far more influence than regular people. This has been true since the first guy drew a line around some land and declared sole ownership of it. Wealth is power because it can be used to buy influence, but also because people tend to respect money. It is a sign that the person is successful and therefore has qualities we should respect. Even the most radical leftists respects rich people. Just as George Soros.

This answers the question as to who really controls the political system in the general sense, but it does not cover everything. Do the economic elites of the West want a long war in Ukraine? Maybe in the United States the war profiteers see it as a good thing, but European industry has been getting killed by the war. Similarly, environmentalism benefits some profiteers, like Elon Musk, but it harms many others. Clearly, rich people can be cajoled into supporting things that harm their interests.

That starts to get at the question as to why the ruling class puts so much time and effort into tricking the public. If you look at lists of the richest people, the one thing lacking in the vast display of wealth is diversity of opinion. You do not find immigration opponents, for example, in the Fortune 1000. There are no zealous Christian Nationalist or even serious opponents of Zionism. There are degrees of enthusiasm for the latest thing among the elites, but everyone supports the latest thing.

No one, not even the sociopaths who populate the economic elite, wants to think of themselves as the bad guy. They may embrace a mock version of being the devilish figure in the drama of life, but no one thinks of himself as the devil. No matter your station in life, you are the hero of your story. What supports this is others taking your side in some moral cause. It is why people like sympathy and forgiveness when they do something stupid or get harmed. It means they are the good guy.

The reason our elites chant about democracy so much now is they not only believe what they are saying, but they have to believe what they are saying. In order for them to maintain their sense of being the hero, they need some moral authority to bestow upon them the blessings that are reserved for the righteous. The support of their fellow elites is not enough. In this age, the righteous have the support of the masses, so that is why our elites invest so much in winning public approval.

The god of democracy is not the god of the people. It is a process that turns the people into a fickle god that must be cajoled and bullied in order to give its blessing. In order for our rulers to see themselves as heroically leading mankind to the next phase of human existence, they need the people to be cheering them. Like the deranged rulers of Rome who staged games to win public acclaim, our rulers stage mass media events, public festivals like elections and public relations campaigns.

In a way, our rulers are acting the same way as the people who go door to door handing out information about their cult. On the one hand, these people think they are giving away something beneficial. They are offering people a way into their cult. On the other hand, they are looking for confirmation. If even a few people show some interest, it confirms to them that their beliefs have some merit. The conversion process in all religions is for the benefit of the converted.

Unlike a religious cult, our rulers resent this relationship. It is a weird aspect of the morality of democracy that it corrupts the soul of the believer. They begin to hate the god they are forced to worship. Our elites hate the marketplace, whether it is the economic market or the political one. It is why they seek monopoly. If they can so dominate the market that they always get majority support, they have tamed their god into always being a loving and approving god.

Of course, nature abhors a monopoly, so that means our elites are always in a contest with the Old Scratch of democracy, which is dissent. As long as there is one person out there who disagrees it remains possible that the opinion of the elites is invalid or even immoral, despite the level of support. Much of the venom directed at the public by our elites is the result of this reality. Final confirmation can only come when the final dissident is wiped from the scene.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe famously picked “Democracy: The God That Failed” for the title of his book promoting private government. It contains many of the themes in this post, but it misses one essential point. Democracy is not a god that fails the people or even society, but a god that can never satisfy the ruling elite. Every ruling needs a god, as they must stand on a moral framework. All societies start from a moral basis and it must feel permanent. Democracy is simply too fickle for the task.

In the end, that is why our rulers and their servants in politics and the media so frantically chase after public opinion. It is why vast amounts of capital are invested into tricking the people. Like the rabbis looking for loopholes in the Talmud, our rulers are always looking for some way to get justification from the public for their actions and their position, but they always find dissidents. For them, democracy is a god that always brings the devil with him to undermine their efforts.

Failure Management

Posted on February 28, 2024 by thezman

Note To SubscribeStar Users: I was told that their payment processor made some changes, so that screwed up some of the renewals. The usual suspects continue to harass credit card processors who do business with normal people. It is a hassle, for sure, but a reality of life these days.

The term “deep state” has been overused and abused to the point where it is meaningless, but the concept behind it remains useful. Conceptually, it simply means the permanent state, the individuals and institutions that lie behind the facade of our democratic processes and institutions. Politicians come and go but there is a permanent managerial elite that runs the important institutions. The C.I.A., for example, does not change after a presidential election brings in a new president.

That is what makes this long piece in the New York Times about the C.I.A. operating in Ukraine an interesting bit for regime-ology. There is not a single punctuation mark in that piece that was not vetted by the C.I.A. Senior people in the agency wanted that piece in the “newspaper of record” so they made sure the senior people at the paper put reliable stenographers on the job. It is why it reads like a marketing piece extolling the accomplishments and capabilities of the agency.

The part that is getting the most attention is that the agency has been operating secret bases in Ukraine since the U.S. led coup in 2014. The newly installed spy chief of Ukraine was in contact with British and American spy agencies on day one, which is a strange thing to make public. On the one hand, the agency wants the world to know that they have been trying to undermine Russia from bases in Ukraine for a decade, but at the same time they were invited into to do the work.

One way to read this is as a signal to Russian intelligence that when the war is over there will be no hard feelings. It is just the old game. While the agency did the task assigned to it by the political side of Washington, the agency bears no ill-will to the Russians with regards to Ukraine. In the article there are several examples of how the agency supposedly told the Ukrainians that they were not so conduct assassinations or terrorist operations inside of Russia.

That sounds like something out of a John le Carré novel, but like the rest of permanent Washington, the C.I.A. is still stuck in the Cold War. This is not the first time that stories planted by the agency have made the point that the Ukrainians have been operating outside the parameters set by the C.I.A., so it is fair to assume that this is a point that is important to the agency for some reason. It could have to do with internal politics between factions in Washington.

Another way to read this is as a way to prepare the ground for the very bad news that is coming out of Ukraine this year. Again, that Times piece reads like marketing material for the agency, which may be intended to shield it from criticism when Project Ukraine falls apart this summer. They can tell the politicians that they did what they could to help Ukraine, but the warmongers in the State Department, along with their puppets in Ukraine, screwed it up.

This interpretation is supported by the panic we are seeing in the political class over the last couple of weeks. Chuck Schumer is now threatening House Speaker Mike Johnson over the Ukraine money. The people controlling Joe Biden are putting on a full court press to get that money, even threatening a government shutdown. In Europe, French president Emanual Macron held an emergency meeting of EU countries to discuss sending troops from EU countries to Ukraine.

The reason for the panic is the war has taken a bad turn. The Russians broke through a key stronghold called Avdeevka. This was a fortified city that secured a key part of the front in the Donbass. This has opened up a hole in the Ukrainian defenses and has the Ukrainians scrambling to build new defensive lines further West. In the north and the south, the Russians are slowly taking ground and inflicting heavier and heavier damage to the Ukrainian army, which is showing signs of breaking.

While no one expects the Ukrainian army to collapse anytime soon, it is clear that it is no longer about if the army will break but when it will break. They are running out of men to fight, as the losses have been staggering over the last year. They also have critical shortages of essential materials like artillery shells. This is why Macron is floating the idea of sending troops to Ukraine. It is also why NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg wants Ukraine to target Russian cities with missiles.

Meanwhile, the public face of the Kagan cult that controls the State Department is making the rounds, threatening to kill Valdimir Putin. Victoria Nuland is doing what these people always do and that is double down on failure. As far as Nuland is concerned, the deteriorating situation in Ukraine is proof that the West must pour even more resources into the Ukraine project. If it means nuclear war with Russia, that is just the price that must be paid to finish the job in Ukraine.

What all of this suggests is that the people operating behind the curtain are deeply worried about project Ukraine. Things may be worse than what the general public can see through social media and local reports. That New York Times piece extolling the glories of the C.I.A. is a glimpse of the jockeying that is going on behind the scenes to see who takes the blame for the failure. More precisely, to see who gets to blame which politicians for the failure of Project Ukraine.

The Losers Morality

Posted on February 27, 2024 by thezman

Note: For those looking for a good book to read, check out this new novel Faction: With the Crusaders, which is the follow on of the writer’s first novel called Faction.

On Sunday, a US Air Force member named Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israel embassy to protest the war in Gaza. This being the modern age, he live steamed the act on Twitch. According to the BBC, he had e-mailed a message to the Antifa media operators with whom he was associated. “Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the email read, warning it would be “highly disturbing”.

The video is disturbing for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which it shows a man burning to death, which is one of the most horrific ways to die. It also shows uniformed police doing nothing but pointing their guns at the man as he burned to death, because that is the only thing they know how to do now. Finally, someone rushed up with a fire extinguisher to put out the flames, but the cops still stood there ready to shoot the poor man if they could find a reason to do it.

The point of this act was to get attention to the cause, which is the Israeli war on the Palestinian settlements in Gaza. Antifa, with whom Mr. Bushnell was associated, is anti-Israel, so they have taken up the cause of Gaza. Despite claiming to be antifascist, the anarchist subculture is surprisingly antisemitic, something that gets left out of the reporting by the media. It is a good example of how the Washington regime will align with anyone, no matter how bizarre, if it suits their needs.

The logic behind this protest is that it so shocks the sensibilities that no one can ignore it, thus attention is brought to the cause. There is no disputing this. Before Aaron Bushnell self-immolated, no one other than his family and friends had any reason to know his name, but now he is global news. To a lesser degree, his reasons for doing what he did are also global news. For the anti-Israel movement around the world, Aaron Bushnell is now a martyr and hero for the cause.

That is where things get complicated. For those already in the pro-Gaza camp, Mr. Bushnell’s actions are noble because they elicit pity. Michael Tracy tried unsuccessfully to make this point on Twitter. You are supposed to see the act, feel pity for the man suffering and then think about his reasoning. Presumably, once you understand his reasoning, you will not only embrace his reasoning, but embrace the moral claims that he is making with regards to Israel.

Of course, you could just as easily look at his act, feel pity for the man and then conclude he must be insane. After all, reason tells us that all living creators seek to preserve their lives by any means necessary. This we can observe in nature and within ourselves as living things. Therefore, a human seeking to die is probably suffering from mental defect and needs protection from himself. Perhaps his cause is just as crazy as the man killing himself in the name of the cause.

There is something else. Why should the moral claims of a loser, a failure, a maniac, have greater appeal than the moral claims of the people supporting the stronger party in the Gaza conflict? In other words, why do the losers have a claim on our sympathy rather than the winners? Why should our sympathy have any role in determining the morality of the two parties in the conflict? Why are both sides appealing to our pity and sympathy rather than some other emotion?

In no other area of life is this logic applied. In a war the winners are celebrated and the losers are punished, usually by their own people. When the Ukraine army falls apart, the political leaders of Ukraine will flee for their lives. The leaders of NATO countries will be mocked and scorned by their own people. We see the same in sports competition, where the winners are feted and the losers and excoriated. Why in this case should the morality be turned on its head?

The truth is, it is not turned on its head. The reason this sort of protest, and most protests, fail to sway the public is they appeal to a loser’s morality. The protestors are saying, in effect, that they cannot win the debate with the public and they cannot win the argument with the rulers. They are powerless, so no one addresses their concerns, which leaves them with nothing by an appeal to your sympathy. This always fails as people naturally support the winner and reject the loser.

This is why most of the commentary online about the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell was mocking and joking. Even in that Michael Tracey thread the replies are sarcastic, despite his obvious appeal to pity. It turns out that appeals to pity only work on those who see themselves as pitiful. To everyone else, they just reinforce the notion that the losers deserve to lose, which is why they act like losers. For most people, Bushnell’s act proves his cause is not worth considering.

It is an important point about politics. Democratic politics are theater and self-pity makes for bad box office. Successful political movements project strength and confidence, not weakness and self-pity. That means all public displays, including protests, should project strength and confidence. Aaron Bushnell would have served his cause better if he went about punching Israelis in the nose. At least then he would have been seen as a threat and people will respect a man who is a threat.

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