Preference Collapse

Posted on February 21, 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.

Liberalism comes in for a lot of abuse recently, mostly due to the abuses done by the current ruling class in the name of liberalism. People are hauled away and thrown into dungeons in defense of democracy, international rules are violated in defense of the rules-based order and all of it is accompanied by endless lying. It is no surprise that a growing number of people inside and outside the West are starting to think that maybe the problem with liberalism is liberalism itself.

Of course, the place to start is the meaning of liberalism. If you tap the word into a search engine you get the stock definition. “Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law.” Note that the only part that the current ruling elites in the West mention is political equality, but they have a different view of equality from the rest of us.

Another way of thinking about liberalism is the idea of permission. Despite claims by some, liberalism is a peculiarity of Western European people. It grew out of the medieval experience where permission was the rule. Up and down the social order, every was required to seek permission from those they served, even for personal issues like marriage and property transfers. Your preferences were controlled by the range of freedoms granted to you by your superiors.

Liberalism, in contrast, seeks to broaden that range of freedom so the individual can make decisions based on his preferences. A man does not have seek permission from his lord to give some of his land to his brother or a total stranger. As long as the new owner abides by the rules applied to all land owners, he is free to take possession of the land if he so chooses or not take possession of the land. His refusal or acceptance is based on his preferences, which he does not have to explain.

Liberalism is often framed as increased choices and therefore an increase in your freedom to choose, but that is not quite right. If you go into the cereal aisle and select an item from the dozens of choices, but must prove to the cashier that your selection is the best one for you, that is a vastly different world from one in which you pick whatever you like for any reason you like. The ability to not choose at all, for any reason at all, is vastly different from a world where you must choose.

In other words, the core of liberal order is not the proliferation of choices or even the right to make a choice, but the right to make a choice or not make a choice without seeking permission or having to explain your decision. You get to live your life by your own lights and you do not have to explain yourself to the authorities. It is only when you violate the law that your motivations come under review and even there is only as a mean of establishing your guilt or innocence.

This is important for understanding the current age. Everywhere you turn now you are expected to explain your preferences and subject those preferences to what the prevailing orthodoxy pretends is the crucible of reason. Even trivial things, like what you choose to eat, often require an explanation. Everyone feels to need to explain their preferences, as if they fear operating outside of official permission. Outside of a narrowing list of personal choices, your preferences are not your own.

One reason for this is the moralization of American society. Since the end of the Cold War, everything and everyone is subject to the proselytizing of the high priests of the new religion who are always increasing the scope of their work. The reason the vegan makes sure to tell the world she is a vegan is she thinks this safely puts her on the side of the righteous. The mask wearing during the Covid hoax was another example of how trivial things can become holy sacraments.

Another reason for the collapse of preferences is the collapse of the liberal order since the alleged triumph of liberalism in the Cold War. Some as yet understood restraint on managerialism during the Cold War broke down with the end of the Cold War and ever since the managerial class has sought to increase it supervision of the people, thus collapsing the individual domain of preference. In retrospect, the end of the Cold War was not the end of communism, but the end of liberalism.

This collapse of the domain of preference is changing the people. Look at an issue as simple as immigration. The choices should range from no borders, as is current policy, to firm absolute borders with no immigration. You as a citizen should pick your preferred option and feel free to advocate for it. Further, you should be free to say you oppose immigration because you prefer not to live with foreigners and have no need to explain your preference, but that is not the case today.

Listen to anyone you know talk about a topic like immigration and you can see them first struggle for why they prefer whatever it is they claim to prefer. On the one hand they want to be seen as preferring the moral option and on the other hand they feel the need to explain themselves when no explanation should be required. It is hard to know what anyone truly prefers when it comes to public policy, because everyone feels they need permission for their preferences.

One reason we seem to heading toward the abyss is that the range of choices keeps narrowing and the consequences for falling outside those narrow options becomes more draconian. The reason for this is preference has been all but eliminated from the collective consciousness of the people. The land of the free is a pasture where the people herd closer and closer to one another, and anyone who strays from the flock is quickly consumed by the wolves guarding our democracy.

What this suggests is that managerialism, left to run its natural course, becomes something like the what we see with insecure managers in corporation. Fearful of their own position, they proliferate rules and enforcement, locking everything down until no one in the company has any range of motion. The company becomes increasing brittle as it sheds talent and begins to fail. The collapse of individual preference in modern society is a sign of distress in our corporatized society.

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Gradually, Then Suddenly

Posted on February 20, 2024 by thezman

The Hemingway line about bankruptcy happening gradually then suddenly is a great line because it applies to many things. The suddenly part is what everyone can see and what everyone remembers. It is the gradually part that is overlooked. It is the important part of the dynamic because it explains why the event occurred. Landslides are not random events but the accumulation of many small, unobserved events that eventually reach a tipping point and we get the big event.

That is something to keep in mind as the military struggles to both meet its recruitment numbers and maintain the human capital needed for its operations. Fifty years ago, after the Vietnam war, the military put an emphasis on quality over quantity in both its arms and the men using those arms. The lesson of the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era, the so-called Stripes period, was that the modern military needed to be smarter, relying on intelligence rather than just brute force.

There is a lot more to the renaissance of the American military that began fifty years ago, but the salient factor today is the emphasis on intelligence. The reason for that is the military is suffering from a brain-drain. The overall intelligence of the military is in decline and it is most acute among the officer class. According to that linked report from National Defense Press, “Two-thirds of the new officers commissioned in 2014 would be in the bottom one-third of the class of 1980.”

As one would expect in this age of censorship, certain factors are left out of the discussion, but they hover over it like a fog. In fact, this reality hangs over everything in American society, despite the rules against acknowledging it. The highly complex machine that is the modern high tech American society is in a race. Will the robots reach the point where they can run things for us before the general intelligence of the population declines below a sustainable threshold?

Of course, a big driver is simply declining intelligence. All the research tells us that intelligence among European people has been in decline for a long time. The debate is how long it has been happening and why. The generally accepted estimate is that European people are losing one point per generation at the minimum. That study about the modern officer class suggests the decline is much more rapid, but that does not adjust for demographic factors.

Talk to anyone willing to be honest about the state of the American military and they will tell you that it would not fare well in a war against a peer. This is a lesson of the Ukraine war that is being ignored by the best people. Not only is this war more violent than anything the American military has experienced in fifty years, it is making demands on the officer class that the American military cannot meet. The American planned offensive last summer is a case in point. It was a disaster.

There is another factor to all of this, the thing that hangs over everything like a fog, and that is the thing no one is supposed to mention, which is demographics. That linked report mentions the collapse in the value of a college diploma, but it skips over why this has happened, which is the important bit. In response to demographic change and demographic reality, the modern levelers are forced to destroy the credentialing system so that it is no longer a measure of anything useful.

The military is finding out what every employer in American already knows and that is a college diploma is meaningless. In fact, it could be an indicator that the person will be a nuisance in the work place, making demands around social causes. The reason for this is the college system is more concerned with training young people for those causes than for preparing them to be productive citizens in the practical economy. College is no longer a reliable type of intelligence test.

Another aspect of the demographic crisis is the white out. This is the evolving process whereby white Americans exit the system by choice. The military, for example, is struggling to recruit white people, especially white men. The main reason for this is the social causes launched by the levelers inside the military to fix the reality of race within the military and make it a new model army for society. The immediate consequence of this is the military is getting dumber at a faster rate.

What is happening is white people are voting with their feet. Anyone who has seen a once popular restaurant or entertainment area go bust can understand what is happening across American society. It declines a little here and a little there without much notice, then all of a sudden everyone notices. In the case of a restaurant, this means the regulars stop being regular. In the case of an entertainment district, it often becomes a free fire zone for local youth.

To bring us back to that Hemingway line, in various areas we are about to see the suddenly part of the process. The military is a good example. The antiwhite pogroms launched inside the military under Biden were a long time in the making. Gradually they got going and then suddenly they were everywhere. The response from white people was to gradually avoid the military and now suddenly it is a thing. This is a pattern turning up all over American society.

The salient point here is that the cracks we see opening up in American society are the consequence of long processes. The levelers have been gnawing away at the support ropes for a long time. These problems that seem to have suddenly appeared, like the military intelligence crisis or the corruption of the court system are the result of decades of the gradual undermining of standards. Like bankruptcy, societal collapse happens gradually and then all of a sudden.

A Price For Everything

Posted on February 19, 2024 by thezman

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A tenet of the old right was that some things are too important to a society to be subjected to the crucible of reason. Traditions, for example, not only bind people to their ancestors, but to one another in the shared understanding of the past. Treating traditions as mere superstition inevitably leads to their abandonment and the loss of their associated social capital. A society without tradition and history is a temporary, ad hoc collection of deracinated individuals.

Reason is not just questioning and demanding proof. The marketplace is a manifestation of reason in the exchange of goods and services. Sellers compete with one another to attract buyers. Buyers compete with one another through the mechanism of price in order to determine the best good or service. Reason states that if you have a competitive and open market, you end up with the best products and services winning over those of lesser quality or higher price.

The old right would agree to the theory behind open market economies but point out that some things are too important to subject to the market. The moral claims of a society, for example, should not be up for bid. The marketplace would no doubt decide that slavery in certain areas is the superior option, as it has for all of human history, but we have decided that owning other humans is immoral. Therefore, we do not make this moral claim subject to the crucible of the marketplace.

We are getting a real-world glimpse of this with regards to the war in Ukraine which the Western managerial elite insist is a moral crusade. Helping Ukraine, they say, is proof that we worship the god called democracy. The Munich Security Conference just ended and speaker after speaker insisted that the god of democracy demands we empty our wallets to help Ukraine. The Danish prime minister went so far as to say that the West must give all of its weapons to Ukraine.

No one really knows, because the cause is too important to waste time on accounting, but the West has supplied Ukraine with weapons and money in amounts many times more than Russia is committing to the war. Hundreds of billions have been given to Ukraine with hundreds more lent though various contrivances. The sorts of people who perform at events like the Munich Security Conference are fond of talking about how the arsenal of democracy is going to save Ukraine.

The trouble is the weapons supplied to Ukraine have not made much of a difference and in many cases have been worthless. French supplied armored vehicles are nothing more than expensive death traps. British Challenger tanks are great on the parade route but unsuitable for actual combat. The German Leopard tanks were sitting ducks against Russian artillery in the summer offensive. Despite the economic advantages, Western weapons have not made much of a difference.

The reason gets back to the tenet of the old right. There is a story in the German tabloid Bild that takes a look at how Germany is supplying armored vehicles. Instead of producing or selecting vehicles best suited for the war, it is an elaborate financial scam that profits the arms dealers and their foreign suppliers but results in expensive and poorly suited vehicles to Ukraine. The German taxpayer is paying three- and four-times retail for equipment that is useless in the war.

To give some perspective, the Russians probably spend the equivalent of one hundred thousand dollars for an armored vehicle. The Germans are paying six hundred thousand dollars, but for the wrong sort of vehicle. This is a pattern that repeats across the Western supply chain to Ukraine. Either suppliers see a chance to unload useless junk at inflated prices or their top-line equipment, in the case of Western tanks, is proving to be ill-suited for the actual fighting.

The Russians, meanwhile, work from that old right tenet. Some things, like fighting land wars on their border, are too important to be subjected to the marketplace. There is competition within the Russian military industrial base, but the winners are not picked by the invisible hand of the marketplace. They are picked by the demands of the military for the situations they are facing. One reason Russian arms tend to be simple compared to American arms, is the military doctrine of the Russians.

It is tempting to think this old right idea applies only to something narrow like war fighting, but war fighting is a consequence of other factors. After the Cold War, the Russians did not embark on a process to ship their manufacturing base to low-cost countries as happened in the West. One reason for that is the Russians do not make profit the singular goal of their society. They set about modernizing their manufacturing base and now they are reaping the rewards.

This is a pattern we see all over the West. Open borders, like slavery in the ancient world, are profitable for society, but it erodes the social capital. It attacks the customs and habits of the people, the things that bind them together as a people. Once you have monetized the social capital of the people and carried it off to vaults in New York, it is no longer available when the crisis comes. It turns out that national borders should not be subject to the crucible of reason.

The crisis surrounding Ukraine, and make no mistake that crisis is spilling over into the West now, is a microcosm for what awaits the West. The reason for that is Western managerial elites turned their societies into for-profit enterprises. The decision point in every matter is whether it profits the managerial elite. Even the abrogation of ancient rights is merely a defense of the bottom line. It turns out that when everything has a price, nothing has value, not even your society.

The New Priesthood

Posted on February 16, 2024 by thezman

A unique feature of this age is the fact that our societies are largely controlled by what we call the media. It was not that long ago when the term “the media” did not exist as a commonly understood concept. There were newspapers, books, and pamphlets, but they were called newspapers, books, and pamphlets. The concept of “the media” is a product of the 20th century.

These days, the media is not a collection of discreet communication entities but more of a subculture that hangs over society like smog. There are thousands of people who call themselves journalists, for example, who do not work for a journal or even have full-time employment at a newspaper. They are part of the media and speak of themselves as if they are in a righteous subculture or mass movement.

That is the way to think of it. The people in this thing we call the media operate like people in a religious cult or movement. This is why there is so little diversity of opinion in the media now, compared to just a generation ago. In a holy cause, there is no tolerance for those who question the cause. The people in this thing called the media are a priestly class who see their role as moral enforcers.

That is the show this week. It is a rumination on the media that came to mind as I was driving home late last night. The show covers why people join the media and why they are unable to square their activism with reality. Of course, I also talk about who really controls the media. This is the surprise ending. It turns out that the media is a consequence of a different process in our society.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Does The Media Run Society?
The Culture War
What Is a Journalist?
No One Wants To Be Evil
Who Runs The Media?

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The Old Fear

Posted on February 15, 2024 by thezman

One of the many oddities of this age is the way in which the political class talks about itself, something they do incessantly. For example, the Senate just passed a giant foreign aid bill to give your money to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the military industrial complex. This is a more bloated version of the “bipartisan” deal that included a few pennies for the border patrol and enshrined open borders. This time they stripped out the border money and expanded the foreign aid.

Now, normal people could be forgiven for wondering if the senators have had some sort of collective mental breakdown. The reason the “bipartisan” deal on immigration failed was not that it was too tough on immigration, but that it did nothing to address the issues causing the flood of migrants. In fact, it promised to make the situation worse by limiting what could be done by future presidents. In other words, the answer was to fix the border provision by making it much tougher.

Again, this is the way a normal person thinks. The Senate drew an entirely different conclusion from the storm of protest. They concluded that what the people really wanted was more of the same on the border and even more of their money going to foreign actors and the war machine. Imagine someone makes you an offer on your car and you say the offer is too low. They come back with an even lower offer. That is what we are getting with the Senate at the moment.

Putting that aside for second, look at how the senators supporting this ridiculous bill are talking about it. They are not talking about the bill at all. Instead, they are talking about their heroism in passing the bill. Mitch McConnell went to the floor to say that history would remember his historic vote in favor of the bill. Chuck Schumer talked about himself as if he was Leonidas. By getting this massive giveaway passed in the Senate he was saving the free world from disaster.

The same sort of thing happened in the first round. What little they said about the immigration portion of the bill was easily disputed by looking at the text of the bill they foolishly released to the public. Most of time was spent talking about their personal heroism in crafting the bill. Schumer did the media rounds tell the various stooges about how he labored like Hercules to overcome one obstacle after another in order to get this bill to the Senate for a vote.

There is nothing normal about how these people talk. Politicians in all times exaggerate their roles in things when times are good. They also exaggerate the role of opponents when times are bad. We expect politicians to do this. What is novel today is how they celebrate themselves like heroes for failing to do basic things. Every Washington pol is now his own hagiographer. At this rate, Schumer will be crafting a bill to have his face added to Mount Rushmore.

One possible reason for doing this is the same reason a failing company ramps up its marketing with promises of the product being new and improved. The theory is if you say it enough times people will believe it. The Senate is a clown show so they are heaping praise on themselves thinking that maybe people will not notice that these guys arrive at work in a Volkswagen Beatle done up as a giant mouse. The consultants are telling the senators they need to build their brand.

On the other hand, it is possible they believe it. These are the same people who thought people yelling at them about the terrible immigration bill were angry that it could possibly slow the flood of migrants. They were the same guys who thought using Senator Howdy Doody as the point man in immigration was brilliant. When you are making these errors, anything is possible, so it is quite probable that these senators view themselves as world historical figures.

Another possibility is that these senators are so insulated from our reality that they are now operating in the realm of fantasy. When was the last time Chuck Schumer talked to anyone who lived among the Dirt People? All of his social interactions are with the Israel lobby and Wall Street. The overlap here is immense. They certainly do think Schumer is a hero to his people, just not our people. You can go through the roster of long-serving politicians and see a similar degree of insularity.

Listening to these feeble old men sing their own praises, one cannot help but think of the Politburo in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Like Washington, Soviet politics had come to be controlled by a class of geezers. Their primary concern for a long time had been keeping their spot. The result was they surrounded themselves with sycophants good only for praising their bosses. The result was the political system was incapable of responding to the brewing crisis.

This is what we see with immigration. The solution is not complicated and most of the tools are available to bring the crisis under control. The old bulls in Washington, however, are primarily concerned with Speaker Johnson, who has come to represent a generational threat to them. The media stooges have acknowledged as much, saying that the Senate is hoping to box Johnson in with this bill. In other words, it is geezers thinking they need to fend off the youngster.

This would explain the self-praise. The geriatric ruling class fears the next generation more than they fear death. They have plenty of younger flunkies around to help guard their position and tell them they are the best. The old party hands have now reached that point many old men in the business world reach and that is to claim their experience trumps the talent and vigor of their young challenger. The result is Mitch McConnel now thinks he is Cicero.

The comparison to the Soviet Union brings with it a warning. Decades of insularity did not just result in an ossified ruling class. It also retarded the development of a succeeding generation of party men. When the icy hand of death started to thin the leadership ranks, what replaced them were men good at currying favor but not good at anything else, so the result was disaster. If Speaker Johnson is our Gorbachev, the next decade promises to be quite grim.

Following Orders

Posted on February 14, 2024 by thezman

I was up before the sun today so I could head out to the new house and avoid sitting in a traffic jam for hours. In the Baltimore – Washington area, traffic starts around seven in certain areas and is a mess everywhere by eight. The same people who tell us they know why Gaia is angry with us also designed the road system that results in millions of cars idling for hours every day, making Gaia angry. Regardless, I avoided being one of those cars be getting outside the wire by six this morning.

An hour into the drive, a sedan came up behind me so I moved over to the travel lane to let him pass. I was probably doing eighty but he wanted to go faster. The road is straight and wide so you can drive as fast as you like for the most part. The only real hazard is the dumb people who camp out in the hammer lane doing the posted speed limit, which is a well-known problem in these parts. These rolling roadblocks are the result of extensive use of lead paint in Baltimore.

A few miles down the road I see that car pulled over by a state trooper, no doubt getting a ticket for speeding. The maps app on my phone warned of a speed trap, but presumably that guy does not use that app. That driver will now get a big fine and spend the next three years paying higher insurance premiums, because the duty officer assign Barny Fife to traffic duty today. He did this because they have quotas to meet every month, despite their claims to the contrary.

If the driver bothered to ask the state trooper why he is pulling people over for speeding on a quiet stretch of highway, the trooper would probably say it is not safe to exceed the posted speed limit. He would say this knowing it is a lie, but that is what he says because it is what allows him to think the job has a purpose beyond raising revenue for the government and providing him with an income. A big part of policing is convincing the cops that they stand between civilization and anarchy.

If the driver called bullshit on it, the trooper would fall back on the line every cop learns after a few weeks on the job. He is just doing his job. This is the most factually true thing any cop ever says in any setting. That trooper is told to write tickets and he knows how many he needs to write before he can finish his shift. If the trooper wants to keep his job, he does what he is told and never questions it. If he is told to randomly shoot people on the highway, he is going to do it.

This is not to pick on the police. They are just the most egregious example of the “I’m just following orders” mentality of this age. If you want to keep your job at Mega Corp, you better not be the first guy to stop cheering at the pep rally. Do not let the boss hear you making sport of his new initiatives. Much of what people do is what they feel they have to do in order to avoid negative consequences. To some degree, everyone is just following orders, because that is the least bad option.

This is much more novel than it seems. Not that long ago the line, “I am just following orders” had very negative connotations. The “Nuremberg defense” was treated as worse than the alleged crime. The argument was that if you follow immoral orders then you are worse than someone who thinks the orders were moral. The latter could be rehabilitated, while the former is someone without scruples and therefore can never be trusted to do the right thing.

We no longer hear anyone condemn the Nuremberg defense. In fact, it has been flipped on its head now. When the cops beat up people exercising their rights in order to defend Antifa rioters, the so-called conservatives rush in to remind us that the real victims are the cops who are just following orders. The people in charge, the people we call the left, love the idea of people following orders. They really love seeing the cops unquestioningly following orders.

It is one of life’s many ironies that in this age where everyone is supposed to search their heart every day for fascism, we can gain some insight into why the German people went along with the Nazi program. In the total state, survival depends upon not questioning the system. If you can put yourself in jeopardy by questioning the orders, then naturally you will take care to never be suspected of questioning the orders, which means enthusiastically following orders.

For those who get the sads when the Nazis are cast in a negative light, the same dynamic came to dominate communist Russia. This set in before Stalin decided he needed to purge the people who might not follow orders. The Bolsheviks, like the fascists after them, figured out that you cannot get to the promised land if you are endlessly explaining yourself to the people who refuse to follow the rules, so the expedient solution was to remove those people.

Anarcho-tyranny is a feature of managerialism, not a bug, because it is what is necessary for managerialism to survive. The people at the top of the system must remain at the top of the system and the only way to ensure that is to make sure everyone is following their orders. The stated goals of the system are a means to an end and the end is to perpetuate the system. The reason you must follow orders may change, but you must always follow orders.

Eventually this advances to the point where the system becomes so conservative and brittle it is unable to adapt. We cannot know how fascism would have ended, but we saw how communism ended. In its final days it was old men desperately trying to hold onto power by enforcing rules that no longer made sense. Once people stopped following orders, the whole thing collapsed. It is something to think about the next time you are pulled over for speeding on a lonely highway.

Killer Drones

Posted on February 13, 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.

If you were alive a thousand years ago and decided you wanted to kill the local prince, it meant getting within reach of the prince. You would have to get close enough to stab him with a knife or poison his food. That meant getting past the guards and his retainers who were always with him. For anyone but those with regular access to the prince this was near impossible, which is why political assassinations were almost always a part of palace intrigue or a palace coup.

Ranged weapons changed this math a bit, but the bow was around a thousand years ago and was not a weapon for this type of activity. The reason is bows were primarily for hunting at close range or part of a system for war. The hunter would need to get close to his quarry as bows were not terribly accurate. In war, masses of archers operated a lot like a missile battery. They would fill the sky with arrows using volume to overcome the limited accuracy of the weapon.

The first real innovation in weapons that could be used for assassinations was the crossbow which arrived in the Middle Ages. We know the ancients had crossbows and used them in war, but they were not terribly accurate. The cost made them a weapon of war rather than a tool for private use. The crossbow disappeared from Europe for almost a thousand years, but then reappeared in the tenth century. Technology soon made them cheap and deadly accurate in the right hands.

This is why medieval leaders grew concerned with this weapon and tried to ban their private ownership in some cases. A weapon that a peasant could own and master that would allow him to strike the prince from a distance created a new problem for the ruling class of the time. A couple of angry peasants on the roof tops or even in the crowd could kill the prince. All of a sudden, having guards and a retinue was not enough, so the prince had to be more careful around the peasants.

Of course, we see the same thing happen with firearms. In the 18th century it was not a great weapon for assassinations. If you could get close enough you could kill the prince with a muzzle loader, but you would also be easy to spot. The first widely available firearms were not great for up close work. Pistols started to change this, and technology soon made it possible to conceal a deadly weapon on your person, thus making the assassin a real threat to authority.

Even though the problem was obvious, it took a while for rulers to figure out how to deal with firearms as political weapons. The same is true for things like roadside bombs and bombs delivered through the mail. A hundred years ago anarchists sent bombs to rich people through the mail. Of course, political actors were able to assassinate important people with the use of commonly available firearms. This is no longer an issue, as the ruling class has adapted to this threat.

This may be about to change. The use of FPV drones in the Ukraine war is doing to range weapons what war did for prior weapons. The FPV drone is a First Person Video drone that an operator uses to put an explosive on a target. The drone has a camera so the operator can look through that camera to guide the drone to the target where it explodes upon impact. Two years ago, these did not exist as a practical matter, but now the battlefield is littered with them.

The reason the skies are full of drones in Ukraine is they are cheap to produce and cheap to master. A team of two can become a highly effective weapon on the battlefield with a week of training on the drone. Training men to use million dollars tanks and artillery takes years. The drone is not a replacement for these weapon systems, but they are proving to be a cheap way to increase the combat effectiveness of troops that have the minimum amount of training.

A big part of the drone war is that the soldiers are learning to operate them and also repair them when needed. After the war, millions of men will go back to civilian life knowing how to make a cheap flying bomb they can guide to a target. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian men will come home angry at their politicians or the politicians of Europe about their conduct of the war. In other words, you do not have to be a genius to see the potential downstream consequences of the drone revolution.

For the last fifty years, the West has had to deal with terror attacks, which meant bombs, mass shootings and hijackings. Western elites had largely insulated themselves from assassination, so the only political violence was attacks on civilians. Now that is about to change as the terrorist can fly a bomb through the window of a rich person’s home or into the limousine of an important person. The math of political violence is about to change due to the drone.

History tells us that no one will notice this until a lunatic flies his homemade FPV drone into a government building. Then the security industrial complex will get the money to unriddle the problem. The battlefield will provide a lesson here as well because those soldiers using drones are working on defending against them. Reports suggest the Russians are way ahead on this, but it will not take long before the private sector in the West is working the problem of killer drones.

In the middle of the last century, it was still common to see politicians mixing it up with the people, but that no longer happens. Over time the threat of political violence, despite the rarity, has put the political class behind a wall. Drones will probably put them in a bunker, but it will also put the managerial elite in bunkers too. They will cease to be real people and instead be nothing more than images on our screens. The FPV drone cannot hunt what it cannot see in the wild.

It will also mean new rules to monitor the sale of components used to make drones, like we see with explosives and street drugs. You cannot go into a store and buy certain cold medicines without a note from the state. It will not be long before you must pass a background check to buy a drone. We may even see politicians try to ban assault drones on the grounds that they are weapons of war. It sounds ridiculous, but our rulers think this is a good ad, so nothing is too farfetched.

This thought experiment is a good reminder that war has downstream consequences that no one can foresee. Cheap crossbows were great for waging war, but lots of good crossbowmen in the crowd were not good for the king. The same proved true for other weapons of war. We are about to see the same thing with this war. In the fullness of time, it will be seen as an inflection point and maybe one that makes the economics of the Western ruling system unworkable.

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.

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.

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.

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