Came For Dinner And Never Left

Posted on November 2, 2023 by thezman

Note: More housing shenanigans today, so this is an item from the early days of the green door when I got the idea to review the AFI top-100 films.

Some movies are on the top-100 list because they are great stories told very well, while others are on the list for their great technological breakthroughs. Some are on the list for their cultural impact. That is the case with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a comedy about race mixing from 1967. The film had two legends, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, and a big star at the moment in Sydney Poitier.

The film was viewed at the time as groundbreaking because it featured a mixed-race couple in a positive light. Right around the time the movie was released, the Supreme Court had struck down anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. Of course, the civil rights movement was at its peak, so this was just what white liberals wanted to see, which was white liberals being celebrated for their goodness.

The movie itself is pretty simple. It opens with the couple in question, generic rich white girl and her much older black boyfriend, Sydney Poitier, getting off an airplane and strolling through an airport like lovers on a walk in the park. Keep in mind that this is 1967, but no one in the airport notices, because you see, this is the glorious future where race no longer matters, so get used to it you terrible bigots.

I was not around in 1967, but I was around in 1977. I was around in 1987 and 1997 as well, so I have some idea what it was like in 1967. I know in 1987, a mixed-race couple would have drawn a lot of stares. It was an extremely rare thing. In 1967 you can be sure the people in that airport would have been dumbstruck, but the story needed everyone to be cool with it so the rest of the story would make more sense.

Anyway, the couple arrives at the mansion of the white girl’s parents. The black maid, played by Weezy from the Jeffersons, is predictably flabbergasted by the site of the master’s daughter bringing home a black man. The two blacks are uncomfortable for a moment, until Poitier asks to use the phone. He goes into the den to use the phone, where there is a bug picture of FDR on the desk. That could be important.

The first parent home to meet the new man is the mother, who is uncomfortable, but tries to play it cool. This is where we begin to learn that Poitier is not just a black guy, but a special black guy. He not only knows exactly how the mother is feeling, but he knows exactly how to break the tension. Unlike the rest of the characters, he alone can rise above the situation and see everything from every perspective.

Next home is the father, who is home early to get ready for his golf outing. For some reason he is not surprised to find a middle-aged black man in his home with his daughter, so he just makes small talk for a while. Eventually, he notices there is a middle-aged black man in his home with his daughter and that is when they tell him that his daughter is planning to marry the middle-aged black man.

This is when we learn that Poitier is the most successful black man on the planet, as he is a famous doctor and world leader. Because the world depends on him, he is going to fly to New York to visit smart people and then head off to Geneva to run the World Health Organization. He has a plan to save Africa by teaching the smart African kids how to do stuff so they can make Africa great again. No kidding.

This is what sets the plot in motion. The parents have a day to give their blessing to the marriage or Poitier will break it off, as he is so noble and kind that he will not come between the white girl and her people. You see, he is not just the most accomplished black man on the planet, he is a numinous Negro. He is the saintly black character who exists to help the whites make their journey to enlightenment.

For a while Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn fret over what to do. Then a priest arrives and hams it up as the stereotypical Irish priest, accent and all. He thinks the whole thing is wonderful and this is where we see he is supposed the be the audience in this drama, enjoying how the rich white liberals struggle with their hypocrisy while trying to get with the times and accept the race mixing.

The catch phrase that is the title of the film comes when Tracy learns that Poitier’s parents are coming for dinner. Tracy is at his wit’s end over having been put in this situation when Hepburn says, “guess who’s coming to dinner?” Then she explains how Poitier’s parents are flying up from Los Angeles. Then the priest invites himself to the dinner, because he is the voice of the audience and needs to be there.

At the big dinner we learn that the black parents are opposed to the race mixing, but the mother is more open-minded to it than the father. We now have the predictable setup of the females trying to bring their stubborn husbands along. At some point the women commiserate and agree to work on the men. Poitier tells off his father, not so subtly implying that old blacks were responsible for keeping blacks down.

Finally, the black mother has a heart to heart with Spencer Tracy and he finally sees the light and agrees to bless the marriage. He then gives a big speech that sounds like it was written by the ad hoc committee of the revolutionary council on race in the 1967 people’s assembly. I actually felt sorry for Tracy having to say such stupid things in what would be his last movie before he died. It was ten minutes of cringe.

You have to judge movies in the context of their age, but even making big allowances for the age, this is a bad movie. It is ham-fisted, predictable, and preachy. The main characters are shallow and basic, with little to no development. Poitier is not even a real person in this movie. He is just a ridiculous version of the Magic Negro. The only character with any depth is Tracy and that is not much.

That said, the movie belongs on the top-100 list for its cultural value. It made $54 million in 1967, which is $420 million in today’s money. That is a massive success, which tells us that whites were enormously gullible and stupid back then. Sure, the movie had big stars and it was intended to be a comedy, but the fact they could not see that this was nothing but anti-white propaganda does not speak well of them.

There is also the fact that fifty years ago the usual suspects were pushing the idea that the only way for white men to be saved was to allow their daughters to run off with non-white males. The reason that white people face a long war to regain dominion over their societies is because it has been a long war against them. The people on the other side played the long game. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a good reminder of that fact and therefore worth watching today.

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A Night In The Future

Posted on November 1, 2023 by thezman

I had a long day yesterday, as I had to start early in order to get my day job items finished by noon, so I could use the rest of the day on another project. That project took me out of the house and on the road until late in the evening. By the time I got home and settled in it was near bedtime. That also meant I had no time to eat along the way, so by the time I was making the trip home I was starving. The last thing I wanted to do was cook, so I decided to stop at a fast-food place.

The first stop was McDonald’s, which is probably the default for most people around the world when you need food in a pinch. The food is not terrible tasting, a bit nostalgic for most Americans, but it is always the same. Outside of the rare exceptions, the burger from the McDonald’s in Europe is going to taste the same as one from Asia, which will be the same as one from Idaho. I was not hankering for a Big Mac, but I had to eat something and that seemed like an easy option.

The drive through had about four or five cars in it when I arrived. Ten minutes later there were a few more cars and I had not moved an inch. Then more cars and then finally the line started to move. It was one of those deals with two ordering lanes and one pay and get your food lane. I question whether this is any better in terms of speed of processing, but it does let them stack up more cars. This last bit is something that is becoming a feature of fast food – waiting for your food.

I get to the order spot and a saucy sassy diverse female voice flippantly asks me what I want, like I just rolled up to her crib, as the locals put it. I asked for the number seven, which is two cheeseburgers, fries, and a drink. McDonald’s no longer has a small, so the small is now a medium. We had a minor debate about my demand for medium as she kept saying large. At least that is what I thought as it sounded like she was at a house party rather than the drive up window.

I am fifteen minutes into this by the time I creep up to the first window, where I expected to pay nine dollars for what used to be on the dollar menu. There is no one there, but the car in front of me is in loud negotiations with the person handing bags of food, so I just sit waiting. A young urban youth appears at the window and begins doing a funky dance for some reason. He is twirling and spinning, while he laughs and talks to someone off screen. He then leaves the scene.

Finally, I pull up to the second window, expecting to pay, but a sassy female who sort of looked like Grimace, if he had been in the sun too long, tells me that I need to pay funky dance guy in the previous window. I told her there was no one there, so she left, and I think she went to yell at him. She comes back and tells me funky dance man is back in his window. I think she expected me to get out and walk back to pay him, as she just stared at me, but I drove off instead.

Next up was a Wendy’s a block away. It has been a long time since I visited with Dave as I do not have fast food very often. When I was on the road all the time, Wendy’s was a preferred stop of the conventional chains. Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Burger King were my order of preference if I had to choose. That was long ago and now I avoid this stuff for the most part. They have added things since my last time. The big special item was what looked like nachos between two trashcan lids.

After a ten-minute wait, a sassy diverse female demanded to know why I was bothering them, and I told her I wanted a double burger meal. I noted that the prices were a bit better than McDonald’s. The double burger meal was $7.49. The big garish looking things were all over ten bucks. I get to the window, and I am told by the man in every ad now that I owed them $11.49. I told him the sign says $7.49 and he told me he did not give a bleep; the meal is $11.49. I drove off.

At this point I was thinking that maybe Uncle Ted was right all along. I am not talking about industrial society and its future. I am not even thinking about the letter bombing campaign, at least not now. He may have been onto something with the off grid living business, despite the compromises on hygiene. At these moments, I can understand why so many white guys still think Ayn Rand speaks to their soul. At least they would never have to see another funky dance.

I have written often about what happens when you try to run a technological society with lots of low-IQ people. Anyone who has spent time in South America or California has glimpsed the future. Even simple things become increasingly inefficient and then people seek to work around the bottlenecks, which adds to the inefficiency. In South America they have an expression called “the Latin way” which means lots of people buzzing about looking busy, but not accomplishing much.

If you add in an aggressively hostile and entitled population to the mix, it is hard to see how we keep the plates spinning. Fast food places keep going mostly on inertia, as they have been a part of the culture for generations. At some point, they either get automated or people abandon them. In other words, in order to maintain the technological society, it will mean masses of unemployed, aggressively hostile and entitled people looking for something to do.

One final thought. The 1990’s action flick Demolition Man probably had the near future about right when they imagined a world run by managerial silly people attempting to control a population of troublemakers. That is where our rulers think this is heading, except they are smart enough to keep a lid on things. The beautiful people and their attendants will manage a giant outdoor penal colony. Maybe they are right, but they best not expect to get a fast-food meal late at night.

Whither Ukraine?

Posted on October 31, 2023 by thezman

For close to two years, Project Ukraine has been the fashion statement for all of the best people in the American empire. Celebrities from all over the West have made the trip to Kiev to be seen with Zelensky and Zelensky has toured the world to be seen with the most important people and ask them for money. Now all of a sudden Zelensky is finding it hard to get anyone to take his calls, much less visit. The war in the Levant has made him and Project Ukraine last year’s fashion.

This may be difficult for Zelensky personally, but it is probably for the best in terms of present politics, as things are not going well for Ukraine. The long-promised offensive that kicked off in the summer has ground to an ignominious halt. Ukraine lost most of the equipment sent from the West and tens of thousands of men in order to capture a few square kilometers of land. Russia actually captured more territory overall than the Ukrainians during the Ukrainian offensive.

Now the war is about to enter a new phase. With Ukraine having lost much of its offensive potential in the counter-offensive, it will have little choice but to settle back into defensive lines and hope for the best. It is hard to know how many men Ukraine has in its army, but even if the high estimates for losses are correct, they probably have a force of about 150,000. They also have to conserve ammunition and equipment as shipments from the West are slowing.

In the south, the line of contact changed very little. This is where the Ukrainians ran into the massive Russian defenses during the offensive. There is some speculation that the Russians could stage a winter breakout from this area, like they did against the Germans in the battle of Kursk. This is where the Red Army withstood a massive German offensive and then launched a counter-offensive, defeating the Germans in one of the biggest tank battles in history.

There is no evidence to suggest the Russians have such a plan. Instead, they appear to be content to reduce their losses to the absolute minimum by grinding down the Ukrainians with superior artillery and air power. The one exception is a heavily fortified town in Donetsk called Avdiivka. The Russians are executing an encircling operation against some of the best Ukrainian units. This is one of those key strongholds along the line of contact that Ukraine will defend to the last man.

Where things have changed the most over the last several months is in the north where the Russians have made big gains. The Ukrainians stripped these lines for the offensive in the south, which allowed the Russians to break through to a city called Kupiansk, a key logistic hub for the Ukrainians. If the Russians are able to secure this city over the winter, it sets them up to move south towards Izyum and Kramatorsk, where the command and control of the Ukraine army is located.

In a war of attrition, however, territory is secondary. The game is to kill as many opposing men as possible while losing as few men as possible. The same logic holds for equipment, logistics and industrial capacity. This is the game the Russians have been playing for over a year now. As a result, their casualties have fallen sharply since the early days of the war. Ukraine, in contrast, has been trying to take territory, which has resulted in huge losses in men and material.

This is going to be the story for 2024. The Russians have been slowly building their forces over the last year. They probably have three quarters of a million men in and around the front. Ukraine is probably down to 150,000. The Russians are also well supplied with ammunition and an increasing variety of weapons with which they can strike Ukraine from a distance. The Russian air force is now operating with little resistance over the entire battle space.

This means there is one very large, well-supplied army on one side, content to pound away at a smaller army from a distance. That smaller army is also finding it difficult to maintain its supply lines and keep its suppliers happy. This rather frank story from Time hints that the army is no longer following orders from the government. Add in the sudden disinterest from Washington and things look bleak for Ukraine. They are facing a slow death at the hands of a superior army.

This is where things get interesting. If victory is off the table and stalemate unlikely, that leaves one option for the West. The problem is Washington has boxed itself in with its rhetoric and actions. This may not be an accident. If in the end Ukraine collapses and Russia installs a new government, Washington will declare it all illegal and refuse to recognize the new government. They will treat Ukraine like North Korea and shift to a law-grade war to keep the place in chaos.

Ukraine has no good options. Zelensky may have gone mad under the pressure of the last two years. Regardless, it is unlikely the Russians will agree to deal with him in a peace settlement. Of course, if he reaches out to Moscow, his own people will kill him, probably at the request of the CIA. On the other hand, if they fight to the last Ukrainian, the army will eventually revolt and kill the political leadership. The only hope is some new event forces the Russians to end the war on their own.

As for Russia, the war is just one part of a larger geopolitical strategy that looks far past the Ukraine situation. The cost of the war in terms of men and material is manageable so they can continue it as long as needed. They see the impact it is having on the European political class and their relationship with Washington. It is also slowly draining the EU economically. For now, the best option for Russia is to keep doing what they are doing and prepare for the inevitable breaks in the opposition.

What this means for Ukraine is it becomes something of a tar baby. With a presidential election coming up in 2024, Washington is trying to flick the Ukraine problem off, hoping it sticks to the Europeans. The Europeans are noticing this and are starting to look for a way to avoid having Ukraine stick to them. Russia is not about to help and allow the fate of Ukraine to become their problem, at least not yet. The result is Ukraine becomes an economic, demographic, and social catastrophe.

Iranian War Drums

Posted on October 30, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the declining intelligence of American film audiences, a post about driving in hell and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Way back in the Bush II years, there was an open debate about whether to invade Iran after conquering Iraq. This was right around when the war against Iraq started, and some people noted that the neocons had ambitions beyond Iraq. For their part, the neocons were quite open about going from Baghdad to Tehran. After all, Iran was part of the “axis of evil” that included Iraq and North Korea. The Bush team made no bones about wanting to regime change all of them.

Of course, the plan to take out Iran was predicated on the plan to take down Saddam and “liberate” Iraq. Dick Cheney famously said that the Iraqi people would greet the American military as liberators. Bill Kristol in the run up to the war said, “This is going to be a two-month war, not an eight-year war.” In other words, the war plan with Iraq assumed the people would revolt against Saddam and the then the Iraqi army would either collapse, surrender or join the revolt against Saddam.

This was a critical part of the Iran concept. Once Iraq was defeated then secured as an America possession, it would be the launching pad for the Iran phase. That half million man American army in Iraq would secure bases for American air power and begin the process of rebuilding the Iraqi army. The new Iraqi army using modern Western weapons supplied by their new benefactors would then be part of the new coalition of the willing which would launch a war on Iran.

Obviously, the Iraq war was not what the neocons imagined. The people certainly had their complaints about Saddam, but they were not sitting around waiting for Uncle Sam to liberate them either. A significant portion dreamed of an Islamic state after the fall of Saddam, not a liberal democracy. The war became a guerilla war that dragged on until Team Obama finally put an end to it in his first term. The dreamed of war against Iran had to be tabled by the neocons.

The reason to care about any of this is there is a lot of loose talk about starting a war with Iran over the war between Hamas and Israel. Without any evidence at all, the neocons have laid the blame at the feet of Iran. In this new narrative, Iran controls Hamas, so Iran must have known about the attack in advance. The plan is to bait Israel into attacking Gaza, so Hezbollah can then attack from Lebanon. This could then lead to Hitler returning to lead the Arabs against Israel.

In response to these fantastical claims, the Biden administration has sent two carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean. There are reports of two other carrier groups headed to the Persian Gulf. These reports are based on rumors as the empire does not announce this stuff in advance. Word gets out among the crew of the ships and eventually makes its way to the internet. The only thing for certain is one carrier group is in the eastern Mediterranean right now as a show of force.

The deployment of two carrier groups would be an overreaction to the situation in Gaza, but four would be a clear signal of something. The reason this could be important is that part of those old war plans for Iran was the deployment of four carrier groups to the region, two in the Mediterranean and two in the Persian Gulf. They would be used in the first phase of a planned attack on Iran. Maybe it is a coincidence, but the regime likes to work in symbols, so probably not a coincidence.

There is a belief among some people that the neocons in the regime are looking at this Gaza situation as a chance to dust off the Iran war scheme. Rather than a warning to Iran, this is an effort to bait Iran into greenlighting Hezbollah, which would be the excuse to unleash an air assault on Iranian facilities. This would then warrant a full-on war with Iran with the demand for regime change. The one thing we know about neocons is they never abandon a project, so this makes some sense.

There are a few problems straight away. One is the old war plan back in the Bush II years said that it would require 1.6 million ground troops. Iran is a big place with lots of challenging geography and it has a big army. Despite decades of sanctions, it has highly sophisticated air defenses and a range of missiles. It is hard to know how its army would perform in a real war, but analysts think it would perform better than the Iraqi army due to better discipline and morale.

That was twenty years ago. Since then, Iran has become expert at the use of cheap but effective drone technology. They gave the Russians this technology last year, which has altered the battlespace in Ukraine. Hundreds of “flying Doritos” overwhelmed Ukrainian air defenses, exhausting their supply of surface-to-air missiles. There is a very good chance that Russia returned the favor by supplying Iran with improved air defense systems and maybe even advanced missile technology.

Then there is the fact that Iraq would not be an ally in this war. In fact, Iraq could side with Iran and attack American assets in northern Iraq and Syria. At the minimum, Iraq would stay out of the fight. There is no reason to think the Turks would agree to host American ground forces. There would be pressure on the Saudis and Kuwaitis to be the launching pad, but the Saudis hate the Biden people. In other words, a war with Iran would be a bloody complicated mess – at best.

Surely the Pentagon understands this, and they have communicated this to the neocons running regime policy. The only thing the military could do in a wider war in the region is attack Iranian facilities from air and sea. They cannot launch a ground invasion and they could not hope to topple the Iranian regime. There is a good chance that the Navy would lose some expensive assets. Iran has only grown stronger since this wargame resulted in a lost aircraft carrier.

This raises the question as to what the regime is doing in the Middle East. They lack the resources for the long dreamed off war with Iran. There has been no effort by the regime to build international support for a war. The usual suspects are on American television screaming for blood, but they do that every day. Lindsay Graham exists solely to go on television and call for war somewhere. In other words, it looks like this is a big show that is not intended to lead anywhere.

If the plan was to put on a big drama and draw all of the mass media attention to it, then it has been a great success. The Gaza story has not only blotted out other news, but it has also triggered convenient domestic stories, like the pro-Palestinian protests. The usual suspects are wasting everyone’s time with claims that those marches are the prelude to the return of everyone’s favorite villain. All of a sudden, there is no room for stories about Ukraine or the economy or anything else.

Alternatively, this could be another example of a regime that is both out of gas and low on intellectual capital being dragged along by events. Their Ukraine plan is a great example of how poorly they understand the world. They were sure Russia was just a gas station pretending to be a country. All it would take is some sanctions and some American weapons and regime change was guaranteed. They could be making the same errors with Iran as they made with Russia.

Alternatively, they could be thinking that the threat of war is just what is needed to get invited back into the game. The empire has been losing ground in the region for decades and is now down to a few barely allies. The Saudis are clearly thinking beyond the American empire. Israel is the last ally in the region and the one thing everyone else agrees upon in the region is that Israel is a bad neighbor. Maybe the threat of war is a reason to invite the Americans back into the discussion.

In the end, this will probably be looked upon as another event in the closing chapters of the Global American Empire. The Middle East is ready to move on from America and America is running out of resources to remain in the region. If this crisis ends in war, it will be another serious blow to the American war machine. If it results in peace it will come through the work of regional players with the help of Russia and China, thus further sidelining America in the region.

Mis & Dis Information

Posted on October 27, 2023 by thezman

The relatively recent obsession by our rulers over misinformation and disinformation is not without merit. The ruling class of every democratic political order must concern itself with what their subjects think because the logic of the system says the subjects should act on what they think is true. Even with their limited power in the political process, they can create a lot of trouble if they think the wrong things.

Compounding it is the fact that managerialism encourages lying. As everyone who has worked in a large company knows, the primary goal of managers is to shift the blame and appropriate the credit. In good times, they talk about themselves as leaders, while in bad times they are the victims. Managers love committees and meetings as it furthers the two goals of blame shifting and credit appropriation.

This may also explain the obsession with narrative. People under investigation by the police have the habit of creating stories to explain their innocence, on the assumption that if it is a good story the cops will accept it. This is why cops are trained to poke holes in the story as a way to break the suspect. Our rulers seem to operate from the same mindset and always communicate in narratives.

Like the guilty, who come to believe their own stories about their innocence, our rulers come to believe their own version of things, even future things. When you combine the extreme paranoia about what everyone believes with their ideological desires, the result is a managerial culture in which narrative crowds out reality. Anything that contradicts the narrative is a threat to themselves and their sense of reality.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Disinformation and Misinformation
Snake Oil Salesman
Official Lies
The information Age
The Ruling Class Problem
Managerial Paranoia
The Managerial Process

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Midnight Cowboy

Posted on October 26, 2023 by thezman

Note: Today is a house hunting day, which means I am out at the crack of dawn to head off to the hills in search of a new lair. Instead of rushing something in the few minutes I have before leaving for the day, I am re-posting a green door item. This is a film review I recently did that feels like a nice break from the usual routine.

The concept of the antiwhite is new to most people, but it has been bubbling under the surface of American culture for a long time. In movies, it often turns up in the “moral complexity” of quintessentially American characters. The prototypical American cowboy, for example, is also a villain. Alternatively, the American dream is turned into a nightmare for the protagonist of the film.

It is not a direct racial assault on white people, like we now see on movies and television, but more of a bank shot. Some aspects of society are criticized, often by inverted reality, as in the case of Easy Rider. Normal people are turned into violent monsters, while two bums are the heroes. The Searchers introduces the concept of racism as a defining feature of American society.

By the late 1960’s, there was no need to obscure the intent. American life was portrayed as seedy and degenerate, the result of the original sin of some “ism” or maybe the falsity of the founding myth. There is the sense that the general terribleness of the period was deserved. Cities were festering sewers riddled with crime and degeneracy because that was the real America.

Probably the peak of this seedy realism was Midnight Cowboy. It is the story of a young guy from Texas named Joe Buck, played by Jon Voight. He quits his menial job and takes a bus to New York City for reasons that are never explained. He immediately decides to make a living as a male prostitute, targeting middle-aged women. His first efforts fail, but he gets the hang of it and finally gets lucky.

This totally naive guy from Texas is shrewd enough to become a hustler but not smart enough to make money at it. He also gets suckered by a crippled conman named Rico, played by Dustin Hoffman. Rico introduces Joe to a pimp, for a finder’s fee, but the pimp turns out to be a religious fanatic. Joe flees this situation and goes looking for Rico but is unable to locate him.

Joe runs out of money, so he gets tossed from his apartment and decides to let a gay guy give him oral sex in a movie theater, thinking that the gay guy is going to pay him for the privilege, but that is now how things work. Joe eventually finds Rico, who lets him stay in his condemned apartment. They become partners with Joe slowly taking care of Rico, who has some sort of respiratory disease.

Eventually the two of them decide to leave New York City for Florida, so Joe picks up a gay guy and murders him for his cash. They use the cash for a bus ticket to Florida, but Rico is now extremely sick. At some point Rico soils himself, so Joe buys them new clothes at a rest stop, but Rico has died. The close of the movie is Joe hugging his dead friend as the bus trundles along toward Florida.

The message of the film is clear. White America is a myth, just as Joe Buck’s cowboy act is a myth that he created for himself. In realty, America is a faker, a fraud, a hustler that can only be redeemed by dropping the act and turning gay. This is a movie made by and for people who hate themselves, their country and would have been better off killing themselves and their intended audience.

That is the main reason the film is on the top-100 list. Another reason is it started the process of normalizing sodomy. It is not just an antiwhite, anti-American film, but it is a homosexual film that seeks to normalize homosexuality, by making Joe Buck a victim of a system that is intolerant of homosexuals. If midcentury bourgeoise decadence could have come to life and made a film, this would be it.

It is impossible to express how much I detest this film, but it is not the worst film on the top-100 list and it probably does belong here for artistic reasons. The message is vulgar and degenerate, but the production and acting are extremely good. Despite the obvious plot holes, Jon Voight makes Joe Buck believable. Dustin Hoffman plays himself, so he is quite credible as a skeevy hustler.

Like Taxi Driver, which I also hated, Midnight Cowboy is important because of what it represents on the historical timeline. When the robot historians attempt to retrace the steps that led to the collapse of the American experiment, they will no doubt look at the popular entertainment of this period for clues. Within a single generation, America went from the pinnacle of cultural achievement to the world of Midnight Cowboy.

That said, if you can avert your gaze from the political messaging and step outside of our current political context, it is a good film. Joe Buck has a story to tell, and we get enough of it to fill in the rest. He is a tragic figure, but he is not without redeeming qualities and we get the sense that redemption is possible for him. That is a lot to do in a film and that speaks to the skill of the people behind it.

In the end, it is all about the main question. If you have not seen this film, should you take the time to watch it? Even though I hate this film, I do not regret having watched it twice now. There will be no third viewing, but if you can stomach the politics and the ugliness of it, it is worth watching for historical reasons. At the minimum, you come away with a sense of the time and place in which it was made.

The Not So Great Game

Posted on October 25, 2023 by thezman

Note: Last week a friend of ours, Jeff Winston, passed away leaving behind a young wife and a baby daughter. Jeff was the founder of White Art Collective, a group of musicians and artist who collaborated on artistic endeavors. A fund has been set up to help Jeff’s wife and daughter. There is no excuse for not ~~hitting~~ exceeding the goal this week, so please kick in a few bucks to the effort.

When the driver of the car carrying Archduke Franz Ferdinand got confused about the route and had to stop and turn around, no one thought this would be the moment that changed history. No one who knew Gavrilo Princip to that point would have imagined that he would be the man who changed the world. He was the son of poor rural peasants and should have grown up to be a poor rural peasant, but instead fate led him to that cafe just as the car of the Archduke arrived.

Of course, Gavrilo Princip was not a victim of circumstances. He willingly joined Young Bosnia, a radical separatist group. He was part of the planned conspiracy to kill the Archduke, who was on tour from Austria. For its part, Austria-Hungary decided to issue a démarche to Serbia known as the July Ultimatum, which led up to the outbreak of World War I. They made the assassination look like it was planned and executed by the Serbs, rather than pan-Slavic separatists.

The Great War and the events leading to it are a useful example of how the participants in a game will not deviate from their strategy on the assumption that they know the strategy of other players and therefore think their initial strategy will result in the optimum outcome, despite the initial results. The fact that the players did not fully understand the thinking of the other players and their desired outcome was not part of the set of possible outcomes led to disaster.

This is something to keep in mind when trying to understand what is going on in the present-day great game. We now have two hot wars involving proxies of the Global America Empire, Ukraine, and Israel. There is a third war in the planning phase using Taiwan against China. American planners are sure they know the strategy of Russia and China, so it is full speed ahead with the grand plan to defeat these two adversaries and bring about the long-promised end of history.

We got a glimpse of this last summer when the imperial planners mapped out the great Ukrainian offensive that was supposed to break Russian defenses. They were sure they understood how the Russian army would react in the field. They were sure they knew how this would impact Russian domestic politics and global politics. When it was clear from the start that things were not unfolding according to plan, they stuck with the strategy, assuming it would result in the desired outcome.

We are getting another glimpse of this in the Levant. Like the group that plotted the assassination of the Archduke, this Hamas cell that plotted the attack on Israel was acting outside the game. They relied on old analog techniques to coordinate their efforts, thus avoiding detection by Israel and other players in the region. This attack is a new element to the game, but the players are all acting on the old strategy, under the assumption that they know what everyone else is doing.

For example, the United States has sent at least two carrier groups to the region as a threat to Iran, which is assumed to be backing Hamas. There is no evidence to suggest Iran had any role in this event, but the American side is undeterred in their belief that Iran is the primary instigator in the region. In fact, the entire American strategy in the region depends on this assumption. The United States has issued an ultimatum to Iran assuming they must respond in a specific way.

It is an interesting example of asymmetric thinking. Like the great powers of Europe before the Great War, you get the sense that American planners want a war with Iran, so they are acting in a way that will bait the Iranians into acting. Israel gets to indiscriminately bomb Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, but if anyone in the region reacts to this, then the United States will consider it an act of war. Like the Serbian government in 1914, Iran is slowly being boxed in by events.

Of course, all of this is operating within the context of the greatest of great games, the challenge to the unipolar order ruled by America. Russia and China are sure they know the strategy of America, as American leaders are public about it. They seek to regime change both countries and turn them into provinces of the empire. The same holds for the lesser powers like Iran and maybe even India. For its part, the imperial schemers are sure they know the plans of their intended targets.

That is the lesson from the Great War. When all sides are sure they fully understand the strategy of the other players and they remain convinced their strategy will get the optimal result but all of them are wrong on both counts, disaster follows. The world seems to be inching toward this exact scenario. Everyone is increasingly sure of how the game must play out, so they are locking in their strategies. They are doing so despite events routinely showing them to be wrong.

There is another piece though, one that may prevent the players of this great game from blowing up the world. Great cataclysms like the Great War seem to require a bit of chance to keep the game going. Gavrilo Princip was not the cause of the Great War, but it is hard to imagine events playing out as they did that summer if he had not been in that cafe at that very moment. Throughout the war, bits of randomness worked to keep both sides locked into destruction.

Those random events worked to continue the game because all sides were locked into a myopic view of the game. In this version, the only player suffering from this is the Global American Empire. The rest of the players seem to understand that the West is acting on an internalized script. The way to avoid catastrophe is to avoid playing the designated role in that script. Russia has managed this in the Ukraine war and Iran seems to be doing this so far in the Gaza war.

That said, one should never be too optimistic about these things. The Thirty Years War happened. The Napoleonic Wars happened. The Great War happened. The Second World War happened. The theme in all of them was the players became convinced they had the optimal strategy, because they thought they knew the strategy of the other players in the game. History says that creating such conditions is easier than it should be, so this great game could end poorly.

The Sales Job

Posted on October 24, 2023 by thezman

Note: Last week a friend of ours, Jeff Winston, passed away leaving behind a young wife and a baby daughter. Jeff was the founder of White Art Collective, a group of musicians and artist who collaborated on artistic endeavors. A fund has been set up to help Jeff’s wife and daughter. There is no excuse for not hitting the goal this week, so please kick in a few bucks to the effort.

In the business world, it is rare to encounter anyone who is skeptical about marketing as a general concept. These people do exist, mostly in the accounting department or in the technical support areas of accounting. They have some sense of the real economic benefit of marketing campaigns, so they tend to be a bit more skeptical of the claims, but they have little say in the matter. The boys and girls in the C-suites are all sure marketing is the key to success.

This is why history books are full of bad ad campaigns. Even the dumbest ideas will win over some people, because it is assumed that all attention is good attention, so even a terrible ad can work. It is also why you rarely see marketing people get sacked for terrible ideas. The one notable exception are the white people who run afoul of the morality police. Put one picture of Hitler on your gigantic scoreboard and you will be fired before the game is finished.

A good recent example is the Bud Light controversy. It should have been obvious that hiring a pervert to sell working class beer was a bad idea. The customers for Bud Light are working men who want cheap beer. These are not the sort of people who squeal with excitement over the latest bourgeois decadence. Sure, the friends, colleagues and superiors of the horse-faced woman who cooked up the idea thought it was marvelous, but they would not be caught dead drinking Bud Light.

It took the executives of that beer company weeks to figure out that they had a serious crisis on their hands, primarily because they have been conditioned to think that anything that gets attention is good marketing. It never occurred to them that their customers would not want to be associated with a pervert. Instead, they were caught up in the excitement of having “gone viral.” It was only after the mockery reached the clouds that they fired the people responsible.

The truth of it is, most of what passes for marketing is nonsense. There is little empirical evidence to suggest it boosts sales. If Coca-Cola stopped running television ads, would people stop buying their products? Clearly not as the brand is globally recognized to the point where it is a generic term like Kleenex or Zipper. Coca-Cola could discontinue all advertising for a year and not see a change in sales. In fact, that would be a great marketing idea and it would surely go viral!

The same sort of psychosis grips politics. It is assumed that the formula for success works backward in that you start with having gained power. If you have power, you can do what you want, but you first must get power. That means winning an election, so you have to focus on that project. In order to win the election, you need to get the votes and that means getting the attention of the voters. In order to do that you need to market your candidate to the rubes out in the hinterland.

This is why the Ron DeSantis campaign is now circling the drain. They assumed that they first needed to make him a household name, so they contracted those who claim to know how to do this. Those people then hired lots of “social media influencers” who would talk about Ron DeSantis as if he is their old pal. Never mind that many of them are weirdos and conmen. After all, any attention is good attention and these social misfits have proven to be great at getting attention on Twitter.

Hiring a gold-plated phony like Bill Mitchell sounded like a great idea because he supposedly has half a million followers. It should have taken them five minutes to see that the follower number is fake. His account gets less engagement than many abandoned accounts, but what he does get is usually mockery. Even among the hardest of hardcore Trump fans Bill Mitchell was a ridiculous person when he was pitching himself as super-MAGA man.

The same logic was behind hiring Mexican Bill Mitchell. You can easily imagine the conversation when they made this decision. “He was on Tucker so those mouth breathers will listen to him.” They never stopped to think that it would be rather obvious that his support was purchased. That and his influence with Trump supporters was contingent on his support for Trump and his last name. When he was MAGA, he was the “barrio Nazi” but with DeSantis he is just Pete.

Of course, all of this rested on an assumption that is probably false. That assumption is that Twitter has an impact on public opinion. For those on Twitter every day, it certainly feels like it is the public square. To those not on Twitter every day, the vast majority of people, it is like every other social media platform they ignore. There is a reason that conversations in the real world about Twitter tend to be derisive. Twitter is not reality, but an alternative reality with little impact on reality.

This is probably true of the internet as a whole. Those old enough to have been online before the mouse recognized this reality forty years ago. Going back and forth with strangers on Usenet was a fun diversion from reality. You and everyone else were playing a role in a simulated world. When your internet time was up, you went back to work and forgot about it. Then when you had free time, you would pick up that thread about who is really the Nazi in the debate.

Like marketing in the business world, social media has become an article of faith in politics that is never questioned. Of course, you have to have a social media presence and of course you need to hire social media strategists. Imagine a big company not having a marketing department! It is the same mentality in politics, and it rests on the same assumption which is probably not true. At the minimum, the truth of it is far more limited than everyone assumes.

In the end, reality matters. If you are selling station wagons just when Chrysler introduced the minivan, no amount of marketing is going to change the fact that the minivan was a better family vehicle. If you are selling Ron DeSantis in the age of Trump, no amount of social media influencing is going to change the fact that he is just another conventional politician in an unconventional age. The best marketing is a product that sells itself, whether it is cars or politicians.

The Low Trust Model

Posted on October 23, 2023 by thezman

Note: Last week a friend of ours, Jeff Winston, passed away leaving behind a young wife and a baby daughter. Jeff was the founder of White Art Collective, a group of musicians and artist who collaborated on artistic endeavors. A fund has been set up to help Jeff’s wife and daughter. There is no excuse for not hitting the goal this week, so please kick in a few bucks to the effort.

A little more than two weeks ago Hamas launched their daring raid into Israel, killing many Israeli soldiers and civilians. The Arab – Israeli story has been on the back burner for a long time, due to relative calm between the various sides. The imperial wars in the region have ended, so the American political class has not had a reason to talk about how much they love Israel recently. This attack unleashed a great deal of pent-up Israel enthusiasm from the Cloud People.

Right after the raid, the Israel lobby in the United States swung into action, launching a massive public relations campaign in support of Israel. There was a contest between the chattering skulls over who could be the most extreme in their demands for vengeance on behalf of Israel. Like the response to the death of George Floyd, the reactions from all corners of the managerial class felt coordinated. The usual suspects were all using the same canned lines on social media.

That may explain why this massive public relations campaign has not had the effect the narrative writers expected. Two weeks on and most Americans are more interested in the NFL scores than Israel and Gaza. Then you have the large pro-Palestinian protests breaking out all over the West. Washington had about ten thousand people turn up to wave the Palestinian flag. Famous people like Dave Chappelle and Greta Thunberg have made anti-Zionism fashionable again.

When you look at the polling, support for Israel is just over fifty percent, but this is due to unwavering support from old white people. Outside of that group support ranges from “a pox on both sides” to mild opposition to Israel. Among the young and left-wing, the Palestinians are becoming the cool new victim group. College campuses are suddenly having to deal with students supporting the people their donors are trying to kill over in the Gaza strip. It is, as the cool kids say, problematic.

Clearly, the all-out media blitz has not had the expected result. The political class is still playing its role, as if the people are clamoring for it. Nikki Haley is running around promising to blow up the world if elected president. She wants to rename the Defense Department into the Offense Department. While she is clearly a psychopathic simpleton, her echolalic babbling is falling on deaf ears. It turns out that even the sorts of people who care about GOP politics are not moved by Israel.

One reason for this is that this media relations campaign looks like the public relations campaigns around previous moral panics. This looks like the George Floyd hoax or the Russian collusion hoax or the white nationalist hoax. It is the same actors playing the same roles with a new bogeyman. This style of gaslighting can only work so many times before gaslighting fatigue sets in with the public. These calls to arms over the latest bogeyman are becoming background noise.

There is also the fact that there is simply too much information and too many people skilled in peddling their own reality. The Israel lobby has billions of your money to spend on these campaigns, but there is a massive guerilla army of online volunteers working to counter them. The internet is full of pics showing bombed out buildings and dead Arab children, along with carefully constructed context. The misinformation war has been joined by this volunteer army supporting the Arabs.

Of course, there is the moral problem at the heart of it all. Yes, Hamas killing women and children in that raid is terrible. Yes, Israelis have a right to be angry and want retribution for the terrible act. No, revenge and retribution are not things Westerners have been conditioned to accept. Pulverizing Gaza as revenge for the raid strikes most Western people as barbaric. Appeals to our empathy is not going to change the fact that Israeli is blowing up hospitals now.

There may be another factor, something that underlies all of these other reasons for the failed media campaign. That is the reputation of all public people has collapsed due to their constant lying and tolerance of obvious lies. All the people chanting “Death to Gaza” are people who sat quietly while their fellows told outlandish whoppers about Trump, his voters, white people, Covid and many other topics. Many of these people have enthusiastically held abhorrent positions.

A good rule of life is to assume that people who lied to you in the past are lying to you in the present and they will lie to you in the future. The public square has been so polluted by official lies and people willing to repeat them in public that many people now assume everything is a lie. If Ben Shapiro was happy to lie about Covid, why would he be telling the truth about Israel? Why would anyone accept what the Biden administration has to say about anything at this point?

This is an underappreciated aspect of what happens to people when they transition from a high trust society to a low trust society. Send a middle-class man to prison and he will be victimized by the system until he gets smart. He then goes to the extreme, assuming that he can trust no one. In time, he figures out that he can trust certain people, but he can never trust the system. Low trust societies have the same sort of trust relationships that you will see in a high security prison.

That may be what we are seeing in America. For some people, it is assumed that everything from the system is a lie. Old people still trust the system, but young people have no faith in it. On the other hand, many people are learning to trust those who have earned their trust. All the highly choregraphed media in the world is no match for the word of that guy who has proven to be on the level. In fact, the media campaigns are creating the environment for this trust model to flourish.

This is not a novelty, as much of the world functions this way. In the Arab world, for example, not one accepts official sources at face value. It is assumed that the official story is cover for the real story. Arabs love conspiracy theories. In Eastern Europe, people treat politics as a separate sphere with separate rules. Seventy years of communism taught them to understand that the people in charge serve their own interests, not the interests of the people.

It is only in the West where people came to expect honesty from the ruling class and consistency in the rules of the system. The civic nationalist concept of good government is a WEIRD concept. The term WEIRD here means Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. It works as long as the societies and their ruling elites remain demographically Western. That is obviously no longer the case, so it is no wonder that the West is evolving a new model.

In the end, the aphorism credited to Lincoln, “You can fool all people some of the time and some people all the time. But you can never fool all people all the time” works better as a warning, rather than a description. A ruling class that keeps trying to fool most of the people most of the time ends up fooling themselves into thinking they are fooling everyone all the time. The end result is a ruling class that has the trust of no one and must rule by force until the end.

Not Our Gods

Posted on October 20, 2023 by thezman

While on a walk, I was listening to Jared Taylor interview a fellow calling himself Ed Brodow about his book, The War on Whites: How Hating White People Became the New National Sport. Given the title and the platform, I was expecting the author to have similar views on race as other people in that scene. Instead, he sounded more like a civic nationalist or a typical conservative.

It was a fascinating conversation as the author would layout a bunch of facts you would get from the race realist camp, but then try to fit them into the conventional moral framework with regards to race. At the same time, Jared was trying to lead him back to the obvious conclusion of the facts the man has in his book. It was an interesting back and forth that is well worth a listen.

It was also a great example of of the power of moral authority. Jared Taylor rejects the moral claims about race that come from the race denialists, while the author of the book accepts most of those moral claims. It was a clash of moral visions that highlights a central problem with regards to race. One side has a different view of right and wrong regard race than the other side of the conversation.

This is not unusual. When it comes to a wide range of issues, most opinions are guided by a moral framework that few people consider. Everyone accepts, for example, that racism is a universal moral concept. Everyone knows it is wrong to notice race, unless you are of the elect and you are noticing that someone not of the elect is noticing something about race. Then and only then is noticing race okay.

The truth is, noticing race was normal until the middle of the last century and the normative claims about racism we take for granted today would have been unknowable to people a century ago. This new moral framework, however, does not rest on a legitimate moral foundation. It was conjured from the ether and great effort is made to conceal its lack of moral authority.