This Ain’t It

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“Once you get the morality right there is no need for politics” is an aphorism generally credited to Karl Marx. Once everyone agrees on how we ought to live, then the only thing left to debate is how best to make sure that it happens. In this context, therefore, politics is the fight over how we ought to live, not how we should achieve the end upon which everyone agrees. This also means that the point of politics is to settle the question, once and for all, as to how we ought to live.

Within the radical framework, this makes sense, but within the framework of reality the opposite has been true. For example, in the West, economic policy has been settled, despite any agreement on how we ought to organize our economies. There is plenty of emotive language about pleasing Gaia, racial equity, and other moral claims, but economic policy follows a corporatist path. The economy is run by technocrats in partnership with corporate interests.

Notice at the American political conventions that there is little talk about things like spending, debt, or the general health of the economy. When was the last time a major politician talked about the debt problem? The best you get is some back and forth on inflation or energy prices. There is never any discussion about what is the morally right goal for economic policy. It is not that the issue has been settled, but that no one thinks it is appropriate to discuss it at all.

You see the same with immigration. Everyone agrees that illegal immigration is bad, not because it is immoral, but because it violates the rules of technocracy. We know this because it has the word “illegal” in its name. It is why conservatives want to make all immigration legal. That way, it does not violate the rules. It also pleases the technocrats who manage the economy. It is also why no one asks if any immigration is moral, as such questions are forbidden.

Contrary to what Marx and most radicals believed, the order of settling has not been to first get the morality right and then sort the details. The order of things has been to first create a complex bureaucracy around the issue so that it is impossible to ever talk about the morality of the issue at all. The great trick of managerialism is that it produces a self-referential morality for everything. The answer to what we ought to do is whatever the managers are doing at the moment.

This is why our politics are content free. The Democrats are putting on their show this week, at which they are introducing their “leaders” and platform. They have dancing bears, bearded ladies and all the other things you see at a circus, but the one thing missing is anything resembling policy. Speaker after speaker promises to boo at the bad things and cheer at the good things. It is a litany of emotive jibber-jabber that is so devoid of content it makes Finnegan’s Wake seem pithy.

The sterility of our political rhetoric is often masked by the emotive preening, but once you get past the pointless emotionalism you find nothing but white space. Note that no one ever provides a detailed answer for why they hate Trump. They hate Trump because he is bad or likes bad things, but why do they think he is bad and what is bad about the things he likes? No one knows. What they do know is Trump is bad and therefore his voters are bad. Boo Trump! Boo MAGA!

That gets to why they hate Trump. For good or ill, Trump represents the fundamental question of politics. That is, how should we live? Once you start thinking about how we ought to live, you then must confront the central question at the heart of every human organization and that is, who are we? This terrifies the managerial class who prefer to operate like a miasma that is just accepted as a default. It also terrifies the oligarchs who sit atop our society as an alien ruling class.

It has become popular in certain circles to quote Stafford Beer, who said, “The point of a system is what it does.” The point of managerialism is to smother the basic realities of human organization in mountains of technocracy so that there is no room to ask, “who are we” and “how should we live?” The trouble is, no society can live at all without answering those basic questions. The current crisis lies in the conflict between managerialism and the fundamental reality of human society.

This conflict provides the energy to this strange dialectic in which each turn of the election wheel results in more bizarre options. The arc of our presidential candidates since the end of the Cold War has led to Kamala Harris. Regardless of how you feel about Trump, he should not be leading a global superpower, but he is now the sober-minded option in national politics. In eight years, he went from the outlandish option to the safe option, simply by waiting for the next turn of the wheel.

In all seriousness, if Kamala Harris is the best the system can produce, then it is perfectly reasonable to think that what lies ahead is something worse. How far are we from having a block of wood at the top of the ticket? If we can be made to pretend that biology does not exist, we can be made to believe an inanimate object is the best choice to lead the government. It sounds ridiculous, but the current president is a vegetable and his handpicked replacement is day-drinking prostitute.

In the end, those questions at the heart of every human society are immutable, so they will need to be answered. The answers will have to be reflected in the elites of our society who eventually rule our society. It is unlikely that the answer to “who are we?” is going to be “deracinated strangers.” That means the answer to how we ought to live is not going to be “by the whims of alien oligarchs and their managers.” Whatever the answer, it will come with a broom that sweeps clean.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











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Boozy Brown Tinkerbell

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Anyone who has been part of a failed enterprise or has done a post-mortem on one is familiar with the weird psychology that comes to dominate the leadership of the enterprise as it reaches its final stage. At some point, the people in charge begin to assume their plans to arrest the decline are working as their default position, rather than taking a wait and see approach. A combination of hope and the desire to remain optimistic clouds their view of reality.

This is why the people inside of a failed company are often shocked when the collapse arrives and they are suddenly out of a position. Some people may have noticed that in their small piece of the puzzle things did not look exactly right, but the big bosses maintained a positive outlook, even as they were made aware of the problems. A form of social proof manifests where everyone inside overlooks the problems because management remains optimistic.

The funny thing about this dynamic is that the people at the top are often as shocked as the rank and file when the final collapse arrives. The history books are full of failed banks, for example, scrambling at the last minute to secure additional capital when it should have been clear for months that the bank was toast. The people running Enron had convinced themselves that their shell game could go on much longer if they could just get some additional capital.

Another great example of this is the mortgage crisis. Long before the handful of smart people inside the system realized what was happening, normal people began to wonder how poor people were affording middle-class houses. All of a sudden, the guy riding a leaf blower at your office park is living in your neighborhood. Normal people wondered how the banks could possibly accept the crazy loans at the time. Right up to the last-minute, however. insiders were sure the system was fine.

The mortgage crisis is probably the one to think about as the regime kicks off the biggest gaslighting party in human history. The Democratic convention is something like the lavish parties the mortgage industry threw for itself in Las Vegas in the months leading up to the crash. On the one hand, there are signs of trouble, but on the other hand the party is too much fun to think about those things. The red flags popping up here and there are a reason to party even harder.

One way to look at this gaslighting operation is as the final chapter in a story that started way back in the Trump term. The people chanting “by any means necessary” created a narrative in which Trump was not only defeated, but he, what he represents and who he represents are removed from the narrative. Trump would be in jail, the right-wing extremist MAGA would be on the run and the brown tide would sweep over the lands that produced this threat to our democracy.

The trouble is the narrative collapsed. It is hard for normal people to grasp how terrifying it is to the progressive cult that Trump remains free. They were sure he would be in jail long ago. The fallback to this was that the party would have excluded him due to the lawfare stuff. They were all sure this was inevitable. Like the people running a failing company, they could not bring themselves to see that their schemes were not working, so they just kept pretending they were working.

This explains the unprecedented gaslighting campaign for Harris. Given the choice of accepting reality and creating a fantasy, they have picked the latter. In this fantasy, the boozy Harris goes from a cackling simpleton to a dusky version of Daenerys Targaryen from the Game of Thrones, carried by the masses to her place on the throne. In this version, not only has the wicked orange man finally defeated, but he is also written out of the story altogether.

The excessively online are downing handfuls of black pills this week, as they are the most susceptible to media gaslighting, but reality is not as pliable. The polling in all of the important states has not changed much over the last month. The top issues for the voters are all bad for the regime. It does not help that Harris is sounding like a tanked-up version of Jimmy Carter, proposing wage and price controls, to deal with the inflation problem the regime claims have been fixed.

The regime is now setting up a scenario in which Harris and Walz never take an unscripted question or debate the Trump – Vance ticket. Harris has dropped out of the first debate schedule for the first week of September. There is a good chance that they will pull the plug on all debates and anything that could possibly lead to these two speaking off the cuff. Like the people running the failing bank, the regime has landed on a plan they are so sure will work, so they will pretend it is working.

There is a name for this sort of collective delusion. The Tinker Bell effect describes the idea that something exists because people believe in it. In the fairytale, Tinker Bell is brought back to life by the audience’s belief. This week, the assembled foot soldiers of the progressive cult and the regime toadies are holding hands, telling each other that they believe, as one character after another is brought forth to pretend that the Neverland of the convention is real.

Time will tell if they manage to gaslight this boozy simpleton and her Elmer Fudd sidekick into the White House. Like a failing bank, Americans may prefer the happy talk of their rulers to the reality of their lives. Civilizations in decline often have a series of bizarre rulers at the end. On the other hand, people may decide that a boozy brown Tinkerbell is beyond their ability to suspend disbelief. Regardless, reality remains undefeated, no matter how hard you believe otherwise.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











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Will And Reason

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Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the microprocessor revolution and its discontents, a post about the drama within the chronically online community and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Many of the leading figures of what came to be known as the Human BioDiversity (HBD) movement are reaching the age where they are no longer producing new work, but instead are part of retrospectives of the movement they created. This post in Aporia by Bo Winegard is a good example. It works as both a summary of Murray’s work and a summary of the hereditarian perspective on the human animal. “Hereditarian” is another word used for the biological realist wing of the human sciences.

It is not entirely accurate to call these people a movement as they have had no impact on how Western societies view human organization. If anything, the West has raced in the opposite direction of what should follow from the realities that have come from the human sciences. Since The Bell Curve was published thirty years ago, the blank slate, fanatical egalitarianism and universalism have become so entrenched in elite thinking that dissent is now criminal in many countries.

That is what you are seeing in the UK. The people being sent off to prison for voicing complaints about immigration are not being punished for opposing public policy, but for violating official orthodoxy with regards to the human condition. Across the West, any noticing of difference between groups of humans is blasphemy. Not only would The Bell Curve not get a publisher today, but it is also something of a miracle that it has not been put on the index of banned books, next to The Camp of the Saints.

Therein lies the most important lesson to come from the HBD scene. Facts and reason can never overcome belief. There is no questioning the science with regards to the human condition. It has confirmed thousands of years of observation that nature does not distribute her gifts equally. That is true with regards to individuals and with regards to groups of individuals. The reason you never take the MLK exist is not because you are immoral, but because you are rational.

Rationality is no match for belief, at least when it comes to politics. The promise of a guilt free future has won every battle regarding biology. Of course, it is the echo of Calvin that embedded racial guilt into the Western mind. Facts and reason had no impact on belief before, during or after the Civil War, because the fanatics behind the abolitionist cause were immune to facts and reason. Like all fanatics, they saw only that which confirmed their fanaticism.

The point here is that the defeat of human biodiversity, hereditarianism, biological realism, or whatever term you have for the facts of the human condition, was simply another battle in the long war between belief and reason. One side, the winning side, believes the human condition can be solved because they believe the cause of human conflict lies in the human mind and can therefore be eradicated. The other side has never had an answer to that claim.

Another lesson from the twilight of the human sciences is that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a dead end. What matters in the affairs of man, therefore what matters with regards the human condition, is knowledge that leads men to act either on behalf of that knowledge or in opposition to it. Anything else is at best useless and at worst a reason for opponents to act on the claim that this new knowledge is a threat to the wellbeing of society.

In one of life’s great ironies, the HBD people never understood how their work could be seen as dangerously heretical. For all their knowledge about the mechanics of mankind, they have never understood the will that lies behind human action, preferring to believe what lies behind the motivations of their accusers is just as mechanical and sterile as their own understanding of man. Materialism is a terrible way to understand the why of the human condition.

More important, the HBD people could never shake their civic nationalist priors or even question them in light of their own work. The Bell Curve is the argument against liberal democracy, an argument understood long before the HBD people arrived. Despite the obvious conflict between what the science was telling us and what political science was demanding of us, the HBD people never lost faith in liberalism. They remain convinced it is the only political option.

It is not all bad for the HBD scene. It has, at least for a while, provided a moral authority of sorts for resisting the gathering darkness. There remains an “E pur si muove” mental space for dissidents to gather their thoughts about what is happening. Inside the mental space lies the flicker of hope that reality cannot be swamped by the fantastical reality of the prevailing orthodoxy. The foundation of the dissident cause are the people who accept the reality of the human condition.

In the end, however, it will not be men armed with charts and graphs who shall beat back the forces of darkness but the men who know that society is determined by those who understand it is always who shall overcome whom. If the West is to survive, it will be due to those who will it so and use any means necessary to prevail over those determined to turn out the lights on civilization. The only justification needed will simply be the desire to make it so.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











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Radio Derb August 16 2024

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For those wondering about the transcript, it is located on Derb’s site. I could probably post it here, but I will have to check with Derb. He may want to have people come to his site for the written version. There are free transcription services I could use to put the transcript in the Rumble and Odysee version. I have not used them, but it might be a fun thing to play around with at some point.

Some have asked if this is the start of hosting the work of others and the answer to that is maybe, possibly, we shall see. The new version of this site that creeps toward reality will have the ability to create spaces for others to post their work. A dissident collective like the Daily Kos model could be a good idea or could be a terrible idea, so I am thinking it through very slowly.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 01m01s Instrumentally challenged
  • 05m38s Higher Ed news
  • 13m03s Educrat out
  • 23m21s Afghanistan, the Lesson
  • 31m51s No hiding place in the UK
  • 35m25s Fringe or cringe?
  • 38m54s Fly the DEI&SI skies
  • 40m42s Signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Profile & Reality

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The great gaslighting operation called the Harris campaign is just the latest in this evolution of the public space away from practical reality toward a virtual reality that operates by a new set of rules. The old public space which was constrained by observable facts and agreed upon ends is giving way to a new public space that is controlled by narratives and characters.

This interview of Mike Cernovich by Tucker Carlson is a good example of how the public space has changed. Ten years ago, people would have roared with laughter at the suggestion that Cerno would warrant national attention. He was nothing more than a weird internet character. Of course, Tucker Carlson was not “Tucker” at the time either and no one imagined such a thing was possible.

The character that is now “Tucker” did not ask “Cernovich” about the many past characters he has played online. There were no questions about when Cerno was playing a transvestite-curious man in Southeast Asia. His time as various types of gurus never came up in the conversation. “Tucker” was happy to interview the character “Cernovich” that exists at this moment.

What we see happening is that people are now going back into Plato’s cave, demanding to be strapped to the rocks, so they can enjoy the life of the shadows, but play some part in creating the shadows. Public life is becoming an interactive fictional drama that is disconnected from tangible reality. It is not just a distraction from the reality of life but supplanting that reality.

That is the show this week. Before you strap in, you may want to double up on the brain oil as there are some big brain topics in the show. The links below are worth the time as the philosopher I reference does a good job explaining his take on this subject. He has coined the term “prolificity”, which I like, but I am not entirely sure if it captures the full nature of what is happening to the West.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Introduction
  • The End Of Authenticity
  • Prolificity (Link) (Link)
  • The Break With Reality
  • Emotivism
  • Symbolism
  • Reality Persists

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Baseball

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Watch an American baseball game and the thing you quickly notice, especially if it has been a while since you bothered, is that the game is riddled with interruptions to the point where it feels like more stoppage than gameplay. Baseball was always a leisurely game that evolved for a people who had long attention spans, so it is a poor fit for the modern American with their low IQ’s and high time preference, but it is also made unwatchable by the constant stoppages.

The league has tried to address the problem by speeding up the gameplay with a pitch clock that gives pitchers 30 seconds between at-bats, 15 seconds between pitches with no one on base, and 20 seconds between pitches with runners on base. According to major league baseball, this has resulted in a 24-minute decrease in the total length of the game compared to the 2022 season. The average length of a game is now two hours and 40 minutes.

That is fine, but it does not change the fact that the number of breaks in play has not changed much and is probably a little worse. The reason for the breaks is the specialization in the game. The days of nine guys playing nine guys are long gone, as now teams employ specialists who enter the game at various points, which slows the game play down. Specialization is the result of quantitative revolution that has happened in all sports, but especially baseball.

Baseball used to be a game run by men who wanted to put on a show for fans and build hometown pride. The owners of baseball teams were local rich guys who not only wanted to make money off the game but took some pride in their local community and wanted their team to win. They hired people to run their teams who had played the game and presumably knew what it took to win. Those guys found and developed players who had the skills to play the game.

That started to change with the growth of advanced statistics. Baseball was always a game of numbers, like batting average, earned run average and other measures of a player’s success in his role. Advanced statistics took that a step further and used quantitative measures to predict the impact of players on winning games, based on measures like on-base-percentage and wins above replacement. These new measures not only determine rosters, but they also determine gameplay.

That is why we get so many breaks in the game. After every at bat, both teams basically re-crunch the numbers to determine what they should do next. That may mean pulling the pitcher who has been on a roll to this point or pinch hitting for a guy who has had a monster game thus far. We now have scenarios in which a pitcher is pulled from a game while throwing a no-hitter. The numbers say he has reached his pitch limit, and the reliever has a better chance against the rest of the lineup.

You can see how this works by looking at the roster of the current best team in baseball, the Baltimore Orioles, and the roster of the 1970 Oriole team that went on to win the World Series that year. The first thing you will note is that the 1970 squad used a total of thirty-two players for the entire season. The current year Orioles have already used fifty-four players and will use many more once rosters expand in September. Baseball is now a game of roster rotisserie.

Another thing you will note is that the best starting pitchers on the current team will not reach 200-innings this year. Most likely, they will rest their best pitcher down the stretch so he will finish the regular season with around 175-innings. On the 1970s team, three pitchers pitched 300-innings. More shocking is the fact that the 1970 pitching staff had sixty complete games, while the current staff has none. Last year there were a total of 34 complete games in all of baseball.

The stat guys will tell you that the use of advanced statistics makes for a more competitive game by removing chance from the equation. People with a soul will tell you that the stat guys should be sent to a labor camp. No one watches any sporting event to see the stat guys show off their latest number crunching. Sport is human drama with all of the flaws that come with it. Removing the flaws inevitably removes the humanity from it and you are left with robots playing robots

The reason everyone who was aware in 1988 remembers Kirk Gibson hitting the homerun off Dennis Eckersley in the World Series is because it is the thing every kid who played baseball dreamed of doing. It is a scene every father taking his son to a game hopes they will see.  The aging slugger called in to face off against the game’s best closer in the deciding moment. The old man mustering what little he has left to stroke one last home run to win the game.

If the modern stat head had been in charge, that moment never would have happened because Gibson would not be on the team, much less sent up to bat. Tommy Lasorda would not have been in the dugout to make the call. Instead, the robot manager would have sent up a specialist whose only role was to face Eckersley. Maybe the Dodgers win anyway, but no one would remember it because there would be no reason to remember what in the end was a statistical anomaly.

The reason that any of this matters is that baseball is a microcosm of American life in that society, like baseball, is now run by people who have no appreciation for the things that make life worth living. Instead, they view people as mere economic units or perhaps items to manipulate in the transactional world of managerialism. Society has been drained of its authenticity and in its place is the drab materialism in the meat space and the superficial drama of the virtual space.

The answer to fixing baseball and other sports is to open the windows of the skyboxes where the stat guys run the game and throw them out of those windows. Let the players play the fans enjoy the human drama. Similarly, the answer to what ails the modern world is to throw the managers off the roof of their offices and let people go back to figuring out how to live. The results may not make for an impressive pivot table, but no one should live inside a pivot table anyway.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











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An Old Story

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For a little over a year, it has been clear to people who have followed the war in Ukraine that there is no winning scenario for Ukraine. The sanctions on Russia failed to change the Russian approach to the war. The hundreds of billions in NATO weapons, planning and support were not enough to beat back the Russian army. The great Ukraine offensive of 2023 was a stunning failure that eliminated any possibility of the Ukraine army holding the line in the Donbass.

The question has been how does the war end. For Ukraine, the best outcome is a negotiated settlement that includes a change in Ukrainian attitudes. Maybe NATO abandons the project and the Russians install new leaders. Maybe Zelensky figures out that he is about to be cut loose and cuts a deal with the Russians. Maybe Washington, hoping to save face, backs Zelensky in making a deal with the Russians. No matter how, the best option for Ukraine was a negotiated settlement.

That appears to be off the table now that the Ukrainians have launched this crazy incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. It appears that the plan was to reach the nuclear power plant in Kursk and then use it as blackmail. The Ukrainians would not just demand negotiations but require a Russian withdrawal as a condition for negotiations or they would blow up the nuclear power plant. As ridiculous as that sounds, the other explanations for this gambit are even nuttier.

Of course, this plan sounds like it is from a poorly made Hollywood action thriller, rather than a sober-minded military operation. The reason for that is the people running Ukraine are actors. For going on three years now they have spent far more time crafting creative narratives about the war than thinking soberly about how they can avoid being wiped off the map. For people who imagine reality is just a clever written story, this operation sounded brilliant.

The supreme role of narrative for Western political elites is evident in how they have reacted to this new production. It seems they had no part in its construction, or at least they were not told about it in advance, so they were unprepared to play their role in selling this as the next great event in the drama. Western media was not provided with a script, so they had no idea what to say. Eventually they settled on this being bad for Putin’s narrative, a thing that does not exist.

It is another example of the total lack of realism in our political class. The Ukraine war is an unnecessary venture for everyone involved except the Russians. A thousand years of history says they will not allow Ukraine to fall into the Western orbit. Otherwise, everyone else involved has practical reasons for not having this war, but the good feelings that come from good narratives have been too much to resist. The result is an unfolding catastrophe for the West.

This total lack of realism in the West seems to have finally reached an end point with the Russians after this latest caper. In a recent press conference, Putin said that it is now impossible to deal with Ukrainian leadership. While not closing the door to negotiations completely, he has now ruled out dealing with Zelensky. Other Russian officials are floating the idea of regime change in Kiev as a necessary precondition for any negotiated settlement to the war.

What that means is that the eventual collapse of the Ukrainian army, which is now accelerating due to the nutty decisions made by Kiev, will be followed by a political collapse, by force if necessary. In other words, if the West deciders it is time to make a deal with the Russians, that deal starts by cutting Zelensky loose, which in the context of Ukrainian politics means the whole crew must go. They will not go voluntarily, so it means the end game includes a civil war in Western Ukraine.

The Ukraine war is a microcosm of what is happening in the West. Every decision is based only in the moment without any thought of what comes next. Things are done voluntarily that should have been avoided, not because they are part of a larger strategy but because they fit the current narrative. It is as if once the story is created, the writers are sucked into it, losing all control of the plot. All they can do is respond as if they are now unwitting characters in the story.

This is harmless in the low-stakes world of parlor games in which members of the political class evolve, but in the practical world, it is a disaster. It leads to a scenario in which no one knows if the current president is alive or dead. No one seems to care because his character has been written out of the story. Who is actually making decisions is a mystery. It is the dynamic that created the condition for war in Ukraine and is now pushing it towards catastrophe.

On the one hand, it certainly seems like the West is now governed by emotion and symbolism, rather than practical considerations. The Kamala Harris campaign can be boiled down to a promise of feel goods. The entire production is a collection of symbolic shapes and sounds to transmit the simple idea that it feels good or that the alternative will make you feel bad. To his credit, Trump is offering tangible things that have some connection to practical reality.

The lesson of the Ukraine war, however, is that reality still matters. All the feel-good stories and symbols has not changed the fact that the Russian army is chewing up the Ukrainian army. The clever narratives cannot conceal the massive cemeteries full of dead Ukrainian soldiers. The question that arises from this war is whether Western elites will learn that the clever stories by the managerial class will not keep them from the gallows if things start to crumble.

The great lesson of history is that there is always a price to be paid for failed leadership and that price is paid by the people, then their rulers. Joseph de Maistre famously said that the people get the government they deserve. He was wrong. The lesson of the French Revolution is that the ruling elite gets the people they deserve. A ruling class that is concerned more with clever narratives than practical reality will face a people, who out of practical necessity, decide they must get a new ruling elite.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











.

Escape From Reality

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The great fear as the internet spread across American society was that things in this virtual world would somehow cross over into the real world. Usually this meant that the machines would get super intelligent and take over society. This is the underlying theme of movies like The Terminator. Alternatively, a being from inside the internet would make the jump into the meat space. This is the plot for the film Virtuosity. A virtual serial killer gets loose in the real world and does his worst.

Nothing like that has come to pass, but something worse may be happening and that is reality is being sucked into the virtual world. More accurately, people are spending so much time online that the virtual world is supplanting reality for them. We are seeing this with the Harris campaign, which is probably the most intensely online political program we have every experienced. Everything about it is based on winning the internet that day, which means it operates by the rules of the internet.

The most obvious example is how the Kamala Harris character has been reimagined by her developers into something disconnected from reality. From the presentation, one would never know she has been Vice President for the last four years or that she has spent those years arguing for the administration’s positions. Like a discarded scene from a video game, all of that is gone now. In its place is the new character whose only connection to the prior character is the name.

The disconnectedness extends to her campaign and its supporters. Trump has been stumping on the idea of exempting tips from income taxes. Whatever the merits of the idea, it is a clever way to appeal to young people. The other day, the Harris character announced its plan to not tax tips, as if it were something totally new that had never been mentioned by anyone. Miraculously, the people playing the Harris character online responded as if it was a total novel idea.

Of course, this being the age of mendacity, the new Harris gameplay comes with manufactured crowds online that cheer for it. There are fake polls that claim this character is now the most popular character in the game. It is destroying all of the orange baddies in this expansion pack. We know this because every day the lie machine we call mass media fills the game space with stories about how Trump is raging in his bunker about the greatness of the Harris character.

This upgraded version of Kamala Harris is now equipment with a lacky to do the things lackies do for the hero. Like the new Kamala Harris, the character called Tim Walz bears little resemblance to the old version. Instead of being a bloviating windbag who bores people with his imaginary tales of heroism in the military, this version is a folksy good old boy who just happens to hold all of the same opinions as the developers who created his character for the game.

What we are experiencing right now is a political campaign that exists only in the virtual world of the highly online. If you are not playing in this part of the game or you live in reality, you may not know about any of this. Maybe one of your favorite “influencers” has gone into panic mode for some reason and that got your attention. Otherwise, if you are not in this part of the game, none of this is real to you. The main reason for that is that nothing about this campaign is real thus far.

This is why the people most affected by this new release are the self-styled influencers who live entirely online. These people spend all day, every day, looking for something they can front-run in order to maintain the illusion that they are not just playing the game, but they are controlling it. The reason they are called influencers is not that they influence anyone, but that they are the most easily influenced. The right-wing influencer crowd cannot stop playing the new Harris character.

The highly online, of course, will argue that this is reality, and it is now changing the meat space, but how would they know? One of the weird aspects of virtual reality is that it is self-affirming to the people who have been sucked into it. For many of them, Twitter is reality and people outside of it do not exist. This is why influencers banned from Twitter were so desperate to get back on the platform. Having your account suspended is what passes for Hell in the virtual world.

That still leaves the question as to whether this is working. More people get their news from online sources than from legacy sources, so if you win the internet then it suggests you can influence people. On the other hand, the internet is a big place and people gravitate to that which confirms the opinions. One reason the undecided voter is a thing of the past is everyone now has an online tribe. Alternatively, they have a cable chat show they watch every night for their opinions.

The highly online like saying that arguing with a boomer is arguing with the television because all of their opinions come from television. Ironically, arguing with the highly online is arguing with the internet. The people playing the Nick Fuentes character right now have no ideas of their own. They have the ideas of the other players in the Nick Fuentes game space. It turns out that right-wing zoomers are just like the right-wing boomers they criticize. They just have a different god.

That is what will be the interesting thing about the Harris game. Eventually, the Harris character will have to step outside the curated world of gameplay and talk to flesh and blood humans, as well as debate Trump. As much as the developers would like to believe the reality they have created has supplanted the old reality, the test of this will be their character leaving the game space for the meat space. The same holds for the lackey with his Elmer Fudd costume and reimagined backstory.

What it will ultimately come down to is whether the voters will prefer the game space reality to the meat space reality. Will they believe the upgraded Harris character is preferable to the meat space Harris and continue to play the game character as a form of escapism or will they experience the meat space version and get turned off by the game itself? That is the central question of this election. This is the first election where people are asked to choose reality versus escapism.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











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The Haunted Present

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Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about land management in Sweden, a post about the drama within the macramé community and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

At the dawn of the information age, it was assumed that everyone having the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips would unleash human potential in ways that had never been imagined. Instead of vast swaths of information being cloistered in the books of specialists, it would be available to everyone. The democratization of information would not only raise all of humanity but unleash the potential of people who would otherwise be denied access to the information.

A couple generations into it and this has clearly not been the case. Creative output, for example, has grounded to a halt. New movies and television shows are, at best, technically superior, but creatively inferior, remakes of past works. The traditional arts, like painting and sculpture, have been made ridiculous in an attempt to find novelty rather than genuine cultural expression. The creative side of Western culture has reached a nadir as technology has reached its zenith.

The public space, of course, has become so narrow that comparisons to the Soviet era are becoming trite. In the UK, men are being sent to dungeons for the crime of mentioning that foreigners are murdering British school children. In the United States, the secret police is everywhere looking for dissidents to harass. The great democratization of information and the public square has led to a dark age of authoritarian violence and suppression.

Alexander Duggan once said that the end of the Cold War was a catastrophe for the world, by which everyone assumed he meant the Russian world. That was certainly true, as the Russian world had evolved to depend on the Cold War as both a justification for the Soviet system but also the framework in which people lived. Once the Cold War ended, the moral framework collapsed along with the political system, and the result was a generation of chaos.

Something similar may be happening with the flood of data that has washed over the Western world via the internet. We now live in a world where it is plain to see that every creative thing one can imagine has been done and most likely done better than anything that could be done today. Why paint portraits when the greatest portrait painters who ever lived, have already lived? Why sculpt when a machine with unlimited information can produce better results?

No one thinks too much about how the technological revolution must change the way we organize ourselves, because we are awash in the history of the twentieth century where all of the political ideologies were resolved, and liberal democracy was declared the winner. The end of history has left us with nothing but history. The information age has not just made the past accessible, but it has also tuned the past into a great flood that washes over every aspect of the modern age.

The curse of information is most evident in the public square where it is easy to see, or at least it seems that way, that every idea worth discussing has been raised, debated, and judged in the past? More important, every idea that is viewed as dangerous can be compared to something from that past that has been condemned. The reason that everyone with questions is called Hitler and even the slightest push back is fascism is that the information age makes such comparison simple.

Why would a young political activist spend time thinking critically about the world as it is when he can more easily look up ideas from the past and then repackage them for the present age? The reason our politics feels like a technically superior reboot of prior politics is that all of the participants are rooting around in the past for inspiration, rather than thinking of something new. Instead of standing on the shoulders of the past, everyone now trembles in its shadow.

The promise of the internet was that it would unlock the doors to the future, but instead it has walled them off by opening every door to the past. It is simply too easy to find what you need from the stock of existing knowledge than to take a step back and think about what you are seeing. The information age has turned the intellectual space into an endless museum in which we are all trapped, forced into playing roles from the past, regardless of their applicability to the present.

This may explain the woke business. The reason people are creating these bizarre and logically impossible roles for themselves, things like transgenderism, for example, is as a way to escape the conformity of the present. On the one hand we live in a world where you are told to be an authentic individual, but the information age shows that every human character has already existed. The solution is to break free from reason itself in order to create new roles to play.

Another piece of this is the American civic religion of progressivism, which treats the past like an angry mob chasing after the righteous. The information age has turned the past into a deadly fog that has descended onto society. The only solution to this is to destroy reality itself since the past is what shapes present reality. The war on biology, reason, truth, and empiricism is a war on the fabric of reality that defines the present and that which makes the past possible, our minds.

In the final analysis, the information age, especially the internet, may turn out to be a terrible curse, rather than a liberating force. For most of human history, the past was of little use, other than the lessons of the past. These were contained in stories and songs, rather than in detailed accounts of the events and participants. The point of the past, in this context, was to inspire, rather than constrain. Our detailed knowledge of the past, in contrast, is a psychological prison.

Ironically, this is not new either. James Joyce wrote about how the Irish were prisoners of their own struggle. The fictional South created by William Faulkner was also haunted by the past. The solution in both cases was the abnegation of that present reality in order to close the door to what created it. The Ireland of Joyce no longer exists, and the South of Faulkner exists only as a bogeyman for the progressive. The solution to the past haunting the present was to abandon it entirely.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at

sa***@mi*********************.com











.

Radio Derb August 9 2024

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When VDare went down for good, I offered to host Radio Derb here and set it up on the various platforms where people listen to podcasts. Going forward you will find the legendary John Derbyshire’s weekly podcast posted here on Saturday, as well as on Rumble, Odysee and the various podcast networks. It will take a few days for them to approve the new host, so I will post links when it happens.

For now, if you want to get the show in your favorite podcast app, you can use the RSS feed I have set up off the Spreaker site. Link below. Just paste it into the app following their instructions and you are good to go. Probably by the end of the week it will be on all of the apps, and you can then find it through their search tool. It should also be on Amazon and Spotify by the end of the week.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00m46s: The Walz Conundrum: Woke, but not a China gull
  • 06m46s: Britain’s funeral pyre flares up: Disorders will get worse
  • 15m16s: Totalitarian Legalism: Gorsuch’s new book on our over-lawyered society
  • 21m18s: The Law’s Delay: The 9/11 plotters plea deal done, then undone
  • 26m30s: Lost in Space: Our two astronauts can’t get home
  • 28m22s: What’s Up in Bangladesh? Can we please mind our own business?
  • 30m55s: Watergate Plus 50: Remembering Nixon Derangement Syndrome
  • 32m58s: Signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee