The Traitors Among Us

In case you hadn't realized....

2011-06-27T09:34:00.000-07:00

I moved this blog over to WordPress, because I have problems creating links and posting videos in Blogger. It's now at deconstructingleftism.wordpress.com. I hope to see you there.

OneSTDV: Reflections on Carter Strange Attack and the N-Word

2011-06-27T09:33:00.000-07:00

OneSTDV: Reflections on Carter Strange Attack and the N-Word: "http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/06/hordes_of_unruly_teens_shut_do.html"

Conservatives and constitutionalism

2010-06-10T20:43:00.000-07:00

Conservatives love to say we have to get back to the Constitution and all our problems will be solved. The Constitution is instead the cause of most of our problems.

Consider, if you will, the Dred Scott decision. The North didn't want slavery there or expanded to the West but didn't really care that it continued in the South. The problem with slaves is that they are a naturally increasing asset- being living creatures they produce offspring, which is a great way of increasing your wealth, but the resulting persons must be put to work somehow, somewhere- you can establish new plantations and have them work there, or you can sell them to an entrepreneurial planter who will establish a new plantation and put them to work.

The land devoted to cultivation under slavery must increase with the slave population. A slave you can't work still must be fed and will quickly destroy your profits.

The South then wanted to open Western lands to slave cultivation. The Northerners wanted to expand their own economic system and culture into this area, based on owner family farming.

The long, ugly, and angry story of all this eventually came to a legal and constitutional end. With the Civil War, you say? No, not at all. The Dred Scott decision made it a final decision, of the unappealable law of the land, that slavery would be established in the Western territories.

Slavery is, you see, "constitutional." The concept of the Supreme Court as the final and unquestionable authority on the law of the land had been established for over 50 years, by of course John Marshall in Marbury vs. Madison.

I looked up John Marshall and was a bit surprised, although I should not have been, to find he was very much the product of English feudalism. His father, and he after him, were clients of Lord Fairfax, who functioned as an English lord in the Virginia colony. John Marshall is a great hero of liberals; he and his enthronement of judicial review are one of the great stories of liberalism taught in American schools.

The North was then placed in a very difficult position. It was widely expected- not unreasonably- that Roger Taney would soon declare slavery to be constitutional in every state. Even its expansion in the West would destroy the dream of New England, the Midwest, and the old Northwest- a nation of freeholders. Such a nation didn't exist anywhere at that time.

Stephen Douglas and the northern Democrats tried to downplay this- they said slavery couldn't be successfully established against the will of the people if the people refused to establish or enforce laws for its maintenance. The alternative was of course worse, and what was going on in Kansas- Southern vigilantes coming in to force slavery on the population.

The Civil War was, then, as the Southerners of the time correctly perceived, a revolt against and for purposes of overthrowing the Constitution. The love affair that liberals have with the Constitution, judicial review and an activist federal judiciary only dates to about the 40's, by which time they had taken over the academic culture and thus the judicial culture.

The bottom line is the Constitution means, and says, whatever the people who run things want it to mean and say. The idea that we don't currently live under a Constitutional regime and if judges would only apply the Constitution we would be free is outdated. Was it true at some time in the past? Not really. Roger Taney was no socialist- he was one of the worst human beings ever to live, and certainly the worst who was not a communist, but he was a very respected legal scholar and a traditional man of property. John Marshall might be thought of as a Roman patrician- a man who believed in the law, as long as it kept the people in power in power.

O, Canada!

2010-06-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

I made a short visit to Canada. There is plenty bad said about Canada, all of it true- the snide self-satisfaction of Canadians, the lack of free speech, the crappy government medical care- but all the same it's a nice place. Clean and friendly.

In all the talk of the worldwide fiscal meltdown it's sometimes mentioned Canada had trouble in the 90's and made significant cuts in spending. This is always spun in a liberal way- a liberal government is more trusted to make cuts- but whatever the case it makes it unique among Western social democracies.

Canada is like the US in that it never had the social cataclysms of the 20th century involving communism and nazism, and didn't develop a large welfare system to dampen any possibility of revolution from the left or right. As a British colony it was more comfortable with private property and free markets. It never had a lot of industry and avoided the labor unrest and associated tendency toward socializing the economy.

But I think that if there is one big advantage that Canada has it is that it's substantially white. The east Asian immigrants are middle class. The Islamic immigrants are middle class, certainly hostile to their host but without the intensity of the lower class Moslems in Europe.

Canada still doesn't have and probably won't have massive Third World immigration and this will keep it in much better shape than the US, Europe, and Australia- New Zealand also should remain white. If the cold keeps out the riffraff, maybe it's worth getting the Carhartts.

Islamic Rage Fat Chick!

2010-06-02T08:44:00.001-07:00

Elmer Fudd And My New Mnemonic Of Politics

2010-05-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

Guy White (a Jewish HBD blogger, guywhite.wordpress.com) takes a shot at Charles Schumer-

"I hate Schumer. His ideology is everything I am opposed to. (Incidentally, he agrees more than he disagrees with neo-Nazis: opposes free trade and free market, supports abortion.)"

http://guywhite.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/schumer-set-to-become-majority-leader

This of course just illustrates the parallels between white socialists and- what do I want to call them? Regular socialists? Socialists historically classified under that label? Left socialists seems best, since that is their place on the traditional political taxonomy.

So we have white socialists and left socialists. White and left. Which sounds like right and left, as said by Elmer Fudd! Perfectly appropriate, because most of what is called "right" in our day to day political discussion is actually just white socialism.

To keep your head clear when thinking about politics, remember Elmer Fudd. For "right and left" immediately substitute "white and left" and see if that isn't more accurate. Usually it will be.

Philadelphia Phil

2010-05-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

Mangan has an interesting quote on his blog-

"I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one's opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us." - Lichtenberg

Herr Lichtenberg was a bit of a cynic, although undeniably a realistic one. I can't even muster his reduced level of hope. Not only can't we convince our adversaries, we can hardly convince our friends. I would like to find a way to alter the system; I will settle for some useful analysis of it, so that some form of alteration may become apparent later.

And still we must argue, for the reasons Lichtenberg stated. The system works more than anyway else by getting people to shut up. There can be no other explanation for people who offer so many insults and so few arguments. And the system is remarkably effective at this. On some subjects, such as race and public affirmation of homosexuality, they have been so effective they can mostly let the subject drop, with only the occasional maintenance "SHUT THE FUCK UP!" On others, like the current criticism of the Obama administration, more aggressive measures must be taken.

Essentially the degree to which they feel they have matters in hand is directly proportionate to the frequency and hysteria with which they demand that people "SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

It's important to know they don't have everybody intimidated. Irritating them keeps them off balance and absorbs some of their resources, although their resources are almost unlimited. And it gives the silent a little bit of strength, to know they are not alone, if only to use the "n" word in a conversation with a friend or vote Republican.

Philadelphia Phil is a character in a movie titled "Big Fan", directed by the guy who wrote "The Wrestler" and featuring comedian Patton Oswalt as an obsessive New York Giants fan who calls into a sports talk show every night to argue the virtues of his team. Phil is a Philadelphia Eagles fan who calls into the same show for no other reason than to provoke and annoy Giants fans. He succeeds in getting under the man's skin, a little too well as it turns out. But there is something to be said for just pissing people off.

Again- There Is No Such Thing As "White People"

2010-05-26T15:31:00.000-07:00

I came across this Moldbug classic in Mangan's current post, and read it again-

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-i-am-not-white-nationalist.html

Usually Moldbug steps back too far and loses a certain amount of perspective from this. Here he misses something, simply out of lack of familiarity, although I'm the only person who really recognizes this.

His taxonomy of white people recognizes three groups- Brahmins (the master culture, as I call it, that runs the system), Optimates (the old elite) and Vaisyas, or what is usually thought of as traditionalist whites of the middle and working classes.

What he doesn't see is that Vaisyas are further divided, into at least two groups, possibly three or more.

More than one VDare contributor would say, that because my ancestors come from Scandanavia and western Ireland, rather than Great Britain, including the English-occupied northern part of Ireland, I am not a real American. The Old Americans can be thought of as being English, Scottish, Dutch, and some Germans. Of all these groups only the Scots, or the abominably termed "Scotch-Irish" of the highland South are not close to the establishment- and not even all of them as I'll point out.

So the primary group of American nationalists- the term "white nationalist" is too perjorative, and really applies to different groups- are what I'll call the Highlanders. I knew a lot of these people in the military. I'll be honest that from a social standpoint I didn't much care for them, and truthfully they didn't much care for me either. If I was going to engage in a healthy, manly, improving activity such as slicing up Communists, I would likely enjoy myself more in the company of a Spaniard or a German, cultures with real records of slicing and dicing. The Scots haven't done anything in the world other than as stooges of the English.

An important element of American nationalism is overseas intervention. As Patton said, all real Americans love to fight. And a real American doesn't need too much justification for kicking somebody's ass, any more than he needs an excuse to ride a motorcycle on a sunny day. Some things are their own rewards. The Highlanders however reject this. They think we are no better than what ever brown people we are currently roughing up and have no right to tell them what to do. That's as weak as an alcohol-free fraternity.

The Highlanders are also rather attached to the system through white socialism. I read years ago about a black man killed in a white area in Vidor, Texas. The white area was a public housing complex inhabited only by white people; the area apparently had public housing for blacks but this man was desegregating the white housing. Now, isn't public housing for white people just retarded? I mean, just by living in public housing you cease to be white. A poor white person might live in a trailer or a shack, he might sleep under a bridge or in a refrigerator box, but he would not live in public housing without losing his status as a white person. But the New Deal is full of stuff for people like this. Highlanders would like socialism for whites only but the only way to get it is to make a deal including minorities so they do it.

We see an unbridgeable gap between these people and the dreaded "neoconservatives", which has somehow come to be applied to mainstream conservatives of the Reagan-Goldwater variety.

So looking at Moldbug's Vaisyas, we see further rifts, maybe deeper than even the others. But when has it not been so? Why didn't the Gauls or Germans unite against the Romans? Because then there were no Gauls or Germans. They thought of themselves by their own tribes, not by generalized terms applied later by historians.

Groan (again) I Knew This Would Happen

2010-05-24T11:14:00.000-07:00

We have recently witnessed the spitting and roasting of Rand Paul for his timid, qualified disagreements with some aspects of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He has quickly backed off those, and gone silent, but of course he's still a racist! RACIST!

Nonetheless the left finds things to cheer about with Rand Paul, specifically his foreign policy and defense ideas:

http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/203286/can-rand-paul-revive-conservative-foreign-policy

Again we find the far "right" and the left sitting together under the apple tree, holding hands and gazing deeply into each other's eyes.

Draw Muhammad Day!

2010-05-20T17:35:00.000-07:00

I'm too lazy to actually draw anything, but if I did it would be this, courtesy of "In Mala Fide" and Ferdinand Bardamu.

The SWPL And Why He Matters

2010-05-18T16:43:00.000-07:00

The HBDers and paleocons have adopted the acronym "SWPL" as a noun. Pronounced, I assume, as "swipple" it originates with the Christian Lander blog "Stuff White People Like" at http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.

The affection that a certain type of white person has for expensive coffee, sushi, foreign travel, living by the water, or Asian girls is not what draws their attention, but rather the almost universal adherence among these folks for the kind of holier-than-thou progressive politics long espoused on NPR and epitomized by Obama. The HBDers/PCers, led by Steve Sailer, identify the status aspect of progressive politics and its importance to these people. I think they make a critical mistake however- they mention it as a minor feature, while I think it is one of the cornerstones of the system.

Where do our values come from? Why do we think things are important? Since this is a status issue, the value held must be one held by people of high status. Who is of high status? That obviously changes over time, but the change we are concerned about dates to the early 19th century. In what is called the Victorian era, power in English society moved from the landed gentry to merchants, bankers and manufacturers, who were Calvinists and necessarily had different social mores.

When we think of a "gentleman" we think of a courteous, restrained person who treats others well. In reality a gentleman is no such thing. I read somewhere the literal definition of the word was a man who was not a nobleman but related to one, however distantly. More practically it was a man who derived income from agricultural rents and did not work. Such a man, before the era we speak of, could cavort with prostitutes, drink heavily, assault persons of lower social status, and generally make a complete ass of himself. His status came from his family and assets and not his behavior.

If your ability to make money depends on your acceptance by others, particularly those of a conservative religious community, you have no such freedom. You will be at pains to avoid offending people and be thought well of. As this class of people multiplied and gained power, this type of behavior came to be seen as the way people should concuct themselves.

So not offending people is an important matter for the upper middle class of today. To be offensive, in the manner that these people define it, is a matter of social life or death.

In this way liberal policies become matters of simple decency, the way any person with a conscience would conduct themselves. Racism is a matter of offending black people, of making them feel bad; one must not exclude them, criticize them, or say anything bad about them, because it is mean. Same thing with homosexuals; do not criticize them or say anything bad about them, or even imply their behavior is not completely normal and healthy, or other than to be celebrated.

Income transfer policy is a little different but with the same basic idea. Transfers are a simple matter of human decency to those less fortunate, and to question them is cruel and heartless.

In a "free" society people ought not to be too dependent on what others think or too concerned, but actually we have the exact opposite. People are terribly afraid to be portrayed as outside the group or outside the norm, and in any case where leftists can establish the frame in this way they drag along the amorphous middle that looks for comfort and consensus over all else.

You have to either be the right sort of person, or vote for the right sort of person; this explains the absolute horror with which Sarah Palin is received, because middle-middle class people and below are not to participate beyond voting or perhaps precinct work.

If you think Victorianism is relatively marginal to the American experience, consider the very Victorian nature of modern Irish Catholicism, even its Calvinistic nature. Or if you won't or haven't, I will. My mother came from the kind of Irish Catholic family that was desperate to prove they were just as good as the Protestants; the intense social control established by the Church after the famine was largely a matter of bringing in Victorian mores.

Many things can be thought, but can't be said; but our world is based on the things that can be said. Humans are social animals and if you can make something socially painful it will recede to the margins.

Stepping Back Far Enough To Take Aim

2010-05-17T19:55:00.000-07:00

RS McCain takes me to task for defeatism in my comment at The Other McCain-

http://theothermccain.com/2010/05/16/fun-light-hearted-and-accessible-is-ok-but-how-about-winning-elections/#comments

Mr. McCain is a few years older than me, I think, but he has only been a conservative since the early 90's. He was a yellow dog Southern Democrat- a white socialist- and then got into the von Mises and other crap and saw the light.

I on the other hand have been a sick, twisted right-wing fanatic since my earliest memory. I cried when Ronald Reagan lost the nomination in '76. I have watched, participated and cheered the modern conservative movement for all these decades. If I'm disillusioned it's because I have hoped for conservative change longer and it has been a deeper part of my identity.

McCain may be a conservative, but he has never really swallowed the red pill, or as in my case had it forced down his throat many times. Because his perspective is shallower he has not seen the profound failure of this movement and still thinks that politics, as we know it, is the solution to politics.

You can't fix something if you don't know what is wrong and don't know how to fix it. In auto mechanics there is something called "parts changing." There is a problem; a solution is guessed. A part is purchased and installed. The problem continues. A part has been changed, but nothing has been accomplished.

Conservatives have long thought that by obtaining a Republican president, House and Senate they would have all the parts changed to fix things. This happened and the change did not occur. The offices have reverted to Democratic control and it is now believed electing Republicans will help. But if it didn't work then why would it work now?

It won't work because real power does not lie in those places. Moldbug explains where power does lie, but does not offer a solution as to what can be done, other than patiently waiting for the system to collapse. That may be the only thing to do; I would still like to see what else might work. For those who have portable capital or skills the collapse of the West might be avoided by going elsewhere; but most people can't do that, and those that can shouldn't have to.

What doesn't work? Some things-

-Constitutionalism. Conservatives love the idea that we just need to follow the Constitution. But exactly the opposite is true. To adhere to the rule of the Constitution is to submit to the rule of judges who decide what it means, which is exactly what we have now.

-Color blind rule- part of constitutionalism, but an issue in and of itself. Everybody but white people know we live in a society of competing ethnic interests, and they compete for their own group. Racial and ethnic consciousness are unavoidable.

-Conventional politics- I will not say nothing has been achieved in this area. Thw worst excesses of the 60's have been rolled back. But beyond that a Republican legislature is only a little better than a Democratic legislature.

-Reliance on law and order. Whatever else happens at least they can't kill you in your own home, right? Conservatives don't see that police agencies have gradually been bent to the purposes of the liberal state. I have spent a bit of time in Seattle and the surrounding area. It is a mostly white, wealthy and civilized place. It is also very liberal and this is reflected in the weak and ineffectual police agencies of the region.

Real dissent is harshly punished by social ostracism. I'm nothing more strange and threatening than a Goldwater Republican but it's not for nothing I do this anonymously.

At some point however those who can need to speak up. Right now anything you can say on the record is not worth saying. The system protects itself by making anything that would actually threaten it taboo. Conservative arguments are simply ignored and business goes on as usual.

The Brezhnev Doctrine

2010-04-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

First a couple of news notes-

The latest leftist meme is "epistemic closure" which means those idiot conservatives are unable to cope with reality. Sounds like projection to me, but of course it follows the leftist strategy of ad hominem attack.

Ta-Nehisi Coates reveals he is guilty of an assault on a public school teacher.

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/04/harness-on-our-back/39450/

Well of course the teacher was a sick, filthy, evil racist! Or if black, (which is quite likely) an Uncle Tom or a house n*****. (Google isn't real good about free speech so I'm engaging in the quaint Victorian use of the asterisk.) If you're black and a violent scumbag who can put a few words together you get to be a high-level journalist. How galling it must be for this teacher to see this rotten punk achieve such power and success. But to be a public school teacher, more than any other job working for the NDS, is to choose a life of degradation.

But what do these have to do with the Brezhnev Doctrine? Which for those who don't remember was the position that once Communist a country could never turn back. Brezhnev and his doctrine are long gone as a matter of international affairs but very much alive in democratic socialist domestic politics.

Greece is currently going over the edge financially, which just means the Greek government is unable to handle its spending as a purely internal matter and must get outside help. Of course everything relating to the matter is described in terms of inevitability. The Greek must spend the money, and they must be assisted in doing so. But why? Because the Brezhnev Doctrine has been recruited. Once established, a government program, agency, job position, disbursement, or any other financial expenditure becomes permananent, not to be ended or even seriously questioned.

One of the authors on the Soviets- I'm pretty sure it was Viktor Suvorov, but it might have been Vladimir Bukovsky- wrote about the closing of the Ministry of Power Station Construction- the beautiful, well-appointed offices, once full of bureaucrats and now emptied of them and most of the fine furniture. "And yet" he wrote, "power stations went right along being constructed."

Indeed they did. Is it possible- I know this is crazy, but bear with me- that the Ministry of Power Station Construction was not really formed to build power stations? Because it was not necessary for that purpose? That it was formed to provide jobs for the connected? And that when somebody stopped being connected the MoPSC stopped serving its purpose? That to say that the Ministry provided an absolutely vital service and disaster would result from its closure would be incorrect?

Today not only is the Ministry of Power Station Construction gone, the Soviet Union is gone with it. The NDS and its equivalents are still here, claiming protection under the Brezhnev Doctrine. But for how much longer? In the immortal words of Kansas, "nothing lasts forever, but the earth and sky."

"Hypocrisy!"

2010-04-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

Conservatives have a long list of charges against liberalism, all of which are completely true, and which they have been leveling for years, to absolutely no effect. Why is this?

One of these charges is that of hypocrisy- that liberals say one thing, but personally do another.

What conservatives don't understand is that within the liberal mindset, hypocrisy is not wrong, for liberals. This goes back to the Protestant idea that believing, and only believing, is what makes you a righteous person. He who believes is righteous. By this logic a liberal actually gains the right to be a hypocrite, by virtue of being a liberal.

As I have said before, the master culture is fundamentally Calv inst, so this fits right in. Still, many liberals are Catholics or Jews, these religions might actually be regarded as liberal religions, and they do not proscribe to the belief that believing alone creates righteousness.

It's a little harder for a Catholic or a Jew, but a similar process applies. In these cultures a man might have many bad personal habits, but if he is rich and gives money it will be overlooked. He publicly sets an example, and puts his money where his mouth is, so his behavior can be overlooked. After all who doesn't have faults! We must not judge harshly!

Rich Catholics and Jews get a clear pass. What of the not as prosperous? An upper-middle class person pays a significant amount in tax (at least theoretically) and may work in a "publicly spirited" profession. Any lawyer can consider himself a good person by virtue of that, even if he is not involved in helping the poor in any way. Same with a doctor or any health care worker, even if they are well-paid.

The fact that taxes aren't voluntary, are not charitable contributions, are assiduously avoided by the same people, and are paid by conservatives as well is beside the point. They pay some tax; they believe the tax should be paid; so they are good people.

This helps explain the lack of interest in liberalism among poorer whites. They aren't in revered professions, and they don't pay as much in taxes, so there duty is to obey gratefully and follow worshipfully. A lot of people don't care for this.

Pointing out that liberals are hypocrites is completely pointless and a waste of time for these reasons.

Looking Deeper Into The Way Things Work

2010-03-27T17:22:00.000-07:00

Alternativeright.com is a new paleoconservative site, so it typically will show the intellectual deficiencies of that line of thinking, but I found an interesting article on there-

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/trash/pop-culture-is-important/

Popular culture is used by liberals to brainwash people into believing liberal ideas are moral, good, and cool, and conservative ideas are evil, bad, and totally lame. Obviously everybody knows this but until conservatives can figure out a way to counter this their electoral efforts will be largely in vain.

This article is about pop music, but I see this more strongly in humor. Humor, in the liberal media culture we have, is generally portrayed as a clever outsider, a friend of the underdog, attacking the foolishness and hypocrisy of the powerful. It can be explicitly political, and often is. The earliest really overt example I can think of is the "Laugh In" TV show of the 60's and early 70's; the Smothers Brothers also had a show in this time period which may have been even more political, but I suspect "Laugh In" had more influence because it presented itself as hip entertainment.

We are expected to believe that the anti-war movement, and all its sophisticated, cool, rich and famous supporters represented the "outside", the "disenfranchised" those with "no voice", "students" (who being non-working adults living off the largess of society are obviously unprivileged) and let us not forget the "poor." In reality they represented the Left New Deal (or as Moldbug would put it, the State Department) against the Right New Deal (or as Moldbug would put it the Defense Department.) The Left New Deal has always and everywhere maintained control over the Right New Deal, being more educated, richer, and longer established in the country. To present it as the outside rather than the ultimate inside is preposterous.

The biggest example of a comedian who is a shill for the establishment of this sort is Jon Stewart. Calling him a comedian is of course a stretch; mocking someone is not necessarily funny, and he never is. Still, people fear greatly being mocked, and it's a powerful tool.

If conservatives wanted to "fight the power" (to take a phrase from rappers who are shills for the establishment in exactly the same way) they would use this tool themselves.

When The Elephants Fight, The Ants Get Trampled

2010-03-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

As Moldbug pointed out in some criticism of Auster, a conservative today would have been a liberal in the 50's. In that spirit I would like to review how I see the divisions that have generated over the last 80 years.

The New Deal state essentially wiped out everything before. The old-style conservatism became irrelevant. Even the old-style liberalism of the big city machines was thoroughly transformed, from something controlled by neighborhood politicians who may not have graduated from high school to professionals such as lawyers, bureaucrats and technocrats.

My grasp of American history is not that great, being a graduate (or at least attendee) of American public schools, but I think Thomas Dewey was the last example of an old-style Republican. Famous for prosecuting mobsters, he would have represented the small-town distaste for big-city corruption. Eisenhower was a life-long Army man and as a big cheese in WWII (not to mention a Kansas farm boy) so he would have been a solid member of the New Deal establishment.

By the 50's the New Deal state was an accepted fact of life, and it was only divided into roughly right and left halves. The left half, as we know, was formally allied with the Soviet Union and working for an American version of permanent revolution. The right half accepted that the government now had a much larger role in controlling society, but didn't think this role was unlimited and expected some reasonable balance of power. Ronald Reagan, already advanced in years and semi-retired from acting, was a Democrat and had been all his life; only his disgust with Communist activism in Hollywood caused him to see things were out of hand and limits had to be set.

So we now have a right New Dealer as a leading conservative. The patrician liberal Republican tendency, which wasn't really interested in limiting government, just controlling it themselves, was strong in these times. As much as Richard Nixon was identified with the lower middle-class he was probably closest to this kind of thinking.

And yet another faction arose at this time, a libertarian faction that could still remember when the government didn't control everything, saw how it had used the Depression and WWII to take control, and figured it was time to dismantle it. Considering the fact that both these historical events were long over, it doesn't seem to qualify as ridiculous, but Barry Goldwater was portrayed as a crank and went down in a hail of gunfire. Whatever else you can say about the man at least he died with his boots on, metaphorically.

The struggle we see then beginning in the 60's and continuing to this day is between a group that accepts that the federal government will largely control the economy and involve itself in many aspects of life, and tax significantly to support programs that benefit society at large, but doesn't want it to get too personal or provide a lot of benefits to badly-behaved poor people, and the Popular Front faction of permanent revolution. Almost everybody who is a Republican now would have been a conservative Democrat back in the old days, myself included.

Some of the legislation of the New Deal seems ridiculous today- a large part of the commerce controls were overturned in a Supreme Court case involving the sale of individual live chickens in butcher shops in New York. But the larger principle was conserved- the government can involve itself in anything where some worthy party- a Democratic activist in the form of a liberal lawyer, a member of a minority rights group, a concerned congressman, or some other such person- believes there is a need.

The System accepts no limitation on itself and is slowed only by the need to follow some formal process in establishing its authority- sometimes the passing of legislation, sometimes the decision of some court or panel, sometimes the long process of shaping the minds of the public. It grows slower or faster but it is never reversed or changed, except in odd circumstances. One was welfare reform; the right side of the New Deal had been disgusted with this for 30 years, and in a brief moment of power was able to amend the program. The other was the Reagan Doctrine, a fairly significant departure from the strategy of containment.

As Kansas told us back in the 70's, "nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky." The end of the New Deal State is on the horizon. The current administration has doubled down; their bet is that the economy will recover and they can cut military spending and get things under control before it collapses. But simple arithmetic intrudes; trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see cannot be sustained n any imaginable way.

Anyone preparing for the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 70's would have been thought mad. And yet many must have seen it coming- the people running it were not stupid, indeed they were as they had to be quite cunning. Any Soviet official working overseas used the opportunity to make as much money as possible; much of that money went home, but much must have gone into Swiss bank accounts as well. Maybe the rise of the oligarchy of the FSU shouldn't be such a surprise after all.

And who knows, maybe the same thing is going on in the Obama White House. They also are not stupid, and as the lawyer said in the musical, "That's Chicago."

Thrasymachus on VDare on Auster on Steyn on Frum

2010-03-27T13:17:00.000-07:00

You can look all these people up yourself since links suck in Blogger (and now they suck in WordPress too) but you can see the circular firing squad of today's conservative world.

There is nothing new or interesting or remarkable about Frum's defection. The System regularly peels off weak members of the herd- Frum's site even features a patrician New York congressman, Harris Reid, who became a Democrat in 1972. This usually happens during periods of conservative weakness- there were probably many other examples from the 60's and early 70's. David Brock did it in the 90's, I think because Clinton proved resilient and one can't really be a gay Republican.

Steyn's attitude is thus the most accurate. He is too kind to Frum, I suppose because he is a more relaxed fellow and doesn't see a need to make an enemy. But Frum is not that significant anyway. The backstabbing of Colin Powell and even Peggy Noonan last year was much worse.

Auster wants the opportunity to rip on "neocons" in general and Frum's warmongering. Of course you can see that the paleoconservative objection to the war has essentially the same Calvinist-pacifist snivelling tone that the objection of the left does- "It's none of our business! Who are we to tell them how to live? If they hate us it's because we interfere with them! If we left them alone everything would be fine!"

"Evil! Pure And Simple! From The Eighth Dimension!"

2010-03-19T16:57:00.000-07:00

Fans of "Buckaroo Banzai" will recognize the quote. An almost random link from Andrew Sullivan-

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/03/china-realist.html

Actually AS isn't that evil. He just went around the bend on the gay marriage thing; that whole process is worth looking at sometime. I would like to see if I can get a trackback, as while I mainly do this for personal venting I would love to offend a few people at the same time. Unfortunately links don't work in Blogger so it may not work.

Parallel Logic and Liberalism

2010-03-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

At the end of this Steve Sailer mentions how liberals want two contradictory things- excellent teachers in inner city schools, but without discipline-

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/03/nyt-school-discipline-is-racist.html

Logically, no teacher with other options is going to want to teach in a school where the students are allowed to run rampant. But there you go thinking like a reactionary racist! The two are in no way incompatible!

As Orwell noted, the system requires that its adherents be capable of holding conflicting ideas and sincerely believing in all of them- he said both, but modern liberalism is a little more complicated than the 30's Stalinism he was talking about.

First, liberals couldn't give a shit less if poor black students learn anything academic. The purpose of public school is to provide the people with the right kind of political and social awareness. Math? They have calculators for that. Reading? They get the information they need from TV. However, they can't really admit this, not even to themselves. The system needs a reason even if the reason is bogus.

Along with the concept of catastrophism- liberalism will at some point achieve a sudden critical mass that will in a flash take it from an imperiled political struggle to an unstoppable social phenomenon- liberals also cherish the concept of parallelism- that for liberal projects to work, many factors must be in place, and set in at essentially the same time. This accomplishes several things. One, it is a further excuse for liberals to require many programs and initiatives, which control society and which they control. Two, it provides an ongoing excuse for why the system does not work, and comes nowhere near achieving its stated objectives.

Let's say one day, highly qualified expert teachers- perhaps recruited from suburban districts with some combination of high pay and appeals to the noble mission of teaching the poor- appear in all the slum schools. And, on the same day, discipline is suspended. The liberal prediction? Sunshine and rainbows! The kids want to learn! the kids love to learn! And now with good teachers and the humiliation of being expected to behave removed, they will all go to Harvard!

Of course these two things aren't close to being enough. Is there enough money? There must be an unlimited supply. Is racism a problem? Teachers and staff must receive the most rigorous anti-racism training, because it is always there somewhere. Do students learn better with a good music program? The finest music program must be provided. Ad infinitum.

The Catastrophic Theory Of Liberalism

2010-03-11T15:34:00.000-08:00

I use "catastrophic" in its mathematical sense, a function not with a smooth curve but one that at some point makes a rapid break- like a beam that when loaded past a certain point does not gradually bend, but breaks, catastrophically.

There is an old Dr. Seuss book, made into an animated TV show, called "Horton Hears A Hoo" (spelling not checked.) Horton is an elephant who believes a flower contains a tiny city; the inhabitants of that city must make themselves heard before they are destroyed. They shout and shout, but are not heard. An old man must persuade a small child to make a noise, any noise; he finally does and the shouting of the Hoos breaks through the cloud cover over the city and they are heard.

One of my themes recently has been that leftists are not stupid or crazy; but there is one area in which they have an irrational belief. Leftists believe that there is a certain point of public support at which all resistance to their program will suddenly collapse, the dam will break, and they will permanently remake society in their image.

Hunter S. Thompson describes this feeling in some writing of his, that in the mid 60's leftists felt the old order was washing away, virtually without resistance, and the Age of Aquarias was coming. This probably explains some of the rage and bitterness of the late 60's; and I think it explains the spluttering rage and indignation leftists display now, with the tea parties and the opposition to health care reform that refuses to die. To them, their moment has come, and any continuing resistance is futile and thus even more evil, like a military unit that keeps firing after its defeat is assured.

Remember that Bush II said after he was reelected that he had political capital, and he intended to spend it; he felt he had the strength to put up and pass his agenda. So the attitude is not exactly restricted to conventional liberals, although Bush was not really a conservative and he didn't mean it in the messianic sense that liberals do.

But winning an election, even winning it big, just gets you an office. You still have to convince people to support your specific ideas, rather than just you. Obama went easy on the ideas, which is probably a good choice for an election under those circumstances, but leaves you more work after you get elected.

The victory of leftism has been thousands of boring, often seemingly barely significant initiatives, barely worthwhile to impatient leftists, just barely objectionable to all but doctrinaire conservatives. Big leftist initiatives require an atmosphere of crisis; but there is no health care crisis, for most of the population anyway.

My Issues With Moldbug

2010-03-06T12:04:00.000-08:00

Opposing the system has come to seem more and more pointless to me. I still want to figure out how it works; partly out of morbid curiousity and partly out of a vague hope that if understood, it can be opposed more successfully.

The only person I'm familiar with who has tried to do this is blogger Mencius Moldbug; critiques of the system are common by conservatives but they don't step back far enough or they misdiagnose the problem, as with Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism."

Moldbug is a very smart guy and has made an exhaustive historical study of the phenomenon usually called liberalism. His identification of its original source- the bourgeuois Calvinism of England- I believe is correct. I can't agree with all his conclusions, or all his affinities. Carlyle was a horrible human being. If he was right that popular democracy would stir up a world of trouble, he was wrong that his way was better.

My biggest problem with Moldbug is that he describes Soviet communism as a subset of Anglo-American liberalism, as authorized and initially controlled by it. This is a stretch too far; the progressives of the time liked communism, and they thought it was the right system for low development countries like Russia, and in more recent times for the third world. They thought they could control it; they wanted to contain it, but not so much as to hinder its development in places they thought appropriate for it. Communists sneered at such patronizing attitudes, although they took advantage of them as much as they could.

Moldbug also attributes more power to the members of the bureaucracy than warrants, rather than the legislation and funding that support it. His parents both worked for the federal bureaucracy, so there is some family pride involved; but bureaucrats work in a legal environment and under budget priorities set by Congress (or its staff) and respond to initiatives set higher up- within their own organization, but influenced by other currents in the system. Judges are the real executives of the system; but they only do something when the issue has been decided elsewhere, partly in the "legal" community, partly in academia, and partly in the press. How this works exactly is one of my primary fascinations.

My shortcoming as an intellectual is impatience; I want distilled useful information now. Moldbug is good reading for somebody doing a life sentence. Of course for the kind of information I want, it's distilled nowhere.

How, goddamnit, does the thing work? What is it doing now? How should a man hoping to maintain his sanity cope with it?

Are the people who run the system stupid? Obviously not. Why do they say things that are obviously untrue? They expect stupid people to believe, and less stupid people to go along. Do they know they're lying? Partly. Why don't they just admit what they are doing and how they are running things? It's useful to lie sometimes, necessary to lie others.

Moldbug cover a lot of the why, but the how is pretty much all in Orwell as far as I can tell. There are three volumes containing all his essays published, but I only ever see the third in the bookstore; as cagey as I find Amazon I will have to get the set from them.

What's The Plan?

2010-03-06T11:49:00.001-08:00

The obvious conclusion is that the people running the system and their minions are crazy or really dumb. Or else why would they not be able to see how unsustainable it is? But I have been thinking about this over the last few days and that's not the case.

I remember the howls of protest when Prop. 13 went on the ballot. the public schools, we were assured, would be destroyed. Of course they weren't and today are as well funded as ever but the system lost a big source of sustenance. The New Deal propaganda is that every government program is vital, and the demands of government must come first in all considerations. Opposition to any program is proof of stupidity or bad faith or both.

As far as the people who run the system are concerned, operating a sound, sustainable government is not the issue. Gaining, maintaining, and increasing control over resources is. They understand the threat to their unquestioned control is unusually high right now- which is not saying much, because it's still very low, but their is a real fear among the public of excessive government spending and the consequences.

What they intend to do is bluff and bluster their way through and hope that an economic recovery will come soon and take the pressure off. It's a gamble, but plenty of people are gamblers; the New Deal state has been the strong horse for a long time, and for now it's still a good bet.

The Horror! The Horror!

2010-03-04T14:20:00.000-08:00

Ta-Nehsi Coates, black nationalist/nerd culture blogger at the Atlantic (sort of like Aaron MacGruder without the sense of humor) writes about his experiments with making homemade granola:

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/03/crunchy-lefty/36959/

The concept of making homemade granola passes without comment. Really, I'm not saying anything. Not gonna touch that one.

But seriously, folks, blasting your body with those kinds of carbs is doing it no favors. I was previously banned by him from the Atlantic for saying Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist sympathizer, which isn't much challenged by the actual facts. My comment here was, "Why don't you just eat the sugar directly out of the bag? You'll get the same nutritional value and save yourself a lot of effort." Or something like that, because he deleted it.

But why? Pointing out that the #1 secular saint of liberalism was all gooey for communist insurgency is just rude; not wrong, just rude, and I understand that. But can't the man stand a little trash talking on what he eats? I kid because I love! Actually no, if he died of a heart attack tomorrow I wouldn't really give a crap.

But some things are just wrong. I mean, wrong. I'm not one of those "carbs are evil! EVIL!" people but the human body was not designed for this. You need some carbs for energy but you also need some protein and fat. Have granola at breakfast if you must, but have some eggs and a banana with it. With what this man is eating he may as well have Captain Crunch.

Update- I have not been merely deleted, I have been banned. Again. And I was only trying to help. A white man puts out the hand of help and friendship to a black man, and has it smacked down. Dr. King may have been a pinko, but even he wouldn't have wanted this. Unless he ate granola for breakfast and was very sensitive.

Deconstructing Leftism

2010-03-01T23:40:00.000-08:00

Like many I have taken to using the word "socialism" to describe the politics of state control. It goes under a variety of names, for its different versions- "communism", "liberalism", and "progressivism" among others- but "socialism" has seemed to encompass them all and capture the emphasis that such people put on the group over the individual.

It's a very deceptive word however, which is why of course socialists use it. "Social" is a word that has usually very warm connotation. A person with a good social life has enjoyable relations with a variety of people, including probably having sex with them. Sounds great! A social or sociable person is someone you would enjoy being around. A social event will probably be fun and enjoyable.

But all of these things have to do with one's voluntary relations with others and nothing at all to do with the government controlling, preventing or compelling anyone. Socialism sounds like a big party, kind of like a potluck where people bring and share what they have and have a wonderful time. In reality people under socialism are completely atomized, there are only themselves and the state. The state takes what it wants, gives what it will, and orders as it sees fit. The choice of the individual is completely drowned out, with only microscopic influence in the occasional election.

Libertarians like to use the term "statist" and this exact same rant has been written by many libertarians before. And yet that isn't very helpful either, since almost everybody believes in a strong state, only disagreeing on what it should do.

Leftism seems to be the only reasonable term. It only describes a seating position in the old French legislature but since those days everyone knows what leftists have stood for, more or less.

See? SEE?!?!

2010-02-23T08:11:00.000-08:00

Scott Brown votes for "jobs" bill-

"http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2221899520100222">

Scott Brown ran against the health care bill, but said he supports the Massachussetts health care plan. So in all likelihood he would vote for some similar bill in Congress.

Republicans are different only on the margins. The government is going fiscally sideways quite well enough without the health care bill, and Brown isn't going to stop that.

Republicans will gain control of Congress and Obama will shame them into supporting his spending, just as Clinton did.

Thrasymachus Speaks

2010-02-21T19:33:00.000-08:00

I'm sick with rage, but rather than lashing out myself, I will let my namesake do it for me, from the original. He is disgusted by the sophistry of the gathering, and by Socrates' continuous use of questioning to tear apart the statements of others, without making any statement himself, to reach a preordained conclusion-

"He roared out to the whole company: What folly. Socrates, has taken possession of you all? And why, sillybillies, do you knock under to one another? I say that if you want really to know what justice is, you should not only ask but answer, and you should not seek honour to yourself from the refutation of an opponent, but have your own answer; for there is many a one who can ask and cannot answer. And now I will not have you say that justice is duty or advantage or profit or gain or interest, for this sort of nonsense will not do for me; I must have clearness and accuracy."

The gathering seems quite frightened by this outburst- I don't know if they had anything like dueling back then, but they seem to think he might actually hurt somebody. They assure him he will have the chance to make his argument.

"Listen, then, he said; I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger. And now why do you not me? But of course you won't."

Socrates' way of dealing with this is to say that the rulers may sometimes be mistaken, and in that case their orders to their subjects will not be in their own interests. So, to the extent the rulers are correct, they are justified, but when they are wrong, well, it's just too bad.

This line of logic has been followed by all the totalitarian regimes of modern times I can think of. It's not that totalitarian regimes don't admit mistakes- they sometimes do explicitly, like the Soviet Union after Stalin, or implicitly quite frequently just by changing policy. But they don't have to, and they pay no penalty whether the mistake is recognized or not. The subjects have no participation in this process, except to gratefully receive the wisdom of the anointed.

The system is closed. The Popular Front social democracy under which we live is no different. The sanctions are much less severe, but all the principals are the same.

The current chimpout is over the torture of terrorists and the legal justification offered for doing so. The US Constitution does not apply to every person on the planet; nor do the Geneva Accords. There are quite a few scumbags who fall through the cracks on these. You don't need to be a law professor to figure this out; but the Constitution doesn't mean what it says, it means what they say it says.

But by this logic how are the drone attacks not first degree murder? Because when a liberal does it, it's not a crime.

Forget It, OK? Just Forget It

2010-02-18T13:42:00.000-08:00

Hope springs eternal, kind of like herpes I guess. The Conservative Political Action Conference is starting and conservative bloggers are excited. Every 15 years or so the people generally refered to as conservatives get excited and figure they have a chance to take control of the government and roll back its size and scope. There was the Goldwater campaign; the Reagan campaign; the Contract With America, which was as close as they ever came; and the recent disappointment with our progressive overlords.

The HBD people believe that because non-Asian minorities vote heavily socialist, controlling immigration would give conservatives a chance to defeat it. Mainstream conservatives of the National Review sort believe that NAMs can eventually be persuaded socialism is not in their best interest. But as I have said, socialism is an entirely white concept and does not need any minorities to achive power. The current troubles in Europe bear this out.

So let's say we only had conservatives, we would at least then get rid of socialism right? It's a complete fantasy and will never happen but a man can dream can't he? No he can't. As far as I can tell a majority of conservatives are also socialist.

What conservative has a coherent plan for reducing the size of government? When a publicly traded corporation is not making as much money as management would like, its bureaucracy is cut very unsentimentally. These kinds of reductions occured mostly in the 80's and 90's- these corporations are run pretty lean now and have been for a while- but companies laying off thousands or sometimes tens of thousands of people used to be in the news all the time.

One way to look at this is the steady growth in Cabinet departments over the decades. I don't remember how many the US had starting out, but I believe some later additions were Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Education, HEW/HHS, and Veterans.

You may protest the DOD is obviously necessary- but remember there was once Departments of War(the Army) and the Navy, which still exist. The DOD and Air Force Department were added, leaving four departments were once there were only two, with the same forces as before. I don't think you have to be a hardcore libertarian to realize that the growth of food does not require a department, nor does the production of energy, the education of children or adults, and what critical services the government does need to provide can be grouped under other departments.

To be taken at all seriously, a conservative candidate would need to plan on closing the departments of Energy and Education. The federal government needs to control nuclear power, but since the DOD operates the majority of nuclear reactors they can do that. Veterans come from the DOD and the DOD can administer any programs former servicemembers may need. Are people any smarter or more educated since the establishment of the Department of Education? No? Lot of people getting paid to not accomplish anything. Really, this is just efficient management. It is not anything remotely radical. Laying people off is no fun but when there are more employees than work, that is what you do.

This will never happen though. People would get upset, and in a democracy people must never be upset. No politician unwilling to do this can be called anything but a socialist, and only a few meet that criteria. So let's just stop pretending. The current path will be pursued until bankruptcy.

America Sucks

2010-02-17T10:43:00.000-08:00

Having a certain masochistic streak, I can't explain it in any other way, I read some of the various blogs at the Atlantic, that is Megan McArdle, Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James Fallows as I mentioned in my last post.

Megan McArdle seems to represent the rightward most position acceptable in polite company- economically somewhat libertarian, but supporting all the ongoing policies of bailouts and other spending, skeptical about the health care plan but not actually opposed. The rest are pretty much, "What's wrong with these evil scumbags?" in their attitude towards the average American.

Sullivan brings up Glen Greenwald today, an example of perhaps the most noisome creature in the US, the "constitutional law/civil rights" attorney or professor. We are reminded occasionally that Obama was a "constitutional law professor" although in reality he was nothing more than a part-time lecturer, the title of professor and its associated subdivisions being jealously guarded distinctions amongst college facutly. I put that in quotes because while such a person may be an attorney, which is a simple description for a member of the bar who represents others, there is essentially nothing constitutional about what these people do, and nothing even legal except to the extent the judge can send the sheriff after you.

The reigning theory of law in the US, at least among the liberals who actually control almost everything, is Critical Legal Studies, here in Wikipedia-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_legal_studies

I'll save you the trouble of following the link by summarizing that this just means the law is whatever they think it should be.

The left likes to slam any use of the concept of patriotism, which they blackguard as an attempt to take ownership, to define what is good and righteous behavior; but they do the same thing all the time themselves. The terms "constitutional" and "rights" are constantly abused; whatever they think government policy and social norms should be we are assured is a matter of "constitutional rights" while in reality it is simply what the consensus is among a certain elite, achieved on an informal social basis rather than a legislative one and bearing only the most tenuous relationship with the US Constitution.

If The People are brainwashed by appeals to righteousness and patriotism, it is entirely by the left, which has hijacked the legal system since the New Deal era to serve as their enforcement mechanism. Glen Greenwald is just a goon.

How can Glen Greenwald, Barack Obama and the rest of these refined folks just be goons? Well we were repeatedly told that the prison at Guantanamo Bay was illegal and unconstitutional. If so all the individuals held there should have been released the afternoon of January 20, 2009 when the Obama administration took office. If it were in fact illegal and unconstitutional there would be no question at all as to what had to be done; and yet over a year later the individuals are still held, with no certainty at all as to what will be done with them.

So what was illegal, unconstitutional and immoral under Bush is merely unfortunate and inconvenient under Obama. He would like to do away with this prison, we are told, it's just so difficult to arrange an alternative! But- again- if it is illegal the prisoners must be released more or less immediately. 24 hours for some kind of processingly might be acceptable, maybe even 72 hours or a week, but no more.

If what is legal depends on who does it, we have a system little different from the Soviet Union. One doesn't go to jail for dissenting; plenty of dissent is tolerated to the extent the dissenters are only punished with shame and ostracism; but the fact of a party that decides for itself what is right, and then propagandizes the society to obey, is just the same.

You Hate Me! You Really Hate Me!

2010-01-16T08:10:00.000-08:00

In my wanderings around the web I came across this by James Fallows-

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/12/a_moment_to_note.php

It's just depressing. This is the normal tenor of liberal writing, it just stings more because Fallows writes better, he strikes certain cultural notes familiar to me, and he is strongly, confidently, magisterically wrong.

California, especially southern California, used to be a fairly conservative place, in the Western libertarian mode, as Fallows reports with consternation and relief. His look back shows how conservative ideas are as relevant and irrelevant as ever.

Fallows thinks Medicare is great, any opposition to it was crazy, and the same is true of the current "health care" legislation. But Medicare like Social Security is based on demographic anomalies which are not forever sustainable. The programs will wither come to burden the working populace unbearably- it's littled noted how much they burden the working population now- or simply come to an end, not having benefited the bulk of the people who paid for them. It's not evil to point this out- it's not rocket science, it's not even algebra, it's just arithmetic.

Fallows describes Proposition 13 as "disastrous." In fact the state and local governments of California have financed themselves fairly well for most of the over 30 years that have passed since Prop 13 did. If pressed he might remember why, and how, it came about, but he doesn't bother to connect the dots himself.

Prop 13 happened because in the late 70's rampant inflation and housing price increases lead to big increases in property taxes. The group most affected by this and the most able to do something about it was old people on pensions. As a result the rates and assessments were rolled back and the tax payment was fixed for the period of ownership of the house. Briefly, Prop 13 was an old peoples' welfare program, just like Medicare. Why does Fallows like the one and not the other? I suppose like many urban liberals he thinks old people should be living in rent-controlled apartments, like they do in New York.

Elsewhere he talks about opposition to the civil rights legislation of the era. I have talked about this before but lower class white skepticism was well-founded.

Think of this- a group of people who have little social status or legal rights are going to be granted both. I think it's obvious that social status is a zero-sum good; I suggest that in most systems legal rights are also. The political and legal systems have limited resources and while everybody theoretically has "rights" as a practical matter only few have their rights recognized. As a practical matter, the status of blacks increased slightly and the status of lower class whites decreased significantly.

But it's more the overall tone of contempt from Fallows that depresses me. It's not humorous, but it's much like the "crocodile humor" Moldbug talks about. You too can be a dissident in America, as long as you don't mind being a pariah.

Fallows' beloved Mr. Haight was just an apparatchik. He represented the ascendancy of the Left New Deal over the Right New Deal. But like all the other Popular Front socialists the Right New Dealers were scheduled to get shot from the beginning. It's not an accomplishment and not something to be proud of.

The Current Unpleasantness

2010-01-11T08:56:00.000-08:00

As always current events are of little interest to me, unless the affect the really big picture. The current economic crisis does fall in that category.

It seems obvious to me that the people running things don't have much idea what they are doing. They know what worked in the past, or what was thought to have worked in the past, but they are just guessing now.

Monetarism seems to be the big loser here. Monetary policy- raising interest rates on the threat of inflation, lowering them on the threat of recession- had a long and apparently successful run, from 1981 or so until around 2006. The idea that modulating interest rates will produce optimum long term results and prosperity seems a little too simple. Wealth and prosperity don't come from the money supply, they come from accumulated capital.

Keynesian policies don't seem to have worked as well as advertised, less now than before. In the 80's Keynesianism lost some of its appeal, if only because in the 60's the money spent was used to benefit minorities and the far left. But they will always be popular in a democracy so we are back to being all Keynesians pretty much. A significant portion of the populace is very upset by debt and spending but I doubt this political energy will every be put into actual policy.

In the middle part of the last decade the Fed seemed to lose their touch. Loose money is generally what's popular and taking away the punch bowl is not easy. When things get away they really get away though, regardless of Bernanke's claims.

Rich people can spend their money on what they want- gold-plated plumbing fixtures, Porsches, garish clothing, high end French restaurants- but only as long as the money lasts. The US has been rich for a long time and has seen fit to spend a lot of money on things that make many people feel better but do not actually make the nation wealthier.

Education is the best example. Most liberal arts degrees are useless, and yet millions are earned and granted every year. The idea that these degrees substitute for IQ tests that employers cannot legally give is a little weak; a college degree of any kind once indicated you were a person of at least a little refinement and I think that tradition continued for a generation or two after it really meant anything. As highly praised as higher education is in providing benefits to society it mainly provides the illusion to those attending and their parents that they will be members of the middle class.

K-12 education is a much worse situation. When not useless it is actually harmful. Little of value is taught. Special education has become an obsession, and a great deal of money is spent on students who have no chance of benefiting from it. Autism is the worst case; assigning one teacher and one aide to each autistic "student" is an incredible waste of money.

Real education is an elitist enterprise, an elitism of meritocracy which makes it all the more repulsive to both the "elite" and the hoi polloi. The idea that everybody can and should be educated is the compromise reached and as a result fewer are really educated than should be.

If public schools, and public subsidized private schools, simply eliminated much of their liberal arts programs, and kept only enough to provide teachers and professors of the subjects, the prospective college student would be faced with the choice of pursuing a degree in something productive and useful or not going to college at all. Most soft subject students don't get much more than a piece of paper and worse waste a lot of their or their parents' money or take on a huge debt load.

I don't think American society as a whole is going to learn any lesson from this. Only individuals who want to see what works and doesn't work will be able to benefit. People with real assets, without debt, and with valuable skills are likely to have the best opportunities in any economic environment. The same is true of nations, but nations are not people.

White Socialists, Left Socialists And The "Real War"

2010-01-02T21:28:00.000-08:00

Patrick Buchanan, as he often does, criticizes the Bush and now Obama anti-terrorism policy, here linked at Vdare-

http://www.vdare.com/buchanan/100102_real_war.htm

The policy Bush followed is probably easy to criticize. All the criticism has fallen on deaf ears, however, because none of it was regarded as credible.

In general communication must be regarded as credible, that is, the communicator must be believed as actually believing what he is saying. Exceptions to this involve various kinds of political kabuki but then the message intended to be understood has to be credible.

The critics of the current policy should have some impact, except nobody believes they would do anything more effective against the threat that exists. Buchanan doesn't say what he would do, so I will guess.

Buchanan would withdraw US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. He would severely restrict entry of immigrants and visitors from Islamic countries.

And that's it.

But the American consensus does not believe this would lead to acceptable results. As often as Bush was parodied as a right wing nut his policies were only on the politically right edge of the establishment consensus. The agreement was Afghanistan had to be secured, and Iraq was a threat that had to be dealt with. People don't generally think that if we leave the Moslems alone, they will leave us alone. And they don't generally think a military withdrawal in the face of stiff opposition will lead to a similar withdrawal by the enemy.

Other policies might work, but they will not be followed. The dismantling of Saudi Arabia would probably help a lot. It won't happen, even if the Saudis hadn't paid off everybody in Washington. Assassinations would help, but that is against American policy, has been for a long time, and the policy won't change. A hard hand in Pashtunistan would help, and this is actually being pursued to some extent, but still this is quite limited. Drone attacks, like all other military action, can only occur with no civilian casualties, which limits them a great deal.

I suspect Buchanan is a lot more pacifistic than he would like people to believe. The left spent a great deal of effort convincing the American people there was a role for America overseas, however, and has had little luck over the last 50 years trying to unconvince them.

Harsher policies are unacceptable, and as far as gentler policies, even Obama is having trouble backing off.

Obama As Symbol

2010-01-01T10:07:00.000-08:00

If Obama is a symbol, what does he represent?

Every major politician represents some kind of an archetype. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan all represented the friendly, personal, optimistic image of the can-do American type we associate with leadership in most fields. Franklin Roosevelt represented the kindly, paternal patrician, a type still in evidence at that time. George H.W. Bush was very much a man of this type, but their day had past, and particularly as a Republican he was caricatured as an out-of-touch elitist.

Obama gets many points for his speaking, but his personality is not something we associate with the man at the top. He has a coolness that passes for deepness, but try to picture him in charge of a football team, a company, or a city or state, and you can't do it- only the mist of mythical mystery that surrounds POTUS allows him to fit into the image of the office.

Wretchard noted a David Broder column praising Janet Napolitano- briefly he says "It's OK, she's a friend of mine." Who gives a crap whether she is David Broder's friend? It's horribly incestuous. However, the elite establishment has been rallying around "Obama"- what the man symbolizes, rather than the individual himself- since September 2008. Peggy Noonan's brown-nosing is a little less obvious, and David Frum's has been expressed more as attacks on Republicans, but it all amounts to the same thing.

Obama simply represents the class of people operating the American socialist state- maybe fascist or corporatist are better terms, but they all boil down to the same thing. This class wants to be firmly in charge, and they were getting the feeling that in the Bush years a little bit too much power was in the hands of the hoi polloi. That Bush was constructively a New Deal liberal, that he didn't really oppose them at all, wasn't really the point. He was not 100% with the program and he was influenced by people who were not 100% with the program.

Popular disgust with Bush led to a liberal shift in the '06 elections. That wasn't enough. For some reason the financial meltdown- engineered by Ivy League JDs and MBAs- proved to them it was more important than ever that Ivy League JDs and MBAs, along with a few MAs and MPHs, have a tight grip on the system.

A vast section of proledom follows along with these people, those who have been provided jobs executing the program- people in education, healthcare, and government. Another big section is less keenly devoted, but votes Democrat out of habit. With the people who were tired of Bush, and saw McCain as more of the same, an electoral majority was formed.

That's all fairly obvious, but why did nominal conservatives, or at least nominal Republicans like Noonan, Frum, and Colin Powell go along? Because, as Moldbug says, everybody is really a New Deal liberal. The New Deal state- quickly organized in 1933, rapidly expanded in the next 15 years, further expanded in the 60's, is the American state. Even Ronald Reagan didn't want to dismantle much of it, nor his followers, they were only after the excesses of the 60's aimed at funding rebellious inner city minorities and the far left.

The New Deal state is huge and controls every aspect of American life. Just the organs controlling financial matters are all-controlling and ubiquitous, and there are many others. Moldbug says the bureaucrats themselves control all of this, with essentially no supervision; I think that is a stretch. The legislative branch passes the legislation that controls and is used for control by these agencies, and provides their funding. Once any agency is established, it essentially lives forever, but it is always subject at the margins to new legislation and funding constraints. It creates its own lobby, a not insignificant member of which is itself; but to say it's unanswerable is going too far. It also creates its own counterlobby, which provides plenty of work for Republican legislators and lobbyists in keeping it under control.

Needless to say this apparatus employs a lot of people, and is regarded by many as essential to the well-being of the nation. The fact that our army of financial regulators did nothing to stop the greatest swindle in history, and in fact helped it along, does not register. Among people close to the state and its associated institutions, the belief became strong that the experts must be placed firmly in charge again, and they would know what to do. That Barack Obama, with his thin and dubious resume, would qualify as an expert is dubious; but he speaks well and has an Ivy degree. That such weirdos as Janet Napolitano and Kevin Jennings would qualify as experts is even more dubious, but they are part of the package.

All conspiracy theories and fringe ideas aside- I hope I have made clear I'm just your average Republican, I think Ron Paul is a moron and I support a fiat currency and fractional reserve banking- these experts have never been terribly useful and exist mainly to make people feel better. They don't know what they are doing now and are probably going to do more harm than good. The tools they use have rapidly diminishing returns. A little financial regulation is necessary and helpful, but it does not then follow that a lot is better. A little Keynesian stimulus may keep things rolling, but government deficits as a yearly thing are not going to help.

Monetarism is the latest god to fall. Moderate right to moderate left everyone was convinced that finally the economy would be managed and the business cycle would be moderated forever. But if there is no business cycle, credit can be extended very generously with profits assured, because the borrower will always be able to repay, right? And we see how that worked out.

I think the age of the expert is coming to an end. The unwashed masses know something is terribly wrong, and just because they can't describe exactly how or why doesn't mean they are wrong. The New Deal state then loses its reason for being, and all that's left is a vast web of graft and patronage. That's plenty to keep it going, but not enough to keep its respectability.

Obama the man seems to be getting a bit worn out by all this. "Obama" the movement of New Deal experts seems to be in over its head also- if you can't keep a guy who's own father reported him directly to the CIA off an airplane, a lot of people are getting paid for nothing.

The system can go for a long time on momentum alone. How much longer will that be?

Happy New Year

2009-12-31T18:56:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year.

No exclamation point? It's a wish, but not a very strong one. I have been thinking about the perfection of soft control the left seems to have achieved. Carrie Prejean was on the news the other night- her 15 minutes are long past, but they just can't drop her. I guess she is a helpful reminder to the peasants of wrong thought.

Somebody needs to start a pool on when the USG (I find Moldbug's shorthand useful) is going bankrupt. It has to spend money, a lot of money, but it can't do it forever.

I think I need to do something on the actual operating philosophy of Popular Front socialism. I have plenty to say, in a few days.

The Strange And Terrible Saga of George W. Bush

2009-12-30T18:21:00.001-08:00

As I hope I have made clear, I'm no sort of political fanatic, just an anti-communist, or these days better said an anti-socialist. Anti-communists have included such foaming at the mouth right-wing fanatics as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Not wanting to be killed or enslaved by sociopaths wrapped up in 19th century German philosophy doesn't make you a fanatic, it just makes you not crazy, in my book.

Well, then, isn't shooting nuns in the back of the head not only evil but fanatical? Not at all. A guerilla war, urban or rural, is still a war, and the rules of war as recognized by civilized people apply. If you're a combatant, you're liable to being killed, and if you're not actually engaged in combat but are giving "aid and comfort to the enemy" you are a traitor and liable to being killed. The absence of formal legal channels for doing this is not relevant- for among other reasons that if such legal channels existed they would be subject to terrorism and assassination by the socialists. So yes, if in a society under siege from urban terrorism you are a left-wing intellectual who thinks fighting back is wrong, because it doesn't address the "root causes" or because the methods required for survival don't meet some imaginary legal criteria, you are subject to being killed. If it is suspected you know something, you are subject to spending some time on a bed frame with the leads from a car battery on your genitals. Every living creature fights to survive. The Constitution- any constitution- is not a suicide pact.

For the record, and so you might understand where I am coming from better, I am simply a libertarian conservative of the old school, the Goldwater/Reagan school. I voted for George W. Bush twice, and in 2004 I has a community chair for Bush/Cheney 2004. I was in a very blue community, in a purple city, in a red county, in a very blue state. My efforts from a practical standpoint meant nothing. I supported Bush in spite of his Karl Rove inspired attempts to hold the center, the Medicare drug benefit and the steel tariffs being the most memorable examples. But for the War on Terror, it was Bush or capitulation. It would have been easy for Kerry to run to the right of Bush on terror- "Go after the Saudis!"- but all he had to offer was surrender.

The Jedi mind tricks of the New Left- same as the Old Left- are not what I wanted to write about today though. My subject is George W. Bush, Governor of Texas, 43rd President of the United States, son of George H.W. Bush, 41st President of the United States, grandson of Prescott Bush, U.S. Senator from the state of Connecticut, brother of John Ellis "Jeb" Bush, Governor of Florida. A more distinguished pedigree and political career would be hard to imagine. Bush II was elected twice and served two full terms as President, the most constitutionally allowed. The only greater accomplishment would have been leaving the office to his Vice President, but only two Presidents have ever done that. In neither case was the transfer politically successful, and in any case Dick Cheney was never intended to fill that role. It can be argued that on some level John McCain was Bush's designated successor, but it would be more correct to say that McCain was the Republican Party's chosen successor, Republicans often choosing candidates by seniority.

And yet Bush II (I will simply call him Bush from now on as his father is not much relevant to the topic) is almost universally despised, apoplectically hated by the left, dismissed by the right. Was Bush in reality a spectacular failure as a politician?

As young people are earnestly told, usually by older people who should know better, a person must define success for himself, not as others define it. This advice is used by young people to pursue low-paying "careers" that leave them broke and disgusted in middle age. If they are honest they then tell young people to pursue money, but they generally don't.

Bush seems to have taken this message to heart, and succeeded beautifully with it. Money was not an issue; he entered office with a comfortable amount of money, and while he is not in a position to cash in like Clinton, he will want for nothing.

As a practical matter, Bush did whatever he felt like in his eight years in office, with only a few exceptions. His one significant failure was immigration reform; this was thwarted by his own supporters, who he smeared as racists, as did his allies in the matter John McCain and Lindsay Graham. He was thwarted also in the nomination of Harriet Myers, again by his supporters, who wanted someone who could win an argument with Stephen Breyer. His last failure, another minor matter in the greater scheme, was in the Dubai ports deal. The nature of the opposition in this was somewhat more widespread and ill-defined, but again was mainly the protect America people who supported him, and not the left.

The was criticism then, that seems to have resurfaced, that Bush did not respond to attacks from the MSM, thus harming his cause. It may have harmed the conservative cause, but it didn't harm him. When did anyone, any group, any movement on the left stop Bush from doing anything? Never, as far as I can tell. If you can name a circumstance, tell me, but I don't think you can.

Bush was never a conservative activist, never a conservative partisan, never really a conservative of any kind. John O'Sullivan wrote a description in National Review, and he described Bush as an ad hoc politician, not moved by any ideology but only his own feelings on particular issues. I don't think this is quite right. Bush was at least somewhat ideological, but he came from the old school of northeastern liberal Republicanism, not progressive, but with a strong element of noblesse oblige. But for Bush it was always about him and his family. His sister-in-law comes from a poor Mexican peasant background, so for Bush poor Mexican peasants are members of his family, and he has to look out for him.

So how did he do it? Precisely because Bush was not, is not, an ideological conservative, in fact was a moderate to liberal Republican, and always followed a line pretty close to what the consensus of the American public was, his policies were broadly accepted and not aggressively challenged by the left or right. There was plenty of theater, for the rubes in San Francisco and Boston who haven't yet realized politics is as real as pro wrestling, but when the time came to vote in the legislature the opposition faded away.

Beyond knowing and following a popular line, that would have been consensus if not for the personal, culturally driven distaste, Bush had another quality virtually no other politician possesses- he just did not give a shit. Or, he did a hell of a job bluffing. Normally criticism is a very effective way of sterring the political process, because politicians, like people in general, hate to be criticized. Criticize a man and he will at least respond, likely qualify his position, and many times modify it substantively. Bush really didn't do any of this. He was used to dominating people in face to face, personal relationships, and never saw the need to bend for people he didn't know, never met or dealt with face to face, and had no personal leverage on him.

This is not, repeat not, the same as putting your finger up to the wind. Bush never did that either. He already believed things close to the consensus, usually, so there was no need. When what he believed was not close to the consensus- with immigration reform, Harriet Myers, and the ports- he did not change or bend one bit, instead he fought to the end with the nuclear weapons of politics, accusations of racism and bigotry.

If Bush didn't bend for people who didn't like him, didn't support him, and never voted for him, it's not surprising- it was to them, because they think they call the tune, but it should not be for anyone else. But he didn't care about the people who supported him either. They had no other alternative, so why would he? He didn't even pretend at the end.

Why no one seems to understand Bush is the real mystery, because nothing he is and nothing he does is that complicated. As a politician he is extremely unusual, as a person only unusual. Bush discovered at some point in life that people would bend to him, so he didn't need to bend to them.

More White Socialism

2009-12-30T18:03:00.000-08:00

I stumbled across this in my endless internet meanderings-

http://www.trivisonno.com/hillbillies-wreck-america

The blogger posits that a deal was made with Mexico and China to permit manufacturing imports in return for industrial imports. I don't know how explicit it was, but it seems a reasonable example of rural interests taking precedent over urban interests. As I have said in "White Socialism" rural, "traditionalist" interests are by no means conservative. The New Deal only married long-established rural rent-seeking to somewhat more recent urban rent-seeking under the roof of the federal government.

The Brussels Journal recently had a post where they used an old British movie about a woman visiting a little island in Scotland to show traditional culture under assault-

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4230

I took a look at the embedded video and I saw something entirely different. Many people don't remember that rural culture was in times past treated with great reverence in socialist propaganda, e.g. this movie. Protecting, or pretending to protect, the quaint culture of The People from the evils of capitalism was a big part of the socialist project. The People of the countryside were more than willing to go along.

The People of the countryside are at least as mean and stupid and The People of the city, if not more so. All these quaint singing and dancing Scots were quite likely hostile and cruel to any outsiders, especially city people.

The mystically revered "family farm" of US agricultural policy is mostly gone, or the family is quite rich. But farm state senators will trade their votes for subsidies, so white socialism is alive and well in the hinterlands.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T00:11:00.001-08:00

Peace on earth- goodwill towards men.

The Politician As Symbol

2009-12-17T16:57:00.000-08:00

Truth be told, Barack Obama is not a terribly remarkable fellow. Biracial prep school graduate, small time political hustler, minor league progressive politician- other than the biracial part, the blue cities are thick with this sort of character.

I have long believed a man must be destined to be President. Men of long and highly successful political careers have failed to reach this most lofty of offices, only because the fates that order our lives did not so will it, and the stars, for a few early months of an Olympic year, did not grant them favor.

For some, election as President of the United States- head of state, head of government, Commander in Chief- was the culmination of years of politicking, governing, organizing, preparing- Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan fall in this category. Roosevelt was a man of the establishment, Reagan was more of an insurgent, but they had both been around a long time, governors of large states. Their hour arrived, and they stood up.

For others, it was more a matter of chance, but not chance unaided by the gods. Bill Clinton was a prodigy, but not a man close to the huge and sclerotic establishment of his party. But the spectacular failure of that establishment- three terms of Republican presidents in a center-left country- as well as the spectacular failure of the liberal, Northeastern establishment Republican George H.W. Bush- cleared his path. But make no mistake, the path prepared for him, he was prepared to take it, something many can't do.

Eight years of comfort and prosperity, Clinton was ready to do something only two other presidents have done- leave the office as a legacy for his vice president. That the two men who achieved office in this way, Martin Van Buren and George H.W. Bush, are remembered as mediocrities, does not detract from the towering status of their predecessors, Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan. And yet Albert Gore Jr. was not fated to be President. The man whose fate that was- George W. Bush- benefited as Clinton had from the tiredness of the opposition and the failure of his own party to prepare for its next grand chance.

George W. Bush is indeed a fascinating character, whose spectacular wielding of immense power is all the remarkable for the surpassingly strange manner in which it was done. I think I'll have to provide my take on this, and maybe it will be preserved on some server in the far-off decades when his real history is written. But with reference to my current point, Bush II came to function more as a symbol than a real person. What he actually was and actually did became completely obscured in what his opponents feared he was and to a lesser extent, in what his supporters hoped he would be.

Getting back to Obama, he is indeed an unremarkable individual. Nothing against him on that account- lucky is better than good any day. But the gap between what he represents- competent, confident progressive governance, unmarred by the dissent of the stupid, angry, and unenlightened- and what he actually is, a guy who makes too many speeches and plays an awful lot of golf, is wide indeed.

But what the hell were these people expecting? Progressive governance unhindered by unenlightened dissent doesn't even occur in Berkeley or Ann Arbor, so why would it suddenly occur in DC?

But even Obama is not the apotheosis of politician as symbol- no, he is not the undisputed ruler even of this. That would go to the anti-Obama, the person hated, feared and vilified more than any officeholder in the US, Sarah Palin.

Why is Palin a symbol? Well, just think about it. What do you really know about her substantive actions and positions? Anything? No? It is just as I though. I follow politics pretty closely, and I can't say I know anything about what she did or what she stands for. I will offer my presupposition though. I believe that poltically, Alaska is like other small, remote jurisdictions like Hawaii and Guam. Which is to say, you have Republicans and Democrats, but there is no ideological difference, it is all a matter of getting your hands on the loot.

Palin seems to have been a "good government" candidate, opposed to the grifters of both parties. These types occasionally show up when the usual game gets tiresome to the electorate. The current Republican governor of Hawaii, Linda Lingle, seems to be of this mold.

Palin doesn't seem to be an ideological conservative, a conservative activist, or even particularly conservative in any way. Her first drawback as a political figure is her sexiness, or better put her animal vitality. She's fairly good-looking, but that's not the issue. She has a primitive charisma, significantly sexual, and a personal power that deeply frightens and upsets a large portion of the population. People who went to good colleges, and people who look to those people for leadership and wisdom, know that these kind of people exist but the idea frightens them and they would prefer to forget it.

That segues into her second drawback, the deep belief in a technological elite of government, primarily composed of Ivy League graduates. The left wing investment in this is obvious; the right however has established an array of counter-institutions, also primarily drawing from the Ivy League, and these people want to be the ones running things. The fact that the alternatives are low-ranking Naval Academy graduate John McCain, and affirmative action Ivy Leaguer Barack Obama, neither of whom probably has an IQ meaningfully higher than Sarah Palin's- if they are in fact higher at all, does not seem to matter. It's the style of the thing.

A politician can go a long way on being a symbol- FDR certainly exploited it to the maximum degree, but he also ran things. Politicians must do things. And they either are or aren't doing these things while people are projecting their hopes and fears onto them.

George W. Bush did mostly what he wanted to do, which was put through mildly liberal policies and programs while being caricatured as a right wing fanatic. Barack Obama is doing little, mostly talking up initiatives of Congress, while being idolized as the ideal of progressive leadership. But people are people, and not symbols, at least until they have been dead for some time. A living man, as they used to like to say, puts his trousers on one leg at a time.

The Filth And The Fury

2009-11-25T15:38:00.000-08:00

In his classic "The Redneck Manifesto", author Jim Goad says "If I don't work I'll starve. If I don't write I'll die."

This sums it up for me. I am currently undergoing special, high intensity training of a highly stressful and demanding nature. Nonetheless I must take a few minutes of my day to continue the war on socialism and the intellectual and cultural wasteland it produces.

Some things are just too awful to contemplate. This of course varies from person to person. Moldbug is shocked by the frankly racist blog South Africa Sucks, and while he mentions it he will not link it. You can now find it at www.mysasucks.com should you be curious. When your friends and relatives are being regularly raped, robbed and murdered by black people you will tend to hate them, even though the sentiment isn't completely rational. I won't hold it against them.

What frightens and repels me in this manner? The basic cable channel FX has a show about an outlaw biker gang, theoretically modeled on "Hamlet." They occupy a small town near the Bay Area, own the police force, assault and intimidate the residents, and sell assault weapons to Oakland drug gangs. They are unambiguously the heroes of the story.

Why? They keep their town free from developers! What does a socialist hate more than a violent criminal who engages in the illegal firearms trade? Why a developer of course! Other antagonists are a white supremacist biker gang that manufactures and sells meth (Drugs are bad, mmmkay?) and a white supremacist group hired by developers to run the hero bikers out of town.

The dual nature of socialist revolution is its most obvious feature. Socialists love laws, regulations, and other rules, and put a great deal of effort into demanding others follow them, and for this reason so many socialists are lawyers. So, then, do socialists adhere to these same rules? By no means! (Hehe that St. Paul thing again.) Socialists simply ignore, or openly violate any rule they don't like, because if they don't like it it is by definition illegitimate. The common name for this is civil disobedience.

Let's take the developer thing. Land development is regulated by complex rules most places, very complex rules in places where socialists are in political control. Anyone wishing to build on and profit from a piece of land they paid for and pay taxes on must adhere very carefully to all of these rules, at great time and expense. These rules give countless opportunities for those opposed (usually socialists) to stop the process by legal means.

If the permission is granted anyway? Socialists will use extralegal means, such as vandalism, or protest to stop it. All that shit goes right out the window when socialists are unhappy.

Conservatives have a strange dependence on the rule of law. But there is no law in a socialist society. Adhering to the law other than as a matter of discretion (which is plenty of reason enough, you don't want to be on the wrong side of the IRS) is just stupid. Law starts when a community agrees on it. Those who don't agree on it aren't in the community, they are "outlaws."

The Priestly Class

2009-11-06T11:34:00.000-08:00

This is not as well developed as I would like but I don't want to let it sit forever.

One- we have a priestly class, in our case priests of the religion of socialism, and they are now in charge.

I had an employment dispute some years ago that led me to file a complaint with the Department of Labor. I got my ass handed to me, of course, because I hadn't quite realized that such institutions exist not for justice, but for the appearance of justice.

Every society must have some generally feeling that things are fair and that justice is served to maintain social peace. Whether this is actually the case as an outside, disinterested observer would see is beside the point. Often this has had a religious element. Someone who broke social norms might be obligated to make a sacrifice; personal misfortunes might be punishments from the gods, again requiring sacrifices, or the punishment might simply be postponed to the afterlife.

In more modern Anglo-Saxon society the regulation of social norms and the quest for a better society has been largely religious, often led by low church Protestant ministers or their followers. This is true up to the civil rights era; even today we often the Reverend Al Sharpton or the Reverend Jesse Jackson on TV demanding justice. It has been many years though since they used the Christian religion as support for their case.

Since the 60's the effort to ensure that society is "fair" and "just" has become a matter for various parts of the government. People or organizations are denounced; punishment is organized, sacrifices are made, sackcloth and ashes are worn. This is all managed by lawyers and activists rather than prophets as in the Old Testament.

To what extent anything that would be called "justice" is produced as it would be defined by you, me, or anybody else is not the point. Like the burning of a witch or the sacrifice of a virgin, it provides social catharsis. This comes with a price- hearings officers, lawyers, judges, and the associated government staff have a price tag, just as dead virgins and witches do. This catharsis is also valuable, despite what libertarians say. The anger and fear so alleviated would come out in some other way, possibly less convenient. Many Marxists have said this more artfully, and countless more much less.

Like anything else the costs and benefits must be balanced. The activist class is in the business of stirring up these resentments and then getting pay offs to keep them under control. The ruling class has to decide how far to let this go- not far enough and certain segments of society are angry and restless, too much and those paying the cost revolt. The priestly class is not in the business of ruling, they are in the business of managing peoples' beliefs and emotions.

So what happens when they become the rulers? The balancing function of the ruling class ceases to occur. This is what is happening today in the US government. The shakedown artists don't need to shake anybody down any more, they just pass the loot out to their clients. If you take one golden egg a day from the goose, it lives, although as a slave. If you kill it, with the hope of getting all the golden eggs, it dies and you get nothing.

The Laffer Curve is thought of as a conservative economic idea, but it is simply a theory of golden egg extraction management. The Laffer theory only says how the government can extract the most out of productive society, not to what extent it is actually beneficial.

It is a credit to how far extractive thinking had penetrated American society that to sell lower taxes, it was necessary to tell the people that the government (meaning them, as they saw it, the New Deal majority that Reagan coopted thinks he government is them, and exists for them.)

Unfortunately the 60's generation of New Left activists doesn't even have this minimal level of self-regulation. They don't respect the capitalist system in any way and given the opportunity to loot, as they have been, they will loot without reservation.

Can balance be restored? I think not. The New Deal consensus- maintaining a capitalist economy that supported the Democratic Party client state, managed at the margin by Republican Party business interests, seems to be gone. The 60's radical faction is for now ascendant. It can't last long- for the reasons I have stated- but nothing exists that will oppose it, or function as an alternative to it.

The Employment Demographics Of Socialism

2009-11-06T08:50:00.000-08:00

I would like to further develop something I said in a comment at Mangan's. I have been thinking about this for awhile, and there are a couple of intertwined ideas here, that also relate back. I will have to carefully split these apart and write more on this, but I'll start with the following observations.

The HBD, immigration, reactionary and "white people that SWPLs' don't like" blogs have gone on at great lengths on the contribution of racial politics and immigration to the political and economic situation. As I have said, socialism is an entirely white concept and does not require any minorities at all for its implementation, although they obviously help.

Changes in employment have have affected the makeup of society for decades. The racial/ethnic part of the demographic has been discussed at length; the employment part has hardly been mentioned, but I think it is just as important.

It used to be everybody was a farmer; farming became more efficient and now hardly anybody is, although there is plenty of food. Then many people were factory workers; manufacturing became more efficient (or was moved overseas) and now hardly anybody works in a factory although there is more stuff than ever. Even distribution and services have leaned way down; ever tried to find a helpful, friendly employee in a store? Good luck!

So where do all those people work now? I don't have the numbers but I would say the growth sectors for several decades have been legal and compliance (including HR and other such administrative functions involved in following government regulations), education, and health care (why medical treatment is called health care is an Orwellian story of language distortion but I'll leave that aside.)

Education is obviously a government function; all those new education workers are thus dependent on the government. Health care, too, is largely government financed so those new workers are government dependent. Legal and compliance? It's not so obvious but all these people are effectively government employees, even though they may be paid by a private entity. Their livelihood depends on government regulation so they are government dependent as well.

So we have vast numbers of new workers who by the nature of what they do are not just liberals, but Obama liberals. The recession has only accelerated this trend.

These new members of the socialist regime fall into two basic categories- control, for legal and compliance; and amelioration, for education and healthcare. (Notice how "health care" often becomes "healthcare", an entirely new word has been invented. Truly Orwellian!) This has its own significance but I'm not entirely sure what it means.

"What White People Should Do"

2009-10-17T00:31:00.000-07:00

I read various human bio-diversity and pro-white blogs and they often talk about what white people ought to do. In terms of government policy to be pursued, culture, behavior, et cetera.

Well I have news for you people- there is no "white people." There never has been and the subgroups of white people often hate each other more than they hate non-whites.

Socialism is a European concept. Its existence doesn't presuppose any non-whites. Non-whites are mostly socialist but are only relevant (in terms of politics in European or European settled countries anyway) because they ally with socialist whites.

Henry Louis Gates and the Mini-Riot

2009-10-16T12:50:00.000-07:00

I was watching something called "Police Women of Broward County" the other night. The cops were busting a group of black drug dealers in a house. They were not surrendering easily, each one shouting and complaining as the were cuffed, and keeping up the chorus as they were sitting outside. The chief complaint seems to have been that one of the officers stepped on the foot of one of the arrestees, and this was intolerable police brutality. Mean while a crowd of (black) neighbors had gathered and were also shouting at the police about this awful violation of human rights.

It occurred to me this is simply a black tactic for dealing with police. It is hardly unique to blacks; I have heard of Lebanese in Australia and Kurds in Sweden doing the same thing, as well as Gypsies. I have read teachers saying a classroom of black students will simply erupt with shouting.

I suppose the hope is to discourage the police from making the arrest, or confuse and slow down the situation in the hope the police will change their mind. I think it is most likely to work just as the police arrive on scene, before they have actually seen any criminal activity.they may then decide the thing to do is calm and disperse the crowd and leave. Once they have actually seen something that requires an arrest or a citation, I doubt they are going to let it go.

If you come from a raw power culture- the culture of ghetto blacks and third World people- it makes sense to try to intimidate the police. In these cultures a cop is just another guy, and most likely sees himself as just another guy, who does not want too much trouble with his paycheck. In a principle culture though the officer must do his job, and is going to be offended at the attempt to interfere.

Still, to the extent it discourages cops from investigating or patrolling aggressively it has the intended effect. The same people then complain the police don't do enough for their neighborhoods, but nobody said it was rational.

This type of "chimp out" was apparently what Henry Louis Gates was attempting when the police came to his house. If you're a Harvard professor who summers on Nantucket and rides an adult tricycle there the opportunity to engage in real ghetto black behavior must seem like a dream come true- sort of like the "Frasier" episode where he starts to hang out and the pub with all the English blokes. Unfortunately for Prof. Gates he never stopped to think that for this to work well, you need a whole crowd of large, angry, foul-mouthed homies who have probably seen the inside of a cruiser or two, and probably the county jail. One small, "seasoned", frail Ivy League professor is not going to scare a hall monitor, much less a police sergeant.

The other element of the Gates "chimp out" was his accusation of racism. Superficially, this is always a good move for a black arrestee. It puts the arresting officer on guard and reminds him of the risk he's taking by arresting a black person. Filing a complaint later, no matter how groundless, is good too because it will harrass the cop and consume lots of police resources which might otherwise be used to enforce the law.

Had Gates been lucky, this complaint would have landed against an officer who had been investigated, and completely cleared, at least once for an allegation of racism. Again how utterly baseless this allegation or allegation might have been it would have still served the purpose of smearing the officer's record for future reference. Gates was not lucky, as the arresting officer was so politically correct as to be an instructor on the subject of racial profiling.

This leads into another issue, whether Gates should have been arrested at all. some people who believe his behavior was foolish and reprehensible believe the officer overreacted. I say no, for this reason. Due to his special status as a racial profiling instructor he was at much more risk than a regular officer. A regular officer might just say, "Just answering a 911 call sir. I'm glad to see you're OK, have a nice day." Cops have to be able to read people and as long as he thinks this is the end of it, he is probably inclined to take a donut break rather than do a couple hours of paperwork. I live in a politically correct northern city where the cops don't arrest anybody for anything short of murder, and only rather reluctantly for that.

This one (I don't remember his name and I'm too lazy to lok it up- some Irish mug named James, we all look alike to you people anyway so what do you care?) had much more need to maintain his unblemished record of racial bona fides. Let's say a passenger accuses a pilot of having been drinking just before a flight. What does he do? He cancels the flight, calls his company and demands an alcohol test. He has no choice, if he takes the flight he does so with some suspicion he was under the influence. He will never be able to prove otherwise without the test. The officer had to arrest Gates to prove he was doing his job properly and that Gates' interference was unjustified.

Lesson for blacks- one, always go for the racial complaint. It probably won't do you much good but it will help out another brother down the road. Oh, I forgot, black people don't give a shit about other black people which is why they do each other so much harm. Two, if you are a drug dealer or other criminal, when the cops show up the game is just beginning. Keep your mouth shut and let your attorney go to work. Three, if you are a middle class person who might benefit from the protection of the state, cooperate with the police even when it is unpleasant. Their job is tedious and difficult. The best way to get them out of your hair is to politely tell them what they need to know so they can leave.

Who Killed Che Guevara?

2009-10-10T00:53:00.000-07:00

The answer is generally the CIA, although in my dim recollection a local pulled the trigger. Preppies don't shoot anything but birds.

I was reading another blog and apparently this is the anniversary of his death. I recently watched a documentary (available through Netflix! Now cut the pop ups and enroll me in the affiliate program you bastards! Just kidding! No not really) entitled "Nobody Listened" or in Spanish "Nadie escuchaba." I can only recommend it for hard-core anti-communists for two reasons. One is they use white subtitles against a background that is frequently white, so you can read maybe 80% of them. My Spanish is weak so I really would have liked to read it all.

My second criticism is more to the point. Almost every one of the plaintive interviewees, so distressed by their maltreatment by the Cuban Communist revolution, was a former member of it. A few were close aides of Castro who went to prison within days of his victory. Many more were functionaries who ran afoul of him a few years later. Well, what did you morons think was going to happen? Please understand this- if you believe something that is obviously not true, the untruthfulness of which is easily established by readily available sources, you are stupid, regardless of your IQ, SAT score, or GPA is. If intelligence is not a tool to cope with the world then it is nothing. Simply aping things you have read in books or heard in lectures will get you nowhere, not even in a Communist or other socialist regime. I'm sure every day some young idealist in government or education gets eaten alive by "dumber" people who know the office politics of the outfit.

Somebody said a revolutionary regime needs many supporters, but few activists. So once it achieves victory it immediately has a surplus of activists who must be dealt with. Apparently in Cuba this was done immediately, while in the Soviet Union it took some years before it got started. Had Communists learned from the mistakes there? Did Soviet advisors tell Castro he needed to take care of right-sizing the organization quickly? The study of history is endlessly fascinating.

"Che" would have been a special case. I'm guessing that he and Fidel were as good friends as such people can be, and yet Fidel could hardly stand to have a charismatic hero around. On the other hand jailing and shooting him as a fascist saboteur was out of the question, even allowing for sentiment.

Sending him out of the country to murder people elsewhere was the most convenient solution. Still I can't help but think Che knew he was being set up as soon as he got the assignment. Travel is quite dangerous for a high profile terrorist. The only place he would have had safe haven was Cuba, or traveling on a diplomatic passport as a Cuban government official. I doubt the romance of being out in the bush supervising operations had any charm left for him. It's a job for a young man, of much lower status looking to prove something. It's dangerous and having seen what happened in Cuba, the fascists were likely to be on guard, and keenly motivated to avoid the same fate.

My speculation aside, Guevara met with little success and a grim end after a relatively brief time. I don't think appearing on millions of T-shirts would have held much consolation for him, however valuable of a propaganda symbol he is.

Che Guevara was killed by Fidel Castro just as surely as any of the unlucky victims shot by Che himself in Cuba. But how is that novel or surprising? The top of a revolution is a place quite as dangerous as the bottom, as the French and Bolshevik revolutions proved. Guevara, like so many others, though it was different for him. Being turned on by something you believe in is a bewildering fate- Orwell was an insightful, discerning man and it even surprised him. At least Che was spared the humiliating end of Yezhov and others.

Maybe he maintained much of his illusion in the last moments- I doubt he maintained it all, but he was not an introspective man so he must have kept some. We all treasure our delusions, but for a revolutionary they are a little more precious.

Self Criticism in America!

2009-09-15T10:23:00.000-07:00

Bus attack in Belleville- you've seen the story elsewhere, but not with my razor exegesis.

First, more black people behaving badly. I fear this is going to be a daily occurence for a long time. Black people would like to believe their dominance has been established by the election of Obama. In reality it has been established socially and culturally many places, but not politically over the whole country. There is a lot of resistance to Obama, and while the left elite loves to attribute this to racism the groundswell of popular discontent started with Bush II's massive domestic deficit spending, reached critical mass with Bush II and Paulson's bailout, and so was well established by the time of Obama's stimulus.

Speaking of established dominance, I'm guessing the white kid knew who was boss and tried to avoid annoying his betters but they will attack anyway on an unpredictable schedule to maintain dominance, and the bus is the worst place to be cooped up with bullies.

Here's the link-

What's interesting to me is not the retraction of belief in a racial motive. That is easily predictable. Public spokespeople backtrack all the time when they have said something a little inconvenient.

However Capt. Sax said it was "a personal and emotional comment" which goes to a deeper level. The problem is not the professional judgement of the police department, it's Capt. Sax's latent racism, or whatever.

Black People Behaving Badly

2009-09-14T18:15:00.000-07:00

First, Henry Louis Gates..... now Serena Williams and Kanye West.

I think this estabishes a pattern. Black people since the mid 60's have been arrogant and unwilling to cooperate with legitimate authority, but these kind of big public outbursts generally involved traffic stops by thugs or athletes.

I believe black people are giddy from the election of Barack Obama and feeling inclined to throw their weight around.

The Fire Support Plan

2009-09-09T16:06:00.000-07:00

Say what you will about the Marines- I'll say plenty, but I'll save it for later- they produce some good speakers. The only speaker I have seen who could compare was G. Gordon Liddy in his pre-born again phase. (I saw him at USC around 1980, I don't know what is like now.)

In particular I remember an instructor at OCS, Captain Hernandez. He could turn a half-dead class of candidates into a howling mob. I guess charisma can't be discounted as a leadership quality- throughout the ages soldiers have been tired, hungry, bored, agitated, and of course frightened. I would not rank fear high as a factor in soldiering though- I always thought that after a few months at Camp Lejeune any war would seem like a welcome relief. Eugene Sledge and his comrades actually believed boredom was a tool used by the military establishment to motivate them. Trust me, nobody over the rank of lieutenant in the Marines is that smart. But I can see where they got the idea.

Anyway, back to Capt. Hernandez. He once lectured on fire support. His thesis was that fire support, as outlined in the fire support plan, was the most important factor in combat. "Remember the fire support plan! It's not your karate lessons or your Fairburn-Banks fighting knife that's going to save you, it's the fire support plan! When you're on your deathbed, surrounded by your family, with your last breath you're going to pull your young grandson to you and tell him 'Remember the fire support plan!'If, before an assault, the objective has received a large quantity of well aimed fire, you will only need to walk across the smoking ruins, collecting souvenirs."

Standoff firepower- where we can hit them, but they can't hit us- is the way of war for Western democracy in the modern era. We place a high value on the lives of our soldiers. (The WWII bombing of Germany involved horrendous casualties, and whether the same military effort in another form would have resulted in less Allied deaths is a good question, but I will leave that for someone else.)

Our enemies of course know this. The bombing of Germany was controversial in Britain as it was conducted, and I have to believe this came in part from the friends that Germany had there. The cry of "evil/civilian casualties" was constant in the Vietnam War.

The capability of doing this has improved incredibly with modern electronics. Accuracy allows the reduction of collateral casualties, but can't eliminate them- if the target is in the same building as civilians you can't avoid them. This is of course using human shields, and the onus is on those using the human shields, not those attacking a legitimate military target.

Politics override the law of war, always of course against the side of humanity and for the side of evil. The rules of engagement have been changed in Afghanistan. Indirect fire must be approved by higher ups- who will not approve it if they think there is any chance of civilian casualties. Since there is no greater coward on the planet than a man with an oak leaf on his collar who wants an eagle, or an eagle and wants a star, so it will be denied often.

Here's a wire service story on denial of artillery support in an ambush-

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/75036.html

Realistically, this policy will not change. Artillery is not irrelevant now. Air support is accurate but it is expensive, limited in quantity and limited by weather. GPS guided shells are now available- not cheap but far cheaper than the same munition delivered by an aircraft. I think aircraft are preferred because there is a second set of eyes, and a second scapegoat, involved.

This doesn't look good. When the enemy gets to define the rules they win.

The Inevitability of Socialism

2009-07-19T10:47:00.000-07:00

Is socialism inevitable? It may, or may not be, but as a matter of politics it depends heavily on belief in its inevitable growth and victory.

Marx's "scientific" socialism promoted the idea- primarily to socialists themselves- that socialism was destined by the predictable course of history. I'm guessing this was a morale builder more than anything else- I don't know if "Das Kapital" has previously been described as a morale builder, but I think most left wing literature falls into that category.

Remember the French Revolution was a miserable failure- quickly devolving into a revolting dictatorship, followed by a military nationalist dictatorship, followed by collapse and partial restoration of the old regime. No socialist revolutionary of that time had any reason to be optimistic.

Socialism has had much more success, although with various setbacks, since then. But the one thing the socialists need to do more than anything is convince people that their victory is inevitable. Some significant portion of the population is hard socialist by nature- 20% to 30%. They are the bureaucrats, social workers, teachers, government lawyers, and public health workers who directly benefit and get power from the system. Another 10% to 15% are socialist by sympathy- they are convinced only socialism can solve the things they see that disturb them.

The rest of the people are hostile or skeptical. Socialists try to make their victories appear inevitable to get the passive acceptance of the skeptical and the demoralization of the hostile.

The "health care" "debate" is just such an issue. Free market solutions, or reforming the malpractice law system, are simply never discussed. The horror of the lack of third party payment for medical treatment is pounded into peoples' heads all the time until it appears there is just nothing else to be done.

Still many people ask "What's in it for me? Why should I pay more? Why should I get less benefits?" In different circumstances they could just establish a new entitlement, with no taxes or changes in private benefits. But people are now worried about spending, so someone must pay, and socialists don't like the idea of private benefits, so they want to restrict them at the same time. The CBO announces it will cost too much, and it is no longer inevitable.

I was listening to Obama talk about this, and he was shouting. He is getting rattled, and it looks bad. Shouting does not work for him. Obama more than any other figure I can think of needs the armor of inevitability. The crisis atmosphere of 2008 was perfect for him- people really were looking for a savior. But the skepticism about huge government programs actually started to grow before his election, with the bailout package. His ability to push a program through without too many questions peaked with the stimulus package.

Walter Cronkite, BIH (burn in hell)

2009-07-18T18:13:00.001-07:00

What am I supposed to say? The guy was a Communist shill. He believed because he was the most trusted man in America it was his opportunity to feed the people the party line. I have read he can't really be blamed because Congress didn't bail on Vietnam until years later but he set the tone- the war was lost and any continued support would only lead to more bloodshed, and was thus immoral. This is the position Ted Kennedy and the Watergate babies took in 1974.

Glenn Greenwald over at Salon is upset because these days the media are only passive aggressive shills, rather than active shills. He forgets the press is supposed to be objective, or pretend to be, and it's more fitting and decorous, and thus more effective, to just print unedited leaks from State and CIA.

Media Credibility

2009-07-05T16:30:00.001-07:00

Most people seem to need to have a global view of reality, outside of their immediate experience, of how things work. This can be simple or complicated, and check out to varying degrees against objectively verifiable facts. A false worldview may be much more complicated than a real one, just as Ptolemy's astronomy was much more complicated than the real solar system, to account for the need to match the evidence of the senses to the faulty theory.

Gathering information about the world is a difficult and time consuming process. Almost everyone delegates this to others. Children get their initial orientation through education, religious and secular. Parents and relatives impart much. Those who want to work in science or engineering get detailed instruction in how to make things, so they don't fall apart. Those who want to work in the socialist system get quite a bit of education also, for the increasingly difficult job of justifying it against reality.

On a day to day basis, people need updates. Let's just look at straight news for now. Entertainment serves much the same function but that is another subject. Newspapers and radio and TV news inform the public what is happening and why. Armed with this knowledge people go about their business.

America functions under two greatly destructive myths; that the news media is neutral and is a public trust. These ideas are hardly universal. In Great Britain newspapers are partisan and reporters regard it as their job to sell newspapers, which makes British papers significantly less dreadful.

At any rate what is published or broadcast is believed by a large portion of the population to be a decent representation of the state of things. It should be understood that the typical reporter does not think of himself as liberal, but as a moderate, or in any case that a liberal is actually a moderate, representing the decent, rational, thoughtful and responsible point of view. To the left are communists and progressives, passionate idealists who hope and work for great things but are a bit impractical. We need dreamers though! To the right are moderates, not bad people but a little hard hearted, always saying to slow down, think of the practicalities. Farther to the right are conservatives, cruel, hateful people who actually oppose helping minorities, women and the poor, using specious arguments about individual rights, which just means protecting the powerful and privileged.

If someone is simply stating the facts it is churlish to argue with them and try to come up with different facts. So if the Mudville Times tells us at risk youth are increasingly drawn to crime by a lack of education and special programs, you are supposed only to ask what specific type of education or programs need to be offered, and whether a substantial amount of money should be allocated or an even more substantial amount. Pointing out that education is of little use to those who don't want to be educated or that for people who enjoy the pleasures of crime sports are a poor substitute will only get you shocked gasps.

Honduras

2009-06-30T21:23:00.000-07:00

The situation in Honduras is the worst thing to happen in a long time.

My thesis in this blog is that the Western left is by a large majority socialist; I define socialist as not democratic, not constitutional, not even social democratic, but simply having the goal of establishing the control of society by a government holding their social and political beliefs. If this is achieved and maintained by democratic and constitutional means, fine; but if not that's fine also. Historically this has been shown by the support of the left for communist governments, particularly in the Third World. Those who remember the Iranian revolution of 1979 will remember the left was quite enthusiastic about it.

Leftism in Latin America has taken on a softer, but more insidious form. Marxist-Leninist revolution and terror produced a violent backlash from those not willing to go to their deaths meekly. Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador all have leftists governments now, but of a benign sort you'd find in the First World. Leftists in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela have used a different method, broadly populist, that depends on massive, violent street demonstrations and fishy elections to install governments that are democratic to the extent that they have the support of a large segment of the population (the 50% can be manufactured as necessary) but don't follow any law or respect the rights of their opponents, engaging in intimidation as necessary as well.

This is much like Obama of course. He's a cult of personality and promoted a mass movement. The United States has strong civil institutions and it is difficult for them to just ignore them. The refusal of Eric Holder to continue the prosecution of the New Black Panther Party poll intimidators is an example of what they can get away with. I'll leave it others to catalog the marginal legality of the Obama administration.

My point has been well proven. Obama, the UN, the Western Europeans have all joined up with Pelaya, Chavez, and now Ahmedinejad. Latin Americans have been fairly resistant to the demands of outsiders on how to run their affairs. Even if they resist a bad precedent has been set. Any compromise will ratchet to the left.

American Society Is Deeply Sick

2009-06-27T01:23:00.000-07:00

I eschew topical politics for deep politics, but even that seems to fail me. There is something much worse going on.

Politics supposedly represents a struggle between different segments of society with different goals and values. But the basic nature of the society in question is more important to understand.

I have an online backup service that I bought when I bought my computer, provided by a third party. I paid for a year but they seem to think I'm on a trial. I have spent quite a bit of time on the phone to no solution.

You feel for me in my private hell of phone "support", but you don't see what this has to do with the deep metastisized cancer of American society. Please bear with me.

The social environment these days is extremely toxic. This is what the late 60's must have been like, minus the riots and bombings. Of course the people who organized the riots and bombings are running things now. What happened then? Is it happening now?

The late 60's and early 70's were a time when a huge portion of society just dropped pack. It wasn't civil rights or the war, it was a cultural revolution in which much of the vast middle of America got, or gave themselves permission to free themselves of their obligations to others, to their families and generally accepted norms of cvilized behavior. I was a child then and I have come to see a lot of the horrible stuff I saw then was a result of adults deciding to hang loose and do their own things.

The decay slowly crept through society. The Catholic church became overwhelmed by child molesters, Wall Street by a variety of grifters. I don't know exactly how to follow the thread, but during the 90's businesses decided that customers were expensive, and should not be served.

Johnny Carson liked to joke about the DMV, by which of course he meant the State of California DMV. In the 80's going to the DMV was a hard slog. It helped to go to a less busy office, but if you went on Saturday you would be in line for three hours easily. It was not easy to find where to go, and getting in the wrong line meant starting over again.

At some point the DMV started the practice of phone appointments. This was enabled I guess by a computer program that worked with the phone system and smoothed out the flow through the office. You made an appointment, showed up and were pointed to the right window, and did your business. My most recent interactions with the California DMV were actually quite pleasant, as have been those in my current state of residence.

But why shouldn't they be? State employees are well paid and well taken care of, and work regular hours. They have every reason to be pleasant and helpful. Businesses on the other hand are obsessed with squeezing every last bit of "productivity" (read- money) out of their employees. Pay is low, hours are irregular and changed constantly, and full time work is hard to come by.

The employees themselves are nothing to write home about though. They are lazy, not terribly polite, and usually don't care. Being friends with the supervisor is much more important to your quality of work life than doing a good job, so why should they?

Conservative political support presupposes more faith in business than government, but such faith is not merited and thus held by few people. If you call a business for help you get a person in India who hangs up on you if you are too demanding. You are a nuisance to the people you buy goods and services from. Nobody cares.

Your parents divorce if they are bored. Your boss can barely stand to pay you a minimal salary and basic benefits. You may have a few sincere friends, but they are as broke and helpless as you. You have little way to find some satisfaction for yourself other than buying stuff and isolating yourself in media or some private hobbies.

Fundamentally things don't work. A society has to work, it has to reliably function on a sustainable basis.

The Obama phenomenon is the culmination of something building for a long time, 30 or 40 years. People want easy answers, and they want the burden to be borne by somebody else.

Various groups want to hold power, but once you have power you need to be able to do something with it, even if that is only benefit yourself. Leading America- virtually bankrupt, with a surly and uncooperative populace, is not great prize. But people kill to control even the poorest place, so the struggle will not end.

Harmless Weirdos, Who Are Occasionally Useful

2009-06-23T23:16:00.000-07:00

The term "white socialism" describes a lot of the activity on the far "right" but no term describes all these people because they are quite individualistic and no two are ever really alike. Circus freaks are all different, or they wouldn't be circus freaks would they?

I'm sorry, I just insulted circus freaks. I don't think too many circus freaks think Abraham Lincoln was the Worst Person in the World. Let me throw out a few useful generalizations though.

The biggest group is what are called "paleoconservatives" to contrast them with "neoconservatives." The term neoconservative is a very popular perjorative with both the left and the far "right" and thus doesn't mean too much more than "I don't like you." Until recently it was used to describe a few Jewish communist intellectuals who in the 70's became disillusioned with communism and switched sides. If you use it to describe anyone who was once a liberal but became disillusioned then Ronald Reagan was a neocon. I would congratulate myself for having worked Ronald Reagan into the argument but these kind of people regard him as a liberal squish so I don't score any points.

There is an old American conservatism that was based on "small town values", isolationism, and protectionism. This was long dead 50 years ago and I don't think today's paleos can really trace their intellectual thread back to that, but they think they can which is some clue to their mentality.

I will digress with a story. My family lived when I was a child in a town in the California desert, where my father worked at the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Lab as a chemist. (Frank Zappa's father also worked there as chemist, but about ten years earlier.) He had a friend, also a chemist and the story goes the friend's wife went into the back of a florist shop and found a John Birch Society enemies list, which they were on.

Now, my father is a New Deal liberal, and I'm guessing his friend was also, but they were doing much more to fight communism, through the work of designing rockets with which to nuke the Russkies til they glowed, than a paranoid small-town florist was. And as a matter of fact, the John Birch Society was quite skeptical about the Vietnam War, because it wasn't being pursued aggressively enough, or maybe they thought there was a bit too much liberal nation-building going on.

So if a National Reorganization was to occur, I would feel obliged to shoot all the JBS members. Because if you're against the Vietnam War, you're soft on communism. And we can't tolerate that.

There is another faction referred to as the paleolibertarians, who seem to congregate on the Lew Rockwell website. I haven't read it and I'm not going to, as from secondary and tertiary sources it seems to be quite repellent. Apparently they regard the war as a big scam, probably Jewish, and want a gold standard (until we actually have one, then they won't, see More On White Socialists.)

Another faction- and these people overlap quite a bit- are Southern partisans. Believers in the Lost Cause, southern independence, etc. These people really hate Lincoln. I think both Lincoln and Grant were slandered extensively by pro-southern revisionists in the late 1800's but Lincoln had countervailing power. Grant unfortunately was left to the mercies of Democratic politics, which even in progressive Northern circles were hideously racist. I won't speak for his presidency but Grant was a military giant, and whereever they are Erwin Rommel bows down before him. But having your character assassinated by liberal Democrats is an everyday thing and Grant has plenty of good company.

Another category is the racists. Now, I'm a racist. I believe the white race and it's works are superior by some margin to all others. I believe blacks, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, are more violent and less intelligent than whites. I believe that while Asians are a little more intelligent they have not shown any particular accomplishments, particularly outside of participating in white culture, to be regarded as superior or even equal.

This is all on the bell curve of course. And on the bell curve most people are average. Our society is obsessed with people on the extremes, high and low. This doesn't need to ruin anybody's life. Judge people on objective criteria and they will occupy the space they belong in, be it a prison cell or a scientific fellowship. All affirmative action does is put a few more minorities in sexy jobs at the top- not unsexy jobs at the top like scientists. In liberal jurisdictions blacks get more lenient treatment at the bottom, in the criminal justice system, but it only means they hurt a few more people before going to jail for a long time.

For the racists though this isn't quite enough. To call for objective treatment to them is kind of a copout, and if you don't advocate treatment by race, you're a liberal squish.

So what, as Jerry Seinfeld would say, is the deal with that? First, as we see with white socialists, the assorted riff raff of the far "right" agrees much of the time with left socialists, in which case they are used to point out that "not all conservatives believe X, in fact real conservatives agree with us." A "real" or "authentic" conservative is one who agrees with a liberal.

On the other hand, when these people believe something regarded as odious, liberals can say, "see, some conservatives believe X, which just shows you what bad people conservatives are." The same person (often Patrick Buchanan, sometimes William F. Buckley or Barry Goldwater) can be used both as an example of authentic, hairy-chested, plain folks conservatism (as opposed to the evil neocon variety) or as an example of the terribly outdated and unenlightened nature of conservatives.

If you agree with liberals on some important issue, even if for different reasons, you're probably not a conservative. If liberals like to use you as a positive or negative example, you're probably not a conservative. If you're used as both I don't think even the circus can use you.

Puke

2009-06-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan congratulates Obama on making a statement on Iran that supports the protesters without playing into the hands of the evil neocons.

Puke. Obama's position for the last seven days, and the left's position for the last seven years, has been the Marxist-Leninist one that freedom and democracy are an imperialist plot.

But, if the Western left and thus most of its government, media and academia are simply stooges and toadies of the communist project, why would we expect otherwise? I guess the people in Iran didn't get the memo.

More on White Socialists

2009-06-19T20:52:00.000-07:00

I read on Guy White the other day a quote of a Nazi copping that yes, they're about racial unity not capitalism and individualism. So I will stick with the term "white socialists" because to me it is the most descriptive.

A belief is a conclusion one has arrived at. Since you can arrive at a destination by different paths different people can believe the same thing for different reasons. White socialists and regular socialists have different, but similar paths to their belief systems.

I think what distinguishes white socialists the most is they really hate Jews. They dislike blacks but don't hate them, and have no hostility at all to other cultures other than wanting to be separate from them. White socialists see Jews as behind all the bad things that have happened to their people, although I myself am inclined to see white socialism itself as the problem. Regular socialists only hate pro-Israel Jews, and of course many regular socialists are Jews themselves.

Regular socialist look at the world with benign care. We should help, but must not interfere in any way with the myriad cultures and nations of the world, which are in no way inferior to our own. White socialists view the world with benign indifference. We must not interfere in any way with the other cultures and nations, which may be inferior to our own, but love themselves as we love ourselves. White socialists cherish their faux traditionalism and admire societies that assert their own faux traditionalism, such as the Arabs and Chinese.

Israel is a different case. Here the two groups hardly differ at all. They both believe the Jews manipulate the US to support Israel unconditionally to its great detriment in the rest of the world, which explains most of our Middle East problems.

Money is another weird one. White socialists love the idea of a gold standard, because they think the Jews are manipulating fiat currencies for their own benefit. (They may be right- it's worked out pretty good for George Soros.) But I think if the world was on a gold standard, they would say the Jews were hoarding all the gold, creating chaos for their own profit, and demand we get off it.

Economics is a little more complicated and requires going into history. Let me dispatch with the National Socialists of Germany first. One of their intents was to settle Germans on Eastern European farmland cleared of Slavs. They thought urban living had softened the German people. I don't know that many people in Berlin or Hamburg liked the idea of moving to a nice little place with a few cows in Poland or the Ukraine but that was the idea.

White socialists in the US on the other hand wanted to keep people in the country, not move them back. Something you heard all the time up to a few years ago was the critical importance to America of the family farm. It was important to keep agriculture in the hands of sturdy, hard-working, decent, land-loving farm folk and out of the hands of the giant corporations.

A caveat- I'm an unread blogger, not a historian, and you get what you pay for. To continue. Most people, throughout most of history, lived on farms, because almost everyone was a farmer. You were rich if you owned a lot of land, and poor if you had none and worked for someone else, probably as a serf or a slave. You grew most of what you ate and made most of what you used, or a neighbor did. Only a few merchants and tradesmen lived in towns or cities full time- and only higher level nobles part time. Few people went more than a few miles from their place of birth. Cities were dirty, nasty places.

Now, in the Mediterranean there was a maritime grain trade that supported large cities but the large scale movement of food- and the replacement of subsistence farming by business farming- wasn't really practical until the invention of the railroad. Up to that point the only practical way of moving a large, heavy load was in a ship. The Romans had good paved roads but even on those how much can you haul in a wagon drawn by oxen? Not more than a few tons.

In the US after the Civil War you then have people flocking to the Great Plains to start farms, accompanied by railroads to connect them to the cities, which were filling up with immigrants and people who were abandoning subsistence farming for other kinds of work. Farmers were now businessmen, making a product to sell to others.

The first problem that arose was transportation. The only way to sell your product was to move it on a monopoly railroad, which might charge more than you cared to pay. Farmers settled this by demanding and getting government regulation of freight rates. This might well be the first example of white socialism.

Farming like most other businesses has substantial economies of scale, and giant bonanza farms worked by farmhands for wages with steam-powered machinery arose. I don't know how much this affected the economics and culture of the Midwest. I'm not sure if these farms lasted or went bust in one of the many panics and depressions. However, that brings up the second problem, which is that farming is a highly competitive business with thin profit margins. Farmers were discovering they weren't living as well as they thought they should while the new class of businessmen and even many average city dwellers were becoming more affluent. Farmers started another effort, which continues to this day in every First World country, of getting government protection to ensure their standard of living relative to the urban population.

The third problem was money and credit. Farmers hated the gold standard because it restricted the money supply and available credit, and farmers are voracious consumers of credit, farming being a very capital intensive business requiring much expensive land and equipment, and a great deal of working capital to fund operations until the crop is sold. Getting off the gold standard was white socialist OG William Jennings Bryant's big issue, which he expounded in his famous "cross of gold" speech. This is why while white socialists claim to want a gold standard they would probably be screaming bloody murder the day it started.

And it was hardly just a matter of money, it never is. In the farmer/white socialist corner- low church Protestants of old English extraction, joined by a smaller number of Scandinavians and Germans, Lutherans or low church Protestants. In the urban/Wild East capitalist corner- high church English, Catholics and Orthodox from all over Europe, and Jews. The importance of maintaining the purity of rural culture- the racial and religious nature of it is only hinted at- is held up to this day.

Are white socialists and regular then at odds? By no means! (Hehehe I borrow from St. Paul, it drives me nuts the way he does that about three times a chapter in Romans, but perhaps it is an effective rhetorical device. Used moderation of course.) In fact in the state of Minnesota the Democratic Party is officially called the Democratic Farmer Labor Party. The two forces are seamlessly combined. The ethnic homogeneity of Minnesota and much of the rest of the Midwest no doubt helps this. Lacking this the two can still work well together as they have in the New Deal coalition. But they are different things and that cannot be forgotten.

In the end it's rural interests versus urban interests and the real home of white socialism in the US is the South. In this era the South decided if you can't beat them, leach off of them. The century long domination of the US congress by Southern Democrats then began. The seniority rule gave the many-times reelected southern congressmen control of key committees and ensured the flow of federal money into their states.

If you use government power to obtain subsidies, the fixing of prices (high for what you receive, low for what you pay) and money spent in your area is that not socialism? If you use it to protect and continue your racial group is it not racial socialism? I don't think the concept of fascism is even meaningful. It's all about who gets the goodies, and the battle is substantially if not always openly racial, ethnic and cultural.

I said I would explain why the problem for white socialists was white socialism and not the Jews. The system, at least as it exists in the US, was set up by white Protestants largely of the Southern racialist bent- even Woodrow Wilson was a southern racialist. If you had told a black sharecropper or a Jewish cart peddler in 1870 that his great grandchildren would be twisting arms to fill their pockets he would think you were nuts. But if you set up a system where people logroll, favor swap, arm twist, vote count, propagandize and intimidate for financial gain eventually others are going to want in, and they will get in.

What Is The Right?

2009-06-18T14:47:00.000-07:00

Moldbug's post today talks about the nature of the crimes of Marcus Epstein and James Brunn, and he says at one point that while the left follows the rule of "no enemies to the left, no friends to the right", so does the right. And, yes, people on the "right" are often eager to disassociate themselves from other people who are "further to the right."

I put the quotes in because while everyone on the left believes much of the same things, and differ mainly in how aggressively they want to change society in pursuing it, the right is composed of a lot of different people and philosophies that are often incompatible with each other.

What makes a person of philosophy "right wing"? Here are a few markers-

-Opposition to abortion, and willingness to vote on this issue. Many left wing people (blacks, Catholics) are against abortion but don't vote on it. For many "conservative" Republican voters it is the only reason they vote Republican. If Mike Huckabee did not vote on abortion, he could easily be a Democratic congressman from Massachussetts. Notice I say he doesn't need to change his belief about abortion, only his willingness to vote on it.

-Stated preference for lower government spending and less government regulation. Again I qualify the marker as stated preference because in reality all politicians work for higher spending and regulation.

-Opposition to illegal immigration. In general only strongly conservative politicians will oppose illegal immigration. However libertarians, generally considered part of the right coalition, favor illegal immigration.

-Explicit or implicit preference for white races and cultures. I think this one is partly valid, because the left-right continuum generally goes from outright hatred of white races and cultures to mild preference for them. Again though libertarians don't have such a preference, and white racialists generally think Asian races and cultures superior.

What about James Brunn, the Holocaust Museum shooter? He was immediately fingered as a right wing fanatic egged on by conservative opposition to Obama. Conservatives responded that no, as a Nazi he was really a socialist and thus left wing.

It's easy to get agreement on the idea that the left-right axis is an out of date concept. Libertarians like to use an x-y axis for social and economic freedom. I don't think that is even that helpful.

Since Brunn was some kind of self-proclaimed Nazi, consider the Nazis. Some conservatives like to finger them as a left-wing, socialist movement. Really the Nazis wanted what was good for Germany. They wanted an economy with a fair amount of state control because they thought that was good for Germany, and they wanted to attack other countries and exterminate Jews and other undesirables because they thought that was good for Germany. Their ideology was Deutschland uber alles, not something we today recognize as a political philosophy.

Moldbug seems to believe (although he doesn't specifically say) that people on the right have no friends on the right for the same reason people on the left do, which is that the proper movement of society is to the left and conservative ideas and people are repulsive. To an extent this is true. The farther "right" you go, the more socially unacceptable you become, and past being a moderate Republican it can be inconvenient. It's not for nothing that as a fan of Augusto Pinochet and Roberto D'Aubuisson I do this anonymously.

There's more to it though. People of the far "right" (I have to go back to quotes again) share important attitudes with the far left. For example, opposition to the Iraq War and opposition to support for Israel. They oppose the Iraq War (and the Afghanistan War) on pretty much the same basis as the left does, that it's a big scam cooked up to profit giant corporations and at the behest of Israel. At bottom though not because it's bad for the people of the world, but bad for the white people of the US. Same thing with Israel- the US government is controlled by Jews and operates for the benefit of Israel against other more legitimate interests. Left- bad for Palestians! Right- makes Arabs hate America! but in both cases, the same belief.

And the far "right" is not at all opposed to high government spending as long as it's for them. Tom DeLay and his crew would have been Democrats as recently as 20 years ago. A big part of the Democratic Party, southern whites (who of course are always thought of as "right" now) simply migrated over because they didn't like so much of the spoils going to blacks.

Part of Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Year of Reform" was a measure reducing the power of the public employees union. Steve Sailer was opposed to this, saying the government was the last source of good jobs for the white middle class.

I read VDare but it pains me to be constantly reminded I'm not a real American because my ancestors were not Protestants from the British Isles. They even have a 9/11 truther! And while they don't officially call it "The Worst Person in the World" like Keith Olbermann does, they tear up Abraham Lincoln pretty regularly.

Socialists to the left, socialists to the "right"- at least when you're surrounded, you can shoot in any direction!

Sotomayor And The Management Of Debate

2009-05-29T12:11:00.000-07:00

Again, I am not really interested in writing about the politics of the day. It's excruciating, boring, and usually very predictable.

And yet I read the news compulsively every day. It's a filthy and self-destructive habit but I can't seem to let it go. I think I have figured out why though.

The student of Zen sits and meditates on an apparently meaningless phrase for hours, days, weeks, maybe months on end. I would think he experiences a great deal of frustration, boredom, possibly anger, and probably despair, but out of this he gains insight. And from looking at the freakshow of American cultural and political discourse every once in a while something becomes clear.

As Moldbug likes to point out since the New Deal, or at least WWII, all politics in the US has been firmly social democratic. The most rabid, foaming at the mouth conservative Republican of today would simply have been a moderate Democrat in the 50's. Shortly after he left office Harry Truman ripped Eisenhower for being weak on defense, kind of like Nixon on McGovern or Reagan on Carter. Not even a conservative Democrat, a moderate Democrat. Eisenhower was of course a career Army officer from the Midwest, which might lead me to explicate the virtually pacifist nature of the US Army and the Protestant culture of the Midwest, but that's another post.

The left generally gets their way, and drags the country along with it. Sometimes the masses rebel. When they do they succeed about half the time. When they lose it is usually because the courts have taken over the matter.

What the socialists try to do is control the terms of the debate. They inform people of what they can and can't say, and if people agree to that the socialists win. One must not criticize, or "attack", a liberal; that is "mean-spirited." One must most definitely not criticize, or "attack" a minority; that is "racist."

Since the election Democrats have been offering, on an almost daily basis, helpful advice on how the Republicans can improve their prospects in the future. On one level this is unremarkable. People love to offer advice, usually unsolicited, because it affirms their superior fitness and authority. Please understand advice is much different from help. Advice is generally unasked for and unwanted instruction that involves no practical assistance to those receiving it. Help means actually providing valuable assistance, in terms of requested instruction or other service or good.

Still- why even offer advice to a competitor? That can't do you any good, you had best keep working to increase the distance between you, since he is probably doubling his efforts to catch up.

Now, from a tactical standpoint, you can either attack someone for criticizing a minority, or try to exercise prior restraint by telling them not to do it. Telling them they can't do it, or shouldn't do it, even for their own benefit is the same as telling them not to do it.

There's a clear advantage to this. Let's say you make some criticism of a minority. A socialist then attacks you for being racist. He has used the WMD of modern politics against you, and you are probably done for personally. However- and this is a pretty big however- someone listening may not have had there hands over their ears, and may not have the right anti-racism software installed, and may actually take a few minutes to consider whether the criticism you offered was valid. Killing the messenger is great, it strongly discourages people from delivering the message, but it does not completely stop the message from getting through.

Socialists are sadistic people and love to give humiliating floggings to disobedient proles. I think at the current time they would prefer to avoid it though. They have total control and power and it is unseemly for the powerful to appear too arrogant. They may have some dim realization there may be some backlash to the Carrie Prejean incident. "Hope" and "Change" (it really demands to be capitalized) among other things was supposed to mean we would all drift smoothly along to the calming voice of the Dear Leader, and high volume public trashing doesn't really go along with that.

And that brings up the special term, "backlash." It has been used to describe popular uprisings against socialist rule, when the rulers have gone too far too fast. The word has been used with a certain amount of sympathy, but it is intended to indicate an ugly eruption of evil and base sentiments amongst the insufficiently indoctrinated.

But- the masses win when and only when they are angry! Resentment and disgust aren't pretty emotions. Socialists and their troops are entitled to them. Others, no. A certain amount is required to motivate any human action, as humans are emotion driven creatures.

Memorial Day

2009-05-25T18:57:00.000-07:00

Pericles gave this speech at the annual service that Athens gave for the war dead, after the first year of the Peloponnesian war. I don't believe its eloquence has been matched ever since. I would like to point out that Athens is the true model of all democracies; those who like to think they model themselves after Spartans in reality model themselves after the hoplite class of Athens; nothing like Spartiate society has existed since, for the better in my opinion. But I will leave the rest to Pericles.

"Most of those who have spoken here before me have commended the lawgiver who added this oration to our other funeral customs. It seemed to them a worthy thing that such an honor should be given at their burial to the dead who have fallen on the field of battle. But I should have preferred that, when men's deeds have been brave, they should be honored in deed only, and with such an honor as this public funeral, which you are now witnessing. Then the reputation of many would not have been imperiled on the eloquence or want of eloquence of one, and their virtues believed or not as he spoke well or ill. For it is difficult to say neither too little nor too much; and even moderation is apt not to give the impression of truthfulness. The friend of the dead who knows the facts is likely to think that the words of the speaker fall short of his knowledge and of his wishes; another who is not so well informed, when he hears of anything which surpasses his own powers, will be envious and will suspect exaggeration. Mankind are tolerant of the praises of others so long as each hearer thinks that he can do as well or nearly as well himself, but, when the speaker rises above him, jealousy is aroused and he begins to be incredulous. However, since our ancestors have set the seal of their approval upon the practice, I must obey, and to the utmost of my power shall endeavor to satisfy the wishes and beliefs of all who hear me.

"I will speak first of our ancestors, for it is right and seemly that now, when we are lamenting the dead, a tribute should be paid to their memory. There has never been a time when they did not inhabit this land, which by their valor they will have handed down from generation to generation, and we have received from them a free state. But if they were worthy of praise, still more were our fathers, who added to their inheritance, and after many a struggle transmitted to us their sons this great empire. And we ourselves assembled here today, who are still most of us in the vigor of life, have carried the work of improvement further, and have richly endowed our city with all things, so that she is sufficient for herself both in peace and war. Of the military exploits by which our various possessions were acquired, or of the energy with which we or our fathers drove back the tide of war, Hellenic or Barbarian, I will not speak; for the tale would be long and is familiar to you. But before I praise the dead, I should like to point out by what principles of action we rose ~ to power, and under what institutions and through what manner of life our empire became great. For I conceive that such thoughts are not unsuited to the occasion, and that this numerous assembly of citizens and strangers may profitably listen to them.

"Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors', but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.

"And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; our homes are beautiful and elegant; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish sorrow. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own.

"Then, again, our military training is in many respects superior to that of our adversaries. Our city is thrown open to the world, though and we never expel a foreigner and prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him. We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands. And in the matter of education, whereas they from early youth are always undergoing laborious exercises which are to make them brave, we live at ease, and yet are equally ready to face the perils which they face. And here is the proof: The Lacedaemonians come into Athenian territory not by themselves, but with their whole confederacy following; we go alone into a neighbor's country; and although our opponents are fighting for their homes and we on a foreign soil, we have seldom any difficulty in overcoming them. Our enemies have never yet felt our united strength, the care of a navy divides our attention, and on land we are obliged to send our own citizens everywhere. But they, if they meet and defeat a part of our army, are as proud as if they had routed us all, and when defeated they pretend to have been vanquished by us all.

"If then we prefer to meet danger with a light heart but without laborious training, and with a courage which is gained by habit and not enforced by law, are we not greatly the better for it? Since we do not anticipate the pain, although, when the hour comes, we can be as brave as those who never allow themselves to rest; thus our city is equally admirable in peace and in war. For we are lovers of the beautiful in our tastes and our strength lies, in our opinion, not in deliberation and discussion, but that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting, too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection. And they are surely to be esteemed the bravest spirits who, having the clearest sense both of the pains and pleasures of life, do not on that account shrink from danger. In doing good, again, we are unlike others; we make our friends by conferring, not by receiving favors. Now he who confers a favor is the firmer friend, because he would rather by kindness keep alive the memory of an obligation; but the recipient is colder in his feelings, because he knows that in requiting another's generosity he will not be winning gratitude but only paying a debt. We alone do good to our neighbors not upon a calculation of interest, but in the confidence of freedom and in a frank and fearless spirit. To sum up: I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth and fact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which these qualities have raised the state. For in the hour of trial Athens alone among her contemporaries is superior to the report of her. No enemy who comes against her is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the hands of such a city; no subject complains that his masters are unworthy of him. And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages; we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment, although his representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we have compelled every land and every sea to open a path for our valor, and have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of our enmity. Such is the city for whose sake these men nobly fought and died; they could not bear the thought that she might be taken from them; and every one of us who survive should gladly toil on her behalf.

"I have dwelt upon the greatness of Athens because I want to show you that we are contending for a higher prize than those who enjoy none of these privileges, and to establish by manifest proof the merit of these men whom I am now commemorating. Their loftiest praise has been already spoken. For in magnifying the city I have magnified them, and men like them whose virtues made her glorious. And of how few Hellenes 1 can it be said as of them, that their deeds when weighed in the balance have been found equal to their fame! I believe that a death such as theirs has been the true measure of a man's worth; it may be the first revelation of his virtues, but is at any rate their final seal. For even those who come short in other ways may justly plead the valor with which they have fought for their country; they have blotted out the evil with the good, and have benefited the state more by their public services than they have injured her by their private actions. None of these men were enervated by wealth or hesitated to resign the pleasures of life; none of them put off the evil day in the hope, natural to poverty, that a man, though poor, may one day become rich. But, deeming that the punishment of their enemies was sweeter than any of these things, and that they could fall in no nobler cause, they determined at the hazard of their lives to be honorably avenged, and to leave the rest. They resigned to hope their unknown chance of happiness; but in the face of death they resolved to rely upon themselves alone. And when the moment came they were minded to resist and suffer, rather than to fly and save their lives; they ran away from the word of dishonor, but on the battlefield their feet stood fast, and in an instant, at the height of their fortune, they passed away from the scene, not of their fear, but of their glory.

"Such was the end of these men; they were worthy of Athens, and the living need not desire to have a more heroic spirit, although they may pray for a less fatal issue. The value of such a spirit is not to be expressed in words. Any one can discourse to you for ever about the advantages of a brave defense, which you know already. But instead of listening to him I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it, who in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always present to them, and who, if ever they failed in an enterprise, would not allow their virtues to be lost to their country, but freely gave their lives to her as the fairest offering which they could present at her feast. The sacrifice which they collectively made was individually repaid to them; for they received again each one for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all tombs, I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war. The unfortunate who has no hope of a change for the better has less reason to throw away his life than the prosperous who, if he survive, is always liable to a change for the worse, and to whom any accidental fall makes the most serious difference. To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more bitter than death striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of courage and animated by the general hope.

"Wherefore I do not now pity the parents of the dead who stand here; I would rather comfort them. You know that your dead have passed away amid manifold vicissitudes; and that they may be deemed fortunate who have gained their utmost honor, whether an honorable death like theirs, or an honorable sorrow like yours, and whose share of happiness has been so ordered that the term of their happiness is likewise the term of their life. I know how hard it is to make you feel this, when the good fortune of others will too often remind you of the gladness which once lightened your hearts. And sorrow is felt at the want of those blessings, not which a man never knew, but which were a part of his life before they were taken from him. Some of you are of an age at which they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will the children who may hereafter be born make them forget their own lost ones, but the city will be doubly a gainer. She will not be left desolate, and she will be safer. For a man's counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you who have passed their prime, I say: "Congratulate yourselves that you have been happy during the greater part of your days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those who are gone. For the love of honor alone is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but honor is the delight of men when they are old and useless.

"To you who are the sons and brothers of the departed, I see that the struggle to emulate them will be an arduous one. For all men praise the dead, and, however preeminent your virtue may be, I do not say even to approach them, and avoid living their rivals and detractors, but when a man is out of the way, the honor and goodwill which he receives is unalloyed. And, if I am to speak of womanly virtues to those of you who will henceforth be widows, let me sum them up in one short admonition: To a woman not to show more weakness than is natural to her sex is a great glory, and not to be talked about for good or for evil among men.

"I have paid the required tribute, in obedience to the law, making use of such fitting words as I had. The tribute of deeds has been paid in part; for the dead have them in deeds, and it remains only that their children should be maintained at the public charge until they are grown up: this is the solid prize with which, as with a garland, Athens crowns her sons living and dead, after a struggle like theirs. For where the rewards of virtue are greatest, there the noblest citizens are enlisted in the service of the state. And now, when you have duly lamented, every one his own dead, you may depart. "

Stalinism as Social Censure- More on Carrie Prejean

2009-05-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

The Carrie Prejean story is one of those awful things that never quite goes away, and yet I have become more and more interested in it. It seems to show a lot about how the left controls society.

I was reading the "Savage Love" column recently, for those of you not familiar with it a sex advice column written by a homosexual man that has long run in free weeklies. A reader, who identifies himself as strongly for gay rights, writes to object that Savage has gone in with Perez Hilton on the vilification of Carrie Prejean. The column is here-

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=1540586

Savage tells him he originally did not go along with this, but later did due to further statements by Prejean changed his mind. First however the state of mind of the reader.

The reader is uncomfortable with the attack on Prejean, but why? I speculate it is because he wants it to be thought he supports gay marriage because he is a reasonable person, and not because he is terrified of being publicly humiliated. To an observant person who doesn't care, or cares but does not want to be aggressively trashed, the obvious lesson from this incident is to answer, when asked, that you support gay marriage. Those who oppose it will not try to destroy you if you say this, but those who support it will if you say you don't, so saying you support it is the safe, non-controversial answer.

But if the safe thing is to support gay marriage, where is the reward in doing so? People who support it because they actually believe in it would like to be thought well of for it, not merely left alone by the hyenas. What the reader does not understand is that he, and others like him, must solve this problem by actively, and not merely passively, showing their support and working for the establishment of the desired policy.

This is true for any socialist issue. There will be three groups that materialize. The first is opposed, and will be attacked. The second assents, and will be left alone. The third actively supports, agitates, and promotes the policy, and gains power and status by doing so.

The problem comes in when those in the third group try to maneuver for leadership, as they always will. They get more aggressive, and the bar keeps getting moved. Mere assent is not enough. After all if you can protect yourself just by assenting maybe you aren't really a supporter after all, just an opportunist. Mere assent is then punished, and some level of activism is required for safety. But if one attends meetings and gets up to the microphone to voice support, maybe this too is only to make oneself comfortable, and neither this will guarantee safety.

Something very much like a feeding frenzy may result. Under historical Stalinism the initiators of the process often became its victims fairly quickly, because the process assumes a life of its own. I hesitate to say it becomes "uncontrollable" because probably there were those who understood the process, knew what was happening, and pointed it in the direction they wanted it to go.

The reader is very naive and seems to think people will believe as they will and the chips will fall where they may, most likely for gay marriage because that is what decent people want and most people are decent.

From what I know of Savage he is a perceptive and intelligent person. I saw him on the local access channel in Seattle a few years ago talking about the culture of the city, exhibiting an uncommon insight. I don't doubt he is inclined from the beginning to view Prejean as a silly, repressed, and not very bright child. But I doubt the idea of shaming her appeals to him. I think he saw that his credentials would be questioned if he didn't go along so he did. Perez Hilton is a repulsive toad who lives to humiliate people far more accomplished, attractive and loved than he could ever dream of being. His treatment of Prejean is just what he does every day anyway, so it hardly rates any mention. I think Savage genuinely wants to help people, as well as make some money and notoriety with his column, so it is worse to see him go along with it.

The problem then is not the Hiltons (or Olbermanns) because they are always part of the population, but the Savages who go along with them out of convenience.

The Communist/Confederate Connection

2009-05-22T20:41:00.000-07:00

Nicely alliterative isn't it? I noticed some time ago that when the Civil War comes up in movies it is the Confederate side that is treated with sympathy. "The Outlaw Josey Wales" is an obvious example, more recently "Open Range", and recently on The Belmont Club a few excerpts from "Shane" were used for illustration. I was surprised, but shouldn't have been, that the bad guys are Yankees.

A former Communist named Eugene Genovese wrote a book about the antebellum South, "Roll Jordan Roll", which I have not read, but which is supposed to be highly sympathetic. When I have some time I think I will look into this.

An ordered, hierarchical, authoritarian society where everyone knows their place and submits respectfully to the elite is of course what socialists want. The way dissent was dealt with is appealing to- physically violent humiliation for the lower, socially violent humiliation for those not subject to the first.

The Libertarian Slippery Slope- An Illustration

2009-04-21T15:49:00.000-07:00

I never intend to be topical, I want to go deeper than that. But topicality, like greatness, can be thrust upon a man.

Miss USA pageant. Miss California is asked by by Perez Hilton her opinion on gay marriage. She gives the libertarian answer, to paraphrase, It's a free country, do what you want, but I'm against it. She is excoriated by Mr. Hilton, for some strange reason a homosexual male judging the desirability of females.

http://perezhilton.com/

Ten years ago this answer would have been considered quite reasonable, perhaps generous, by even such as Perez Hilton. Gay marriage was contemplated nowhere, and considered quite avant. The idea that somebody, somewhere, might want to do this and it would be OK was quite enough to be considered progressive.

That was one lawsuit ago, though. Now it's an inalienable, non-negotiable human right. Any state where more than 50% of the electorate wants gay marriage, or more that 50% of the Supreme Court wants gay marriage and there is no initiative system, gay marriage will be the law. If the US Supreme Court applies the full faith and credit clause to gay marriage, it will be the law everywhere.

That's still not enough. It has to be the law in every state, so homosexuals do not need to go to another state to get married. (Under the full faith and credit clause I suppose they can get divorced in their home state.)

Mr. Hilton has on his site various young female celebrities advocating for gay marriage, although if you read closely they are not all exactly doing that, they are keeping it pretty vague, as they do have other people to keep happy.

Allow me to pose a question, should anyone be interested to answer it- is a rectum a vagina? Does the insertion of an erect penis into a rectum serve any useful biological purpose? Might it not in fact be quite the opposite, and pose serious health risks to the persons holding both body parts? It is considered incredibly gross that I should pose such a question, but not that anyone should defend the act not only to be accepted but celebrated.

Mencius Moldbug

2009-04-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

Mencius Moldbug is blogger of a different color. He never puts in 10 words what he can put in 1000 and he deals in obscure concepts that are largely his own invention. He is needless to say a complete crackpot, but I'm a crackpot myself so I can't hold that against him.

Here is his blog-

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/

It is very hard to read in sequence, but someone has arranged his posts by date and subject-

http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/

I remember reading a trashy novel my dad brought home from the library when I was a kid. Now I can tell the author was going for Conrad- a guest is asked to relate his story, and he asks if he should tell the long or short version. As I remember the host left it to him, and he chose the long version, for reasons of authenticity and aesthetics.

Critics took Conrad to task for the length of his Marlowe stories, but he defended himself by saying if read out loud they would take something like two or three hours, which is certainly reasonable for a story told over dinner and a few bottles of wine afterwards. I personally prefer the long version. A story is not much without nuance and asides, there is much important that can be left out.

Still, Mr. Moldbug abuses the privilege. However if you have a lot of time on your hands scanning his writings is at least very thought provoking. (If you read his writings in detail, you really need to get a hobby.)

Moldbug doesn't like democracy and thinks things have been going downhill since Cromwell. His argument for this is the huge piles of dead bodies produced by the political upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries. His definition of democracy is very broad- he includes communism, fascism, and Nazism. For those who argue these aren't democracy, I think he would reply that you call what you like democracy, and what you don't like something else.

He calls what I call the "master culture", "cryptocalvinism" or "universalism" and traces its descent from the dissenting churches of England to its present form. He calls these the "low churches" while I referred to them as the "high churches" because they are the churches of the New England elite, but he is more correct.

I think he makes the error of taking an idea and pushing it farther than you can really take it, but if you have some time on your hands and are looking for something thought provoking it's worth a look.

The Libertarian Slippery Slope

2009-04-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

The "slippery slope" argument is frequently discredited- the term itself is discrediting. I'm sure someone must have used the term in a positive way but almost all references that come up on Google refer to the "slippery slope fallacy." Eugene Volokh has an article taking it seriously, but I think that is the only readily available reference.

I'm not willing and perhaps not able to argue or analyze this in great detail. But I will give one example, a libertarian slippery slope using gay rights as an example.

The original argument for gay rights was libertarian. Surely, nobody could object to private behavior between consenting adults. What people agreed to do with each other in their own homes could not possibly be anybody else's business. Other arguments were included in this. The fiscally conservative argument-Why should law enforcement resources be used in this way? The law and order argument- With serious crime rampant (this was the 60's and 70's) why should law enforcement resources be used in this way? The kindness argument- If a person's heart should long for another of the same gender, why should they be denied happiness?

Essentially though it was a libertarian argument for negative freedom. If anybody had told you it would someday be illegal in Canada to quote the Bible on the subject of sodomy, or that opposing gay marriage would make you a censored person in polite society, you would have thought them crazy.

The slope was indeed slippery though. The next step was employment rights. It had been accepted for a few years that sodomy was not an immediate threat to the general welfare. But homosexuals were not protected against employment discrimination. If you thought them disgusting or evil you needed not give them a job in spite of that. But if the behavior wasn't illegal, really, how could you use that as a reason not to employ a person? Even as a teacher of small children? I had some teachers who in retrospect were probably gay, and they were good teachers. That was not for me to decide though. Officially gays are not any greater risk of molesting children that heterosexuals. I remember seeing once on a cover of a gay newspaper an article that seemed to be about the noisomeness of age of consent laws, and the burden of sex offender registration. (This was a local paper in San Diego in 2005 or possibly 2006.)

The AIDS epidemic put an entirely new twist on things. Generally public health authorities track the contacts of people who have serious communicable diseases. If you have TB and don't cooperate, you can eventually land in jail. AIDS was from the beginning a civil rights issue. The crucial thing was that AIDS infectees not be discriminated against, and thus their status must be kept completely secret at all costs.

More recently the subject of gay marriage has been an issue. Ten years ago this was a very hypothetical issue. Even strong gay rights advocates thought maybe it would occur sometime in the future, but were not sure if it was even necessary or desirable. Then the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided in was, in fact, an absolute and inalienable human right. In just the last few years this has become the liberal dogma. Being for civil unions is in no way a defense to the charge that if you oppose gay marriage, you are an evil person who hates gays and wants to kill them. You want to take rights away, and that these rights were invented by a few judges in a very liberal state is not relevant.

Liberals now say gay marriage will not be forced everywhere, and churches will not be forced to perform gay marriages, and to say they will is ridiculous. But history shows what today is supposed to be ridiculous will be a non-negotiable demand in a few years and firmly rooted law a few years after that.

The history of liberalism and socialism is the history of slippery slopes, most not libertarian, and I'll try to look at those later. But if someone tells you A won't lead to B, and saying so is paranoid and ridiculous, A will most definitely lead to B. There is a slope and it is slippery.

The Chosen Few

2009-04-07T11:16:00.000-07:00

"The Terminator" series is what people who talk about the movie business call a "franchise", I think, which is to say a concept from which an ongoing series of movies can be made. The Terminator series now consists of three movies that came out in the 90's, one coming out next month, and a TV series that has been showing Friday nights on the Fox network.

The story starts with something that must be a fairly stock story in human literature, a woman in peril who can get help from no one except a mysterious stranger. It adds time travel and evil robots who take over and threaten humanity- which of course we saw in "The Matrix" also. Some people like to talk about an idea called the Singularity where this occurs in the future due to rapid increases in computing power. (If the computer in question is Windows based, it won't work and all the blame is on the third party manufacturer; if it's Linux based it will work but there is no driver; if it's Apple based it may work and be highly intelligent but it will be too smug to be of any use, preferring to work on its novel in a non-corporate coffee shop.)

Sarah Conner is the protagonist and by far the most important character; while her son John Conner is the fearless maximum leader of the future resistance he only appears in the stories as an angry adolescent. And she has a hairy problem- evil robots are trying to kill her, because she is the mother of the saviour of humanity, but nobody believes her. Since the threat comes from the future, the only way to deal with it permanently is to wipe out anybody now who might be contributing to the problem in the future and anybody who inconveniences her in any way in this quest.

In some instances, if she catches up to you, she may try to explain what the situation is and ask you to work with her- in T2 she does with with the president of the chip company, Miles Dyson, who then quickly and inexplicably joins her in destroying his life's work. Or she may try to destroy your work and leave you alive, as she does with Andy Goode's chess computer in the TV series. (Her confederates lack the sentimental streak she has and Kyle Reese kills him anyway.) But the bottom line is she really doesn't have time to explain herself, and she absolutely cannot risk that you will interfere with her project in any way, so most likely you're getting dead real quick.

She thus goes around tracking down and killing scientists, engineers and computer programmers who are working on artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and military projects, and occasionally law enforcement officers who catch up with her. She's a terrorist- she comes right out and says so in a recent episode of the TV series.

For Sarah Conner, ignorance is not an excuse. None of the human beings she kills are guilty of doing anything except working on artificial intelligence, or even just powerful computers. They don't know they are spawning a system of evil robots because that doesn't occur until some time in the future. They are nonetheless guilty. They are pawns, of the system. Individual culpability is not really the issue in any case but working on AI, powerful computers, or military projects is just distasteful anyway and what sort of person would do that?

The movie "Terminator 2" originally included a speech by Sarah Conner at the end excoriating the military-industrial complex and the evil of nuclear weapons. It was cut because it was feared the overt left wing politics would turn people off. Its absence hardly makes any difference at all in the message.

"Terminator- the Sarah Conner Chronicles" is reportedly done for due to low ratings for two seasons. "Terminator 4" is out in a few weeks. Apparently it brings in a new twist, robots who think they are human. It sounds like a political metaphor to me.

In the broadest sense this deals with any situation in which one party perceives itself as having superior information and knowledge, and the stakes are high. What do they do? Should they attempt to educate and inform others and gain agreement on a course of action? Must they do this? The answers from socialists to the first is yes and the second is no, although emphasis varies somewhat across the leftist spectrum.

Socialists of all kinds love education, by which they mean telling you what to think. Education is a big activity in all socialist societies, ranging from training conducted in schools and colleges in classrooms that looks very much like real education, to meetings in totalitarian societies where people are expected to sit silently and listen to regime propaganda and occasionally shout out the slogans themselves. There is no substantive difference between diversity training conducted in a Fortune 500 corporation and Juche indoctrination conducted in North Korea. The comfort level is much different and the penalties for non-compliance are different but the purpose is the same.

And that is because your agreement with the message is helpful and desirable but in no way required for the functioning of the regime. The answer to the second question is no, they can and should proceed with the program whether the subjects of the regime agree or not. Again, how this is done varies across the spectrum. In totalitarian societies people who do not conform are killed or imprisoned. In democratic societies they are ignored or subject to civil penalties. In Europe bureaucrats create and administer the system without reference to the desires of the population; in the US the process starts with judges, who decree certain kinds of compliance, which is then administered by bureaucrats.

In brief, if anybody says "I don't have time to explain it to you" you are in really big trouble.

Here's an Idea...............

2009-04-05T23:46:00.000-07:00

I recently thought of a really cool idea for a terrorist attack on the US.

What? Like they haven't thought of everything already? Well, maybe not this, but if they actually try this don't blame me, it suggests itself easily enough.

The Taliban need to get together a good sized force- 500 to 1000 hell-bent for leather desperadoes- and move on US forces in Afghanistan. Then, they should surrender.

"Ooooohhh, some terrorist attack. That's terrifying and disorienting." Please- sarcasm is rarely effective humor and never effective argument. But since you don't get it yet, I'll explain.

The prisoners of Guantanamo Bay have wreaked far more havoc on the US relaxing in their orange jumpsuits eating delicious, and completely halal, Army chow than they ever did on the battlefield in Afghanistan. Or, more specifically, their lawyers have, all American citizens, and all sworn before the bar to uphold the law as officers of the court.

Well, not them either. Thousands of times every day judges dismiss motions from defense counsel that don't have a prayer, without rolling their eyes because they understand the defendant's lawyer has an obligation to do everything in his imagination to protect his clients procedural rights, even if he's really grasping at straws.

Of course in any number of cases they have a valid point and get the ruling. That's how the adversarial system works.

And yet power goes to the heads of a lot of people, judges especially. They have trouble believing anybody can do anything without their consent and supervision, or any American at least. And so they regularly invent new rights for terrorists, who have gone from being illegal combatants eligible for battlefield execution to criminal suspects with full legal rights in US criminal courts and aliens with full legal rights before immigration judges.

Why? Because at root America is wrong. Whatever it is doing, it must be suspect, and enemies of America most likely have good reasons for doing what they do. Everything the US does can and should be litigated.

Liberals and Reality- Unclear on the Concept

2009-03-29T12:06:00.000-07:00

Carrie-Ann Moss as Trinity, destroyer of false consciousness

I don't waste time on current politics, as others cover that far better than I could, and today I'm not even going to bother with current culture. Instead I'm going to take you on a nostalgic journey, back five years or so to some movies I will just collectively refer to as "The Matrix."

Keanu Reeves. Laurence Fishburne. Women in skin tight black leather. Slow motion martial arts and gunfights. Sounds pretty good doesn't it? Maybe I betray myself, particularly with the skin tight black leather part. The first was an OK action movie, the second one kind of sucked, I didn't bother to see the third, which I think was the reaction of most people.

But what stuck in my mind was the portrayal of reality in these films' universe and how it reflects the way liberals and socialists understand the world.

To recap the plot, Keanu Reeves is an office drone who is deeply dissatisfied with his life and realizes something is wrong. He has some dispute with some authority figures, possibly FBI agents? (hey it wasn't that good, how am I supposed to remember everything?) and wakes up from his dream and finds he is in a pod with numerous electrodes attached, from which he is ejected and finds himself naked and wet in a hellish industrial world.

He is taken in by other ejectees who explain what in the Sam Hill is going on. The "reality" of the people in the pods is completely imaginary. They think they are leading normal, possibly happy, lives, working, eating, commuting, lounging at home, but in fact they are sleeping in pods wired with electrodes so the evil robot masters of the world can use them to generate electricity. The "reality" these people experience is just an elaborate computer program, called the Matrix, which has been generated to fool them into thinking they are happy or at least content while the machines suck the juice out of them.

Rarely one of the pod prisoners will realize this, in which case they are ejected from the system. The ejectees try to fight the robots but they can also plug themselves into the Matrix with electrodes attached to their heads. They can explore and gather intelligence but they must leave before they are discovered or they can be killed.

The "mystical" part of this is the prophecy that eventually a man will come along who can go into the Matrix and having such a strong mind and deep understanding of the Matrix that he can actually overcome its illusions and defeat the program and the robots that run it from within.

OK, so is this a dumb but maybe entertaining science fiction movie, or Marxist-Leninist propaganda? I'll go with number 2. See, it's all an illusion. The people (or should I say The People) are being fooled. They think they are happy, they think they lead lives of meaning with those they care about, but they are really just mindless slaves to the machine. A few realize this, and fight the machine. Someday one man (perhaps we might refer to him as The One) will come along and destroy the illusion once and for all.

This is a reminder that if liberals seem disconnected from reality, we need to remember they have an entirely different idea of what reality is. Human nature as a constant over time that changes little and slowly is simply not the case for them. Social reality is simply a construct of the powerful that can and should be overthrown. It's very hard because people cling tightly to it, in their foolishness and ignorance, but it must be done so the foundation of a brave new world can be constructed.

And in fact, socialists have had long periods of time in which they had total control of the culture in which to try to accomplish this. Human nature has stubbornly resisted this makeover, but that's another story.

Next week- left wing terrorism! On TV Friday night! On the Fox network!

The Candidacy of Barack Obama

2008-10-22T12:05:00.000-07:00

I have left routine political commentary to others, who are better qualified to do it and better at it. The routine of politics is not all that interesting to me. Presidential elections just reflect the shifting hopes and fears of the undifferentiated masses, as they shift from one concern to another.

Barack Obama is different however. He is a genuine Popular front fellow traveler. Often compared to George McGovern but Henry Wallace is more appropriate. There's no Soviet Union to fellow travel with any more but there are plenty of other left wing poster children for him.

I don't have anything against Obama personally. He's a simple left wing snake oil seller, and there are plenty of politicians like him from liberal constituencies. He should have ended his career as the Senator from Daley, but his intense ambition and the workings of fate have him the likely next president.

The good people of the Silent Majority will be quickly shocked and appalled at what they have done, but by then it will be too late. Obama is not a leader, not a craftsman of legislation or a builder of alliances. He won't be able to run the Democratic party or push through an agenda. The hyenas of the left will overreach themselves, as well as any other ambitious or power hungry elements of the left.

Even so he will be able to stock the Justice Department with left wing lawyers who will use their offices to attack any opponent, even some Democrats, and punish dissent. He'll withdraw the military and let various adversaries expand their power unchecked.

Setting aside predictions, the strange and fearful thing is the cult which has arisen around the man. The enthusiasm is overwhelming. The elites are very, very invested in the man, without any logical reason for this. McCain is very much a creature of the establishment, and would be easily controlled by them, but is not of them. Obama is too a creature of the establishment, but left of the elite consensus and not really in their control. Right now the influence follows the cult, or the enthusiasm, and influences them, not the other way around. Maybe they feel they *have* to go along with it, which would explain the aquiesence of the Republican elite.

There is much more to be said about this, probably not by me, but who knows. I will say the Obama after the election will be a lot different that what we have now. I predict, there will be victory riots, like when an NBA team wins a championship. (Is that racist? Yes.) There will be a great rush for power, and Obama will not handle it too well. David Axelrod has run this like his TV show, "The West Wing", but governing is not a TV show. The people will develop buyer's remorse pretty quickly, but to what extent the media will protect him I can't say. They will need to take him down a notch, to show him who's boss. Bill Clinton handled this fairly well, but Obama is not Bill Clinton. A small amount of critical press could do him a lot of damage.

To close I will say this does not reflect the failure of Bush, although he has failed, as much as a fundamental change in the nature of American society. More and more Americans work in law, government, education, human resources, and health care, and these are all bastions of therapeutic liberalism. The conservative mentality has been eclipsed, and thus conservatism must be also.

Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and Stalinism

2008-05-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

Note- I wrote this a long time ago and just found it in my drafts so I thought I would publish it.

Words mean so much. A word usually must mean much, because that is what words are for- to make a compact abstract representation of a large experience.

A word, or a phrase, may come to mean something, or be used to mean something, other than what it meant originally. This is problematic of course. "Marxism" now means something like a belief in the desirability of socialism. What Marxism literally means of course is the ideas of Karl Marx as outlined in his various writings, "Das Kapital" primarily.

Marx may be called an economist, or a philosopher, but I think he was really a historian. He had a theory, which may be considered an economic theory or a philosophical theory, but was really a historical theory. I think this is because historians don't have the intellectual prestige economists or philosophers have. In any case Marx stated that human history followed a certain pattern of development, and would follow this pattern of development predictably into the future. He was an advocate for the development he forsaw but it was still a matter of objective truth, not simply something he desired.

He wasn't alone in this belief. Josef Schumpeter also believed socialism was inevitable, because of the trauma of creative destruction. The capitalist triumphalism you would find in Forbes magazine or the Wall Street Journal would dismiss this, but Schumpeter was more right than they are, and Marx was not very wrong. The social democracy found in the most developed countries today is nothing like the communism Marx envisioned, but it's nothing like 19th century capitalism either.

Marx saw the future more clearly than most in the 19th century, but even so Marxism as an intellectual concept isn't popular these days. Academics have other things to toy with.

"Marxism-Leninism" is a term not much used, but what it refers to is much simpler. Lenin wanted to develop a plan for implementing the socialism Marx forsaw. He didn't think the workers were going to spontaneously rise up, so he organized a "vanguard" party, that would attack the existing political structure, rally the workers, establish a disciplined socialist government, and develop a communist society.

A Marxist revolution might be considered democratic, as it would involve a large proportion of the population, but Lenin didn't care about that. A small number of people would establish the program, and everybody else would go along with the program.

What actually happened 80 years ago isn't really important today. What's important is what people currently believe about those events. Marx was right in broad generalities- people would change, society would change, and people would want to throw off the bonds of the past in favor of something new. Specifically, he was quite wrong. What you get, when the inhabitants of an advanced industrial country decide to completely overthrow the past and start anew, is not anything Marx envisioned, but France.

Some people love France, some people hate it. I've never been there, so I can't say. Liberals and socialists of all stripes love France though. Not socialist, but a heavily social social democracy, it is the apex of a certain kind of social development.

But France is only vaguely Marxist, and not at all Marxist-Leninist. For that you need an undeveloped, agricultural, virtually feudal place, like Russia, or China, where there is a small group of people who pull the strings who can all easily be wiped out. My feeling about Marxist-Leninist projects is that they either succeed quickly or not at all. And usually if they fail, they fail fairly quickly. Spain and Latin America are examples of quick failure; the exception being Colombia, where a formal M-L insurgency still exists. But the FARC is really more a bandit group and drug outfit than a real army.

In any case Marxism-Leninism is an idea that had a brief heyday and is not active now. Its blood-curdling rhetoric is found among progressive types everywhere but the active parts of it are pretty much gone, athough I don't know how exactly they monitor and control dissent in Bolivia and Venezuela.

Stalinism is again something very different. Usually when people say "Stalinism" they are actually refering to Marxism-Leninism. Since the term is much used, although nothing like in the old days when the Soviet Union was active, I will offer a definition of it, which I believe will clarify things.

Stalinism is not a political or governmental system of any sort. It is a rhetorical style. A rhetorical style that when matched with a totalitarian system creates havoc but nonetheless merely a rhetorical system.

First you have a party line, the official position of the party, what's correct and what's right. All parties have party lines, even if many of the members don't really follow them. Stalinism is different in the way deviation is handled. Under Stalinism deviation from the party line, however slight, however expressed, is evidence that the deviator is not merely a bad party member, or uneducated, or of a different but psooibly reasonable position, but an actual enemy of the party. the evils that can then be attributed to this person are then limited only by the imagination.

Marxism is today little studied, Marxism-Leninism is mostly defunct, but Stalinism is where ever socialism is.

In Consideration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

2008-04-06T19:32:00.000-07:00

As you are probably aware, Friday was the 40th anniversary of the murder of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The usual eulogies have been made, but there has not been much dispassionate evaluation of King's legacy. It's acknowledged he was tired of his mission. It's acknowledged the times had passed him by, that more aggressive leaders were taking over and his Gandhian non-violence was viewed with derision.

What is never even considered is that he did terrible, and probably irreversible damage to his cause after around 1965 or so by changing his message, from one the vast majority of Americans had to agree with, if not always enthusiastically, to one which alienated another vast majority.

The message of the early civil rights movement was simple and compelling. "Look," it was said. "All we want are the same rights all other Americans have- to vote, and to have access, only access, to jobs and services. Nothing more. What honestly good reason do you have for denying us that?"

And nobody outside the South had an answer for that. Well, what difference did it make if Negroes (as blacks were then called) voted? The voted up North and nothing terrible happened. If they wanted to drink from a water fountain or use a restroom or sit at a lunch counter, what difference did that make to anybody?

The Southern arguement- that racial separation was natural and required- didn't fly up north, or out West. People there jostled closely everyday with strangers, even if they retreated to monoethnic neighborhoods at night. The libertarian arguement- that if you didn't want to serve blacks at your restaurant, or hire them for your business, that was your right whether it was rational or not- also didn't persuade many people. After all it wasn't fair, and most people like the idea of fairness. Wasn't one man's money as good as the next? And if you needed somebody to load boxes, or tote figures, or shuffle paper what did it matter what they looked like?

Southerners had great power in Congress and they held the legislation back a few years but its passage was inevitable. By 1965 blacks had all kinds of legal guarantees to full participation. In the typical white person's view, blacks had been fully emancipated.

But as it turned out this was only the beginning. Blacks outside the South had a completely different set of grievances, that were largely unaddressed. I'll be charitable and describe it from their standpoint- the police were oppressive, their white neighbors hostile, and economic improvement unavailable despite civil rights legislation. And they demanded, and got, a relaxation of criminal law and vast patronage.

In other words a Gramscian program of liberation was instituted. And King was the loudest advocate of all. Blacks were to be heavily funded, indulged in violence and criminality, and paid the greatest obeisance. And if you didn't agree with this program, well you were just an old style, Bull Connor, Klan member racist.

Unfortunately, vilification or not, a great many people did oppose this program. Working class white people were directly harmed by the shifting of public benefits to blacks, the entry of lower class blacks into their neighborhoods, and the explosion of black criminal violence. They could bear the vilification in any case, and as their vital interests were in mortal danger, they reacted strongly against this.

The Boston busing case is the most famous example of this. But in any case what was now called "civil rights" was a vicious, humiliating, often terrifying attack against all the rights, interests and affections of millions of Americans, people generally regarded as being of no consequence but not without a few champions and not entirely without recourse to protect themselves.

First they vacated the cities, leaving them to poor blacks and black politicians. They then abandoned the Democratic Party, their political patrons since they stepped off the boats. They withdrew their support for programs for blacks, and supported instead politicians who would protect them from criminal activity, almost all Republicans.

Black politicians and their close supporters have collected spoils as a key constituency of the Democratic machine. Blacks in general? An orderly integration of black Americans into the wider society has never occured. Blacks who adhere to traditional mores and educate themselves do well with affirmative action but the majority of blacks are physically, socially, and politically isolated from mainstream society and are likely to stay that way.

The King of 1968 was a far different man from the King of 1963. And I'm afraid he undid a great deal of what he accomplished.

The Amoralist

2007-10-07T16:11:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens just put out an article about a young man who persuaded by his writings on Iraq joined the Army and was killed in Iraq.

He was by all appearances a fine young fellow- well-liked, intelligent, thoughtful and persuasive. He came from a loving family of liberals and stood up against Nazis. I'm sure I would have hated him had I known him. Just kidding- he was in the Army, so there must have been something wrong with him. Again, just kidding.

What struck me about the article was the young man's detailed humanitarian reasons for fighting in Iraq. I was motivated to join the US military by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis. I served in the Marines from 1983 to 1986. My service was uneventful and even more undistinguished. I never left the continental US.

My service is different from this man's in one other more significant way. I joined and served for pretty prosaic and selfish reasons.

You see- it seemed to me it was going to be either us, or them. And quite honestly, in that case, I would prefer it to be them.

Now- how do I justify that? How do I morally justify the life my friends, family, and countrymen lead, ordering our own affairs, and living as we choose and see fit- against either the workers' socialist revolution of the Soviets, or the Islamic caliphate of the mullahs? Well, I don't, because I simply can't. I'm not that smart, and in reality there is simply no justification for refusing to live under the dictatorship of the proletariat- as led by the Communist Party of the world's socialist homeland- or the governance of the message of God's final prophet.

The truth is I would prefer not to be killed or enslaved. Even if it would be more moral, and better for humanity if I was, I just prefer not to. Now isn't that just goddamned selfish of me? Indeed it is, but that is just my preference.

I'm no Jacksonian. I hate the term. It implies we should run if we're losing, instead of doubling down. The "paleos" disgust me. As Patton said, real Americans love to fight.

I can't claim the high moral motivation of the soldier Hitchens writes about. I think Iraq ought to be a democracy, but because it's good for us, not because it's good for the Iraqis.

For every soldier like this one, I think there are a hundred like me. "I'm an American. Don't fuck with me. As an American I'm friendly, and generous, and if you need patient help I will glady provide it. But never forget your destiny is in your hands, and if you fail to understand that nothing can help you."

Sniveling, spineless submission to communist dictators, capitalist version

2007-09-23T04:15:00.000-07:00

Mattel apologizes to Chinese people

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/99b42156-683a-11dc-b475-0000779fd2ac,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F99b42156-683a-11dc-b475-0000779fd2ac.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fhome%2Fus

The Chinese people sell Mattel poisonous toys, and Mattel apologizes to *them*?

But, this is the deepest essence of socialism- make people say things obvioulsy false, obviously absurd, not simply to get ideological agreement and establish the appropriate "facts", but to humiliate them and destroy their confidence in their own minds.

Mattel thought doing business insulated them from the nature of the regime, and especially buying, as in capitalist society the buyer is treated with deference and has great ability to set the terms of the relationship. Mattel thought they were above, and not below, the Communist officials they dealt with.

I really hope Mattel starts buying toys- all its toys- someplace else. My extremely cynical view of human nature tells me they will do even more business in China, and tell everybody how greatful they are to do so.

What the Hell Happened to Liberalism?

2007-09-18T18:11:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, while I was working one of my hare-brained business ideas out of my dad's house, I was preparing a mailing, which required a rather unusual and peculiar stamp, one denominated at $0.52. As it happened, the figure on the stamp was Hubert Humphrey.

My parents were traditional New Deal liberals but I have been right wing since as long as I was conscious. I'm told, although I don't distinctly remember, I had a Barry Goldwater poster up on my wall when I was 4.

Still, sitting there at the kitchen table slapping on the stamps, I knew there was something wrong. I asked my dad, "Dad, don't you think Hubert Humphrey deserves better than a $0.52 stamp?" to which he answered yes.

I was watching a video of a Saturn V launch, in all its amazing, iconic, patriotic glory, and I remembered- conservatives did not do this. Liberals were the authors of this amazing human achievement.

Some of you can still remember- a time long ago, disappearing in the mists, almost but not quite completely forgotten- when liberalism was about hope, dreams, brotherhood, fair play, the dignity of honest work, mutual respect between boss and worker, and telling the communists to go to hell. That died with JFK, although it was probably going to die anyway. Right about then it started to be about hectoring shame, belittling people who weren't sophistcated enough, keeping the proles in line.

The socialists were not going to be kept out of power. In a society becoming wealthier and more therapeutic, more concerned with fixing itself than eating, people were taking charge of the mind and soul as well as the treasury.

The big mistake of the civil rights movement- which despite producing great political power for black people has established a permanent divide between the races- was using preachers to spread its message. What do preachers do but tell you you're going to hell unless you straighten up and fly right? People will listen to that for an hour on Sunday morning and then go back to drinking and whoring and stealing first thing Monday.

Salon tells us that the Democrats are finally, thank God, giving up on the white male voter- the victim of all this hectoring and preaching. The victims have mostly tuned out, only voting Democrat we are told if they are union members. Unions are the one place the old flame still burns, just a little bit.

The Jews

2007-01-13T08:33:00.000-08:00

Since the subject has come up, I will state my opinion on the subject.

The Jews do not run everything. It is widely believed, and by no one more than the Jews themselves, that they are secretly running things. Left wing paranoids are convinced that a cabal of right wing Jews (the "neoconservatives") are in charge; right wing paranoids are convinced a cabal of left wing Jews are in charge.

There is indeed a group of people who run things, but they are not Jews. The easiest way to describe them from a cultural or religious standpoint would be "Episcopalians", although "high church Calvinists" would be more accurate. Although these people don't attend Episcopalian or Presbyterian churches, their grandparents mostly did. Quakers would also fall into this category.

While Jews are theologically more like Catholics (personal behavior is what God wants, thus the guilt thing) they are culturally more like Protestants. And the master culture and the Jewish culture are similar in that they both believe there is a group of people chosen by and most pleasing to God, and that in the modern era these people are wealthy merchants and bankers.

These similar beliefs allow Jews to cooperate with the master culture, although as much as they emulate it and as close as they get to it, they are not part of it. The master culture itself is very low profile. Perhaps the one significant difference it has from Jewish culture is its desire to remain as unseen as possible. Jews on the other hand maintain a distinct ethnic and cultural identity, and out of ethnic pride like to be visible.

So, the Episcopalians let everybody think the Jews run things, and they let the Jews think they run things. This serves the interests of both groups.

Much is made in the left wing press about the ethnoreligious background of some second rank officials of the (pro-war) Defense Department. Nobody ever mentions the ethnic or religious background of the (anti-war) State Department or CIA.

Fighting for Israel

2007-01-13T08:29:00.000-08:00

That we are "fighting for Israel" or the Jews is a tired trope of both the far right and left.

I personally oppose the existence of the State of Israel. Zionism is an irrendentist/revanchist (or to be simple, let's just say fascist) philosophy of the late 19th/early 20th centuries. The idea that certain ethnic groups had "homelands" that were "theirs" was very much in vogue at the time, as the old empires collapsed. Along with Copmmunism this led to a fantastic amount of bloodshed, in particular that of Jews who various people were trying to get out of "their" "homeland". During this time the Jews were also violently expelling people from "their" "homeland", look up "Irgun" on Wikipedia.

The last empire, the British, broke up after WWII and somehow somebody got the idea to "give" part of Transjordan to the Jews. The non-jews residing there were not consulted about this, and they were not happy about it but they were ethnically cleansed out of the area.

I hope we have now established I'm not a Zionist tool. That said, THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE WEST AND ISLAM DOES NOT NOW, NOR HAS IT EVER HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH JEWS, OR ISRAEL, AND WOULD EXIST IF JEWS AND ISRAEL DID NOT EXIST, AND WOULD CONTINUE IF JEWS AND ISRAEL WERE WIPED OUT.

Islam has been attacking Europe off and on for as long as it has existed. It will continue to do so until it is crushed and humiliated in its nerve center, the Arabian peninsula. The fact that some Jews in the executive branch are advocating the policy means nothing. If there was a Democratic administration there would be Jews in it advocating a policy of appeasement.

I'm glad Charles Martel didn't stand up before the Battle of Tours and say "Hey, we're just fighting for the Jews, let's stop all this warmongering and go home."

"What's Right?" vs. "What's Right For Us"

2006-12-27T10:04:00.000-08:00

"Whaddeyou mean by that word "right"? The only thing we're concerned

about is what's right for us. We got our own definition of "right".

-A Hell's Angel sunk in philosophy

From "Hell's Angels" by Hunter S. Thompson

So, what is right? Is it what's right for us? Is it the opposite of what's right for us? Do the two, if separate, partially overlap?

I was watching CNN Saturday night and they had one of those roundtables, and the subject was America. (You know you're in trouble when the subject is "America" in the abstract.) One of the guests was that Canadian lesbian Moslem, and she was saying she'd like to see more of the America of inclusiveness, democracy, human rights, the Statue of Liberty, blah blah blah.

I like that America, and I'm proud of it. But there's another America, the one that will stomp you into the ground if you screw with it. The America that firebombed Tokyo and Dresden, and in the days before airplanes, burned Atlanta with torches. I like and am proud of that America too, And the first does not exist without the second.

Short of reading material, I was flipping through "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", a most profound book by a most profound author, Philip K. Dick. Understand that the book is much different from the movie it inspired, "Blade Runner." In the book the androids are not sympathetic, they are incapable of empathy and will kill without remorse as many humans as they need to to ensure their freedom.

(Spoilers ensue.)

Deckard has grown tired of killing and finds it repellent. He comes across another bounty hunter, Phil Resch, who has no qualms about this. Deckard is so offended by this he demands to test Resch and see if he is an android. Resch goes along, and no, he's not an android. His argument is that all the androids they are hunting have killed human beings and will keep doing so. He tells Deckard it's easier to kill an attractive female android if he has sex with her first.

He enlists the help of Rachel Rosen, the Rosen company android, to help him kill the others. He has sex with her and finds he now has no stomach for killing the rest, particularly Pris Stratton, an identical model to Rachel. (In the movie Rachel is played by Sean Young, Pris by Darryl Hannah, and the issue of them being identical is never raised.) Rachel gleefully tells Deckard that was part of the plan, and no bounty hunter other than Resch has ever been able to kill an android after having sex with her.

Despite knowing he's being cynically used by evil androids who have killed and will continue to kill, Deckard can only just bring himself to kill the remaining androids. Dick presents Resch as a strange and unusual character. Dick may have been a pacifist, if so that would explain it.

For liberals, killing is just bad. Killing to prevent other killing is no excuse, it's still killing and is perhaps even worse than what the bad guys do because it is done after some moral deliberation. Bad people kill mostly without any such deliberation and thus in the liberal mind get a pass of ignorance and thoughtlessness.

From this standpoint, morality not only has to be absent of one's self interest, ideally it should be against one's self interest, to prove its authenticity. But the morality that destroys the individual or group holding it is not morality at all. "What's right" is substantially, if not completely, "what's right for us." Prefering one's own is not evil, it's a basic survival mechanism even primitive creatures have.

Chess players of any skill think at least a few moves ahead, but liberals never do. The question is not "Is violence bad?" but "What is likely to be the result of this violence?" The result of violence by bad people is usually more violence. The result of violence by good people is less violence. Every time Nazis used violence and where successful. they engaged in more violence. Every time the West has used violence, the result has been less violence.

A cultural value system has to be self-sustaining as well as ethical, or it will lose out to systems that are just self-sustaining.

The Death of Wahhabism

2006-12-21T06:54:00.000-08:00

Here is a review, of a book about jihad-

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/4825051.html

The key point is that jihad differs from other forms of conquest by allowing the conquered to join with the conquerors, by way of conversion.

What doesn't come up is the weakness of this. If you rope in a wide variety of people and cultures, the original belief system is liable to become diluted. And that is what happened with Islam. The strict desert religion became something a lot looser. Islam as it came to be practiced in Indonesia and Bosnia was not something recognized in Saudi Arabia as true Islam.

The weakness of the Ottoman Empire, and the toleration of different kinds of Islam, must have provided a lot of the motivation for the Wahhabi revolution, which started 200 or more years ago. (I'm going to lump in Salafism here, although I appreciate there are important differences.)

It has some to the point where certain factions of Islam believe they need to reassert it as a world enveloping, universal ideology and cultural and political system. But any such ideology has to deliver. Communism made the mistake of promising worldly material prosperity, and on top of that a kind of personal freedom where one could live without the oppression of a boss or a priest. Instead it brought want and the constant surveillance of one's thoughts and behavior. People realized this and it lost its appeal. As long as it was gaining it seemed like the future, and won by resignation, but confronting a rearmed and aggressive capitalist world it folded pretty quickly.

Islamic fascism makes no such temporal promises. But it has for the last 20 years asserted that it, in either the Iranian or Saudi form, is, must and will be the universal ideology of humanity. It can either deliver on this or lose credibility.

Despite all the gloom and doom you hear about the death of the West Islam is not going to take over the world, and particularly not the fascist strand of Wahhabism and Salafism. Islamic fascism will lose its credibility and 50 years from now Islam will be something quite different from the Saudi dominated version we see today.

First, Wahhabism has nothing to offer anyone in the West or even the Islamic world beyond a few alienated fanatics. A much larger number of people will go along with it if it seems to be the powerful and winning force (bin Laden's strong horse.) Even in its home and financial stronghold, Saudi Arabia, it is paid only public lip service and mostly ignored in private. It's easy to do if you can rape your Filipina or Indonesian maid when you want or go drinking and whoring in Europe when the mood strikes you. Saudi society is deeply sick and only held up by massive amounts of oil money, which will not last forever.

Second, as aggressive as it is in the West, it is simply incompatible with western society. The really dominant ideology in the West is multiculturalism. Multiculturalism might be called Third Worldism, due to its preference for anything non-Western over anything Western. Multiculturalism does not, despite its name, recognize the equality of all cultures. There is a master culture in multiculturalism, which deigns to grant the lower cultures with its approval. I don't know exactly what to call it, but it is the culture of northeastern US liberal Protestants, some Quaker, some Calvinist, some Episcopalian. It acts in opposition primarily to the culture of Anglo-Saxon traditionalists, mostly in America but also in other countries.

It patronizes other cultures by pitying them and granting them its recognition. The best example of this is the way it deals with black Americans. It grants them political favors on the condition they be appropriately grateful. It's contemptuous of blacks, just as it's contemptuous of white people who aren't of the "right kind." Blacks understand this, and they grate against this, but they mostly go along with it. One way this manifests itself is black-Jewish tensions. Anti-Semitism, at least of any overt type, is quite lower class but it's overlooked since Jews aren't the "right kind" of people anyway. Jews are the one group whose patronizing blacks can smart against.

Many would argue that since multiculturalists run the universities and courts they run the country, and this master culture isn't really in control. But the money is in the hands of the master culture, and thus they rule.

This kind of patronizing contempt works well for blacks, gays, Hispanics, Asians, and even Jews, who are not part of the master culture, regardless of what anyone says. It will not work for Islam though. It can use multiculturalism to get quite a bit of power for itself, and to vanquish the European traditionalists, but it can't live permanently as an angry, aggrieved minority receiving succor from the master culture. At some point it must become dominant.

The pessimistic viewpoint is that when this happens it will be too late. But it's already happening, as we see from Tony Blair's recent speech and some other events in Europe. And here's the critical thing- the only serious weapon the Islamic fascists have is the aquiesence of the multiculturalists! They have no real military power. Their financial power is limited and waning. Any push back from the multiculturalists forces the question of whether Islam, as represented by the Wahhabists/Salafists, is the universal law of all humanity, or a weak, Third World relic to be tolerated and patronized by the rich of the West.

It's like throwing water on the Wicked Witch- it's just a bucket of water, thrown by a teenage girl, but there is not a whole lot there.

The whole thing may be cracking already. To us the situation in Iraq looks like a failure, but the inability of either the Sunnis or Shiites to drive us out is extremely embarrassing to them. I think the enemy was counting on the US elections to lead to a rapid withdrawal, but now it looks like even the more liberal Democrats aren't in a big hurry to get out, so it looks like a couple more years of the Great Satan effectively ruling a large Islamic country. Something is happening in Saudi, and Ahmedinejad isn't looking too good these days.

Augusto Pinochet, RIP

2006-12-21T06:01:00.000-08:00

The recent death of Pinochet has given us a rash of condemnations, or re-condemnations. Even anti-communists feel obliged to say he really shouldn't have killed all those people.

Still, I thought of the words of Air Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris- "The Germans started this war thinking they were going to bomb everyone else, and no one was going to bomb them." The Communists- in the Southern Cone of South America, as everywhere else- assumed they would be able to use murder and kidnapping against everyone else, and no one would would use murder and kidnapping against them.

The fact of Communist terrorism in the Southern Cone is just barely acknowledged. If you look this up on Wikipedia, groups such as MIR and the Montoneros are called "armed revolutionary guerilla groups" but not terrorists. The right-wing groups involved are always called terrorist groups though.

Beyond this, it is said that most of the people killed were not Communists. This is probably true but irrelevant. A great many of the people who think of themselves as social democrats will assist Communists, if only by preventing or interfering with attempts to stop them. Demanding that terrorism be treated as a symptom of social evils, and that those evils must be remedied rather than killing the terrorists, is a form of assistance. Demanding that terrorism be treated as a criminal matter, with all the procedural and constitutional protections afforded criminal suspects, is a form of assistance.

In any case, Communism in the Southern Cone was snuffed out. Much the same thing happened in El Salvador. Many people were spared personal destruction, jail and death, including many no doubt now condemning Pinochet.

But that's a liberal argument- that avoiding the murder of leftists is good. That's Orwell's argument. And I don't believe that. If you live by the sword, or if you sympathize with the sword, or romanticize it, or defend it even on a theoretical and intellectual basis, then death by the sword is just fine for you.

I'll paraphrase the Aesop's fable about the trumpeter. A boy who is an army trumpeter is captured and to avoid execution, falls to his knees before the victiorious king and cries "Please spare me! I'm not a soldier, all I have is this trumpet!" To which the king replies, "You call others to fight, but you don't fight yourself, and claim to be innocent. You're even worse!"

"As many people will die in Argentina as is necessary to restore order." — Army Commander-in-Chief Jorge Rafael Videla, 10/75

"First we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then … their sympathizers; then … those who remain indifferent; and finally we will kill the timid." -- General Iberico Saint Jean, military governor of Buenos Aires, 5/76

The Recent US Elections

2006-12-03T08:31:00.000-08:00

I don't think there's much to say except that the electorate is tired, and for now doesn't have the will to see the Iraq campaign through.

The real problem is with Iran and Syria, and nobody has proposed aggressive measures against them. It will likely take a few years of terror and humiliation before Americans decide to deal with them.

Another logical point for the Democrats is how compromised the US government is by the Saud family.

The Dream That Never Dies

2006-11-18T09:14:00.000-08:00

For an international revolutionary socialist, George Orwell had a few good points. He was a traditionalist, he came to his views by hard personal experience, he was a patriot, and he had a strong affection for humanity. He had one terrible, awful shortcoming as a human being though- he was an idealist.

The problem with idealists is not that they have a vision of something better, but that they don't see or don't understand the way things actually are in the present. Socialist idealists- the kind we are takling about here, although the same applies to Christian idealists and other sorts as well- have a much more positive view of the bulk of humanity than empirical experience supports. "If only" is the key phrase of socialist idealists- if only certain measures were implemented, or certain obstacles removed, their goal would be achieved.

Most of these impediments are the longstanding traditions of humanity. In some cases they are unjust and need removal- slavery, inherited privilege, abuse of women and children. Other things- private property, common law, traditional religion- are widely valued and have stood the test of time.

As a member of the "swinish multitude" I'm no fan of Edmund Burke and the appeal to tradition holds little appeal for me. But the concept of a future utopia- accomplished by only a little human suffering, and most of that by bad people who deserve it- holds even less.

Being a member of Western civilization is supposed to mean holding to certain long established values- a broadly participative government, rule of law, a certain amount of plurality. But for a large minority of people in the West, these things are just obstacles to the achievement of their ideal society, and what's more merely a legacy of a violent, racist, misogynist, imperialistic past. Their real loyalty lies with the world of the future, where perfect harmony and peace have been achieved.

The problem is the future never comes- it recedes always, and we only have more of the present. Thus, whatever, horrible crimes are committed, and whatever spectacular failures occur, it doesn't matter, because of what will be achieved in the future.

So we have a big group of people who can and will throw over our basic institutions- the law, our system of government, our social and ethical systems, even such simple things as common etiquette- for their world of the future. These, then, are the traitors among us.

The Long, Strange Trip of George Orwell

2006-09-24T06:48:00.000-07:00

The thumbnail biography of George Orwell goes like this- scholarship boy at an English public school, not accepted by his wealthier fellow students. Colonial policeman in Burma, disillusioned by imperial abuses. Left the service and bummed around, wrote about his experiences, and became a journalist.

Now, my copy of Homage to Catalonia is misplaced, so certain details may be wrong, but the essence of the story wil be accurate. Orwell arrived in Barcelona at the end of 1936 to write about the Spanish Civil War. He was so swept up in the revolutionary fervor he decided to fight. Although he was a Communist- an important point- his press credentials were from the International Labor Party, so he joined the militia of the Worker's Party of Marxist Unity, or by its Spanish acronym, POUM.

Orwell contrasted the poor equipage and dubious military skills of the militia with its strong atmosphere of working class comradeship, which which he found very touching. After a mostly uneventful few months on the line, he returned to Barcelona for R&R.

While George was away, a rift had opened up in the pro-government cause. The government wanted to disarm the party militias, which resisted. The communists started a media campaign painting the anarchists and Marxists as secretly fascist. After some street fighting, the non-communist left was banned and many of its members arrested and killed. Two of Orwell's friends were disappeared, and Orwell just barely escaped the same fate.

I found Orwell's reaction to this strange. He was upset- exasperated- annoyed- quite put out, but not actually angry. He could not quite bring himself to believe a fundamental injustice had been done, and it had been done by Communists. Orwell saw, and noted with approval, many abusive actions against the bourgeousie- churches desecrated and filled with excrement, landowners run off, a mill broken up for firewood. Orwell blamed the fate of his friends on the Spanish legal system, although I doubt if Spain had had habeas corpus it would have made any difference. Orwell was probably also aware of the many crimes committed by the left in Spain previous

Orwell made one strong judgement against the communists that were running the show in Spain- that they had impeded the revolution. This was what he really cared about, and again, while it upset him, it did not make him break with the Communist cause. Homage to Catalonia and 1984 were both published after his death.

Orwell is an eloquent voice against Stalinism, but for me that is not enough. Orwell criticized Stalinism from the standpoint of a non-Stalinist communist. He didn't see anything wrong with killing people in pursuit of the revolution, he just didn't like it when communists who weren't quite 100% behind the current program from Moscow got the same treatment.

George Orwell was fundamentally committed to the goal of worldwide communist revolution. That goal was important enough to him that he remained silent about its crimes, even the murder of two friends.

This choice, this rationalization, is the fundamental failing of the Western left in all the years since.

The Man Who Started It All

2006-07-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

Reverence for totalitarianism in the West goes back a long way. Plato, in "The Republic" outlined the first ideal society. All the Greek philosophers came from the elite of society, and thought of democracy as little more than mob rule.

Many Western intellectuals in the intervening centuries had a similar attitude. Democracy is indeed messy. The Athenian democracy was chaotic and often dangerous to its participants. Many leaders met death at the hands of an enraged assembly. Many fine men were persecuted and killed, and evil men like Alcibiades often prospered.

To this day, democracy is a little undignified. Elections and debates sometimes seem like a third grade recess. At its best, such as "Queston Time" in the UK parliament, the give and take has dignity and sometimes genuine humor. Unfortunately, that's not often the case.

The crusade to build the perfect society has gone on in the meantime, with its odd and harmless failures like the Shakers and its gruesome failures like the French Revolution. A blog is hardly the place to mine all this history. And so we will start with the man who most clearly delineates this conflict in this and the last century, a most fascinating individual named George Orwell.

Orwell is most readily thought of as a critic of Communism. Various sources will primly remind you that Orwell was in no way a conservative, but in fact a socialist. This isn't really true either. Orwell was a kind of cultural conservative, but in politics he was an orthodox Communist, by his own words.

How did a thoughtful, well-traveled man who had seen the widest variety of human existence and wrote about it with great insight and empathy react when he encountered the most base excesses of Communism? That is where the great rupture of our time begins, as we will see when we examine the taxonomy of the left.

Welcome- Eyes Open to the Truth

2006-07-28T16:49:00.000-07:00

Who are "The Traitors Among Us"?

A free society, by its very nature, tolerates those who at base hate it and want to destroy it. The obviously fanatical and extreme are merely distractions, as long as they don't become actively violent. They might be said to be victims of Herbert Marcuse's "repressive tolerance"- if you're free to advocate revolution and everybody just ignores you, it almost hurts worse than being beaten with a rubber hose by a secret police goon. Almost- Islamofascists still prefer London to Damascus, and not just for the fine dining.

These people hardly concern us though. The real traitors are those who are not openly opposed to the ideals of a free society, but those who claim to be the promoters of its highest ideals, while undermining it at every turn.

So, who are the traitors among us? We will examine this in some detail, but we will start at the very beginning. Marlow always started at the very beginning, and the best stories always do.