Natural Excogitating

Posted on August 25, 2022 by thezman

There are two strains of thought on this side of the great divide with regards to the behavior of the people in charge. One camp, the dominant camp, thinks there is an organized campaign run by a small group of people. The so-called deep state pulls the levers resulting in the things we see happening in the world. The other camp, the much smaller camp, subscribes to the emergent behavior doctrine. What we see is the result of the hive mind that dominates the managerial class.

By any reasonable standard, the deep state side has the easier claim. Spend a week following the main regime media organs and a pattern emerges. On a Monday, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other legacy operations will be running with the same theme. The next day, all of the next tier media operations are running with the Monday theme. By the end of the week, the media narrative has become conventional wisdom, maybe even holy writ.

For example, the midterms are coming up and the uniparty is a little worried that the rubes may be catching on, so they have the media doing their fear, uncertainty and doubt act to wrap up the summer. Here is the Post claiming the red wave nonsense is fading fast. Totally by coincidence, the Times has a similar story. They say it is abortion that is killing Republican chances. Here and here are supporting sources for the same claims made by the big media sites.

The effect of what certainly looks like an orchestrated campaign is supposed to be a collapse of opposition to the regime. Alongside these posts about the dimming Republican hopes in the election are stories about how Glorious Leader has magically made student debt go away. NBC claims that almost half of Latino debt will be wiped away by Glorious Leader. A debt jubilee that targets an important uniparty demographic just when Republican hopes are fading. What a coincidence!

Whether any of this is true is hard to know. It really does not matter if it is true because by next week it will be gospel. Just look at the Russian collusion hoax. Regime media still carries on as if it is obvious that Trump was in league with Putin, who used his super powers to rig the election. He did not rig the 2020 election, which was the cleanest in human history. Only election deniers think otherwise. He rigged the 2016 election, which only QAnon thinks is real.

The point is, spend any time consuming the main media organs of the regime and it certainly looks like it is all coordinated. Add to it the known fact that the activist we call journalist have been caught coordinating their work. Ezra Klein operated a secret group of four hundred far-left activists working in the media. The point was to coordinate their activism across many platforms. This is the sort of thing that supports the deep state idea, but also the claims about its nature.

The thing is though, there is little evidence that spooks from the wilderness of mirrors are behind these operations. When people hear the phrase “deep state” they think of men in stuffed chairs discussing how best to hide the alien space craft that just landed in the desert. The deep state rigged the food pyramid so normal men are filled with soy and therefore easy to manipulate. The deep state is not paranoid weirdos working in the media, sharing the hive mind.

That is the argument against the deep state and for the hive mind. That really is the nut of the emergent behavior argument. Fill a room with people who line their clothes with aluminum foil and very weird things will emerge. The people who work in the media believe completely in the deep state argument. They just think it is run by guys name Prescott and Pemberton. They are raising a secret invisible Hitler army to implement the final final solution.

The further you go up the system, the cultural and ideological diversity thins to the point where it becomes a hive mind. In the media, you cannot survive unless you support the latest things. The selection pressure is for compliance. A process operates across the high ground of the empire. Walk into the C-suites of a large company and it is power skirts, soy faces and a unified commitment to the latest thing. Woke capital emerged from within capital. It was not imposed on it.

The appearance of coordination is the result of a shared set of beliefs by the people who run the important bits of the empire. If tomorrow they suddenly converted to Islam, their women would be wearing head coverings and the men sporting beards. They would carry on as if they had been Islamic since forever. Anyone asking about the sudden conversion to Islam would be called a blasphemer. The New York Times style guide would be relabeled the sharia style guide.

We got a real world test of this claim in February. Russian tanks crossed into the Donbas and instantly every talk head on television was sporting a Ukraine lapel pin and chanting “Keev” like they had a novel form of Tourette’s. It was as if someone updated their firmware overnight. In a way, this is what happened. Everyone was suddenly imitating the others in the hive. It was not a conscious act. There was no discussion or dissent from the program. It was the latest thing.

Just consider what is happening with the Covid vaccine. When Trump announced the program, the hive condemned it as orange poison. Trump exits and suddenly the hive claims the vaccine the universal elixir. They literally spent two years forcing people to take the shot. Now that it is clear it was a fraud from the start and is causing serious health problems, they are pivoted back to blaming Trump. The hive now believes the vaccine debacle was caused by the Trump conspiracy.

When you see these people swinging wildly from one invented reality to the next, it is hard to see the hand of Pemberton and Prescott. Instead, it looks like a murmuring of starlings, rushing in and out of the trees. What controls them is the undefinable, but omnipresent hive mind. They believe the same things, so they react the same way to events, even events they create. The Covid mania makes much more sense when you think of it as a manifestation of a shared reality.

Of course, both sides of this debate can be right. Our ruling class is largely controlled by a shared reality, a new secular religion, but elements inside the hive scheme to manipulate events to their advantage. Here we have Google blithely admitting to running a psychological warfare campaign on the people of Europe. Clearly, the people inside Google excogitating this scheme know what they are doing. On the other hand, they think this is perfectly normal. It is their nature.

This is why it is probably not good to go all in on the deep state or the emergent behavior explanation for what we are seeing. Both are correct to a point but fail to explain the whole. Instead, it is best to think of the people in charge as members of a religious cult and part of that cult is a hatred of normal people. The religion of the Cloud People naturally leads to coordinated efforts to harm the Dirt People. They do this because they have to. It is their nature.

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The Reality Jubilee

Posted on August 24, 2022 by thezman

The Biden administration is gearing up to offer some sort of college debt jubilee as their answer to the student debt crisis. The details of the scheme are being leaked to generate interest in the forthcoming announcement. The idea is to use printed money to buy votes from the millions holding student debt. Coincidentally, this comes just as the regime begins the fall campaign. Currently there is $1.6 trillion in outstanding college debt, most held by the Federal government.

There is no economic sense behind the idea. A debt jubilee is just another way of dropping cash onto the economy. With roaring inflation and supply chain problems, this is pretty much the opposite of good policy. The net effect of the program is to put more money in the pockets of the debtors. They will spend the money, just as they did the stimulus checks, which puts upward pressure on prices. Of course, this will come after the midterms so it makes sense to the politicians.

The reason there is $1.6 trillion in college debt is that the government has been mucking around in the education markets for several generations. Financial aid, like public pensions, quickly became a good way to buy votes. Opposing it on economic grounds, while factually correct, looked like you were opposing it on moral grounds, which makes you a monster. It quickly became a political racket that grew out of control and now we have a multi-trillion dollar monster.

The madness of college financial aid is obvious when you look at the rise in tuition costs over the last thirty years. They have grown at multiples of the official inflation rate and that is excluding hidden fees. There was a time when a student could work his way through college. It was a struggle, but it was possible. Today, the cost of tuition alone dwarfs what a student can make working fulltime. In other words, in the effort to make college affordable, it was made increasingly unaffordable.

This is a well understood phenomenon. If the government starts issuing subsidies for the purchase of new BMW’s, the price of the cars will increase. The increase will track with the subsidy. The people running BMW are not stupid. Once they know the buyers can afford the premium, they will raise prices. This very same thing just happened with the subsidy for electric cars. The electric car makers raised prices to match the new subsidy from Washington.

The remarkable thing about this is everyone knows it is true. The reason the people animating Biden’s corpse have been slow to pull the trigger on this scheme is they know it will be bad for the economy. The timing is to get the applause before the election, then have the public pay the price after the election. They figure that in two years people will forget all about it. Come the 2024 election, the corpse animators will have some new scheme to sell the public.

Even more remarkable is the fact that some people in the media know it is true, but most are innumerate so they do not understand the material. Some of the former group will ask the Biden people about the math and the Biden people will make up a whopper about how the definitions of commonly used economic terms have changed so shut up bigot and clap louder. There will be no serious discussion of this scheme and the economic condition of the country will decline a bit further.

Critics will settle for blaming the voters, especially those rotten kids down at the coffee shop with their nose rings, philosophy degrees and college debt. “The people are voting themselves a raise from the public fisc!” It is a good example of the perverse effect of democracy on the public mind. The people responsible for the terrible governance get a pass, while their victims get the blame. When the people work through bad policy, the “leaders” take credit for the result.

If Joe Biden were the dictator, installed by the ruling class after the old dictator was deposed, there would be no question about who to blame. This is why they remain berserk over the 2020 election controversy. If the people think the game was rigged, then there is no way to shift the blame for the results onto the voters. It turns out that the best way to avoid the wrath of the people over the manifest corruption of their leaders is to give them a ballot and tell them they are in charge.

Putting all of this aside, the college debt crisis hides a much bigger problem going on that you can see in the college numbers. As the cost of a credential has gone up, its value has declined. One reason for that is the dilution of it by handing them out to anyone who qualifies for debt. The other reason is the changing complexion of the student body. The diversity push has changed what the credential means, which has diluted its value to the core market.

The people not going to college are the people who should be getting the additional training from the education system. That is the cohort that is dropping out of the system because the cost-benefit relationship has turned negative. The result is a swelling number of credentialed idiots carrying debt they can never pay. They are also more likely to stop paying, knowing you will not dare go after them. The moral inversion of the education system is creating new downstream problems.

Of course, all of this means the system can never be reformed. What needs to happen is a debt jubilee along with the abolition of all subsidies. Most colleges would close and half of the current students would drop out of school. The system would shrink down to its core of training bright young people and doing useful research. That can never be allowed to happen, so the system will stagger on like this until the printing presses can no longer keep pace and we reach collapse.

Objectively Partisan

Posted on August 23, 2022 by thezman

One of the consequences of partisanship is that it insulates the partisan from the rest of the world to the extent that their reality is deranged. They only know what the others in their group know and that is limited to what is best for the group. Civic nationalists decry partisanship for this reason. It makes objective truth impossible. Radicals, of course, embrace partisanship because they reject objective truth. It is why modern radicals literally speak of their truth.

The funny thing about partisanship is both sides are correct. Politics is about friends and enemies, which leaves little room for objectivity. In politics you want to advance your interests or the interests of your side. That often means doing so at the expense of those viewed as enemies. If the facts say you should yield in deference to your opponent, then you have no choice but to reject the facts. Otherwise, you lose and that undermines the point of politics.

The reality of politics in a participatory system is that the winners and those with some chance to win must be partisans and reject objective truth. The outsiders, those seeking to crack the nut of the political dynamic, must embrace what they claim to be objective truth, in order to wedge open the door of politics. In other words, appeals to truth are just another partisan tool. It is the outsider who can embrace objective reality, because he has no skin in the game of politics.

An example of this is this New York Times opinion piece by two extremist law professors calling for the abolition of the constitution. The very first sentence in their piece is a lie designed to advance their agenda. “When liberals lose in the Supreme Court — as they increasingly have over the past half-century — they usually say that the justices got the Constitution wrong.” Liberals so rarely lose in court that when it happens, it is literally news for months, as we see with abortion.

The point of the lie is to butter up the intended audience with a bit of flattery to let them know the writers are fellow partisans. “We keep trying to use reason on these odious monsters, but they are immune to reason, so here is what we do.” In effect, the partisan statement at the start is an appeal to abandon objectivity. The next sentence makes that exact demand and the next paragraph explains why. What they mean by “rejecting constitutionalism” is the rejection of objective truth.

Of course, in order to make that work logically, they have to provide a definition of “constitution” that is itself a lie. These legal scholars from two of the most important elite academies in the empire claim that a constitution is about “setting more sacrosanct rules than the ones the legislature can pass.” You see, it is just an arbitrary set of “super rules” that were made up out of convenience. Most likely, the people behind it were bad people, being from the past and all that.

The argument in favor of a constitution has always been that it is a formalization of the superstructure of society. For any human grouping to hold together it must first answer the question, “Who are we?” The answer to the question must be filled out by a set of rules that define the answer. A constitution is what complex societies create to define themselves as a people. In one sentence the liberal tradition is discarded and relegated to partisan whimsy by these two radical legal scholars.

The rest of the piece is an argument in favor of overthrowing what remains of the liberal order and instituting what amounts to fascism. They imagine a totalitarian model of the law based on the tyranny of the majority. They make no effort to explain why fifty percent plus one is a sacred number. That is the partisan mind. The partisan never puts thought into analyzing his own statements of faith. Words exist for purely partisan reasons, to signal the who? whom? of politics.

Interestingly, the people chanting democratic phrases, while claiming to appeal to the will of the people, make clear that who decides is what matters. “Liberals have been attempting to reclaim the Constitution for 50 years — with agonizingly little to show for it. It’s time for them to radically alter the basic rules of the game.” The basic argument here is not against constitutions, but about who makes the rules. Objectively, this is a purely anti-democratic argument.

That is why the Left is immune to claims of hypocrisy. They can easily allow contradictory claims exist in their mind, as long as both claims advance the partisan agenda of their group. On the one hand they can demand democracy and on the other demand tyrannical control of the law. Both claims are useful in the partisan game of politics, so both can exist in the same toolbox. For the partisan, the contradiction makes reaching for the right tool easier.

Here is a great example. “No matter how openly political it may purport to be, reclaiming the Constitution remains a kind of antipolitics. It requires the substitution of claims about the best reading of some centuries-old text or about promises said to be already in our traditions for direct arguments about what fairness or justice demands.” The first sentence is self-contradictory. The last sentence is a promise to impose the values of a tiny minority on the population, in the name of democracy.

From the outside, the partisanship of Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, the authors of the piece, is monstrous. The only end is a bloodbath. These two are making the same basic claim as Pol Pot. The thing is, they are correct about one thing. It is who decides that matters, not how they decide. Constitutions must always be about who decides, first and foremost. This ensures the laws maintain this relationship between the rulers and their people.

That was the critical mistake of the Founders. It left open the door for others to decide and that is what led to the nightmare of the 20th century and the current crisis. At the other end of this crisis will be the answer to who decides going forward. Will it be vengeful aliens or the founding stock? In the end, the point of politics is not words on a paper but who puts the words on the paper. Ironically, that is the one objective truth that every partisan can accept.

The Wages Of Evil

Posted on August 22, 2022 by thezman

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it is a deep dive into the life of TikTok star and Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin. Sunday Thoughts is on holiday, but there are two new posts behind the green door about my weekend adventures. There is a longer analysis of what is happening in the Ukraine war and a review of the heretical movie, The Northman. SubscribeStar and Substack.

For a long time, Professor John Mearsheimer has been making the point that the war in Ukraine can easily lead to a much larger war. In fact, it could lead to a global war, maybe even a nuclear war. After all, the United States is provoking a nuclear power over the Ukraine and it is provoking nuclear powers that support Russia. China and India are both nuclear powers and both back Russia. Here is Mearsheimer’s latest analysis of how things can get very bad very fast.

One of the problems with this sort of analysis is it assumes both sides remain as they are in terms of the abilities and points of view. The great unknown unknown in all wars is how the two sides will evolve in terms of how they see the conflict, themselves and their opponents. The actions and reactions of the players in a war creates a dynamic that is impossible to even think about in advance. The race to the sea at the start of the Great War is a good example of the unknowable unknowns.

We can already see this in the Ukraine. It is clear that Russia, the Ukrainian leaders and Europe expected a quick settlement. Zelensky made concessions at the start and was pretty close to taking the deal on offer from Russia. This deal was pretty much the old deal called the Minsk Accords. Then London and Washington intervened to sabotage negotiations, which came to a sudden halt. The West unleashed a tsunami of economic attacks on the Russian economy.

This forced the Russians to reevaluate their operation. Over six months they have switched from a short and limited war that would hopefully end in a peace deal, to a long war of attrition. The Russians are now slowly obliterating the Ukrainian army, in an artillery based meatgrinder. They also have changed their goals. There is little doubt that Russia will take most of Ukraine now. What they will leave as Ukraine will be a land-locked state with limited resources.

This has in turn created a new dynamic on the Western side. The reckless flood of weapons into Ukraine has now given way to a form of terrorism. Washington and London are now helping the Ukrainians target civilian targets in the Donbass. They have launched sabotage attacks in the Crimea and shelled a nuclear plant. None of these are effective military operations. They are intended to create havoc for the Russians and in the case of the nuke plant, possibly kill a lot of civilians.

The other reason for Washington to have Ukraine launch these sorts of attack is in the hope they will provoke a response. The facts on the ground are only going to get worse and public support in the West has started to collapse. Normal people do not care about the Ukraine, but they care about food prices and energy bills. The typical German does not see why his government should send billions to the crooks in Ukraine while he has to take cold showers to save energy.

If the Russians respond to these civilian attacks with an attack on civilian targets in the Ukraine, so the thinking goes, then public outrage in the West will bring opinion back around to supporting the war. A meltdown at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station would contaminate half of Ukraine. Western media would blame it on Russia, which would then warrant greater involvement in the war. This is the sort of lunacy that no one can plan for or even contemplate in advance.

Now we have a new unknowable unknown in the mix. The assassination of Darya Dugina, by Ukrainian terrorists, is the sort of escalation that can set off a dangerous dynamic in this war. Darya Dugina is the daughter of Alexander Dugin, the most important intellectual in the world today. His ideas about a post-Cold War East are credited with shaping the world view of Putin and his supporters. The attack was meant for him but killed his daughter instead.

There is no question that the attack was done by professionally trained assassins and that those assassins were working on behalf of the West. The Russians will blame this on Washington and London because they are not stupid. They will see this as Washington personalizing this dispute. That could very well mean they take the same view and we begin to see car bombings in Western capitals. The neocons better hire food tasters and install radiation detectors in their homes.

One of the early warnings about dumping arms in Ukraine is they could easily get into the hands of gangsters and terrorist. The Ukrainian are the most corrupt people on earth, so they have been selling this stuff as fast as they get it. Now imagine Russia letting Javelin missiles fall into the hands of Berlin-based Islamists who would like to do something big, like take out the motorcade of Olaf Scholtz. The idiots who cooked up the Dugin caper just put everyone’s name on a list.

This is exactly what Mearsheimer has been warning of for months. While everyone would celebrate a car bombing campaign against the neocons, these things never go as planned and quickly become a new problem. Killing Dugin would have angered Russia, but killing his daughter infuriates the world. It underscores the fact that Western leaders are gangsters without scruples. They will kill everyone if that is what it takes to reach the end times they are pursuing.

In the end, the larger story here is not the dynamics of war or how great powers can easily maneuver themselves into conflict. The real issue is the danger of having large empires ruled by alien elites. If the people running the American empire cared at all about the people, this never would have come to pass. They do no care so they do not think about the consequences to the people. It turns out that giving dangerous sociopaths like the neocons access to power is suicidal.

Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead

Posted on August 19, 2022 by thezman

I must admit that I have enjoyed the blow out loss of Liz Cheney much more than I expected to enjoy it. It has been known for a long time that she was going to lose her race, but somehow the Cloud People were not ready for it. They have been carrying on like this is a bolt from the blue. I suspect the midnight miracle of 2020 convinced them that if they wished hard enough, their election dreams will come true.

That has been the best part of it. The people bemoaning the result are the worst people and they are not hiding it. By worst people I mean conservatives. They are so angry that they are letting the mask drop and taking aim at the voters. It reveals that it was never been about Trump the man but about the people who support him. They hate the Dirt People as much as any of the other Cloud People.

For the better part of two years, Liz Cheney has made the straight forward argument that Trump is a menace and his voters are fascists. Conservative Inc. just nodded along, because they agree with her. They actually defended her as standing on principle, which is an amazing claim when you stop and think about it. It means one of their principles is that normal white people are monsters.

This result, along with the sagging poll numbers of the Republicans, suggests that there is a change happening with the Dirt People. Voting out an odious carbuncle like Cheney, just for the fun of it, is a rebuke to the party. Some percentage of the Dirt People are waking up to the scam that is the Republican Party and they are ready to act on it, even if it means the crazies keep control.

Time will tell if the current polling is real, but the fact is the Republicans are currently offering nothing to the voters. Mitch McConnell is publicly hoping the Democrats keep the Senate. He shot down a scheme to nationalize the election around issues like trade and immigration, probably because he knows it would work. The party of Liz Cheney is mad at its voters and maybe those voters are ready to get mad back.

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This Week’s Show

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Liz Cheney
Finks
Trump Rage
Christian Right
Stochastic Violence
Race & Crime

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Stochastic Reality

Posted on August 18, 2022 by thezman

One of the stranger things to come from the collection of sub-cults that make up the modern Left is the concept of stochastic terrorism. In the hands of the believers, it is not so much a concept as an incantation. They chant it online in response to anything that contradicts their beliefs. On Twitter, for example, they believe that if enough believers chant it in response to a tweet they do not like, the gods of on-line moderation will strike down the offending tweet and maybe the tweeter.

Taken literally, it is a meaningless expression. The first dictionary definition of stochastic is random and the second is “involving chance or probability.” The word comes from the Greek word “to guess” and has been used in various fields to describe a range of probabilities within a process. Terrorism, of course, is the use of violence and fear to achieve an ideological aim. Taken together, stochastic terrorism would literally mean random violence to achieve a political aim.

As is often the case, it has two meanings in the cult of the modern Left. One is the purely emotional definition, which is always the primary one. Stochastic terrorism is anything that upsets the user by disconfirming her beliefs. Someone posting crime statistics, for example, is accused of stochastic terrorism because crime statistics contradict left-wing beliefs about society. The phrase is simply a way to mark someone as a heretic or blasphemer.

Just as Eskimos allegedly have many words for snow, the modern Left has many ways to identify a blasphemer. The logic behind the claim about Eskimos and snow is they spend a lot of time around snow, so they have to master the topic. Similarly, the modern Left imagines itself surrounded by demonic enemies trying to hold back the tides of history, so they invest their time in studying those enemies. The result is a long list of words to describe the eyes in the darkness.

In this case, there is a larger meaning behind the incantation. What is meant by the phrase is that people posting unapproved things on-line are setting a range of possibilities by injecting the heresy into the system. Some unknown percentage of people exposed to the heresy will act on it. Some unknowable percentage of those people will commit an act of violence. Posting crime stats will eventually result in a white man killing a black body.

In other words, if a causal link can be imagined between speech and action, then the link is as real as if the speaker commanded the actor. We have quickly moved from the entirely implausible to the probable and then to highly probable. In the mind of the believer, what follows is the inevitable. You posting a graph about crime stats on Twitter will inevitably lead to violence against black bodies, which means you are the cause of crime against black bodies and therefore a terrorist.

This strikes normal people as insane and it is insane. It is another bit of evidence to suggest what we think of as the modern Left is a form of mental illness. The believers are in an imaginary war against imaginary enemies. Instead of walking down a public road, ranting and waving their arms at an invisible entity, they are on the internet harassing normal people just trying to have a conversation, in the belief that the conversation is part of a plot.

This is certainly true of the people on Twitter, which is something of a bug light for the mentally unstable. Mass on-line culture draws in the unstable looking for structure and they find it in the many subcultures. The institutional Left has weaponized these people as a defense against public scrutiny. Wherever normal people gather to talk about what is happening in the world, these weaponized crazies try to prevent it. They have been tuned to think normal people are the cause of their misery.

Further upstream, there is a logic to this idea of stochastic terrorism. The managerial elite struggles to justify their position, so they conjure these ideas as a way to legitimize their defensive actions. If unapproved thoughts can lead to unapproved actions, then their censorship actions are justified. They are not censoring speech. They are protecting the vulnerable from potential violence. No matter how improbable, they must prevent your words from causing the next 9/11.

This fits a general pattern with the American Left. The structure of their thought is to act on the hypothetical, rather than the actual. Look around at the range of issues popular on the Left and all of them are based on a firm belief in the hypothetical. It is possible that climate change is caused by humans. We do not know, but we have to pretend we know and act accordingly. We do not know if racism is a real thing, but we have to assume it is and make war on it.

This gets to something else about the American Left. They firmly believe they can immanentize whatever they can imagine. They create a mental construct, like what is behind the stochastic terrorism incantation. The construct is that speech leads to a range of actions. Then they leap from this model of reality to believing it is reality, more real that observable reality. Rather than interact with the real world, they operate within the constructed world as if it is reality.

This is how entirely novel ideas become bedrock truth in a an instant. Ten years ago, a man in a dress was a crossdresser. Then someone produced an alterative reality in which humans are assigned a gender at birth. Note the replacement of the word sex with the word gender. The former is used on living things while the latter is used for inanimate objects like pipe fittings and electrical connectors. The misappropriation of language is integral to their world building.

Once you cross from the biological reality of sex to the conjured reality of gender, the imaginer is free to reinvent humanity. The man in a dress is another gender and people can choose their genders. Reality becomes a video game where the player can create any character they like. It is a form of escapism, but this alterative reality quickly supplants actual reality for the player. Overnight, normal people find themselves around people who are sure biological reality terrorism.

The question is why now? What has gone wrong in the West leading to this epidemic of delusional madness? Is it a novel parasite that leads some people to slip from the bounds of reality into these imaginary worlds? Is it new at all or just an old part of the human condition we used to control? There is the possibility that mass communication has allowed these deranged people that have always been with us to form up in ways that were previously impossible.

It is hard to know, but what is clear is that these people are much better at conjuring alternative realities than the world is at defending reality. This increased ability to conjure alterative realities and then act on them means the odds of them conjuring a cataclysmic reality has gone up. Put another way, the longer they are allowed to freely create alternative realities, the more likely they are to conjure one that ends in the destruction of the West.

That gets to the universal of the Left. They project onto the world the things they hate about themselves or fear they may be doing. The emergence of stochastic terrorism as an incantation suggests that at some level, they sense their repeated rolling of the dice on reality must come up snake eye eventually. In other words, their very existence will result in some random act of destruction. If the death cult that is the Left rolls the dice enough times, they will get their wish.

Chaotic Evil

Posted on August 17, 2022 by thezman

A generation ago, most Americans associated political prisoners and the secret police with communism and third world dictatorships. A dictator ignored the needs of his people and threw political opponents into dungeons, while lining his pockets and those of his cronies. The communist societies used the secret police to spy on and intimidate the people. The free world had its faults, but it lacked this sort of compulsion, because it was a rules-based system of politics.

Those not around a generation ago are left to imagine what such a world was like, because present day America is nothing like a generation ago. The last three decades have seen a steady slide into the features we used to associate with police states and third world dictatorships. The regime is too busy stuffing its pockets to attend to the people’s business. They use the secret police to harass critics and a deeply corrupt legal system to jail dissidents.

The question that is seldom asked is how did this come to pass? America more or less operated by a respected set of rules into the 20th century. There were periods of lawlessness like the civil war and the Wilson administration. The courts got out of control in the middle of the last century, but they were seeking to expand rights rather than constrict them. The reformers of the 1960’s may have been misguided, but they were still operating within the liberal order.

One argument for what went wrong starts with the Clintons. One side of the political class, desperate for a presidential win, decided to throw in with a pair of narcissistic sociopaths from the Ozarks. This deal with the devil required abandoning one old rule after another until the very idea of rules was in question. The Left’s relationship with the Clintons was a series of moral compromises. Since the Left is the arbiter of political morality, their decent was our decent.

It is not possible to overstate the malevolence of the Clintons. They are the two most corrupt people in the history of American politics. Their first caper in the White House was to steal raw FBI files on their opponents. The mere suggestion of this is what got Nixon run out of town a generation earlier. That caper was the high water mark, in terms of ethics, for the Clinton era. By the time he left the White House, politics reflected the vulgar degeneracy of the Clintons.

The thing is though, the old code of conduct in Washington never would have tolerated the Clintons. We know this because four years before Bill Clinton climbed out of the sewer, Gary Hart was taken out of contention for womanizing. Hart was never accused of murder or corruption. He liked the ladies. In 1988, his lack of discretion was disqualifying, but in 1992, Bill Clinton’s womanizing was overlooked. Something happened in the intervening years to change attitudes.

The big event was the end of the Cold War. The reason for which the American empire had been organized, the Soviet Union, was no more. It has long been forgotten, but the new generation of baby boomer politicians was ready to party. They were going to spend the “peace dividend” on their favorite projects. Bill Clinton’s campaign was an explicit rebuke of the prior generation. George Bush was old and out of touch, while Bill Clinton was cool and modern.

What made the Clinton crime wave possible was the end of the Cold War which took with it the moral imperative to maintain the liberal code. The managerial elite that emerged in the 20th century abided by the liberal code because it was necessary to fight Soviet communism. That set of rules governing both politics and the political culture were necessary to organize society for the long fight. The threat of nuclear annihilation was the exclamation point on the project.

The fall of the Soviet Union removed this great threat and with it the reason to maintain the old moral code. Rolling the dice with a couple of psychopaths suddenly did not seem like much of a risk. Making exceptions to the old rules no longer felt like a gamble, as America was the last superpower. The end of history and the thousand year Reich were upon us all at once and Washington sat atop it all. Everything was possible, so everything was now permitted.

Where we are today, with the emerging thugocracy is a result of a managerial elite that no longer sees any limits. Like the generation raised up after the Second World War, the new generation of leaders that came to power after the Cold War brought with them a narcissistic sense of entitlement. The reason they think sending the FBI to harass opponents is a good idea is because all of their ideas are good ideas. Every criticism is met with a collective “do you know who I am?”

What we are witnessing is the winners version of what happened in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the losers in the great ideological struggle of the 20th century, Russia was prostrate to the world for more than a decade. The only law governing behavior was the law of the jungle. First it was chaos, then it was rule by the various oligarchs and then finally the restoration of civil authority. Thirty years on the new Russia has finally emerged from its past.

America, on the other hand, was the winner. More important, the new generation of leaders that took over inherited the sense of historic accomplishment that came from the victory in the Cold War. Like the degenerate children of a family dynasty, this generation needed structure to prosper. They were made for it. Instead, they came to power just when the old structure was falling away. What they have created in its place is a lawlessness that reflects their character.

Alexander Dugin observed that the end of the Cold War was a disaster for Russia because it suddenly removed the old rules. Communism was horrible, but it was better than the chaos that followed. It turns out that the same is true for America. The end of the Cold War was a disaster. The old rules were not perfect, but they were better than the evolving lawlessness that followed. Unlike the Russians, Americans are learning this slowly, rather than all at once.

Like the Soviet system that emerged after the war, the American empire that formed up after the war was unnatural. America was never fit for a centralized unitary state that was necessary for the long war. It is too big, too diverse and too fractious to be ruled by a central government. In war time, this temporary arrangement was accepted as a necessity of war. Once the war ended, the rationale for the current arrangements ended with it and what is left is this unnatural system of rule.

For that last thirty years the spoiled children of excess who sit atop the managerial class have been searching for a reason to exist. First it was the crusades against Islam, then it was reviving the Cold War with Russia. Now a war with China over Taiwan is the hoped for reason to exist. If Russia and China fail to provide the external justification, then a war against the people will be the answer. They will defend democracy from the people who seek to participate in it.

The autocratic behavior of the managerial elite over the last decade is a response to the evolving awareness of what is happening. The populism that propelled Trump to the White House is an instinctive response to the growing lawlessness. Trump was a chaos candidate only because he represented the old order. The response from the managerial elite was to smash the remaining bits of the old order. Trump’s continuing presence is what fuels their growing authoritarianism.

There is no returning to the old order, but the current lack of order will not survive the people who created it. As the collection of geezers who defined the post-Cold War era die off, their replacements will prove to be as hapless as they look. The great chaos that followed the collapse of communism will come to the West when the post-liberal American order collapses. What comes next will be different, but much more in tune with the nature of the society over which it rules.

Our Weird New Reality

Posted on August 16, 2022 by thezman

One of the great unnoticed things about the current crisis is that the rules that everyone said were inviolable no longer seem to apply. This is most obvious in the economic realm where nothing makes any sense. Things that were said to be impossible a generation ago are now the default. Similarly, politics is now operating by a set of rules that no one can explain. Things that were considered outside of the realm of the possible are the new normal.

Way back in the before times, when Covid got going, the world literally shut itself down in response to the virus. In America, over twenty-five million people were laid off and tens of millions more were sent home to work. The official unemployment rate peaked at thirteen percent and was then restated to be just under seven percent. What the actual unemployment rate was at the peak is unknown. Regardless, it was an unprecedented attack on the economy that should have been devastating.

According to official statistics, the economy shrugged it off. The official figures say the economy contracted by 3.4% in 2020 but all of the decline was contained in the third quarter of the year. The fourth quarter began a massive rebound. The official numbers say the economy grew by 5.7% in 2021. That more than made up for the decline in the prior year due to Covid. It turns out you can literally shut down an economy and nothing serious will happen. No wonder people want to stay home.

It is not just in America where the laws of economics have been suspended. In Europe they are allegedly facing an energy shortage. Since forever we have been told that steep increases in energy prices trigger recession. Germany is literally facing the prospect of having no gas and no one seems to notice. The massive disruptions to the flow of energy into the EU has thus done little to upset the economy. According to the old rules, this should not be possible.

It is possible that the media is simply lying to us. Maybe people are seething at the suffering that has been inflicted upon them. The official media, controlled as it is by state actors, is ignoring this in favor of happy talk. It could also mean that all of those economic rules were just made up. No on really knows why the economy does what it does but like court magicians, economist pretend to know in order to provide authority to the ruling class. The whole thing is a put-on.

It is also possible that we live in a simulation. What we think of as reality is just a bit of software that the creators can tweak as they please. Those old rules had to be abandoned because the system got a computer virus. In order to keep the simulation from crashing entirely they changed the code. It is a temporary patch to the system until the next upgrade. Maybe that is why big events from the past, like the lockdowns, suddenly feel like distant memories. We rebooted.

Politics has the same weirdness. Everyone reading this is absolutely certain that we did not arrest people for speech. That was written down somewhere and everyone agreed that you could say what you like with some very narrow limits. Yet Douglas Mackey faces a decade in jail for making fun of Hillary Clinton on Twitter. Maybe like the economic rules, there was a patch done to the software, a hard reboot and we are suddenly operating under a totally new set of rules.

This confusion is obvious with the political actors. Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage in New Jersey. All of a sudden, the people dedicating their lives to suppressing speech were bemoaning this attack on free speech. In Britain, Boris Johnson has people thrown in dungeons for using the wrong pronouns, but he was out there decrying this attack on our sacred liberty. Maybe the software engineers forgot the update these guy’s code during the last service pack.

Even taking a step back and looking at things in the most general sense, the rules no longer seem to apply. Politics used to be defined by the three big human motivations, money, power and sex. How does drag queen story hour fit in here? Who is benefitting from this lunacy? The point of this assault on the children seems to be the promotion of general mayhem, which used to be the opposite of what rulers sought. The old rules said order was the goal of the people in charge.

Of course, we know that a tenet of the new religion states that only through mass confusion can we transcend this world. They believe if they get everyone into a state of agitation that we somehow break free from our old thinking. This lets us adopt a new model of thinking which is the passage to the glorious future. The endless “subverting expectations” is a deliberate effort to make everyone crazy. It is hard to accept, but this does explain why the rulers now prefer chaos.

That does not explain why the system trundles on, despite violating all of the rules we have been told are inviolable. We have double-digit inflation, periodic food shortages and record high gas prices. The whiplash effect is now emerging, where price hikes are followed by demand destruction, which collapses prices, only to see demand return and drive prices back up again. In other words, we are seeing stagflation in the economy but no one seems to notice or care all that much.

Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing it. Maybe it takes us a while to recognize reality after a long absence. Perhaps what lies ahead is a mass recognition of reality and a sudden return of the old rules. Maybe the people running the simulation get bored and shut us down. At this point, given the general weirdness we are seeing, we cannot safely assume anything. For now, at least, we are in a new world with new rules and a new sense of reality.

The Great Hoax

Posted on August 15, 2022 by thezman

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week it is a review of sorts of a book titillating the usual suspects. Sunday Thoughts is mostly about the various angles to the FBI raid on Trump’s villa last week. SubscribeStar users can find it here and Substack users can find it here.

When it comes time to write the obituary for Western civilization, the focus will not be on the forces of destruction, but the forces of distraction. These are the people who peddle utopian alternatives to the present, thus preventing a real opposition forming up to defend the West from its attackers. The West is not being destroyed by malevolent forces like Wokism, antiwhite radicalism and the concentration of wealth in alien hands, but by the forces preventing an organized resistance.

One of the primary examples of this is libertarianism. The real trick of this evil ideology is that it convinces the victim that he is responding with pure reason to the irrationalism of the rats gnawing away at civilization. In reality he is indulging in fantasy, every bit as ridiculous as left-wing utopianism. The difference is that Marx imagined a world where man was freed from his nature through cooperation, while Murray Rothbard dreamed of you being free from your community.

Libertarianism convinces the victim that cooperation is evil, so he not only eschews any sort of organized resistance, but he also works to prevent it. It is this last bit that allowed it to infiltrate conservatism and turn it into a cat’s paw. Twentieth century conservatism became the great defender of Progressive dominance, undermining any resistance in the name of individual liberty. The result is that otherwise good people volunteer to hang alone rather than hang together.

The true nature of the cult of libertarianism is clear in this review of the most recent Thomas Piketty book, A Brief History of Equality. The author of the review does not beat around the bush attacking Piketty’s ideas. Instead, he warns that it could persuade people to organize against the forces destroying their society. In other words, the crime here is not in being wrong about economics. The crime is in being wrong about politics by advocating against the status quo.

As is custom when critiquing libertarianism, it needs to be pointed out that the author’s revealed preference is for something other than libertarianism. He has steadfastly avoided the dreaded private sector, choosing a life in government, the academy and think tanks. One of things you will never find in the dreaded private sector is a genuine libertarian, because people who work understand that society is not possible without organization and someone enforcing the rules.

Putting that aside, the absurdity of libertarianism is that it starts by agreeing with Marx on human organization. Marx believed that what defined the human condition and drove the flow of history was economic relations. The human condition is defined by man’s economic relations with other men. This is not only the starting point for both Marxism and libertarianism, but the end point as well. Both seek the perfection of human relations through economics.

Of course, Marx was wrong about the nature of man. Humans are not defined by their economic relationships with other men. The glue that holds people together is blood, their shared ancestry. The things that define a people are not the product of economic relations but the product of their shared struggle as a people. Culture is the answer to the central question of human organization. “Who are we?” is answered by the traditions, customs and history of the people.

Put another way, culture is the shared labor of the people. It is not just the product of their current labor. Culture is the preservation and improvement of their ancestor’s labor in order top pass it to the next generation. Culture is the shared accretive product of generations of people. That is what defines a people and the individual, not the trading of goods between people. The Marxist and libertarians strip man of his humanity by reducing him to his transactions.

The Marxists and libertarians share something else. Both are a response to the individualism of John Locke. If God holds dominion over the world because he created it, and man was made in God’s image, then it naturally flows that man holds dominion over that which he created. You own you and everything you make because who you are is the product of your labor. This is the bedrock of Western liberalism. We are naturally free because we own ourselves.

Marx saw capitalist economic relations as the source of exploitation, which he defined as men compelled to labor for others. Contrary to popular legend, Marx was not opposed to capitalism, a term he popularized. He saw capitalism as a necessary transition phase to socialism. Eventually, the number of people controlling capital, thus compelling labor, would shrink to the point where people would overthrow them and restore their rights to their own labor.

Libertarianism makes a similar argument. Instead of the holders of capital compelling labor, it is the state. You will note they always avoid discussing who actually owns the state, but instead focus on how the state compels your labor. They tax your labor and force you to so that which you otherwise not do. It is only when the state is eliminated will you be free, because then you will once again own your labor. They land in the same utopia as the Marxist, just by a different road.

It is not hard to see why libertarians despise culture as much as the enemies of Western civilization despise it. Culture defines who decides. The culture of a people defines who makes the final decisions. The answer is always confined to people who are of the people. How those people are selected and by what right they make their decisions on behalf of the people is within that context. Both Marxists and libertarians hate this idea and always oppose it.

This is the great trick of liberal utopianism. One side explicitly seeks to obliterate natural human relations in order to reach the promised land. The alleged opponent implicitly seeks to obliterate natural human relations but claims to be a defense of those natural relations, which they define as pretty much the same as their opponent’s vision of man in his blessed utopia. In both cases, the goal is a world of pure self-ownership in which man has no debt to anyone but himself.

Whenever the final accounting of Western civilization is done, libertarianism will go down as the greatest hoax in human history. In the name of individual liberty, it commands the followers to build the gas chambers used by their alleged opponents to snuff out the defenders of Western culture. Without out that culture, what is left is a deracinated mass of individuals enslaved to the great ideological state, drugged by cheap consumer goods to avoid contemplating the banality of life.

Thinking About Things

Posted on August 12, 2022 by thezman

The show is a bit slapdash this week since I have been burning the candle at both ends for the last two weeks. Work projects have had me pinned to the workstation from dawn to dusk and beyond. The last week I have been up at six and working well past midnight, so I am running on fumes. There are worse things than being busy, like having no work to do, but there are limits. I need a vacation.

At the start of the Covid panic I noticed an uptick in work requests. It made some sense as the lockdowns threw everything up in the air. We are long past that point in this area and in most areas. Even though lots of people are still working from home, which should be the new normal at this point. Despite a return to normalcy, my workload continues to rise suggesting other forces are at play.

One answer is the accelerating baby boomer retirement. Those old whites are being replaced by people who are differently abled. If you have seen the ads for the Google Career Certificate, you can see the problem. The moaning about the baby boomers always misses an essential point. There are lots of them doing essential work and when they are gone, there is not one to replace them.

Something else I notice is that the people who could be competent either have little interest or they are unprepared. Business has always struggled to find enough good people, but now it is acute. There are people who can do the work, but they do not want to do the work. It is one of the side effects of a transactional society. We cultivated a couple of generations to treat work like a Tinder date.

Whatever the reason, I find myself busier than at any time in my life, so something has to give and this week it is production quality. I literally turned the mic on, started talking, played it back and hit send. Usually, I have a few hours of prep, a couple of hours to record and couple hours to edit. Sadly, I noticed no difference in the audio quality which means I have been wasting time the last few years.

The topic this week is one I will return to when time permits. We really do need a dissident framework through which to interpret the news. The Trump raid is a good example of the need for new tools. We are being hit with a firehose full of government lies, media lies, Trump opportunism and grifter hot takes. The goal for dissident politics is to reach a point where none of this is effective.