The Big Show

Posted on February 12, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door are a couple movie reviews and the Sunday podcast which remains a morning edition for now. Subscribe here or here.

One of the novel things about this age is the role played by carnival acts in reinforcing public morality and shaping public opinion. With the exception of ancient Athens, human societies assigned entertainers a low status. After all, we still have the expression, “run away to the circus”, even though we no longer have the circus. The idea behind that expression is you reach such a degraded state that you literally leave decent society and join the low status world of the circus.

In modern America and the West in general, the circus not only plays a central role in society, but the circus performers also have enormous influence. So much so, in fact, the most powerful people want to be friends with the popular carnies. Every president has a stream of carnies coming through the White House, often attending state dinners with important foreign leaders. Carnies have even turned up in Ukraine, getting a special welcome by the Ukrainian dictator.

Of course, we have just had the biggest circus event on the American calendar, which is the Super Bowl, the title game of the NFL. According to the people in charge, almost all Americans stop what they are doing to watch the spectacle. The Super Bowl party has become something of an industry. Americans spend over $15 billion on parties that host three quarters of all adults. Naturally, all the important carnies seek a way to be part of what is the biggest carnie act of the year.

It is popular to compare the Super Bowl to the Roman games, maybe even dusting off Juvenal’s line about bread and circuses. There is some truth to that, but the Roman games were nothing compared to American entertainment. The games were a distraction for the masses and important people, but the performers were never treated like the modern celebrity or athlete. The performers in the arena were low status and important people made sure they remained so.

This is the great innovation of America. Entertainment has become a church at which the morality of the day is preached to the audience. It is easy to see at the Super Bowl, where moral messaging is everywhere. In the end zones there was a message about ending racism, a hobgoblin of the modern elites. There were ads about other hobgoblins like antisemitism, bullying and Gaia. They have your attention, so they make sure to let you know what you ought and ought not be doing.

Then you have the appeals to unity, by which they mean conformity. At the start of the game, you get patriotic songs. They even have something called the “The Black National Anthem” which is supposed to shame whites and remind them they can never be forgiven for the sin of whiteness. In a prior age, parishioners were told they were at the mercy of an angry God. Today they are told they are at the mercy of angry minorities, which is far more terrifying than an angry god.

When these songs are played at the start of the game, the players, who should only care about winning, make themselves cry and look moved by the program. This is where you see the supremacy of carny life. The star players know this game is really an audition for them to join the media circus or possibly get a brand going so they can be a celebrity past their playing career. Everyone wants to run away to the circus, even people already in the circus.

You see the warping power of the circus with the public romance of Chiefs player Kelce Travis and middle-aged warbler Taylor Swift. She is a super famous pop star, but she can always be more famous, so dating a famous sports star, especially one who gets to perform in the big circus, is good business. The NFL loves it and makes sure to feature this totally authentic romance in their shows. Any bets on whether these two love birds manage to build a life together?

All of this is the product of democracy. In theory, democracy is about convincing fifty percent plus one. In order to do that, you need to get the attention of the public, which is why celebrity becomes the coin of the democratic realm. The only way you can have a chance to influence anyone is by getting on the stage and you do that by getting everyone’s attention. Carnies live to get attention, so it does not take long before they take center stage in the democratic process.

It is why our politicians are mostly actors playing a role. The producers of the political shows are no different from the people who make movies, television shows or produce extravaganzas like the Super Bowl. They select people who can play the role, which often means picking people who will not question the script. Oklahoma senator James Lankford was picked because he is not smart enough to question things. He looks the part, and he reads his lines. That is why he is in the Senate.

It is easy to be critical of mass democracy, but the Super Bowl shows how powerful it is at controlling the masses. More people care about why Travis Kelce wore a suit made from garbage bags than the fact Joe Biden is non compos mentis. More important, it encourages the masses to empty their wallets in order to see the next show that the ruling elite will stage for them. Mass democracy is where the ruling elite charge the masses to be the masses.

For most of human history, carnies were relegated to the fringes of society because the running of society was too important to do otherwise. Today the running of society is over on the fringes, in the shadows where no one looks, because the carnies are now at the center of society. Maybe this is how the great experiment with participatory government is supposed to end. The masses think their voice matters, but in reality, no one cares, just as long as they pay full price for their ticket.

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Living Outside The Law

Posted on February 9, 2024 by thezman

A recurring theme in the parade of madness that passes for the public life of late empire America is the lawlessness. Every week we get some new outrageous subversion of the law from the courts or from the government. These are the institutions charged with defending the law because it is the law that ultimately defends the people. The reason we have government is to defend the law.

The Steyn case is the latest example, but hardly a surprising one. Slowly people are coming to understand that if you go into a courtroom it is a lottery and that assumes they cannot accuse you of heresy. Even under ideal conditions you could be faced with a deranged lunatic as a judge or a jury full of morons. Trial by combat is now a preferable option than the American court system.

We also got word from the government that Joe Biden cannot and will not be charged with mishandling government secrets because he is non compos mentis, but he can be president, while Trump can be charged because he is not insane or demented, but he cannot be president. You have to wonder if we are in a simulation and the people running it have been dropping acid.

It would be funny except that real harm is being done to people. Men are being sent away to dungeons for being white or holding the wrong opinions. Steyn now has to raise a million dollars because he sinned against Gaia. The real harm, however, is to the law itself which is what makes civilization possible. The crazies are making everyone an outlaw by destroying the idea of the law.

If you create enough outlaws, eventually you create some people who feel they have nothing to lose as an outlaw. Right now the outlaws are still coming to terms with being made outlaws. They still hope to come back inside the law, but in time some will simply decide the price is not worth it. Get enough people who like being outlaws and you end up with a war of all against all.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Lawlessness
Proud Boys
The Palin Case
The Steyn Case
Douglas Mackey
VDare
Criminal Trials
Trump Trials
Common Themes
Living Lawless

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The Heart of Blandness

Posted on February 9, 2024 by thezman

Note: The podcast is delayed. The day job sucked up all of my time the last two days, even most of last night, so I need to take a nap and then I will put the show together later today and get it posted. This is a green door post from earlier in the week that should hold everyone over until the show is posted.

One of the things about mass popular culture that is taken for granted, but is genuinely novel, is that pop culture artifacts come to symbolize certain eras. The Great Gatsby, which is a middling novel, is on the list of great novels because it seems to capture our popular conception of the roaring twenties. You read that novel in school because it helps understand the era from a pop culture perspective.

We do not have this for the time before mass popular culture. What is the song that defines the 1890’s? Funny you should ask as there are people who compile such things, but do any on this list make you think of the 1890’s? The songs we can hear from the early days of music recording just remind us of the time when recorded sound was just getting started, not any particular cultural era.

Era defining songs, movies or even television shows are products of mass popular culture, especially electronic media. When I hear All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix, I think about the late 1960’s. Leave it To Beaver is the defining television show of the 1950’s, despite not being very popular. Similarly, Apocalypse Now, which was released in 1979, is considered one the defining movies of the Vietnam era.

Oddly, the film is not about Vietnam or the war. John Milius wrote an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novella The Heart of Darkness and set it in the Vietnam war, as that was a popular topic at the time. This allowed Francis Ford Coppola to play on baby boomer nostalgia and use a bunch of popular music from the period. It is also why it has become a defining film of the Vietnam era.

Whether or not Apocalypse Now is the best Vietnam war film is debatable. Many people think Platoon is the best of the Vietnam films. Full Metal Jacket is another iconic film about the era. The Deer Hunter is another candidate. Interestingly, all of the films on the list of best Vietnam war films were made long after the war. The worst Vietnam film was The Green Berets, produced at the height of the war.

As far as Apocalypse Now, which is the next film on the AFI top-100, it is hard to call it a great film without the cultural context. If it had been based in the Korean war, it is possible that no one would know about it. Much of its fame and popularity stems from the history in which it is set and the period in which it was made. The late 1970’s and early 1980’s was a time of reconciliation for the country.

The big problem with the film is nothing really happens. Benjamin L. Willard, played by Martin Sheen, is sent into the jungle to find renegade Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, and then kill him. In theory he is going on a journey on which he will either learn something about himself or learn something about the human condition. Instead, he is the same guy at the end as he was at the beginning.

The Conrad story, in contrast, is about how a similar journey changed the man telling the story in ways he was never able to fully appreciate. He was changed by going to the deepest, darkest parts of Africa, but by the end he is still struggling to fully understand what he witnessed. He saw the great horror of the human condition, but he does not know what to do with what he learned.

In this film, we know nothing about Willard, other than he is a deeply cynical person, presumably from having served in the war for a long time. His experiences along the journey do not make him question anything about himself. He was sent to kill Kurtz and he never wavers from his mission. In the end he kills Kurtz, but not for some new reason he discovers as part of his journey of self-discovery.

At the risk of engaging in generational politics, this film is quintessential baby boomer high culture in that it operates at a superficial level. Everyone in the film is just what they are, experiencing things that never seem to have any impact on them. Like the intended audience, Willard just collects a bunch of new experiences. He did stuff. He did not live his life in any way that anyone would find interesting.

This film reminds me of the sketch concept in writing. The point is to create a character by putting him into situations in which his reactions to those situations tell us about the character. There is no character development. The situation matters only as a way to describe the character. It is a good way to record the present moment or establish the start to a story, but otherwise meaningless.

That is why this film probably belongs on the list of great films. Again, at the risk of engaging in generational politics, this film captures the essence of a generation even though it does not set out to do so. The generation for which this film was made set out, to some degree, to discover the essence of life, to taste the marrow, but instead indulged in meaningless gestures and pointless activities.

That is what the makers of this film ended up doing. It started with great ambition to bring the Conrad story to film, but in the end, it was just lots of impressive scenes and performances, but totally devoid of meaning. The viewer has no reason to think about Kurtz or Willard after their story ends. The film, like the lives of the characters, and perhaps the intended audience, leaves no impression.

The Madame’s Shadow

Posted on February 8, 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.

One of the underappreciated aspects of the French Revolution is how the ruling class system became detached from the overall social system. The people in the ruling class were ignorant of what was happening in the country and not just the social unrest, but the economic changes that were coming. The people were just as ignorant about why their rulers were doing the things they were doing. Pre-revolutionary France was two black boxes left to guess about the contents of the other.

The United States is entering a similar period. Much of what makes up internet political content is either a reaction to some new emission from the managerial elite or an effort to contextualize those emissions. No one can be sure why the ruling class is doing the things they are doing, as it is not tied to anything normal people experience, so the Dirt People are left to produce their own explanations. Dirt People political culture is a debate about what in the hell is going on in the clouds.

The people in charge could very well be holographic projections from an alien world as far as anyone knows. Their actions and statements rarely correspond to their stated interests or the social interests. You see it in this big drama they are staging for themselves over the failed Senate bill on immigration. Somehow, official Washington convinced themselves that bundling Israel money, Ukraine money and open borders money was a winning formular with the Dirt People.

The reason they bundle these things together is one faction decides to make a trade with another faction in what is called log rolling. Congressman X wants money for a project and Congressman Y wants money for a different project, so they agree to support each other’s projects, even if they should be opposed to them. In this case, neocons go along with some sort of border reform, so they get more money for their efforts to start a nuclear war with Russia.

That is the theory, but in reality, the bill both parties in the senate thought was a winning compromise was something entirely different. It was the open borders crazies getting support from the blow up the world crazies so they could both get billions to fling open the borders and blow up the world. There was nothing in the bill that the voting factions of either party would want or even care about. No one wants open borders, and no one cares about Ukraine or Israel for that matter.

As soon as the senate bill failed, the demon known as Chuck Schumer told the world that he will be working with Mitch McConnell to come up with a way to give money to the blow up the world faction. This gives us a clue about what was really going on with that senate bill. We already have open borders, so that faction was not getting much from any deal, so the real issue was smuggling in the Ukraine money. Israel has check writing privileges at the Fed, so they get their money automatically.

That explains what was really going on here, but it raises a question. Why are these people so obsessed with Ukraine? We know the Kagan cult has enormous sway in Washington, probably due to their work with Epstein. We know that Ukraine is a money laundering operation and much of the money ends up in the pockets of connected people in Washington. That all makes sense, but we also know that this project is doomed, so why are they still obsessed with it?

The writing has been on the wall with regards to the Ukraine war for a long time, especially after the NATO planned offensive failed last summer. The reason General Miley is fishing now is he promised a smashing success. Instead, he delivered scenes of NATO armor on fire in the fields outside the Russian lines. Self-interest should have told Washington that it was time to find a way out of this mess. Instead, they remain singularly obsessed with this project.

People will be tempted to say it is money and power, as those are simple answers that let you stop thinking, but these people have the money and power. If Mitch McConnell wanted more power, he would never have gone along with this ridiculous bill and instead railed against the Ukraine project. That is good politics, especially in an election year when he could see his party return to the majority. Money and power say the republicans should be doing the opposite of what they do.

That brings us back to those black boxes of the French Revolution. A healthy society has a feedback loop between the people and their rulers. The practical interests of the people feed the rulers through various mechanisms like the media, voting, public protests, and economic behavior. The moral claims of the rulers, the things you ought and ought not do, flow down those same channels to the people so that the behavior beneficial to the elite becomes a habit of mind.

In pre-revolutionary France, this loop was broken. The economic interests of the elite were still based on a feudal understanding of the world, so they could not read the economic activity of the masses, which were shifting from that model. Similarly, elites were blind to what was happening in the newly emerging bourgeois class that was arguing about liberal ideas in salons and public houses. The feedback loop had broken and that left those two black boxes.

We have a similar problem in modern America. The media used to provide signals to the Cloud People about what was happening with the Dirt People. Now the media is poorly tuned repeaters of things said by the Cloud People. For example, they are all chanting the word “chaos” now, as if they received a memo instructing them to weave the word into their public performances. This makes the Cloud People feel good, but it also blinds them to what is happening with the Dirt People.

Similarly, Dirt People continue to get bizarre instructions through the economic and media channels about the constantly changing moral code. For no reason at all the Clouds begin to rumble and some weird new idea rains down on people. One day it is men in dresses falling from the sky. The next day it is Jewish dwarf in a green jump suit demanding money to fight the Russians. When the Dirt People look into the clouds, they now see a funhouse mirror.

There are two ways this can end. One is some people in the Clouds realize what is happening and organize a revolt against the other side. This is mostly what happened in the late-1960’s and 1970’s. One group of Cloud People revolted and ushered in a period of reform. The other way it ends is the Cloud People rally in defense of their position against what they perceive to be a peasant revolt. This inevitably leads to a peasant revolt and the collapse of the system.

What that senate bill suggests is that there is no one in the managerial class aware of the problem, much less interested in solving it. James Lankford, the Oklahoma senator who negotiated the deal with Schumer, should not even be in the senate much less brokering such a deal with an arch demon like Schumer. Lankford should be back organizing swim lessons at Bible camp. If there were any reformers in the system, they would have stopped this before this point.

The question that remains is whether or not the American system is past the point where reform is possible. There are libraries of books describing such inflection points in the French Revolution. The past is always uncertain, so there are lots of debates about when things became inevitable in revolutionary France. In the moment, however, no one seemed to know because no one could know. In other words, we will know it is too late when Madame Guillotine is set up across from the Capitol.

Plotting The Collapse

Posted on February 7, 2024 by thezman

On 24 February 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin went on television to announce the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Russia is a legalistic society, so Putin did not declare war or even say it was an invasion, as those terms carry meaning within Russian law that would trigger other parts of the law. We are now fast approaching the two-year anniversary of what everyone involved thought was going to be a quick and largely bloodless path to a negotiated settlement.

For the last eighteen months Russian leaders have talked about the conflict lasting years, as it is now a proxy war between Russia and its partners and the United States and the vassal states of the West. Some have suggested this war is like the Thirty Years War in that it will radically change the moral and political order in Europe, eventually seeing the United States exit Europe entirely. Others see this as another sign that the West is in crisis and headed for dark times.

Putting aside the big picture aspects of the war, things may be running ahead of schedule, at least from the Russian perspective. The first big item to start the year is the stalemate in Washington over Ukraine funding. To the shock and horror of the neocons and their fellow travelers, the public is not interested in the issue, which means there is no risk to opposing more money for Ukraine. The result is money for Ukraine is probably a dead issue for 2024.

That will have enormous implications for Ukraine. The billions flowing from Washington to Kiev do three important things. First, Zelensky uses the money to buy loyalty, as he is Washington’s bagman. This allows him to buy off the various factions in Ukraine and make sure pro-Washington people are in the government. It is why he has faced little opposition to cancelling the elections. Those inclined to speak out against this have either been bribed or jailed by those being bribed.

That brings up the second thing the money does for Ukraine. Those dollars are not just dumped on Ukraine. Instead, the dollars are converted into Ukrainian hryvnia, which are then deposited into the Ukraine banking system. Of course, Ukraine also gets euros from selling energy products and agricultural products to the EU on special deals and those are converted to hryvnia. This is what allows Kiev to pay government employees and mask the money printing to pay the soldiers.

The final piece of the puzzle is the corruption around converting dollars and euros into weapons that can be used in the war. Even regime media has been forced to admit that a lot of the weapons have ended up on the black market. No one knows how much has been stolen or who is doing the stealing, but Ukraine is a pirate’s cove now, with privateers, official and unofficial, stealing everything they can. Even Kiev is getting worried about the degree of theft.

If the flow of dollars stops or even significantly declines, all three legs of the Ukrainian side of the racket will snap. We may be seeing the first signs of this in the drama between President Zelensky and General Zaluzhny. It has been known for months that Zelensky wants to fire Zaluzhny, but so far, he has not been able to do it. Zaluzhny simply refuses to cooperate by resigning or taking another position. Instead he posts pics of himself with the leader of the ultra-nationalist faction.

When the president of a country wants to fire his top military officer, the officer usually resigns in order to save some face. In some cases, the civilian leader will fire the man in order to make a point. Truman fired MacArthur in order to send a message and underscore the subordination of the military to the civilian government. When the civilian leader cannot fire the top military commander and that commander is openly challenging the civilian leadership, there is a crisis.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the head of the Wagner organization repeatedly challenged the authority of the Russian government. He even went so far as to stage a ceremonial march on Moscow. The Russians foolishly thought they could tolerate the behavior of Prigozhin until that point. They realized their error and it was not long before Prigozhin’s plane was falling out of the air in pieces.

You also have to add in the fact that Ukraine is a lawless, corrupt kleptocracy now flooded with weapons and soldiers. Last year, one of Zaluzhny’s lieutenants was blown up by a grenade hidden in a gift intended for Zaluzhny. Someone tried to poison the head of the secret police, Kyrylo Budanov, but missed and poisoned his wife and some of his staff instead. Of course, the Russians mysteriously got the coordinates of Budanov’s location and tried to take him out with a missile.

In such conditions, it is not hard to see how the end of dollars from Washington could set off a political crisis. If that is not enough, the war is going poorly for Ukraine as the Russians slowly ramp up the pressure on all fronts. According to Ukraine, they need thirty thousand new recruits a month to keep up their numbers, which means they are losing a thousand men a day in this war. Many of those men are trained, experienced soldiers who cannot be replaced with raw recruits.

As of this writing, the Russians have broken through one of the biggest strongholds in Ukraine, a place called Avdiivka, or often spelled Avdeevka. Since 2014 the Ukrainians have been building this place up with tunnels, bunkers, mine fields and heavy weapons, to be an anchor point of the front line. Reports from Ukraine say the Russians have entered the city and have trapped Ukrainian forces. That would mean a starving out operation will be followed by a surrender.

There are similar stories around smaller fortifications along the front and all of it is due to the shortage of men and material. According to Ukraine, they have mobilized close to a million men so far and they have plans to mobilize half a million more. Those kinds of losses are added pressure on a political system that has major cracks. If the money runs out, it is not long before some factorions think about what sort of deal they can cut with the Russians to end the war.

Collapse is like the famous Hemingway line about bankruptcy. It happens a little at a time and then all of a sudden. Armies collapse slowly over time then they begin to surrender in great waves. Governments collapse over a period of time, punctuated by crises until the principles either flee or end up dead in a final crisis. The current crisis in Ukraine could be just one chapter, but not the final chapter. Maybe the Republicans will produce the money and save the day.

Regardless, all of this points to a catastrophe down the road and probably right around the November presidential elections, which will make for great drama. Eventually the reality of Ukraine will come home to Washington, no matter how hard they try to pretend it does not exist. Like all bankruptcies, the failure of imperial foreign policy proceeds a little here and a little there, all leading to a point when the whole project collapses, maybe taking the empire with it.

The Witch Hunters

Posted on February 6, 2024 by thezman

In 1692, nineteen people were hanged for the crime of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts, the first of whom was Bridget Bishop, a woman who had been married three or four times and previously accused of bewitching one of her husbands, leading to his death. She was hanged after the court determined that she was a witch because she was a promiscuous liar. There was also the claim that she had a third nipple that mysteriously disappeared upon examination.

Witch trials were not unique to the colonies or to the Puritans. Witch hunting became a thing in Europe during the 15th century and lasted into the 18th century. It corresponded with the great upheavals that occurred with the breakup of the Catholic Church and the wars that followed it. It was a terrifying time in Europe and people naturally looked for reasons as to why it was happening. Naturally, they assumed it was the result of supernatural forces unleashed by the religious convulsions.

We like to think we have moved past this sort of superstitious madness, but superstitious panic is part of the human condition. In the 20th century America experienced the satanic panic. This was when over ten thousand people were accused of participating in satanic rituals in which children were abused. The panic was set off by a Canadian psychiatrist not named Jordan Peterson and his patient who claimed to have recovered memories of satanic abuse.

Eventually this led to wild claims about the sexual abuse of children at daycare centers around America. There was the McMartin preschool case where the operators were charged with all sorts of heinous crimes. There was no physical evidence, and the charges were eventually dropped after thirteen years of court cases. There was the Fells Acres case in Massachusetts, not far from Salem, oddly enough, where the owners were jailed for the satanic abuse of children.

The point here is that superstition is still with us. You can see it in posts like this one from what amounts to a modern witch hunting operation. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism could just as easily be called the Global Project Against Witchcraft and Sorcery and make more sense. The words “witchcraft” and “sorcery” have an agreed upon meaning while “hate” and “extremism” are reduced to nonsense words by the modern-day witch hunters.

Instead of Old Scratch tempting the morally weak into doing his bidding, the modern witch hunter tells us it is white kids using magical incantations to introduce evil spirits into the gaming community. You see, exposure to certain ideas can cause you to build a death camp, so Old Scratch has his minions use special magic words and phrases in the chat rooms of video games. Exposure to these words and phrases can cause the morally vulnerable to succumb to the charms of Old Scratch.

This may sound like an exaggeration, but it is right at the top of that post. They have a warning to readers that reads, “Warning: This analysis contains highly offensive and potentially triggering language and imagery.” They literally assert that words and images can have a physical effect on some people. The assumption is the effect must always be bad, which explains the warning. The only thing missing here is a reminder that the reader should make sure to wear her special amulet.

The entirety of the hate hunter industry rests on the assertion that certain opinions must lead to certain actions, not only by the person holding the taboo opinion, but by those who are exposed to the opinion. At no point will you see these people argue that the opinions are inaccurate, beyond some chanting of abracadabra phrases like “race science” which is supposed to protect the chanter from the opinion. They never explain how opinion must lead to action.

The closest you get is what amounts to the modern version of spectral evidence which they call “stochastic terrorism.” This is a novel concept that claims, “the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” In other words, get enough bad words into circulation and people will do bad things in response to the bad words, but there is no way to know who will do the bad things.

Since there is no way to know who will do the bad things in response to the bad words, the only remedy is to eliminate the bad words. Oddly, the witch hunters cannot know who will be triggered by the bad words, but they know exactly which words will do the triggering and who possesses those bad words. We are right back to examining women for third nipples by self-declared experts in a field that has no rational basis, only moral certainty about their own righteousness.

The graybeards will talk about something they call the great interregnum, a time when interested intellectuals and commentators could speak openly about subjects like race, intelligence, sex, demographics, and immigration. This was in the 1980’s and 1990’s when America was feeling confident. The ruling elite was talking about the end of history, by which they meant their final triumph of all mankind. The Cold War was over, and they would lead humanity to the promised land.

The great interregnum ended as Western elites began to sense they were not leading humanity into the golden age. The rest of the world was stubbornly refusing to go along with this end of history stuff and Western critics began to question the sanity of the end of history business. In other words, just as witch hunting in the late Middle Ages was a response to the collapse of the old moral order, the modern witch hunting is a response to the collapse of elite moral order.

The Reformation was the result of an institution that had evolved down a dead end because it evolved for a world that was beginning to recede. The social and economic relations that made the Church possible were giving way to new social and economic relations, so a new moral order rose up to challenge the old moral order. American liberalism is facing the same crisis. It evolved for a world that no longer exists and has unleashed the witch hunters to find the cause.

That is why efforts with grandiose names like the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism attract money from the elites. They promise to find those responsible for challenging the moral order and suppressing them. The gaggle of petty Torquemada’s that have been unleashed are a rearguard action by an elite that sees itself in crisis and is terrified by the prospect of an alternative moral order. The modern witch hunters are part of the death throes of a dying system.

Political Onanism

Posted on February 5, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a film I did not like, a post about code-switching and the Sunday podcast which remains a morning edition for now. Subscribe here or here.

Carl Schmitt famously said that “the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy.” The shorthand you hear in dissident circles is that politics is about friends and enemies. You can see this in your own life when it comes to some issue with which you have been on the opposite side of a friend. That person may now be a former friend if the issue was important at the time. It is why families often avoid talking about politics during the holidays.

A practical aspect of this reality is that political activism should always seek to harm the opponent and boost your side. An action that makes the other side look bad is good activism and it is even better activism if it also makes you look good. Of course, bad activism is that which boosts the enemy and harms you. The Charlottesville rally in 2018 turned out to be disastrous activism for the alt-right. It rallied their enemies and gutted their support in the broader community.

Life is not always so cut and dried. Generational politics, for example, often feels like good politics to the people doing it. Whether it is young people moaning about old people having had it easy or old people moaning about young people having it easy, the people doing it always feel good about it. A Nick Fuentes feels like a hero when he makes fun of adults for being adults. He thinks it is good politics because it brings in money and gets his young fans excited.

Of course, this goes both ways. Matt Walsh from the Daily Wire often makes fun of Zoomers for being whiny and soft. Recently, a young girl posted a video of herself crying about having to work forty hours a week and still not having money to live like she did in college so Matt Walsh made sport of her. The young people who always complain about the boomers then piled in to tell him he was a horrible person for not empathizing with the young girls in the video.

At a personal level, generational politics is good as it makes money for the people doing it, but at another level it is bad for their overall political mission. The only people engaged in generational politics are white people who are either in white identity politics or aligned with it. Nick Fuentes casts himself as a white identitarian, but he spends a lot of time mocking white people. Matt Walsh opposes antiwhite politics, but like Nick Fuentes, he spends most of his time attacking white people.

You will note that the people who control the culture are fine with this sort of politics, despite it coming from people they hate. In popular culture you will never see a young black guy calling his grandfather a boomer. You will not see an old Jewish guy laughing at his grandson’s student loan debt. For the people who control the centers of cultural production, generational politics is only for white people. It is one part of their antiwhite pogroms that have come to define popular culture.

Generational politics is not politics at all but a form of political onanism. It is not only a fruitless activity, but it also discourages the sort of politics that could bear fruit. It is no different from the war of the sexes business, where feminists and anti-feminists seek to pit white males against white females. Whatever the truth of the mutual critiques, it is not an activity that can lead to anything other than temporary ecstasy. It is a form of politics that can never lead to good activism or any activism.

For example, look at the recent trend of attacking Reagan. Critics correctly note that he signed off on immigration reform. He also ushered in economic reforms that now feel like bad ideas, especially for young people. This critique of Regan usually ends with angry shouting at boomers for having enjoyed the good times that followed the reforms of that period. The boomers are bad people for having enjoyed a good stock market and low interest rates over the last forty years.

Let us assume that Reagan and his supporters were evil people who knew what they were doing would harm their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Let us also pretend that the boomers all agreed it would wreck the country for their children and grandchildren who they would live to see. Even if you could prove this, what would be the point of doing it? The most you get from it is the momentary satisfaction of shaking your first at an imaginary version of the past.

The reason to care about the past is to understand how you reached the present and to have some sense of what comes next. Understanding the politics around the Reagan era immigration policies is about understanding the nature of the people behind the just proposed immigration reform bill in the senate. Chuck Schumer put that together because he hates you and he has always hated you. There is no talking him and his allies out of hating you. He is the forever enemy.

There you see the problem with generational politics. The young people trembling with anger over the thought of Ronald Reagan are focusing on their grandparents rather than the people who finked on their grandparents, the same people who are now trying to close the door on America, by opening up the borders. It is a politics that turns old friends into imaginary enemies and enemies into fans cheering the people attacking one another in the arena of generational politics.

The Trouble With Rufo-ism

Posted on February 2, 2024 by thezman

A recurring feature of conservatism since at least the middle of the last century has been the guy who seems to open his eyes to the problem of progressivism only to come up with a response that promises to make things worse. Conservative opposition to progressivism is usually just surrender, but sometimes one of them finds some courage, but lands on a solution that is guarantee to fail.

That is what we see with Christopher Rufo. He is the C-list conservative pundit who has risen to fame taking on the diversity rackets. What started out as an organic revolt among suburban parents over the lunacy being taught to their kids has become a vehicle for Rufo. He has written a book and become an anti-diversity-rackets crusader on social media. His latest scalp the Harvard president.

While it is always fun to “own the libs” his proposed alternative to the explicitly antiwhite diversity pogroms is actually worse than the pogroms. The reason for that is his opposition starts with an affirmation of the moral framework that not only makes these diversity rackets possible, but inevitable. He spells it out in this essay posted a few weeks ago, in which is pulls the colorblind society from the conservative museum.

Not only is it an argument that failed when used half a century ago, it is guaranteed to get us right back to where we are if it was miraculously successful. A “color blind” society is no more possible than communism. Worse yet, the underlying assertion is the same as progressive diversify demands. Like the diversity gang, Rufo opposes free association, self-ownership and free assembly.

That is the show this week. What Rufo is doing, whether he understands it or not, is repeating old ideas first put forth by the open society people, whose intent was to get us to this point with regards to free association. He is taking old progressive ideas and now claiming they are conservative principles. He is the current holder of the Robert Lewis Dabney chair of conservative failure.

This Week’s Show

Contents

New Civil Rights Agenda (Link)
Open & Closed Society
Free Association
The Trouble With Rufo-ism

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The Arc Of Managerialism

Posted on February 1, 2024 by thezman

In March of 2021, the FBI conducted a raid of a company called U.S. Private Vaults located in Beverly Hills, California. The company offered safe deposit boxes to clients seeking privacy and security. Banks have rules about what can be kept in their safe deposit boxes and often require disclosure of the contents. This company did not place such restrictions on their clients. As a result, it was assumed its clients were criminals or people who would like to circumvent government surveillance.

For this reason and no other reason, the FBI got a warrant to inspect the company’s records, presumably to confirm that criminals were using the service. The legality of this was not questioned by the judge who signed off on the warrant because judges no longer question warrant requests from agents of the state. The FBI could hand a judge a drawing of stick figures in fingerpaint, claiming it is surveillance video of criminal activity and the judge would accept it.

Putting that aside, the warrant made no mention of opening the safe deposit boxes or inspecting the contents for criminal activity. On the day of the raid, the special agent in charge of the raid ordered his agents to pry open the boxes, inventory the contents, bring in drug sniffing dogs to sniff the contents and collect fingerprints from the boxes and the inside of the facility. Then the FBI decided to seize tens of millions in property on the grounds that they could do it.

At this point, the FBI had produced no evidence of a crime. They were probably right that criminals would like to use such a service to hide cash, valuables they bought for money laundering purposes and other things. It would also be attractive to foreign nationals working on behalf of a foreign government. Mossad, for example, could use a company like this as a dead drop. Space aliens could also use it to hide their ray guns and the keys to their flying saucer.

Again, there was never any evidence of wrongdoing. The FBI lied to the court about their intensions, and they willingly violated the law when they decided to not only pry open the boxes, but also steal the goods inside them. The owners of the stolen property sued the FBI to get back their property. The court initially ruled in favor of the FBI because the courts are almost as corrupt as the FBI. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the lower court’s decision.

In its ruling, the court called the raid an egregious violation of the owners fourth amendment rights. They also noted that the FBI clearly intended to steal the contents so they could use what they found in order to go after other people, perhaps raid other private security services in a similar fashion. The government tried to settle the case before it reached this point, suggesting they knew they had willingly violated the law, but they hoped to avoid the court making it official.

Presumably, the FBI will return the property to the owners, but the owners will have to sue the government in order to get back the cost of having to litigate this in federal court for the last three years. The government will probably settle so as to avoid another potential court loss, but the harm can never be fully cured. The company went out of business and who would trust a similar company in the future? If the secret police can willy-nilly raid a private business, what is the point of the service?

More importantly, none of the people involved in this raid from the government side has faced any punishment. The agent who ordered the raid was not fired. The agents and lawyers who lied to the court to get the warrant were not fired. There will be no criminal charges brought against any of these people, despite the fact they committed some of the worst abuses of power in our system. The Ruby Ridge and Waco cases tell us that the agents involved here will get promoted.

In the managerial state, no one is ever held accountable because accountability requires two elements missing in managerialism. One is a moral duty to the stated goal of the institution. If the people inside the FBI were motivated by an aristocratic spirit, the agents involved would all resign for having shamed their leaders. If they had a republican spirit, they would resign for having shamed the institution. Instead, they have a managerial spirit, which means no shame is possible.

The other element for accountability is clear responsibility. Managerialism is primarily about shifting responsibility from individuals onto collections of managers with a shared interest in controlling the organization. It is the magic trick of managerialism that collective error is never the fault of anyone in the collective. Managers socialize failure onto the abstraction that is the system, while privatizing the benefits onto the individuals within the managerial system.

This is why reform of managerialism is impossible. Reform starts by holding people responsible for the results. Managerialism evolved to prevent this so the reformer is either repelled by the system or consumed by it. This is why public companies that fail must be taken private. Elon Musk bought Twitter, took it private and became the man responsible for the company. He then fired half the staff and started holding the rest accountable for their work. He overthrew the managerial system.

Of course, this means the large social systems that control American society will never be reformed either. Everyone in Washington knows the FBI is a disaster, but no one can be held accountable, so not one tries to hold anyone accountable. This means the managerial state will follow the arc of all public companies in that it will reach its end phase and either collapse entirely or be taken private, as in private rule, so the system can be scrapped along with the managers.

Who Does The Measuring

Posted on January 31, 2024 by thezman

In the 1980 campaign, Reagan would regularly say that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. It was a pithy line that got at something that was always missed by the politicians at the time. That is, the economy is not the same for everyone. You can have a good economy but there will be people who are not doing so good. The reverse is also true. Even in the Great Depression, there were people doing fabulously well.

That is the problem facing the political class this year. According to their court wizards, the economy is growing at a blistering pace. The fourth quarter of last year saw growth at over three percent and inflation falling down to two percent for what the wizards call personal items, while overall inflation was under two percent. The definition of “personal items” is one of those things that makes sense to the people doing the counting, but not to anyone who is doing the actual spending

Does it feel like the economy is growing at a blistering pace? Most people do not think the economy is great. In fact, most people think we are in difficult economic times, despite relatively high employment. This was one of the top reasons people voted for Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire. Under Trump, people perceived the economy as strong while under Biden it seems to be weak. The main reason is inflation. Every trip to the store sees prices higher than the last trip.

For the sake of comparison, the last time Americans experienced significant retail inflation was in the 1970’s. The court wizards back then used different rulers for measuring things like inflation, but everyone agrees retail inflation was higher than what we have experienced the last few years. The economy also grew at a faster rate most years during this time. The recession of 1974 was followed annual growth of near five percent the following years.

Five percent growth in 1976 did not keep Gerald Ford from losing to Jimmy Carter and it did not keep Reagan from beating Carter in 1980. The reason is GDP is not a great way to measure the economy. The formula for calculating GDP is Consumption + Government Spending + Investment + Net Exports. If inflation is roaring, consumption and government spending will also be roaring. You can have a growing GDP while people are seeing their budgets ravaged by inflation.

Of course, we live in the managerial age and managers can always be counted on to do one thing very well and that is lie about what they are doing. In the case of the economy, the court wizards keep tinkering with how they measure things like inflation to make the number look smaller. Shadow Stats keeps track of these changes and reframes official economic numbers in the old way of measuring them, so that we can compare today with the past.

When we take an honest look at the economy over the last few years, we see that inflation was comparable to the 1970’s, but not quite as high. People who buy food will tell you that prices are rising again, despite some relief last year. In the end, we could replicate the 1970’s in terms of the pattern and duration, even if overall inflation figures are not quite the same. The reason people think the economy stinks, despite the official numbers, is that is does stink for people who buy things.

That brings us back to that Reagan quip and another key point. The American economy over the last thirty years has transformed into something that is really good for people in finance, government, the academy and corporate governance, but it has not been great for people who make things and fix things. The nurse practitioner, which is really a government job, is doing great, but her patients who work in the honest economy are finding it hard to pay those health insurance bills.

Returning to that magic formula for measuring GDP, if the Investment side grows, but consumption remains flat, then GDP rises. Since government always grows and that growth is fueled by the Fed creating debt through the banking system, GDP is just about guaranteed to grow every year, even if the economy is in recession. Put another way, debt-driven government growth not only corrupts the nation but it corrupts the way in which we can measure the corruption.

This corruption has been highly effective. The typical American has barely noticed that it requires two incomes to have the life that used to be possible on a single income, at least for the middle-class. The baby boomers grew up in one income, intact two-parent homes, but they lived as adults in two income, often broken homes. The relative material prosperity came at the cost of social capital. The new way of measuring things masked the real trade-offs that came with the new economy.

We may be reaching the end of the line with the new way of measuring things, which is why people are not buying the official numbers. Those bulging baby boomer portfolios cannot mask the fact that their kids are saddled with debt and are struggling to maintain a lifestyle the parents took for granted. Of course, the next round of young people will enter adulthood in debt and looking forward to paying the pensions and health care costs of eight million retired people.

What all of this gets to is that measuring is necessary, but it is not how things are measured that matters. It is who does the measuring. That was the subtext of that Reagan quip half a century ago. Americans are pessimistic about the economy because it is not good for them. It may be great for the people doing the measuring, but that does not change the fact the typical American is not experiencing great times. That is because of who is in charge, not how they got there.

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