Thoughts On The New Gods

Posted on July 10, 2023 by thezman

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Despite their many parallels in practice, we separate ideology from religion as two separate things that appeal to different aspect of man. Ideology is an integrated set of assertions, theories, and goals for achieving a social end, while religion is assumed to be a set of beliefs with a supernatural basis. The ideologue is focused on imposing changes in how we live as humans in a human society, while the believer is someone primarily focused on how the individual reaches the afterlife.

This distinction is entirely due to Christianity, which is a universal set of beliefs that apply to all individuals, even those unaware of it. Christians start with the belief that all people have an individual relationship with God. The point of life is to discover and embrace this relationship so that you can sit at the feet of God in the afterlife. As a result, we think of religion as a world-rejecting phenomenon. It is focused on what comes after this life, not how to improve this life.

This has not always been how religion works. What we used to call paganism was not particularly concerned with the afterlife. The religions of pre-Christian people were often world-affirming and specific to their people. A people had their gods to whom they could appeal for practical things like a good harvest or protection from the bad people on the other side of the valley. Their gods were tied to their identity as a people and their customs that gave meaning to their lives.

Some of the old religion still exists in this age. You cannot become a Druze, for example, even if you learn their religion. You have to be born into their faith in order to be accepted into their religion. Shintoism is not as strict, in terms of outsiders joining the religion, but for all practical purposes it is a Japanese faith. It is impossible to disentangle Shinto belief from Japanese identity. These are what people who study religion call folk religions.

Here is where you see the lines between religion and ideology blur. While Marxism does not possess a god or gods, it is not without its mystery. Marxist historiography is a central tenet of Marxism that must be accepted without proof. Then you have the assertion that this arc of history must bend toward communism. Of course, there is the assumption that all of mankind will eventually progress to the point where they join the rest of humanity in the communist paradise.

The similarities between religion and ideology have been noted many times, but always as a way to underscore the irrationality of the ideologue. The climate change people are compared to a cult, because they carry on as if they are worshipping Mother Earth and fear she is unhappy with mankind. Calling it a religion is a way to dismiss their claims to science and reason. Joe Sobran made the comparison between the Left and religion in his essay about the hive.

There may be another way of using this comparison. For example, the distinction made between universal religions like Christianity and folk religions like Shintoism provide an insight into why one triumphed over the other with some exceptions. Christianity pushed out paganism in Europe because it offered something that paganism either did not offer or did not address as well as the new religion. Similarly, Christianity has been a failure in Japan because it lacks something the native religion possesses.

A simple example is the Gaia worshippers. What is it about this doomsday cult that the believers find appealing? There is a money racket to it, for sure, but this is only possible because millions of people sense that the way we are living in the modern age is leading to some sort of supernatural doom. Is this belief appealing because it offers salvation from this world or is the appeal that it provides them with something to supplement their identity as a group?

If we take that last part a bit further and incorporate Gaia worship into the basket of things we call the Left, the result is a collection of beliefs that define a group of people and give them an elevated sense of status. Proof of their uniqueness is their membership in a group that holds these beliefs. They are on the right side of history because they carry their groceries in grimy canvas sacks and take their young children to drag shows at the local library.

Perhaps the appeal of what we call wokeness lies in the sense of identity it provides to people who live in highly conformist societies. The people who embrace these ideas are uniformly white, educated and upper-middle-class. They live in inorganic sterile suburban developments and work in fields with high levels of enforced conformity, like education, government, and corporate management. The folk nature of the new religion is what helps give their lives meaning.

On the other hand, it is possible that the new religion is the vestigial part of the old world-rejecting religion expressing through social fads. The gender stuff is a clear rejection of biological reality. Gaia worship is the rejection of human progress and civilization itself. The thread that runs through all of these social fads is their destructiveness to Western societies. The new religion of wrecking things appeals to people seeking an escape from this life.

The other appeal is that the destruction of the old order and the coming of the new world orders is full of uncertainty. The weirdness of these beliefs operates as a selection mechanism, filtering out anyone who questions the project. The new religion selects for those seeking the same shelter from the storm, but also those who think that when the storm passes, they will lead the way into the next phase of humanity. There is, after all, a whiff of Calvinism to all of this.

At this point, it is hard to know where the new religion will go or where it will end up on the folk-universal spectrum. What we can know is that new religions are like new ideologies in that they appeal to those unhappy with the present. Communism appealed to disaffected intellectuals and the urban industrial poor. Christianity appealed to provincials in the failing Roman empire. The reason this new religion appeals to the managerial class is they are unhappy with the present.

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A Rant About Healthcare

Posted on July 7, 2023 by thezman

As I race toward decrepitude, my interaction with the healthcare system will increase, thus raising my awareness of its many faults. At this point, I am lucky to only have to see the doctor once a year for a physical. I have had occasional injuries in the past, but none of those required more than a single visit. Even so, the lunacy of the healthcare system is obvious even at this stage of my life.

The thing about the system is that it works to the interest of everyone except the patients, but we insist on calling it private healthcare. There is nothing private about it as every aspect is controlled by corporate interests, which both advance and direct government interests in the system. If you want to understand fascist economics, spend some time in the American healthcare system.

Something I did not mention in the show is that a sizable chunk of what passes for healthcare is either unnecessary or not healthcare. The legions of bureaucrats and functionaries that serve only the interest of the system are a great example of Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy. The system is an upside-down pyramid with the doctors and nurses at the bottom.

It is hard to see how this system survives the great wave of baby boomer retirement and the wave of demographic change. A highly complex system operated by low-IQ people is doomed due to that mismatch, but throw in the tens of millions of old people demanding services and collapse is the only possible outcome. The Covid response was a glimpse of how bad things will get in the next decade.

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This Week’s Show

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An Unhinged Rant About Healthcare

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Death By A Thousand Lies

Posted on July 6, 2023 by thezman

On July 4th, a Federal judge in Louisiana issued an injunction against the Federal government barring various departments from contacting social media companies with regards to censoring speech online. This is a practice that started in the Trump years but took off under the Biden administration. On a daily basis government actors contact the censors at these companies and tell them which posts to remove, users to ban and topics that are to be suppressed that day.

In the Trump years, this practice consisted mostly of government officials calling to complain about things that were obviously fake about the White House. Given the lunacy of the people running these companies, the complaints were ignored, but the complaints from fellow partisans were not ignored. A working relationship between the censors and the FBI, DHS and other agencies evolved. Under Biden it is one click away from being enshrined in government regulation.

Most people alive today remember when the media proudly refused to cooperate with the government on this stuff. They would make a big deal about not going along with government requests to suppress stories. It was all a lie, of course, but they felt the need to make a big show of it. The secret police had long ago infiltrated the major media companies to shape the news. Operation Shamrock and Operation Mockingbird we both used to control the media.

The response from the media was much different when the Twitter Files revealed the level of cooperation between Twitter censors and the government. The primary response was to ignore the whole thing. This is the real power of the media. They can simply ignore a story and let it be buried under a mountain of nonsense about carny folk or conspiracy theories about things like global warming. The second response was to trash the reputation of Matt Taibbi who did the reporting.

So far, the media response to this injunction is what you would expect. On the one hand, they are treating it as a partisan issue. You see, it is the nasty Republican states that are hassling Biden for no reason at all. On the other hand, this ruling is preventing the government from defending our democracy against election interference. The brave disinformation researchers are now prevented from doing their work to protect you from words and sounds that threaten our democracy.

Disinformation is information that is intended to deceive, usually from an official source, like the media or the government. This is an easily solved problem by having an adversarial relationship between the government and the media so both sides police each other. Instead, the media has teamed up with the state to battle this invisible fiend who is attacking our democracy. It is tempting to call this language Orwellian, but it is too ridiculous and insane to be Orwellian.

This is a feature of managerial polyarchy that does not get attention. An enormous amount of time is spent on imaginary things. The Russian collusion hoax probably cost over a billion dollars in the end. It was something that obviously did not exist, because it could not exist, but for the people in the hive it had to exist, so they treated it as if it were as real as a rose bush. Take a tour through the fever swamps of the hive and you will see plenty of people who still believe in it.

Then you have the innate need to credentialize everything. Since Grog sold a faulty wheel to Trog, humans have been trying to deceive other humans. In fact, the second oldest profession rests on this very idea. Of course, you cannot have public debate without people trying to convince others of things that are not true. The argument in favor of democracy starts with accepting this trade-off. You accept false opinions in order to encourage the free flow of ideas.

Suddenly, the people who used to claim to be the guardians of this idea are obsessed with disinformation. So much so they will help the government crush anyone who dares say anything that has not been approved. Of course, this means there must be disinformation researchers and disinformation experts. Colleges are now offering courses on the subject. How long before we see someone with the title “licensed disinformation researcher” on a cable chat show?

Notice no one ever asks what a disinformation expert does. The most likely reason for this is the people in this racket could not tell you. Here is the Wilson Center’s page on their disinformation project. Nina Jankowicz is listed a senior fellow. Read her bio and you will see that her only gainful employment has been as a professional liar, spreading government propaganda. Perhaps the theory here is the same as the government hiring former criminals to solve crimes.

If you put “disinformation expert” into a search engine you get millions of links to stories featuring them. If you search on how to become a disinformation expert, then you will see tumbleweeds on your screen. Everyone seems to accept that this profession is real, but no one has the slightest idea how you get the title. One would think that someone in the media would do a deep dive into the topic, but that would risk being accused of disinformation and who wants that?

What this reveals is the inherent decadence of managerialism. Since all authority lies with the expert, every opinion must have an expert behind it. The demand for experts is unlimited, so you end up with experts in things like disinformation. The same process unleashed the army of bigots known as antiracism experts. In place of a holy book or the word of the local shaman, moral authority lies with the expert, so the managerial system manufactures an expert for every normative claim.

There is a practical value to this for the system. These make-believe jobs provide work for the swelling army of credentialed mediocrities. There are now millions of people calling themselves “open-source intelligence researchers.” What this means is they spend all day on Google, going past the first couple of pages. This is the town busy body for the digital age. They work with the disinformation experts to get you banned from Twitter for noticing things.

It is tempting to focus on the un-American aspects of these censorship campaigns, but the fact is America stopped being a rights-based society long ago. The important issue is the vulnerability it reveals. The regime is employing armies of people to control information online and failing miserably. It turns out that the unguarded entrance to the Death Star is a well-formed meme. This probably explains why they are treating Douglas Mackey like his public enemy number one.

It is a sweet irony that a regime that is built on a foundation of lies thinks that its vulnerability is clever lies on Twitter. They are not wrong about this. The regime of lies was possible because people trusted the system. People living in a world of lies are not going to trust the system and they are certainly not going to trust the people who are responsible for the world of lies. They will seek out alternatives. It turns out that the answer to the Big Lie is millions of little lies.

The Russian Anaconda

Posted on July 5, 2023 by thezman

Wars are often described in the context of the diplomacy between the combatants and the battles that make up the war. Today is the anniversary of the launch of Operation Citadel by the Germans in the Second World War. This battle was part of the larger Battle of Kursk, which featured the largest tank battle in history. This battle, like the war itself, is described by its various operations. It was decided, however, by decisions made by both sides long before the battle took place.

It is those decisions made in advance of war that play the biggest role. The planning of both sides, their assumptions about the other side, as well as assumptions about the course of the war, are the major factors in a war. Once the fighting begins, both sides are often swept up in the action, which is the product of their plans and assumptions interacting with the plans and assumptions of the other side. Fighting becomes a machine with a mind of its own.

We see this with the Ukraine war. Before the actual fighting, both sides were busy preparing for what they assumed would come next. The Russians amassed about 150,000 men on the border of the Donbas. The Ukrainians had been preparing a summer attack on the Donbas but switched to preparing for a defense. Both sides were preparing based on the assumptions they were making about the other. In the case of Ukraine, their assumptions were NATO assumptions.

The Russians were the first to move their pieces on the board. They assumed that the Ukrainians would not want a war. They assumed Europe would jump in to broker some sort of peace deal based on the Minsk agreements in 2014. They crossed the border in Ukraine assuming they would not have to do much fighting. The sight of Russian tanks outside Kiev would conjure images of war, which would cause the Europeans to rush to the table offer a peace deal.

This plan was a total failure for the Russians because they were operating from assumptions about the West that were all wrong. Ukraine was not interested in a deal and the Europeans would not try to persuade them because Washington was not interested in a deal. Washington wanted regime change in Russia, which meant they wanted war with Russia in the Ukraine. Not only that but the Minsk agreements were a deliberate ruse to sucker the Russians.

In the spring of 2022, the Russians had to rethink everything. This meant new assumptions and new plans based on those assumptions. This is when they reorganized their command structure, called up hundreds of thousands of reserves and embarked on an entirely new strategy for dealing with the West. The Russians pulled out a blank piece of paper, wrote down what they knew, what they thought they knew and then built a war plan from what they had on the paper.

On the other side, the West had been preparing for this war since Washington overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014. Their base assumption was that Russia was too weak to either stop NATO from expanding into Ukraine or two weak to sustain the effort required to halt NATO expansion. They would either put nuclear missiles on Russian’s border or they would get war that would quickly exhaust the Russians, thus ushering in the planned breakup of Russia.

At the start of the war, the Ukrainians were faced with the same choices that faced the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War. When facing a more powerful opponent, you can either make a daring attack on their forces hoping to force a truce, fall back into defense hoping to sap their will to fight or you can look for some way to reduce their ability to conduct the war. This may mean using unconventional tactics to destroy their war production and logistics networks.

In the case of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis preferred the defensive strategy, assuming the North would quickly tire of the war. General Lee preferred to go on attack, largely based on the same assumption. The superior field commanders of the South would quickly drive up the cost of war for the North. Stonewall Jackson, on the other hand, saw the problem in both strategies. He preferred to attack the North’s industrial capacity and logistics. Lee won the argument and lost the war.

Like the Confederates, the West made the same assumptions about the other side’s willingness and ability to sustain the war. They chose two of the three options, by waging a sanctions war on Russia to reduce her capacity to fight and had the Ukrainian army dig in for a long siege. Even to this day, Western media is predicting that the Russians will collapse any minute. The long-promised summer offensive was predicated on this key assumption about the Russians.

In what may go down as one of history’s greatest ironies, the West has made the same mistake that was made by the Confederacy. It turns out that the Russians can wage war for as long as it takes to achieve their goals. Not only that, but Russia also has large untapped resources to supplement what she had on-hand. As some Western analysist have noted, the Russians are stronger now than at the start of the war. The key assumption of the West about Russia has proven to be wrong.

Once the Russians realized their blunder, they found themselves with the same choices as the North in the Civil War. They could sue for peace and accept whatever would come from it. They could ramp up for a massive offensive against the Ukrainians and accept sizable losses or they could prepare for a war of attrition aimed at sapping the ability of Ukraine to maintain her army in the field. The Russians settled on what amounts to a Slavic version of the Anaconda plan.

The Russians appear to have made three key assumptions. One is they assumed the West lacked the military industrial capacity to fight a war of attrition based on artillery and mine warfare. The second assumption was the West could not replace the Ukrainian air defense system once it was depleted. This would give Russia control of the skies over the battlefield. Finally, the Russians assumed that eventually the West would force the Ukrainians to go on offense using NATO tactics.

The first assumption has proven to be true. The West is running out of stocks to send Ukraine and has limited ability to produce more. The American military system is not built for this sort of war. Ukraine uses in a month what the West produces in a year in terms of artillery shells. This is a fraction of Russian production. Added to this is the fact that the Russians are simply better than the West at artillery war. They have better guns, better training, and better tactics.

The second assumption has also proven correct. At the start of the war, the Ukrainians had the second-best air defense systems in Europe. The reason is they were using the same systems as the country with the best systems, Russia. Again, this is not something in the Western toolkit. American strategy is to use air power to control the skies, not ground based missile systems. That missile barrage against power plants was meant to deplete Ukrainian stocks and it has succeeded.

Finally, the long-awaited offensive by Ukraine is looking like what the Russians prepared for over the last six months. Like the German army in the Battle of Kursk, the Ukrainians are running into complex defenses based on slowing them down so Russian artillery and air power can destroy them. That plus the extensive use of mines to entangle Ukrainian forces as they approach has led to scenes like this one during the early days of the long anticipated offensive.

NATO is set to meet this month to discuss where they go next with this war, so the Ukrainians are desperate to find a victory somewhere to show them. They are currently back to hurling infantry at Russian defenses around Bakhmut. Given the Russian understanding of the dynamics of this war, it is possible that Ukraine wins a battle for a village or two at some point along the front. The point is to keep driving up the cost to the Ukrainians in terms of men and material.

To bring us back to where we started, the long promised Ukrainian counter-offensive is looking a lot like the Battle of Kursk. The Russians were prepared and understood what they were facing. Like the Germans, the Ukrainians have misread things and continue to operate from false assumptions about their opponent. The result is the Russian anaconda plan is about turn this offensive into Gettysburg. It is a defeat from which Ukraine can never recover.

Antiracist Constitution

Posted on July 3, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the movie Amadeus, a post about Affirmative Action and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

When the typical person thinks about the law, he thinks about it as a list of behaviors that are prohibited. You cannot fish during certain months, for example. You are not allowed to drive over a certain velocity. The law is a list of limitations on what you can do as well as a list of things others cannot do to you. This is largely true as a practical matter, but the law is more than a list of prohibitions. It is a moral system that turns those limitations into a habit of mind for the citizenry.

Although the law often looks chaotic and self-contradictory, it is a system made of properties and methods. The properties are things like constitutional rights, precedents, and legislation. These are statements that are treated as facts. Your First Amendment right to assembly is assumed to be a fact of nature. The Court’s decision that the First Amendment does not permit you to yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire is now assumed to be a truth in the Constitution.

The methods are the rules that govern how the people inside the law interact with those properties as well as the other people inside the legal system. The courts have processes for adjudicating disputes between citizens, for example. The government has to meet certain conditions when they infringe on the rights of a citizen. All of us exist inside the legal framework, as it is the implementation of the moral framework of our society and the framework determines how we interact with one another.

This is the starting place for reading this new booklet titled How We Got Our Antiracist Constitution: Canonizing Brown v. Board of Education in Courts and Minds, which is part of the Claremont Provocations Monograph Series. The author is Jesse Merriam, who teaches government at Patrick Henry University. His focus is on the history of the famous Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which has transformed not just the law by the Constitution itself.

The author starts with a short history of the famous case. This is one of those things that will be a revelation for most readers. Even though the case was decided in 1954, the process started a generation earlier when a young communist radical received a million-dollar inheritance from his father. He was going to reject it, but the founder of the ACLU convinced him to use the money to fund left-wing causes. This was in 1922, long before normal Americans thought about civil rights.

This money was used to start the Garland Fund, which gave the NAACP $100,000 to begin the litigation that eventually led to the Brown decision. The author does not spend a lot of time on it, but the point is clear. The civil rights movement was not something organic and spontaneous. It was a long-term project organized and financed by wealthy and important individuals. They set out to change the moral framework of the country and committed their lives to the cause.

That brings us to the heart of the topic. The author walks the reader through the process by which a legal decision becomes canonical and then how that status in the law warps everything that comes after it. In the law, “canonization” is “the process by which a single Supreme Court decision comes to control constitutional theory, debate, and interpretation.” A case can become so important that it changes the methods by which the Court views the Constitution itself.

This is a three-step process that starts with the construction phase. This is when the new moral principles are introduced to the moral framework or old moral principles are challenged as antithetical to the core principles. Brown was the end point of the construction phase where two new principles were added. One is that diversity is a constitutional good. This is why diversity is a strength. The other new principle was that discrimination, private or public, is always unconstitutional.

The next phase is what the author calls submission, which is the process “whereby critics of the initial decision capitulate to the new paradigm.” The author provides data on how conservatives changed over this phase. He counted negative stories in National Review before and after Rehnquist was nominated to the Court. He also looks at opinions on Brown during this period and notes that they went from uniformly hostile to neutral and then accepting.

The submission phase with regards to Brown is a great primer on what lies behind the internet meme “the conservative case for…” These new moral claims are first embraced by the people with control of the institutions. That power is then used to select against critics, which has the desired effect of selecting for those willing to bend their knee to the new moral paradigm. What has shaped conservatism over the last several generations is this process of submission to the Left.

The final phase of canonization is weaponization. This begins “when the former critics marshal the decision and its values for their own legal and political agenda.” As the former critics incorporate the moral principles in their own arguments, the case then becomes a controlling moral authority. Those former critics of the new morality transform themselves into its champions, often trying to stake out positions that are more extreme than those of the original advocates.

Again, the author dives into the writings of conservatism to provide examples of how they now embrace the moral claims of Brown. This is the origin of another well-worn internet meme, “democrats are the real racists.” For a generation after Brown, opposition to this decision was central to conservative arguments. Over the last thirty years Brown has taken center stage in conservative arguments in favor of diversity and opposition to discrimination.

The final result of this process is that the original Constitution has been hollowed out and in place of the rights-based moral order we now have the twin moral demands that have come from the logic of the Brown decision. Not only are your enumerated rights subject to the “Brown test”, but the federal system established by the Constitution has collapsed in order to comply with the new moral paradigm, leaving us with what the author calls the antiracist Constitution.

The author does not get into this, as it falls outside the scope of the essay, but the new legal framework created by Brown reflects the new moral framework that has come to dominate the thinking of the ruling elite. Diversity as the primary good and discrimination as the primary bad haunt every aspect of modern life. Not only must you avoid discriminating against members in the league of the oppressed, but you must also swear allegiance to diversity.

This is fundamental to the new religion which imagines the end point of social progress as the open society. If all people are inherently equal, then the differences we see must be due to social structures, which means that people are infinitely malleable. This is the universal truth of mankind. Thus, we have the holy trinity of the new religion, equality, the blank slate, and universalism. The logic of Brown reflects this spiritual sensibility as well as the ultimate goal of the open society.

This is a topic of critical importance for dissidents, so this booklet on the Brown decision and its canonization in the law is an important entry point. As the author notes, the road forward is not in fighting the tentacles that have grown out of Brown, but to understand how we got to this point. In order to remove the tentacles of Brown v. Board of Education from the neck of society, the moral claims that lie behind the decision must be understood and then defeated.

Affirmative Action

Posted on June 30, 2023 by thezman

This week I thought it would be useful to talk about the Supreme Court case regarding affirmative action in college admissions. As I pointed out on Gab and Twitter, the ruling is a big nothing burger when you read it. Schools cannot come right out and say they are not taking Whites or Asians, but they can still discriminate to their heart’s desire as long as they frame as a character evaluation.

Judge Roberts wrote, “nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.” Colleges will no doubt read this as a license to go crazy with their antiwhite agendas.

I did not cover this in the show, but this case is a good reminder that words on paper will never constrain a ruling class. The letter of the law means nothing to people who have no respect for the spirit of the law. Right now, our ruling class has no respect for the rules that are supposed to govern Western societies. No amount of ink spilling will cause them to change their minds about it.

Another thing worth mentioning that I did not cover in the show is the implied cowardice in these cases. When the Left had the whip hand on the court, they rammed through as much as they could as fast as they could. When the Right has control of the courts it is nothing but baby steps and concessions to the Left. This recent case was a chance to roll back a lot of horrible ideas, but they cucked.

This removes the last argument for voting Republican. We know that when they have control of Congress they will fink on their voters. When they have control of the White House, they will appoint people like John Roberts to the bench. Even with a stacked court the people who vote Republican cannot expect to get anything for their support, so what is the point of voting for a Republican?

This Week’s Show

Contents

The Cases
The History
The Logic of Affirmative Action
Civil Rights Legislation
Four Ways To Manage A Diverse Society
Hard Segregation
Soft Segregation
Proportionalism
Free Association
The Problem With These Cases
Conclusion

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Full Show On Rumble

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Questions Of Competence

Posted on June 29, 2023 by thezman

The crisis of competence has been a popular topic in dissident circles but largely ignored by mainstream politics. Human intelligence is a dangerous subject in this increasingly primitive time because it points to immutable differences in human beings, which contradicts the new religion. If who we are is determined by our genes, then many of the popular social fads are invalid. This makes discussing the declining competency of Western societies difficult.

Even so, the reality of the situation is hard to ignore, and we are seeing more mainstream writers notice the topic. Here is a post in the Claremont Review of Books discussing one cause of the decline. While the article focuses on how civil rights theology has warped the law, this warping of the legal system is having a deleterious impact on society by reducing competence to happy accident. When vague notions of social justice are primary, competence is an afterthought.

The most recent Budweiser panic is a good example. The ethic inside the company was built around notions of representation and equitable outcomes. These magic phrases did not spring from nothing. They are rooted in the same civil rights theology as the legal mechanism that enforce diversity quotas. It is a straight line from expecting equal outcomes to thinking you need to market cheap beer to crossdressers in order to make sure everyone is represented in your marketing.

Instead of a company making cheap beer, imagine the same company making airplane parts, elevator controls or military equipment. Competence is just as essential to beer making as making any other product. There is no reason to think that the company providing safety services to airports is less concerned for their diversity goals than the company making cheap beer. When diversity is our greatest strength, it means competence is somewhere down the list.

Of course, the new religion is not the only cause of the crisis of competence we are seeing throughout American society. This long article on the impact of diversity quietly mentions another elephant in the room. While not explicitly stated, the decline in intelligence brought on by immigration is making it more difficult to maintain the complex systems of our society. The millions moving to America are not fleeing well-run, high-IQ, high-trust societies. They are the exact opposite.

Again, this is not a new topic on this side of the great divide. Here is a post from 2022 on how the decline in competence led to the Ukraine war. Here is another post from last year going into the impact of the general decline in IQ. In 2018 Ed Dutton and Michael Woodley wrote a book on the topic of declining Western intelligence. Quantitative bloggers and HBD commentators have been talking about the impact of intelligence on society for decades now.

There is a chicken and egg angle to all of this. Is the spread of the new religion the prime mover of these observed phenomenon? For reasons as yet explained, the ruling elite of the Global American Empire embraced these vague notions of equity and diversity because they solved some unexamined psychological need or maybe they were deemed useful in promoting group solidarity. The resulting policies led to a decline in competence and general intelligence.

On the other hand, material prosperity reduced the risks in life, which resulted in more stupid people making it to sexual maturity. More of these people were then able to reproduce thus increasing the percentage of stupid people in society. Generation after generation the stupid multiplied due to the work of the intelligent in making life safer for the stupid. At a certain point, ideas like diversity and equity start to make sense as the stupid begin to overwhelm the competent.

The best evidence in support of this theory is the social fads. You have to be outlandishly stupid to think people are assigned a sex at birth. In fact, stupidity alone does not explain this lunacy. It must be amplified by a fanatical zeal to conform. In other words, people are not just dumber, they are increasingly terrified of the world around them and naturally seek safety in numbers. Western man has gone from being wolves taking on nature to moronic sheep hiding from nature.

All of this reads like a warning, as if there is something that can be done about the rapid decline in general competence. The immigration people say that ending immigration will help arrest the decline, but it is probably too late. Even if all immigration ends today, America becomes majority-minority by 2050 at the latest. It would also take competence to end immigration and we probably lack the ability to do it now. In other words, we have passed the point of no return.

The question then shifts from what can we do about it to what happens as the population loses the ability to maintain the social systems? For example, you cannot have a rights-based political culture with a low-IQ, low-trust population. You cannot leave people to question the rules and be inventive when you have to fear the consequences of their inventiveness. The Western way of organizing society can only work when the population is smart and competent.

This raises another question. It is not as if the future will be universal stupidity as it was in the movie Idiocracy. The future is going to be pockets of occidental competence in a sea of vibrant stupidity. Will high IQ, homogeneous New Hampshire want to be in the same country as diverse and stupid New Mexico? The former has an average IQ of 103, while New Mexico comes in at 95. Throw in the language and cultural barriers and you can see the problem.

This brings us to a final question stemming from the crisis of competence. If we cannot have the social structure we had when America was a European society, then what sort of social arrangements can we have in the diverse and stupid future? What sort of society is possible with the demographics of the future? Will all of the people of the future accept such those arrangements? Will the rump occidental population tolerate those conditions or seek to change them?

What Is Happening Inside Russia

Posted on June 28, 2023 by thezman

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth” is a famous quote from Sherlock Holmes. While it can easily lead to the logical fallacy called the false dilemma, it is useful in arriving at a set of possible solutions to a problem. You first remove the answers that are impossible then think about the range of solutions that remain. It may not yield the exact right answer, but at least you avoid the wrong answer.

Such is the case with the Russian coup. Last weekend the head of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, announced he was going to march on Moscow with his troops and forcibly remove the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu. He quickly amended that claim to saying he was staging “a march for justice” to demand the removal of Shoigu and his top deputy Valery Gerasimov. Then a few thousand of his men drove up the highway toward Moscow, stopping at a nearby city.

Some sort of negotiation was initiated by the Kremlin, which led to a deal brokered by the head of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko. The “coup leaders”, including Prigozhin, would not be arrested. Instead, they would head off to Belarus with a contingent of the Wagner fighters. Presumably, these are the fighters who went with Prigozhin. The rest of the Wagner groups would be offered a deal to sign contracts with the Russian military or go back to civilian life.

In the history of military coups, this is the weirdest. An ironclad rule of putting down coup attempts is you punish the leaders of the coup in such a way that terrifies anyone thinking about staging a coup. The ghoulish punishments of the past came about in response to attempts to topple the king. The English used hanged, drawn and quartered, for example, as a special punishment for treason. Cutting open the traitor and pulling out his internals while still alive made a big impression.

Prigozhin going into semi-retirement in Belarus does not make much sense if he was staging a genuine coup. Whatever he was up to, the Kremlin has decided that his goal was not regime change at the top. Further, they decided that no one else thought it was a genuine coup either, so they were free to be lenient. In fact, it appears that the Kremlin has decided that extreme leniency serves their interests. Whatever happened here, we can reasonably assume it was not a coup attempt.

Another possibility is that this is some sort of four-dimensional chess maneuver to get the Wagner group into Belarus. From there they can attack Kiev. We can eliminate this option as the number of Wagner forces headed to Belarus is small, just a few thousand, so they are not attacking anything by themselves. To attack Kiev, you would need several hundred thousand troops. Kiev is a huge city with lots of defenses and tens of thousands of Ukrainian forces in and around it.

We can probably eliminate the other 4-D chess theories as well. The Russians are not fond of these sorts of public relations stunts. If for example, the Kremlin wanted to get rid of Prigozhin, they would not put on a show like this. Similarly, if Putin were looking for a way to sure up his position with regards to the hardliners, he would not risk letting them stage a coup. The right answer lies within the domain of people acting in what they thought was their own interests.

Starting from the least likely, the first possibility is that Prigozhin was operating as some sort of double agent. He was talking with Washington about staging a coup or maybe he was talking to the Ukrainians. In reality he was working with Moscow to help flush out some conspirators in the Ministry of Defense. Prigozhin’s march to Moscow was his final favor to Putin before he heads off to retirement. The drama worked as cover for the Kremlin as they rounded up the real conspirators.

This is possible, but very much in the four-dimensional chess zone, so it is probably the least likely answer. Putin’s position is secure, so he would not have to do this sort of Game of Thrones stuff to deal with troublemakers. He has made plenty of personnel changes during the last year, so he could arrest a couple of traitors. That and there has been no word on anyone being arrested. Russia is a modern country. If someone important disappears, everyone soon knows about it.

There is the possibility Prigozhin went mad. Like Colonel Kurtz, he lost touch with reality and this half-baked coup was the result. The fact that most of his troops refused to participate is an important data point. According to reliable sources, only a few thousand Wagner fighters went on the march. Given the increasingly erratic behavior of Prigozhin and his prior insane statements, this is a strong possibility. He went mad and the Kremlin simply found a peaceful way to manage it.

A similar and slightly more plausible option is that Prigozhin allowed his dispute with Shoigu to get the better of him. His genuine complaints about the conduct of the war were spoiled by his public airing of those complaints. His support within the military collapsed and he found himself with two bad options. One was wait to be fired and the other was to force his way into a better deal. In the end he gets to retire in a form of house arrest in neighboring Belarus.

Another version of this is that Prigozhin misjudged his support within the Kremlin, and he overestimated his public support. He made his move thinking he had a strong hand but once he reached Rostov, reality became clear to him. The reason the Kremlin quickly offered him a golden bridge out of his predicament, is they were confident they had the situation in hand. It also suggests they anticipated this was a possibility and were ready to end it without bloodshed.

Further support of this option is the way the Kremlin quickly moved to offer Prigozhin a way out of his dilemma. Russian forces had already circled Wagner at Rostov, with the Chechens on their way as a sign of unity. It was if they anticipated this possibility and not only prepared a response but had time to consider how it would look to their friends and allies. Independent polling also suggests this went over very well with the Russian people. Putin’s popularity is at a record high.

While the evidence suggests Prigozhin either acted from madness or hubris, there is one wrinkle that is worth mentioning. The usual suspects rushed out to post their fantasy version of what was happening as the events were unfolding. Many stated that they knew about this plot all along. Senior Kagan cult member Anne Applebaum had a narrative out on the first day. Note that her husband, a Polish diplomat, posted on Twitter about the Nord Stream bombing as it happened.

The Russians have used this to claim that Prigozhin may have been working with outside forces, strongly suggesting Washington was involved. The Biden people have been rushing around to deny these claims. The reason is they see that it will give the Kremlin an excuse to escalate in response. Yesterday the Russians bombed a hotel in Kramatorsk, which housed foreign mercenaries. The subsequent video revealed a lot of Americans digging through the rubble.

It has been clear for a while that the hardliners are not happy with the pace of the war, but Putin has been reluctant to go harder on Ukraine. He has also been the least bellicose of the Russian leaders with regards to Washington. Putin has always been in the dovish camp regarding the West. This Prigozhin incident may have opened a road for Putin to take toward the hawks. This Kramatorsk attack could be the start of a new period of escalation by Moscow.

In the end, we do not know the real story behind these events. All we can do is eliminate the impossible. Once you do that, we are left with a picture of the Russian leadership that is trying to avoid World War Three, but also balancing internal politics in order execute a war of attrition with the West. The end result of this Prigozhin incident will not be the end times as imagined by the Kagan cult, but it could lead to a more aggressive stance by Moscow toward the West.

Brain Dead Idiots

Posted on June 27, 2023 by thezman

If you were around in the 1980’s and old enough to have noticed politics, then you probably recall the smug satisfaction of liberals when they criticized Ronald Reagan and the people who supported him. You see, conservatives were uneducated rubes easily fooled by a jocular actor who took naps during the day. Smart and educated people were not fooled by this stuff. It was mostly a coping strategy, of course, as Reagan was wildly popular so liberals could only grumble.

The claim was not entirely without support. For most of the 20th century it was the Left that could claim intellectual rigor. Smart people went into various forms of liberal politics and churned out new ideas and proposals. From the New Deal to the Great Society, liberal intellectuals drove American politics. It was in the 1980’s when that started to change, and the right started to be the place where smart people went to debate the issues of the day and the polices to address those issues.

In fairness, there were very smart people on the Right prior to the Reagan years, but it was a small club. James Burnham, for example, wrote his foundational work during the Second World War. Bill Buckley was challenging the Left in the 1960’s. In other words, there were conservative intellectuals before the 1980’s. It is just that Reagan’s success worked to legitimize the right as an intellectual endeavor, which in turn brought in waves of young smart people.

The truth is the American Left never recovered from the civil rights era. The arc of American progressivism begins with demands to end slavery and ends with the demand that fat naked men have a right to wave their genitals in your face. While it is reasonable to say that the Left is degenerate and evil, the reason they embrace this stuff is that they are morons. The Left is now dominated by credentialed idiots who think being loud and obnoxious is the peak of humans thought.

As is their nature, however, the people who continue to identify as conservative followed their friends on the Left into idiocy. There was a time when the flagship publication of conservatism, National Review, sported some of the smartest and most original thinkers and critics in the country. That was a long time ago. Today you will find jarringly stupid posts like this one. That post is an echo of this longer and much dumber post in something called Law & Liberty.

There was a time when a phrase like “right-wing Marxism” would have been met with howls of laughter. The reason is the term is ridiculous. More important, there was a time when conservatives knew enough about Marxism and what it meant to be right-wing to know the term is ridiculous. The person who posted that item at National Review does not know this. The author of the source item seems to think the word “Marxism” is just another word for “bad.”

Putting aside the stupidity of the key phrase, the original article is riddled with errors that should have been noticed by the editor. An easy example is his claims about Russell Kirk, who has been forgotten by modern conservatives. The reason National Review types sent Kirk down the memory hole is he sided with the paleos. He proudly supported George Wallace, for example. Kirk was also the Michigan chairman of the Pat Buchanan campaign.

The author of that Law & Liberty article is either an idiot or a liar. He clearly does not understand the material. He does not know the history of the intellectual tradition that he is claiming to defend. Worse yet, his main argument is that the paleos were unpopular, which is proof they were wrong. There is no form of conservatism that claims truth is determined by popular consent. In fact, the rejection of that idea is the very first principle of conservatism as presented by Russell Kirk!

This brings us back to where we started. There was a time when conservatism was a vibrant and dynamic intellectual space. There was room for Sam Francis to critique Russel Kirk and a place for Mel Bradford to rebut the claims of Harry Jaffa. Those days are long gone now as conservatism has suffered from a long brain drain. What has replaced it is a narrow conformism. Dimwits like Bobby Miller and Michael Lucchese are now what passes for conservative thought.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor, this state of affairs was predicted by many of those old paleos hated by modern conservatives. Sam Francis observed that Buckley’s movement would inevitably have to compromise its principles in order to have a place at the table. The price of admission was accepting the moral claims of the people who controlled the political system. You could not be a critic of that system and be a beneficiary of it. Something had to give.

These moronic posts on conservative platforms are the inevitable result of the necessary brain-drain that started when conservatives joined the club. Smart people ask questions and asking questions is always a good way to fall afoul of the prevailing orthodoxy, so conservatism began to select for the incurious and dull. The long arc of conservatism ended with morons shrieking phrases like “right-wing Marxism” while they point at the intellectual debate to their right.

The Hour Is Late

Posted on June 26, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about a terrible, but instructive movie called Ooga Booga, a post about the Grim Reaper and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Corruption is a natural part of government, regardless of the type of government, because men are not angels. Government has the power to compel which means it will always attract the sorts of people who are comfortable using force to take the property of others. In this regard, government corruption is a measure of the tolerance of corruption in the system. Government corruption is a function of the culture that controls the actions of the people in government.

By way of example, think about cheating in sports. Baseball developed a steroid problem because the culture within the sport came to tolerate it. No player dared report another player as it would lower his status in the sport. Once the league instituted tough drug testing measures, the culture changed. Players caught cheating let down their teams and even cost teammates money. This lowered their status so the culture of tolerance flipped to a culture of intolerance.

Police departments have always struggled with the culture of corruption. In the last century, big city police departments would go from clean to dirty almost overnight due to the actions of a few crooked cops. The crooked cops would find ways to get other cops to take bribes or participate in shakedowns. This made all the cops guilty to some degree, even if they just remained silent. An otherwise honest precinct quickly became corrupt because the culture changed.

Police corruption is useful in understanding government corruption. Police departments have a high degree of group loyalty. Fraternity is promoted and reinforced in many ways, thus discouraging cops from reporting corruption. No one wants to be seen as a rat, so the natural tendency is to ignore bad behavior by fellow cops. Corrupt cops easily turn this virtue into a vice, by using this high group loyalty as a way to pressure their fellow cops into ignoring their corruption.

When you look at corrupt police precincts, the pattern repeats. The dirty cops start small, often roping in fellow cops on small things like stealing money from the people they arrest. The victims are not only outsiders, but viewed as the bad guys, so no one is running to the boss to report it. At some point, a critical mass of cops is doing this stuff and the culture changes. The “cool guys” are the ones shaking down drug dealers, while the “squares” look the other way.

We may be seeing the same process in Washington. The credible charges against the Biden family are piling up, but so far, few are speaking out about it. Fringe bomb throwers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are making noises about it, but people with status have been slow to say anything. Chuck Grassley is the most soberminded person to raise the issue, but he was mostly ignored by his fellow senators when he raised the issue last month.

What we know so far is that while Joe Biden was Vice President, he extorted the government of Ukraine. We know this because he used to brag about threatening them into firing the prosecutor looking into corruption. We now know that the Ukrainian prosecutor was looking into Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, which was making deals with prominent Washington people. Hunter Biden was given a no-show job at the company, so we know what was happening here.

We also know that Hunter Biden shook down a Chinese company via text message, using Joe Biden as a threat. We also know the Chinese company gave money to Hunter Biden immediately after the threatening text message. In any other context this is a simple case of extortion. In the political context it is influence peddling. When this is added to the millions of dollars in mystery payments received by members of the Biden family, it suggests a long-term pattern of corruption.

Again, this sort of thing is to be expected. What matters here is the weird cone of silence around this story. Regime media mentions it in passing, often shaping these revelations as partisan bickering. Senior Republicans are trying hard to ignore the whole thing. One reason for this wall of silence is that this sort of corruption is so common that no one knows who is clean and who is dirty. Like the corrupt police precinct, the culture of corruption breeds a culture of silence.

The Hunter Biden stuff strongly suggests that this is not an isolated thing. Everyone in Washington knew that Hunter Biden was a crackhead. The only reason anyone would do business with him was to gain favors from his father. Everyone in Washington knows how things work, so no one can claim ignorance. It is a small town and everyone knows what everyone is doing. They may not have the nitty-gritty details, but they know the general outlines. There are few secrets in Washington.

The other thing that points to a widespread culture of corruption is the outlandish nature of the crimes. Biden bragging about threatening the Ukrainians never raised any alarms in Washington, because it was the new normal. Hunter getting a no-show job at a foreign company raised no eyebrows because everyone was doing it. Hunter being a crackhead doing deals with foreign companies should have raised alarms, but official Washington looked the other way.

This raises the question as to why we are hearing stories about Biden corruption from various whistleblowers and anonymous leakers. Speculation is that it is a way to ease Biden out of the way without a messy primary. That is possible, given his failing mental condition, but there is another reason. Based on his recent public appearances it is clear that he is fading quickly. It is possible he drops dead soon and that would mean putting the moronic Kamala Harris in charge.

Another answer is that no one cares. Things have reached the point in Washington where everyone shrugs at this stuff. Like the corrupt police precinct, morality has been turned on its head. Those not involved in shakedowns and influence peddling are viewed as fools, while the smash and grab people are high status. This behavior is now a form of ingroup signaling. Your willingness to take money and your creativity in doing it is what elevates your status in Washington.

None of this bodes well for the civic nationalist types. A system that presents the voters with a choice between two men in ski masks is not going to result in one of them turning on the other. What this all points to is that we are in the final phase of what Sir John Glubb described in The Fate of Empires. The American empire has entered the final phase where looting is the norm and decline is embraced. Everyone is grabbing what they can before the music stops and the party ends.

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