Allyism, Republicans and Democrats

Yesterday I posted the results of a post-election poll. Republican voters believe that the three most important issues are:

Illegal immigration
Lack of support for the police
High taxes

Whereas Democratic voters believe that the three most important issues are:

Donald Trump's supporters
White nationalism
Systemic racism

You will notice that the concerns of Republican voters are not particularly blared through anyone's bullhorn. I wonder where they get their concerns? FoxNews? Qanon? Far-right websites? Donald Trump's secret decoder ring? Couldn't be from Twitter or from youTube or Facebook because eevil far-right ideas get censored on social media as fast as you can say @jack.

But it is not hard to figure where Democratic voters get their concerns. White nationalism and systemic racism are right now the obsession of the mainstream media and the educated gentry class that runs the media, the universities, the bureaucracy, the non-profits. If you lend half an ear to the gentry liberal class you will probably be persuaded that white supremacy and systemic racism are tearing the country apart.

Let us look at this through the lens of Allyism, understanding the America as "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Because pretty obviously, if you are an Ally, doing activism 24/7 on behalf of oppressed peoples, then it stands to reason that Donald Trump's supporters, white nationalism and systemic racism are the reasons why those oppressed people are oppressed. And they will go right on being oppressed until the power of Donald Trump's supporters are well and truly extinguished at a class on systemic racism where they work or go to school.

How systemic is racism? It's a good question. If a half-black man like Barack Obama could be elected president, how bad can things be? If a part black half Brahmin like Kamala Harris can be elected  vice-president, how bad can things be? If a black like Tim Scott can be elected United States Senator as a Republican from the former Confederate state of South Carolina, how racist can those Trump supporters be? If black church ladies are counting the ballots in cities like Philadelphia, how bad can things be? If just about every ad and commercial has "people of color" in it, how bad can things be? If just about every big corporation is a supporter of Black Lives Matter, how bad can things be? If anyone that utters the pejorative "n-word" gets utterly humiliated, how bad can things be?

Obviously, more research is needed. Not.

You know what I think.

I think that every ruling class needs one of two things, preferably both. It needs an existential peril to battle against. Climate change will do nicely. And it needs someone to blame when things go wrong. Yeah! Sytemic Racism! These issue, I argue, from the basic condition of ancient humans. 

First, it is the job of any ruling class to defend the borders of its realm -- although not so much these days since food-growing land is not as critical as it used to be. The enemy used to be the tribe next door. Then it was the barony next door, then the nation next door, then the Communist threat, then the Islamic threat, and now the threat of climate change. Notice how the threat keeps getting bigger. First a local problem with the chaps next door. Then the nation next door. Then the secular religion next door. Then the future of the planet itself! Wow! We are really getting into the big leagues these days.

Second, rulers need someone to blame when things go inexplicably wrong. Take your pick: the crabby older woman living just out of town; the neighbor woman that you are never gong to speak to again; the evil spirit in the tree that just fell on your house; the wrath of God that sent a hurricane and flooded the plain; "malefactors of great wealth;" big corporations. Or the systemic racists in a conspiracy on the Internet.

Our liberal friends have plumped for two threats on which to justify their rule. The first is the existential peril of climate change. The second is the evil of systemic racism. See, without the need to battle these two threats people might start to ask: "why do we need these guys?"

And, of course, the point isn't whether these are real threats and real evils. The only question is whether the rulers can persuade the ruled that their power is needed to fight the existential perils and evils.

I say that the reason that our ruling class has been upping the amplitude on its claims of peril and evil is because of its accumulated failures and its evident incompetence are raising the unmentionable question: what are these guys good for. Anything? Bueller?

Let's put our liberal friends to the test and inquire into its moral narrative of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Liberal allies have been fighting for almost two centuries to bring justice to the workers. And yet we read that the white working class is "dying of despair." How come? The ruling class has had all the money and all the power in the world to help the working class. If it is dying of despair then something is wrong. Maybe the whole program to help the workers was a mistake? Could the problem be white oppressors? Who would that be other than white educated gentry that style themselves as "allies?"

It was 50 years ago that the United States declared racial and sexual discrimination illegal and then set up racist "affirmative action" and quotas to help formerly marginalized peoples. If that hasn't solved the problem then maybe our rulers have been barking up the wrong tree. Maybe the completely wrong thing to do is to give the rulers more power to track down and destroy the "white oppressors." Hey, maybe the problem is something else. Maybe it's aliens.

Or maybe the whole notion of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Or maybe the whole problem is the fault of liberals that have spent the last 200 years discouraging the immigrants from the city from acquiring middle-class culture and instead has encouraged them to become the serfs and slaves of the educated ruling class, relying on the rulers for benefits and set-asides instead of acquiring skills and culture that help them thrive in the city on their own.

As you know, I think what we are seeing is the self-destruction of the ruling elite of the last century, as a result of its false conceits, its accumulating errors, and its foul crimes.

Because the problem is that your average ruling class just can't bring itself to say: "sorry fellahs, we screwed up. Your turn now." Instead failing rulers always turn up the heat, and beat up the plebs and the peasants that dare to point out their conceits, their errors, and their crimes.

What a pity.

See, Even Democrats Don't Care About Climate Change

You've probably already seen the opinion poll about the top concerns of Republican voters, and, separately, Democratic voters in the aftermath of the 2020 election. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. 

For Republican voters the following are the top three concerns.

Issue	Percent Very Concerned
Illegal Immigration	81%
Lack of support for the police	79%
High taxes	77%

For Democratic voters the following are the top three concerns.

Issue	Percent Very Concerned
Donald Trump's supporters	82%
White nationalism	79%
Systemic racism	77%

Here are the tweets in question:

Fascinating look at the top concerns for Democratic voters: 

https://t.co/i5dP3fe26O

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 24, 2021

 Do you see the difference? GOP voters are interested in "Issues." Democratic voters are interested in "Hate."

Well, you can certainly see that politics works. Our Democratic friends have spent the last five years in a 24/7 effort to terrify their supporters about President Trump. They have called President Trump and his supporters every insult in the book. And then invented some more. And they have succeeded!

Mind you, I can see the logic behind the hatred of President Trump's supporters. 

Suppose those Commoner Trump supporters should get another Republican president elected. And suppose they elect a Republican House and Senate.

Maybe. Just maybe the Republican leaders would enact policies to reduce the sinecures and the pensions and the bureaucratic powers of the educated Gentry class.

Boy, if I were a Gentry liberal voter with a nice gubmint sinecure and an electric car in the driveway and solar power panels on the roof and a #WeBelieve yard-sign in the front yard, I'd be terrified of a GOP president and Congress.

But like I say: when a religious cult or a ruling class discovers that its prophecies are failing it doesn't just fold its tents and wind up the cult or the regime. No. Insread it redoubles its efforts, and gets out the machete and starts whacking away at anything and everything.

Because it cannot be true that our Truth is in fact a lie. There must be Evil Spirits at work. And we will dig them out and exorcise them. See if we don't!

But. How come nobody cares about Climate Change? I thought that was the defining issue of our time. Saving the Planet! Halting Runaway Global Warming! Stopping the Rise of the Oceans!

I guess not so much.

The Problem with Anti-Whiteness

All the usual idiots are coming up with comical indictments of "whiteness." There are several charts about "whiteness" in Edward Ring's American Greatness piece on "The Origin and True Agenda of Anti-Racist Politics." I wrote about it last week. They really are sophomoric.

The problem with "whiteness" as the foundation of all evil in the world is, of course, that those bloody whites are the ones that invented the modern world -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. And everybody else is playing catch-up.

So why did Western Europeans pwn the world from about 1500 to 2000? How did they do it? What was the secret to their success, their Baldrick's Cunning Plan?

It wasn't just one thing; it was everything. Europeans had developed ships that could sail around the world. They had developed financial systems to finance long trading voyages. They had guns. And they had young men that were prepared to go to the ends of the Earth to earn a living.

Now I've been doing a bit of reading about pre-1500 Europe. If you read "The Saxon Chronicles" of Bernard Cornwell you read about a world where the bloody Danes had developed amazing longships which were dandy for raids on the bloody Saxons in England. But the Danes couldn't really think beyond capturing slaves and looting silver and seizing good arable land.

Or there is Britain's Edward II that I am reading about through a biography of his Queen Isabella. You see the beginnings of reliance on Italian bankers. But otherwise kingly life was about juggling earldoms and valuable agricultural estates, and tuning up for the Wars of the Roses in the next century.

But read what this Chinese guy, a "Dr. Wu," said about Europeans at the beginning of David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing published in 2003. Dr. Wu and others had been tasked with accounting "for the success, in fact, the preeminence of the West all over the world."

We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism, and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this.

Somebody tell President Xi about this.

The error that our lefty friends make about "whiteness" is that they cannot think outside of a political context. They seem to imagine a white conspiracy to conquer the world, and to dominate and subjugate all non-whites.

Not at all. For instance, the conquest of the world began with a bit of a cock-up on the exploration front. Christopher Columbus was not trying to discover America in 1492; not at all. He was trying to find a sea route to India. For trading purposes. Guess why they called the native Americans "Indians?"

When the Portuguese started trading with India around the Cape of Good Hope it was to avoid having to pay the high prices for spices from the Arabs. And it is pretty amazing that you could make money on months-long voyages from Europe to India. The Portuguese weren't trying to conquer India. They wanted to trade with India.

But here's the thing. What do you need to organize a round-the-cape trading system with India? You need ships that can do the trip. You need guns to keep the pirates down to a dull roar. And you need capital, to fund the months-long trip. If you ask me, it ain't as easy as gussying up some Critical Race Theory training course in "white fragility" and forcing all the white kiddies to show up, or else.

One fine day the current religious, cultural, political and economic society variously created by peoples out of Western Europe will be superseded by something else. Not a doubt about it. But the superseders will not be CRT academics or activists. I promise you that, on a stack of Das Kapitals.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of mysteries to ponder over.

Why did the Brits and others create the anti-slavery movement in the 18th century? What did they mean by that?

And why did the US write the Civil Rights Acts to give full civil rights to a small minority population of ex-slaves from Africa? What did they mean by that?

See, it's easy to understand our liberal friends today who want to change the world for climate change and beat up racist whites because systemic racism. That's easy. Every ruling class needs to be heroically battling against some existential peril, or against some frightful and hateful enemy, otherwise who needs the bloody ruling class?

But why bother about slavery? Why bother about civil rights? That is the mystery.

Our Liberal Friends Won't Know What Hit Them

Let us interpret the last five years as a continuous desperate attempt by our liberal friends to Stop The World I Wanna Get Off.

Because Trump should not, could not have happened. Not unless the Ruskies did it. Not unless FoxNews and Newsmax and OAN flooded the highways and byways with conspiracy theories and misinformation. Not unless "hate."

It has been helpful to me that several years ago I abandoned my conventional understanding of the world through logic and reason and reality and facts and accepted the German Turn that we don't know what reality is. In "reality" we humans, like the rest of creation, are stumbling and bumbling along in our lives, doing the same-old same-old until, all of a sudden, we nearly get killed by something.

It could be a truck at an intersection that nearly ran us over. It could be a cold spell in Texas that shut down all the wind turbines. It could be an Orange Man Bad that got elected President of the United States. It could be a theory that space and time aren't absolute, but relative.

When an animal or a human gets blindsided it responds in one of four different ways.

1. Nothing to see here, move right along.
2. OMG It's the End of the World!
3. It's Evil Spirits (or racist-sexist-homophobes)
4. Wow, maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I did a long post about this when I was reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning. "Maps of Meaning: What Failure to Respond to Chaos Looks Like." As I interpret Peterson:

You put a rat into a new cage, or introduce a cat into its life and it freezes up in terror. For a while. But then it starts to explore and figure out what the new situation means and where the dangers are, and it starts to relax.

See the difference between a rat and a human? A human has the ability to ignore the new situation and just carry on in the old way. Or, of course, it can imagine that it can destroy the threat. Part of the reason for that is our conscious mind. We humans can construct a theory of the world consciously while your average rat cannot.

Now, I believe that our lefty friends have built up a whole world view on the idea that we can and should live in the good old way of pre-market culture. They have an imagined Garden of Eden in which everyone lives in equality and community, and everything is shared and equal, and everyone is benevolently advised by evolved, educated liberals. They experience living in the market system as living under the tyranny of the market. 

Thus Ellen Meiksins Wood in The Origin of Capitalism argues that in the pre-capitalist world many rural humans lived in a world of "customary use rights... or the right to subsistence." But then along came capitalism and "market as an imperative:" Everyone had to surrender to the dictatorship of the market. Yes, but. In the pre-capitalist world everyone lived under the dictatorship of a feudal lord. If people were enjoying "customary use rights" it was because the feudal lord was too busy playing politics with the other feudal lords to exploit his lands -- and his peasants -- to the full.

Actually, I get it. Wouldn't it be loverly if we could escape the treadmill of the market and live in a simpler,  more companionable way? Yeah! Imagine there's no market, as the Beatles might have said. Thus the whole nostalgic culture of the left's Great Reaction, its yearning for a lost world of perfect community.

(Notice how Jordan B. Peterson deals with this fantasy with his "lobster" narrative. Animals don't live in equality; they live in hierarchies, and the reason for hierarchies is that they reduce the need for violence.)

All this is fine. Our liberal friends managed to make the Trump Effect go away by... Well, we are not allowed to say this, but mainly by skewing the system, by censorship in the media, by mail-in voting and I know not what.

But I think that the worst is yet to come. Sorry liberals.

Whatabout the anger of the small businessmen and women screwed by the COVID lockdowns? Whatabout the folk that have given up and gone homeless? Whatabout the folk that have stopped paying rent, and now have to face making up the arrears (estimated at $70 billion nationwide) or eviction? Whatabout the people on the receiving end of the current anti-white witch-hunt in our schools and corporations? Whatabout the rage of people confronting $4 a gallon gasoline? Whatabout the rage of people in blue states that find out that they have been screwed, and that the red states that reopened early made the right decision.

Let's set up the bleachers, because it's going to be quite a show.

Moths Attracted to the Flame of Power

In American Greatness Edward Ring is spinning a tale of conspiracy, of the globalist billionaires willing the hell of Critical Race Theory upon us, with "The Origin and True Agenda of 'Anti-Racist' Politics."

Well, first of all, I don't think that really "anyone" is leading the Woke religion. Ring notes that the left's funding is coming from lefty billionaires and corporations.

It is coming from global corporations and leftist billionaires. The intent is to destroy the sense of shared identity that defines America. By doing this they will eliminate unified opposition to their agenda, which is to remake America into a mere economic unit where the vast majority of residents are of limited means and dependent on government entitlements, the middle class is wiped out, and the upper class exists to serve an elite oligarchy.

Well, I don't think the lefty billionaires and global corporations are that smart. I don't think they have a power plan of that depth and sophistication.

For instance, the corporations. They are just playing the angles. They know that their pots of gold are an eternal temptation to all governments and politicians, for politics has forever been a game of loot and plunder. So they are pal-ing up with the activists in the hope that they will be eaten last.

Then the lefty billionaires. I don't think of the @jacks and the Zucks as dark malevolent forces. They are just picking up the Zeitgest and going along for the ride. That's what humans do. There are only a couple of prophets in any era that redefine the meaning of life for everyone. Everyone else goes along to get along.

Now I believe that the religion -- Wokism if you like -- is a foolish and false religion. But it answers the call of Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

Doesn't that describe our lefty friends to a "T"? There cannot just be different groups with different genetic and cultural inheritances optimized for life in different parts of the world. There must be a fault, the fault of racism.

And really, we are not just talking about primitive religion. All religion is trying to deal with the problem of suffering, and all religion tends towards the notion that someone is at fault. In religion this fault is assigned to evil spirits or to Satan. In Communism the fault is assigned to the bourgeoisie. In New Deal politics the fault is assigned to the "big corporations." In politics, of course, the fault is assigned to the out group, the hated enemy. So, of course, the practitioners of "anti-racism" have as a hated enemy the "white oppressor."

As I say in my maxims: "politics is division."

Then there is the other thing, issuing out of my maxim: "the only warrant for government power is existential peril."

If you are a ruling class courtier or a billionaire, you can probably find your "meaning of life" by battling some existential peril, because battling an existential peril requires more power to government and the ruling class. The current peril du jour is climate change. It really is  magnificent. It is something you can't really measure, except through ruling-class-financed computer models. And it requires immense new powers for the ruling class and for their bribed apologists in the corporations. And unless we act now...

But I think that the salient question of our age is that the old instincts of defending the patch of land from marauders -- or alternatively attacking the neighbors and looting them -- doesn't work any more.

And that is due to a simple reason. In the old days the best patch of land for growing food equaled wealth and life. Everyone had an interest in stealing the best patch of land from its current owner. If you succeeded, you were rich and he was poor: Yay! If you failed, well, better luck next time.

But that is not how things work any more. The best thing now is for everyone to stay on their patch of land and make stuff and trade it. If you loot some guy's property you don't really make yourself richer; instead you have removed his contribution to the common wealth and made everyone poorer.

But, we are still programmed the other way, that loot and plunder benefits me if I loot my neighbor before he loots me. And we are still programmed to believe that if anything bad happens it has to be the result of malevolence.

Hey liberals, I think the next outbreak of malevolence will be the ordinary middle-class folks devastated by the Year of Lockdown. Old folks like me are looking at the booming stock market; gentry liberals are enjoying issuing rules and regulations. The poor are enjoying being able to stop paying rent.

But when it is all over, the people in the middle, that took in in the solar plexus, will be looking for someone to blame, and I don't think that the MSM and social media will succeed in pinning the whole thing on Trump and on "white oppressors."

Just sayin'.

Yes, What Should We Do About Public Education?

The problem with government, all government, is that it comes down to loot and plunder. What supporters of government want is free stuff, whether they are Viking raiders or today's "oppressed peoples and allies." The oppressed peoples just want handouts, the allies want government grants to support their activism -- to help the oppressed peoples, dontcha know.

And the same goes for public education. What may have seemed like a good idea 150 years ago, Horace Mann, is now just another special interest group. And since gubmint employees are allowed to form labor unions, politicians are scared stiff of the women teachers.

Notice, that when Florida Gov. DeSantis called for schools to reopen he didn't criticize "teachers" or "teachers unions," but "education unions and special interests." I wonder what he meant by that?

But the question is: do we need gubmint schools at all? Read this, from the MIT Technology Review by Nicholos Negroponte about an experiment in Ethiopia with computer tablets in villages where the children "had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them[.]"

OLPC [One Laptop Per Child] workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Do you see the point here? If you can hack Android to re-enable the camera, you are literate. And you did it, all on your own, with the other kids in the village.

Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different.  We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

Remember, these are kids that were completely illiterate. Although, I suppose, if they opened the boxes, powered up the tablets, they musta heard some weird rumors about tablets and computers and stuff.

So, just what exactly is it that "our teachers" are doing for us these days?

Now I'll bet that there are some drawbacks to the tablet thingy. I'll bet that the village bullies and the kids of the village Big Man get first dibs at the tablets, and the poor kids in the village get to suck. Oh yeah. All kinds of possibilities. But the point is that it didn't take teachers, didn't take gubmint, didn't take experts. The kids took those tablets and made themselves literate.

So what do we do about education?

First of all three doses of reality:

1. All kids want to do social media, texting. You need basic literacy for that, even if you are a gangbanger. So every kid is going to get literate enough for that.
2. Most kids learn by doing.
3. Most kids want to get out in the world.

But the education system is designed by the educated Gentry for the kind of education that the educated Gentry wants for itself. And that is directed towards the credentialed, literate, top-down world that the educated Gentry lives.

Most people learn by doing. They get a job and figure: hey, if I learned this skill I could get a better job. Do they really benefit from an academic education? Remember colleges were originally designed to train state-church priests and future rulers. Today they have been adapted to train deep-state functionaries and ruling-class activists.

Certainly, gubmint schools permit parents to drop kids off at school while they do other stuff during the day. But, for that we spend a trillion dollars a year in the US?

I gotta say, I really don't know what happens next in education. I just know that the current system is rotten to the core.

Rush Limbaugh: The "Jaunty Optimism" of a Commoner

I just checked my blog, and I mentioned the dearly departed Rush in 109 blog posts. The first one was on June 2, 2005, when John Kerry was complaining about the right wing noise machine that was drowning out the liberal message.

I know! If only!

But I think that the thing that defined Rush Limbaugh was his "jaunty optimism." I picked that line up from some liberal sneering at Rush, but now I can't find out who it was. Because when you search for Rush Limbaugh "jaunty optimism" the first thing that comes up is yours truly: "Glenn Beck's Girl Conservatism." In that piece I say:

I once read a critic of Rush Limbaugh who lightly sneered at his "jaunty optimism." That's it, I thought! That's exactly the secret of Rush Limbaugh: his day in, day out, irrepressible jaunty optimism. It's a profoundly male thing, of course. When men are under stress, whether they are an army platoon in a tough spot or working in a business that is teetering on the edge of failure, the response is to maintain a front of jaunty optimism, to say to your brothers that things are looking up, we'll get through to the end of this, and then we'll lift our arms with a brewski.

Also, I notice, that Ronald Reagan was noted for his "jaunty optimism."

But the other thing about Rush was that he was a Commoner. Actually, he was the son of a lawyer and his brother, David Limbaugh is also a lawyer. So, in a way, Rush was born Gentry and reinvented himself as a Commoner. Because what is more Commoner than starting out as a radio-station helper disk-jockey?

Anyway, that was how he presented himself on "The Rush Limbaugh Show." Nobody here but us regular guys and our common sense. And, from what I understand, Rush never put on airs. Rush told the story of the first time he got invited to see William F. Buckley Jr. at National Review headquarters in Manhattan. Kathryn Jean Lopez:

The first time he was to meet Bill, for an NR editorial dinner, he had his driver drive around the block a few times, because he was so nervous.

Common sense is the philosophy of the Commoner. The Commoner does not try to "make a difference," as the Gentry does. The Commoner lives within the received world of the culture and the world he was born into. And Commoner men make fun of things, because otherwise life would be too discouraging. Here's an example of who Rush was. His "Environmental Wacko Pick." 

In the early days of the program, I picked football games on Fridays, and a lot of people listening didn’t care. They didn’t like football, some women and some guys. “Come on, stick to the issues!” So I devised a way to combine politics with the football picks and came up with the environmentalist wacko method. What it does, basically, is take each contest, take the teams involved, and determine who should win.

So he would go down the NFL matchups for the weekend and predict the result using the environmentalist moral narrative. Dallas Cowboys vs. Cleveland Indians? Hoo boy. It would be only right for the poor Indians to win that one. But what about the Seattle Seahawks against the Philadelphia Eagles? Hmm, that would be a puzzler to Rush, and he would wrestle with the environmentalist wacko pick where both the animals were notorious predators.

The Environmentalist Wacko Pick was pure Rush. Making a political and cultural point while skewering the opposition with a satirical take on their moral narrative. Really, nobody could beat him at that game.

They never let Rush into the Holy of Holies, never gave him a show on network TV, never celebrated him in the corridors of power. Of course not. Rush was a Commoner, not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.

No doubt that's why Chief Nancy of the Kapitol Keystone Kops tore up the speech of President Trump when he awarded Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

"Mrs. Pelosi, Tear Down This Wall."

And liberals were trying to cancel Rush Limbaugh before there was a "cancel culture." They intimidated big corporate advertisers off his show. And they canceled his foray into NFL color commentary 20 years ago. You can see why. Rush said, of black quarterback Donovan McNabb:

I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team.

Sorry Rush. You are not allowed to say stuff like that. Not nohow.

What Rush Limbaugh did, with his Sacramento show and then his national show from New York City, starting in 1988, was to save the AM radio station business from oblivion. He and his backers figured that there was an opportunity in the middle of the day, after the end of the morning drive time shows, for a political show. And there was. And how.

That is the fundamental way that the market economy works. You notice something that nobody else has seen. And you decide to take a flyer.

But here's the thing. The Rush Limbaugh Show was Rush and his monologue, Rush and the call-ins. No guests, no interviews. Just Rush. And Rush made it look simple.

Yeah. If you want to know how hard it is to be an opera singer, don't listen to Luciano Pavarotti. Listen to someone just starting out, and feel how hard they are trying. The genius of genius is to make it look simple.

The same applies to former President Trump. He made it look simple. He made everyone think he was an amateur, a fool that caught a lucky break.

Sorry chum. A guy that takes out the entire field of GOP presidential hopefuls and then beats the candidate that was supposed to be the First Woman President is not a fool.

And the guy that reinvented political commentary and created a whole new industry was not the hateful bigot that liberals wanted him to be.

Rush Limbaugh had a lot of zingers, designed to get under the skin of Gentry liberals. One of them was his self-description: "talent on loan from God." You can take it any way you want. I take it to mean that Rush Limbaugh understood that his particular talent was God-given. But it was up to him to make it work.

Rest in Peace, Rush Limbaugh.

Another Four Law. But What to Call It?

I've been pondering adding another law to my Four Laws. Did I mention what they are?

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). 

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). 

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

My fifth law has to do with our current Big Problem, that the lower part of the Ruling Class -- not the actual ruling clique but the whole educated Gentry -- overloads the political system with 1,001 different wizard wheezes for government programs. And the legal system. What we call "lawfare," where 1,001 activist groups are manipulating the legal system with attempts to mandate this or that use of government power to bend the arc of history towards justice.

One example of this problem is, of course, climate change. The whole educated class is down for the cause, and is pushing it in a hundred different programs and a thousand different legal cases. Meanwhile the media and activists and leading government scientists all turn the question into a moral crusade and stigmatize any opponent as a "climate denier."

The point is, once the educated gentry has got the bit in its teeth like this, what can the average person -- or the aggregate of average persons -- do against the flood tide of educated and expert opinion, except brace for the inevitable crash landing.

And, in the broader context, where is the justice in a system where the ruling class can bully the rest of the country into submitting to and paying for its 1,001 wizard wheezes, which are not really about making things better but flattering the activists in question into thinking that they are "making a difference?"

Because it is really hard to come up with a political program that really does make things better, rather than merely feed the conceit of the activist in question. Here's a potential maxim:

All activism comes from a place of privilege.

But that doesn't quite get where I want to go. I am thinking about the right of the average Commoner to live his life in peace without being jostled around by privileged Gentry on some conceited mission to save the world.

What I am really asking for is a political threshold that must be exceeded before an eager activist can lasso the whole of society into his moral crusade.

It goes back to the other Four Laws. Don't muck about with the economy and its prices, because 1000 to 1 you will only make things worse, Mr. Socialist. Don't think you can run the Districts from some bureaucracy in the Capitol, Mr. Credentialed Bureaucrat. Because you don't have the bandwidth to do so. Don't think you can regulate the malefactors of great wealth, Mr. Regulator, because all you'll do is get captured by the regulated. Don't start any new program, Mr. Activist, because you will cast some social/economic activity in stone and prevent its improvement.

I guess this goes back to my notion that "the Age of Politics is over." What I mean by that is that politics, the practice of civil war by other means, really should not go much beyond resolving and compromising conflicts that might lead to civil war. Anything else should be done outside of politics.

On the other hand, by meddling around in politics, our liberal friends are actually creating new instances of conflict where the people adversely affected by their noble activism may be prompted to form a head of rebellion to obtain redress against new injustices. I guess that is what I mean by suggesting that our lefty friends represent a Great Reaction. They are returning us to an age where people feel the only way to get their voices heard is by force.

RIP Rush Limbaugh.

How Not To Resist the Regime

Instead of getting on with his Gray Mirror book project Curtis Yarvin has been taking after Scott Alexander -- of Slate Star Codex and now Substack and others of the Silicon Valley "rationalist" school. Whatever that is. Scott Alexander has recently been drive-byed by The New York Times for something or other.

But Yarvin has a word for you would-be opponents of the regime. They are the Three Don'ts.

Don't Collaborate. You'll humiliate yourself. And that's the whole point of getting confessions from the dissidents.

Since the entire principle of dissidence is denial of the regime’s mandate of heaven, any voluntary collaboration with power, for any reason, humiliates the dissident.

Don't forget, Yarvin says, "As a dissident, you are nothing, you mean nothing and you are worth nothing." Yes, but what does that mean? How to do this? Yarvin says that "you can never again trust anyone who has cooperated with power"; they are rats.

The way to deal with rats around the house is the same: don’t have nothing they can eat, and you won’t have no rats.

Easy for you to say, Mencius!

Don't Repeat Big Brother's Lies. You'll humiliate yourself. And don't believe in the lies either. For instance you don't ever want to say that women are "less intelligent or any worse at math than men." But what do you say? Hey, women just aren't that interested in math? What is the truth? I don't know, but there are a lot more male nerds that female nerds. I wonder why? And women seem to be a lot more interested in relationships than men. I wonder why?

To refuse the frame is to never mouth power’s lies. Never accept its assumptions; never respect its authority; and above all, never speak in its accursed soixante-huitard jargon.

Hmm. I tend to do that all the time, to satirize ruling-class lies. 

Don't Confront the Ruling Class. You'll humiliate yourself. Why would you want to confront people that are more powerful than you are? In fact, you are doing them a favor, as the viking chief did in Congress on January 6.

Why does confrontation not work? Because you are confronting enemies who are far stronger than you...  

Confrontation feeds their energy because it convinces them of their favorite fantasy: that, on behalf of the weak and helpless, they are fighting an uphill battle against the evil and strong.

 Yes, well, but where does that leave us? Merely here:

You actually cannot replace a regime. You can only convince it to replace itself.

Like the Soviet Union in 1989. Yes, why did the Soviet Union decide to cancel itself? I can't remember, but cancel itself it surely did. Now, mind you, today's Russia is still ruled by the KGB; Putin was once an officer in the KGB or whatever it last called itself.

But you can at least say that the Reign of Terror aspect of the ruling class in Russia is over. Because Reigns of Terror and witch hunts and purges and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutions just don't last. 

Obviously the Cancel Culture of the present era is not over. And I suppose that what Yarvin is saying is that you still want to be around after the end of today's ruling class hysteria.

So don't collaborate with the regime; don't believe or repeat its lies, and don't confront it.

Hmm. I just called Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss about a truck-jacking right here in River City, in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood. Should I have done that? Or will Dan make a special point of making my life a hell when he gets the chance.

Not Civil War, Not Revolution, But "Social War"

The Zman just put out about the best thing I have ever read on our current situation. He calls it "Social War in the Synopticon."

He says that our current online social media world is not like Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" where the state can watch the peasants. Or like Orwell's 1984.

It may be closer to Huxley’s Brave New World, but our managerial class is nothing like the World State, in terms of intelligence and purpose. There is no Mustafa Mond in our ruling class.

In other words, I assume, there is nobody at the top that knows what they are doing, Joe Biden. No, our world is different from both Orwell and Huxley.

While Orwell could imagine a world where everyone is watched by the state, he could not imagine a world where everyone is watched by everyone. Huxley could imagine a highly ordered society controlled by a few; he could not imagine artificial intelligence.

It really is a Brave New World.

America is now a synopticon. This is a term coined by Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen to describe a society in which the few are watched by many. 

Everything we do is watched, not just by the state and its secret police, as in the movie White Nights, but by everyone. The cancel culture works by a nobody accusing a somebody of a moral crime, like the prep school kids that got NYT reporter Donald G. McNeil fired. See, Good LIttle Girl Sophie Shepherd was talking to McNeil about education and:

He responded, she recalled, that “it’s frustrating, because Black Americans keep blaming the system, but racism is over, there’s nothing against them anymore — they can get out of the ghetto if they want to.” 

Can you imagine how unsafe a Good Little Girl from a private school would feel if anyone said that within her hearing or the hearing of her friends and the friends of her friends?

The point is that the synopticon allows everyone to get in on the action.

Another key concept to this new world is the social war. In agrarian and industrial societies, civil unrest leads to civil war or possibly revolution. A civil war is when factions within the elite draft the population into their dispute. A revolution is when a new elite rises up outside the old elite and attempts to overthrow them. A social war is one in which all participant groups can be at war with one another, but also in league with one another, for reasons they do not necessarily understand. [my bold]

Obviously, the ruling class, sitting at the top of the synopticon or at least with the power to turn off peoples' ability to broadcast to the synopticon, has significant advantages. But this is nothing new; the ruling class is always in the cat-bird seat.

But in the current situation, everyone thinks "they are losing control of the social code that shapes behavior." So maybe wokism is a flailing attempt by the liberal elite and its bribed apologists to regain control of the social code.

A civil war is about control of the state. A revolution is about the same thing, with the added aspect of ideological conflict. A social war is about control of the social code, the invisible set of rules that govern human behavior.

And, I would say, nobody really knows how to fight this kind of war.

Modern society is looking like a boiling pot. The more it boils, the tighter the lid is drawn down. Inside, the increasingly aggressive and antagonistic conflict is causing the pot to boil more violently. 

Wow. This is a truly remarkable analysis of our current situation. And, I emphasize, nobody, from the glorious leaders to the deplorables down to the meanest gangbanger, has a clue how to play this game to win. If, indeed, the purpose is to win, if it is even advantageous to win. 

I gotta think about this. When you butt into a new idea you have to release it to your unconscious and let it process it, and dream about it, and spit out something back into the conscious mind. At 3:00 am.

The Kids Are Not All Right?

Because I have a strong animus against gubmint schools -- for many years I have called them "government child-custodial facilities" -- I am rather taken aback by the current conventional wisdom that kids are depressed and suicidal because they can't go to school.

Wat?

But here is Salena Zito writing about the travails of the daughter of a "hospitalist," Dr. Paul Carson, of Pittsburgh, who has gone from an A student to a D student, because "I have nothing to look forward to."

Wat?

So, Doctor Paul, whatabout a spot of homeschooling? Whatabout a micro-school with your Doctoral pals? Whatabout a "learning pod," whatever that is? A month or two ago, on my regular evening walk, I came upon a couple of families -- with kids roaring around before my eyes completely out of control: yay! -- who were sending their kids to a "micro school." And these were doubtless completely conventional gentry liberals of North Seattle.

Here's the problem for me. In my reading about homeschooling, I get the impression that kids that are homeschooled are streets ahead of gubmint-schooled kids when it comes to social skills and learning skills. They are self-motivated. Because, I assume, they have not been kept in gubmint child-custodial barracks during their impressionable youth where all they had to do was follow orders.

But if kids that normally go to gubmint schools go all to pieces if they can't go to their gubmint schools... Well to me it says that the problem is bigger than I thought. I mean: to me, schools with their ranks of desks and their teachers up front and their tests and their grades -- well, in my dotage, where I am always trying to think Bad Thoughts, I am coming to think that schools are military basic training for... For what? Life as a cubicle worker?

As a kid born to Brits in India, I am sensitive to what generally used to happen to Brit kids in India. They were sent home to Britland, maybe to board with a relative, and sent to boarding school.

Then there is the case of Rudyard Kipling and his sister that were sent home from India and spent years boarding at the "house of desolation." Boy, can you spell child neglect?

On the other hand, my mother, born and raised in Japan, always regretted that her parents did not send her back to Britland to go to boarding school.

Now, my parents moved from India back to Britland when I was two, and I went to private schools, going to boarding school from the age of 10, I think. It all seemed perfectly natural to me.

My only regret in my youth was that I feel that I would have preferred to be around adults more instead of around kids my own age. When you go to boarding school you are around kids your own age 24-7. See, I tended to think that kids my own age were idiots, and I might have learned a lot from being around older people. By the way, there was almost no bullying, as I would understand it.

See, I tend to think that, given how we treat kids -- following the latest religious or political fad -- it's a bloody miracle that kids grow up to have a decent adult life at all.

And then there is the curious phenomenon that IQs in the western world are going down. Whereas, earlier in the 20th century, according to the Flynn effect, IQs were going up. Until they started down.

You think that there is a problem? If so, I wonder what it is.

But Tear Gas and But Hate

I had my jolly little phone chat with Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss yesterday, and here are my takeaways.

When it comes to policing, Year Zero for Strauss is the occasion of the mostly peaceful protests in Seattle in 1999 against the WTO. You can see what the ruling-class conventional wisdom is, from La Wik's "1999 Seattle WTO protests" with a picture of Seattle Police doing a spot of pepper spraying.

That's interesting to me, because Dan Strauss, born in April 1986 according to La Wik, would have been 13 at the time of the riots. Was he on the street back then? Or his social-worker parents? Why exactly would a 13-year-old be exercised by the WTO protests? Was he pepper-sprayed? Or one of his parents?

So Dan Strauss is interested in reducing the Seattle Police Department use of violence and tear gas and pepper spray. At least, that is what I understood from his comments.

Later on I introduced the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" moral narrative -- Allyism -- and proposed that it was problematic to describe the world with a moral narrative before you have described the world with a descriptive narrative. 

I advanced my reductive Three Peoples theory as an example of a descriptive theory, that tries to understand the world before judging it. Mind you, the idea of a descriptive narrative rather than a moral narrative is incredibly modern and progressive. If we are dealing with ancient religion, the whole of creation is subject to the wrath of the gods, and, as Mircea Eliade argues in his Myth of the Eternal Return:

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

See, I'm so sophisticated that I hesitate to blame my neighbor's malevolence for all the sins of the world.

And the narratives that arose later in the Axial Age are all moral narratives, too.

I went on to mention to Dan the virtue-signaling yard-signs so common in the gentry liberal neighborhoods of North Seattle that Dan represents: the Black Lives Matter, the #WeBelieve, the Hate has no Home Here signs.

In response Dan Strauss muttered about Hate. At least that is what I understood him to say.

Unfortunately I did not get in my Hegel zinger, that Hegel says that the thing is the same as its opposite, as in the north pole and the south pole of a magnet: the same, only opposite. On this notion, when you are exercised about racism as an noble anti-racist you are really putting yourself on the racist's level: obsessed with race. And if you are fighting Hate, you are probably a hater, because after all, you hate the Haters. Right?

The joke, to me, is that our liberal friends have become precisely the people they have criticized all these years. They used to rail against McCarthyite witch-hunts -- although back in the day Hollywood actually took fairly good care of the Commies in their midst. Now they get people fired for their political beliefs. They used to rail against censorship: now they applaud it. They used to sneer at enthusiastic Christianity and its obsession with sinners. Now they are obsessed with sinful racist-sexist-homophobe Haters.

Like they say: be careful who you choose as your enemies, because you will become them. 

Well, well, well. It's Nietzsche who said that:

Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that's who you become most like.

Or Marcus Aurelius arguing the opposite:

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

Or Sun Tzu:

To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy. 

Golly Geewillikins. Who knew?

But it does raise the question of how we deal with our liberal friends. Really, we don't want to wipe them and their hatey-hate Hate from the face of the Earth. We know that if we were to wipe out all liberals they would just be reborn as something just as foolish and knavish. Correction: as something more foolish and knavish.

Hey liberals! Ever thought that if you utterly cancel all the bitter clingers and deplorables they will return as something far worse?

And, of course, it is my conceit that I understand liberals and the left, that they are reactionaries lurching back to the past, that their activism culture is a kind of neo-Quixotic movement, pretending to be revolutionaries way after the end of the Age of Revolution.

And it is my belief that liberals, devoted to the idea of the creative life, of making a difference in the world, have totally misunderstood how the creative life works. It is not a triumphant bending of the arc of history, but a harrowing journey into the unconscious that, if successful, may well end in the death of the Sacrificial Hero rather than the applause of a grateful world. As I rehearse in my Good Life concept.

But hey, if the gentry liberals of North Seattle want a councilman concerned about police brutality and Hate, why, they got exactly what they want in Dan Strauss. Bless their hearts.

What Do You Say to a Progressive Seattle Politician?

I'm scheduled to have a phone conversation this afternoon with my progressive Seattle Councilman Dan Strauss, who was elected in 2019 over a slightly less progressive Heidi Wills. Heidi showed up at my yoga class, where I used to like to zing the teacher Jim, who would always have the conventional wisdom line from The New York Times or The Atlantic.

What should I say to Dan?

I think that I will ask him about Defund the Police.

First, I will ask him which activist groups are pushing it. Is it just Black Lives Matter, or is it a whole phalanx of activist groups?

Then I will ask him what he thinks is the problem? Police brutality? Gang warfare? Systemic racism?

Then I will tell him about my understanding of the problem, from liberal journalist Jill Leovy, author of the 2015 book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America. I'll tell him that I wrote about the book back in 2015 "The Real Problem 'Ghettoside.'" See this is how Leovy reports it.

1. Blacks in the inner city are mad as hell because murderers never get caught.
2. Blacks in the inner city are mad as hell because the police are always harassing young men on the street.

There is a very good reason why murderers don't get caught. It's because of "snitches get stiches." The gangs intimidate witnesses so they won't testify at trial, although "everybody knows who done it." BUt everyone is still mad that the perps don't get perped.

The police react to this situation in a sensible way. Since they "know who done it," they harass the guys "who done it" for minor street crimes. And everyone is mad about that.

What to do? Well there is something. I read once from a policeman that the dirty little secret of successful policing is informers. If you have informers you can bust up the gangs. And the murdering is all about gangs defending their turf and conducting border warfare. Also, of course, since a lot of economic activity in the inner city operates outside the law, the folks in the inner city can't call on the police for help when illegal activity is involved.

And that includes simple off-the-books employees.

Yeah, that's a problem. The gangs exist because of the marginal economy in the inner city that operates on the edge of legality, because uneducated people and unacculturated people often can't get well-paying jobs above the minimum wage, or union jobs because they don't have the connections.

Gotta be careful not to get too far into the reeds.

But maybe I'll tell him the story of Lady Marjorie's fencing contractor. See, Marjorie had some fencework done and was not happy with the work so she stopped the check she had just written to the contractor. A short while later, a check-cashing facility called! The contractor was getting cash on the check with which to pay his off-the-books Mexican workers. So I wrote about this at American Thinker and pretty soon got an email from an auto mechanic in Florida. He said that it was almost impossible to get and on-the-books job, and that was a problem because he needed a credit record to get a home mortgage, and for that you need an on-the-books job.

Oh well, it's an imperfect world, and it's tough trying to bend the arc of history towards justice.

Then, I think I'll ask him about Allyism, about the three layer social analysis of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Where does he fit in there? As an Ally? Or as a "white oppressor?" And what about tech billionaires and CEOs? Are they white oppressors or are they allies because they donate to BLM and censor "far right" insurrectionists?

Then, maybe, I should ask him about Defunding the Police now that we know from January 6 that the real problem in  America is "far right" insurrectionists, which are so big a problem that the usual practice of freeing people accused of crimes without bail has been suspended. And we need 30,000 National Guardsmen in Washington DC, while we didn't need them in Seattle and Portland last summer.

Don't you think, I'll ask him, that the post January 6 events are something of a "tell" from the ruling class? Are they not saying that BLM and AntiFa are nothing to worry about, because they are the street thug of the ruling class. whereas Trump insurrectionists are an existential threat that needs immediate action and overwhelming force.

Maybe I'll even have time to offer my reductive Three Peoples theory that experiences America not as a moral drama but as just three kinds of people trying to live their lives: Creative people that want to make a difference; Responsible commoner that want to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law; and Subordinate clients that want their lives protected by political power

I wonder how it will actually go down.

Charles Murray's Last Broadside "Facing Reality"

Way back in the 1990s Charles Murray was the second tier in Herrnstein and Murray on The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

The point of any Bell Curve is that if you measure anything about humans in a human community, most people will cluster towards the average, with less and less people as you get away from the average. Thus, there are a ton of people with average intelligence, a few with above-average and below intelligence, and only one or two complete geniuses and one or two complete idiots.

Herrnstein and Murray "noticed" that humans are not all alike. In particular different "races" have different "bell curves" where intelligence is concerned. And, given that, as we now say, "experts agreed" that jobs in the modern economy were increasingly requiring cognitive skills rather than manual skills, that could result in a bit of a cock-up on the race front, because blacks present a bell curve on intelligence shifted quite a bit to the left -- i.e. lower -- when compared to whites.

La Wik: "Murray's work has been and remains highly controversial."

Er, no, Wikkie. His work is only controversial to liberals and lefties, because it drives a stake into the heart of their belief system, and they can't deal with that. Because safetyism.

You can see why liberals jumped all over The Bell Curve at the time. Their religion said that humans were equal, and that any inequalities between person and person and between black and white were due to discrimination. But if Herrnstein and Murray were right then we would never get to a perfect world where the racial breakdown of everyone from CEOs to garbage workers would match the racial percentages in the nation.

So Charles Murray had to be racist-racist-racist and sent to the academic equivalent of Outer Slobbovia.

Murray's response, ten years later in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, was to show that if you purged race out of his Bell Curve prophecy -- and racistly only racistly analyzed racist whites -- the argument about cognitive skills still applied. In today's America the white cognitive elite, with degrees and credentials and careers up the ying-yang, are doing fine. The white commoners in the middle are doing so-so, and the white underclass, the bottom 30 percent, are really sucking air: the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

The liberal response to Coming Apart was basically not to respond.

But you will notice that liberals today are basically conceding Murray's point. Today's liberals say that IQ tests are racist. And they say that whites do better in school and life because of "white privilege" or, failing that, because of "systemic racism." Rather than admit that, not surprisingly, people with different backgrounds, different origins, different genetic inheritances (i.e., race) have different capabilities, as common sense would suggest, they say that it's all a conspiracy of white males since the dawn of time.

So why do East Asians have the highest IQs in America? Huh? White privilege? Mandarin classism?

So now lefties are saying that teaching the classics of Greece and Rome is racist. And getting coverage in The New York Times. Mind you, I am all in favor of increasing the teaching of the classics of South and East Asia. We systemic racists might learn something from them.

Anyway, Charles Murray, now age 78, is publishing one last broadside, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. It looks like he is taking the bull by the horns. Or double-shotting his guns, etc. From the blurb at Amazon:

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

I.e., The Bell Curve, dummy.

You did know, didn't you, that East Asians have a higher average IQ than Jews have a higher average IQ than "whites" have a higher average IQ than "Blacks." But race is a social construct.

My theory is that average IQ is a measure of the time that a particular cultural group has been literate. And, of course, literacy parallels involvement in Axial Age religion and commerce. I suspect that East Asian elites -- mandarins -- and South Asian elites -- Brahmins -- have the longest experience of literacy. So they are the most intelligent. Not exactly rocket science.

Only, recent immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria apparently have higher IQs that native American Blacks. Could that be a benefit of Brit colonialism compared to All-American plantation slavery and Jim Crow and unionized public education? You tell me.

I tell you what I really think. I think that our liberal friends are half way into an intellectual collapse. They don't study history and philosophy and politics and economics any more, because if they did they would face irreconcilable differences with their lefty secular religion. Case in point, Jan Psaki challenging a reporter's question on the $15 an hour minimum wage. But the CBO says that increasing the minimum wage would cost up to 1.4 million jobs. This is not rocket science. But I'll bet that a whole generation of Democratic political activists have just steered away from ever dealing with the question. So that they literally know nothing.

The reason that elite scions went to college back in the day, and studied the classics, was because the ruling class wanted their young sprouts to know how the political power game was played back in the day. They figured the young'uns would learn something. When young scions of the ruling class don't learn all that hard stuff they remain ignorant of the nuts and bolts of ruling.

Here is something from Ben Stein about recently deceased George Schultz that I didn't know.

When he was secretary of State under the great Ronald Reagan, Eretz Israel was struggling with intense inflation. Secretary of State [Schultz] sent my father [Herb Stein], along with a super smart economist named Stanley Fischer, to Israel to help.

After many meetings with top Israeli officials, Pop and Dr. Fischer created a plan (kindly called the Stein Plan), to reestablish a new Israeli Shekel backed by the United States. The plan worked like a charm. Even now Israelis — thanks to Secretary Shultz — consider the Stein Plan salvation.

See what I mean? Those clueless lefties running Israel back then Literally Had No Clue about a functioning monetary policy. But the knowledge of How to Do It was right there, if only someone had opened an economic textbook. Only, if your entire leadership had been to activism school rather than economics school, well, then you need to send Herb Stein over there to teach 'em how to do it. You get the point.

And I suspect that the same is true about all the swamp creatures in the Biden administration. Only, the lefty geniuses that rule us would rather die than take advice from a conservative economist.

Dueling Three Layers: Allyism vs. Americanism

I was doing an American Thinker piece about my brilliant notion of "fake tribalism," that all tribes and tribalisms are fake because humans didn't develop tribes until they started living in villages/towns of 2,500+ inhabitants.

One of my present obsessions is the Allyism notion of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." It comes from a piece by Matt Taibbi "On White Fragility" where he takes down Robin DiAngelo's megahit On White Fragility. He writes, of progressive ideology:

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

You can see that this is all about the epidemic of virtue-signaling in our ruling class. We rulers are the Allies, les chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche. We are so special it makes your head spin. But, of course, it is all a lie. Let us count the ways.

Members of oppressed groups. Yes but just how oppressed are the oppressed groups? Compared to conquest slaves captured in West Africa? Compared to Brits captured by Vikings in 1000AD and sold in the slave market in Dublin? Just what are the roadblocks to any human in America that sticks around for an average public school education and gets some sort of a skill? Oh yeah! Credential laws that discriminate against new entrants; high payroll taxes on wages; mortgage subsidies that benefit existing homeowners and boost house prices for aspiring oppressed groups; minimum wage laws; anti-gig economy laws. I could go on.

Allies. Just who are the allies helping? Are they really helping oppressed groups by encouraging them to gather in identity politics enclaves? My line is that the best thing you can do for minorities is to teach them the skills and the culture of middle-class life, as per my Road to the Middle Class. But, in fact, the policy of our ruling class for the last century has been to lure the "oppressed groups" off the road to the middle class and into the brambles of free stuff and subordination. And how much of being an Ally means getting Jobs for Gentry in government regulating business and doing climate change?

White Oppressors. Just who are these white oppressors? Tech billionaires? Heavens no! @jack and the Zuck are Allies, censoring "far-right" conservatives on social media and donating hundreds of billions towards getting out the Democratic vote. Good old Jeff Bezos has rescued the liberal Washington Post from oblivion. Are they Trump Car Parade enthusiasts? Really? And how much power does a Ford F-150 driver have to oppress oppressed groups? OK, not much. So how about Ford F-350 drivers. Boy, there are guys with more money than sense!

Pretty obviously the whole Allyism thing is a fake doctrine intended to make ruling-class activists feel good about themselves. But, let us not forget Nassim Nicholas Taleb's dictum enshrined in my Maxims:

Never virtue-signal; never rent-seek; you must start a business.

Hey Allies! Allies? Anybody there?

Now my Americanism retort to the Allyism is short and sweet. There are Americans, known to each other as 'Muricans; there are Emerging Americans, not quite ready to fly the Trump flag. Then there are Anti-Americans, who are above the commoner culture of Americanism. Shall we go into more detail? I think we should.

Americans. Today’s America is the greatest country in the world, and the American people are the best people in the world. Most of us are straight-up Americans: we go to work, we obey the law, we follow the rules. And we thrive in the best country in the world. Go ’Muricans! 

Emerging Americans. Some Americans, the “Emerging Americans,” are not so sure about America. They have heard tell that the suburbs of America are teeming with racists and sexists, human werewolves and the like, that wish them harm. But we Americans say to the Emerging Americans: come on in: the water’s fine and the membership is open to all that came here legally.

Anti-Americans. Hoo boy. They Anti-Americans hate America; they despise ordinary Americans -- on a good day -- as “bitter-clingers” and “deplorables.” On an average day they are inventing corrupt Jobs for Gentry programs like climate change, the great reset, critical race theory and 1619 Projects. On a bad day they hate ordinary Americans as racist-sexist-homophobes. And they lie to Emerging Americans, telling them that they are doomed unless they hunker down in their identity-politics enclaves. So there you have it: the Anti-American politics of Hate and The Big Lie. Why, that is Literally Hitler!

Of course all these Three Layer theories are absurdly simplified rubbish. Or are they?

I would just say that Three Layer theories -- my prize collection is here -- are the minimum social theory that makes any sense. If you say that all humans are alike, you learn nothing. If you advance to a two layer theory, then it becomes Us vs. Them, which has use only for the War of All Against All. If you go beyond three layers to multi-layer theories like Piaget and Wilber, you lose your general audience and appeal only to obsessional people like me.

Yep. Good old Americanism. What's not to like?

We Can't Go Away and Hide in our Little Platoons

We humans naturally prefer our own kind, for "man is by nature a tribal creature," writes Robert Stacy McCain, approving of Burke's "little platoons."

How, then, has this principle of group loyalty become so wickedly warped, and turned into a weapon destructive of all social order, by the contemporary practice of progressive identity politics? Why is tribalism in America now asserting itself in such toxic and ferocious ways?

Actually, I would say that all group loyalty has been "wickedly warped" since, well, since humans started to live in communities bigger than "Dunbar's number" of about 150 people. La Wik:

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

I am relying on the anthropological writings of C.R. Hallpike. In his How We Got Here he argues that hunter-gatherers were pretty relaxed about tribe. They were pretty individualistic, except about sharing food. And they would change from one "band" to another without much fuss.

According to Hallpike, humans didn't start getting really tribal until they started living in village of 2,500+ people.

I take Hallpike's ideas and propose that all modern tribes are "fake tribes," gussied up to unite people against a real or perceived threat. Read La Wik on "Clans" and tell me what you think about clans, bands, and tribes.

So I say that all modern tribalism is "fake tribalism," whether tribalism of religion, of class, of nation, of race, of tribe or clan or band, of occupation, of level of education. All fake. All tribes, all identities, all groups are artificial, using the natural groupishness of humans for a political purpose.

Here is an example of what I mean. America's "Blacks" -- once "black" and then "African American" -- are descended from a whole bunch of tribes in western Africa. Each individual Black got enslaved by some tribal incident of conquest slavery and then sold to a white European slave trader. Yet now, we are told by our betters, all Blacks belong to one race -- except that race is a social construction. Anyway, if you disagree with any American liberal on race you are a "racist." Barack Obama, son of a white mother and a well-born East African, is America's First Black President.

Obviously the invention of "fake tribalism" is the most important thing since sliced bread. Or before sliced bread.

But when McCain proposes that we check out of the crazy world of "victims" and "oppressors" and "get through the week, pay our bills... by clinging to those 'little platoons,'" and when Jackie Gingrich Cushman says our problems must be "conquered in a bipartisan way," I say fuggetaboutit.

All politics is "fake tribalism." All religion is "fake tribalism." All culture is "fake tribalism." There is no checking out of the game and going back to your "little platoon." If you want to be a "man in the arena" then you are a player in the "fake tribalism" game.

There is only one way forward: to create a "fake tribalism" that is better and nobler and more popular than the left's "fake tribalism" of race, of gender, of identity politics, of "allyism." And let it be said right here that Donald Trump's MAGA movement, based on the idea of America as a nation and the American people as one American people, was the first shot fired in developing this new -- better, nobler, popular -- "fake tribalism," No wonder our liberal friends want to kill it in its cradle.

The question is: on what principle do we raise our banner? Our liberal friends have based everything on the concept of victimhood. Whether it was the industrial workers of the nineteenth century or the unemployed of the 1930s, or blacks suffering under Jim Crow, or women from an eternity of patriarchy, or gays suffering from ages of homophobia -- did you know that Edward II of England was gay? -- or oppressed peoples in general suffering under white oppressors but for the heroic "allies:" it's all about the victims.

And about the "fake victims." I buy slaves as victims; I buy blacks under Jim Crow as victims. But post 1965 Civil Rights Act? Well-born educated feminists as innocent victims? Well-born gays as innocent victims? Ahem.

There is, I think, an eternal temptation to don the mantle of "innocence." I say that it is almost universal that small minorities use a "culture of innocence" to maintain tribal unity. But that is not for us; innocence is for the Garden of Eden, not for life in this vale of tears.

I don't think the victims narrative works for us. And the reason is quite simple. We middle-class Americans are Commoners, what I call, in my reductive Three Peoples theory: People of the Responsible Self. Responsible people cannot be victims.

I think it is pretty obvious what works. We need to base our politics on the "fake tribe" of nation, and the "fake tribe" of the middle-class Commoner, responsibly getting a job, getting married, raising a family, and providing for our own.

And we must stop apologizing. A good start would be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Every Republican and every American Commoner should be saying: "hey Dems: come and talk to us when you have dealt with the poisonous racists and sexists and anti-semites in your own party. Period."

President Trump fired the first shot heard across America. It is up to us and to a new generation of politicians and culture warriors to continue the fight.

And that means having the zingers ready when the liberals come with their pejoratives. Such as this on the accusation of systemic racism.

So, pal, what is it about the Civil Rights Acts you don't understand? It is illegal in the United States to discriminate on the basis of race. So, if you see discrimination, report it to the police. Don't complain to me. I ain't the system. You are.

And so on. I was talking to a nice liberal lady the other day and she talked about race as a social construction. So what is 23andme.com all about, I asked? Profits, she said. Oh yeah, I said, of course. Silly me.

What is about America as the best country in the history of the world, and the American people as the best people in the history of the world that our liberal friends don't get?

What a Surprise: EU Flunks Vaccine Rollout

Even the ruling-class media are "shocked" about the EU's failure to get COVD vaccine out to the plebs. Says Breitbart:

The European Union appears to be haemorrhaging goodwill over its botched handling of coronavirus vaccine procurement, as reliably pro-Brussels outlets line up to criticise the leadership of the bloc in the strongest terms.

Or, as they would have said on the Reginald Perrin show, "a bit of a cock-up on the vaccination front."

The point is that when you have any bureaucracy you are going to get cascading incompetence. Because.

Because a bureaucracy is a top-down thing; like a modern army, it is designed to execute the will of the leader, all the way down the chain of command to the young chaps on the front line who will likely lose their lives executing on the power agenda of the chappie up at the top.

The only way a bureaucracy -- or an army -- can correct itself is in the aftermath of a big cock-up or defeat in battle. It's the only time that the leader gets feedback from the front line. Indeed, the whole point of an army or a bureaucracy is to limit feedback. After all, the general of the army can't exactly be too sensitive to the complaints of the squaddies on the front line saying that "hey, general, if we do that we are all going to get killed."

My line is that, apart from the existential response to barbarians on the border, the bureaucratic method is not a very good idea, exactly because it is purpose-designed to be non-responsive.

Compare bureaucracy to the market. The market is responding to new information all the time. Most of the information is true, and acting in response to the information will serve the consumers and increase profits. Some of the information is false, and acting in response to the false information will not serve the consumers.

The point is that nobody knows, in advance, which information is true, and which is false. But it all comes out in the wash.

But a bureaucracy -- or a clerical oligarchy -- is top-down all the way, and so it finds it almost impossible to correct errors until after a disaster. And, as Curtis Yarvin writes, the whole point of being a clerk in a bureaucracy is to avoid making decisions, because any decision might end up as a mistake that goes into your record and prevents any further promotions. As Yarvin says:

The universal principle of bureaucracy is that everyone follows the rules at all times; there is a rule for everything; no one makes or gets to change the rules they follow; and anyone who succeeds understands how to respect the rules, and how to bend them. The career objective of a bureaucrat is to always be relevant, and never be responsible.

But notice this:

So long as the employee has followed the procedure, the concept of accountability is not relevant. If following the rules produces a bad result, the rulebook may need to be updated. The failure does not reflect poorly on either the employee or the rule-writers. They both did their best. 

So, obviously the "rulebook" at the EU needs to be updated. But it's not the fault of the chaps in the EU bureaucratic chain of command. Oh no. They were just following the process.

Did you know that after World War I the German General Staff did a top-to-bottom review of the total cock-up on the Eastern and the Western Front? The staffers came to understand that the army of the future could not operate on classical bureaucratic principles. That's because the general could not know the details of the war at the front. Somehow the top-down chain of command had to be more flexible so that people lower down the chain of command had the authority to adapt the orders to local conditions. So the German generals came up with a new doctrine, of which Gen. Hans von Seeckt was the lead author:

[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier.

Hmm: "responsibility." Doesn't sound much like a modern EU bureaucrat. And in World War II, the average German soldier was reckoned to be worth 1.5 to 2 times better than the average allied soldier. 

I wonder. Do you think that the EU bureaucracy runs on those principles? Or the CDC bureaucracy in the US? Or the various health department bureaucracies in each state?

Of course not. The health bureaucracies all across the world are organized on the correct procedure and rulebook culture described by Yarvin. And, as the Brits say, such an organization is "not fit for purpose" when the problem at hand is not routine and normal and day-to-day.

That's why I think that our present clerical oligarchy, of "experts agree" and so on, is heading for the trash can. Because what we need is a flexible, responsive politics and culture. Just like the market.

Problem is that in such a system there is a reduced scope for power.

The Day After: "Groundhog Day"

A couple of years ago I determined to observe our sacred national festival of Groundhog Day by watching -- what else? -- Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day about a pompous twerp of a TV weatherman caught in a Nietzschean "eternal recurrence," reliving February 2 at Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and suffering the local yokels pulling the groundhog out of his den and announcing to the world that Phil the groundhog -- seer of seers, prognosticator of prognosticators -- has forecast another six weeks of winter. Again and again.

Nietzsche's line is that, when God dies, what you get is decadence, nihilism, and the eternal recurrence, over and over, until a new God is born.

In the case of Phil Connors the weatherman played by Bill Murray, he tries out all the sins of the world -- in particular manipulating women to get them into bed -- before he surrenders and just tries to do the right thing by little old ladies with a flat tire, performing the Heimlich maneuver on a local yokel choking on his breakfast, making his music teacher proud, being a nice guy, and finally winning the love of producer Rita Hanson played by Andie MacDowell.

This year, I particularly noted that the neurologist played in a cameo role by Harold Ramis is practically blind. Hmm. I wonder what he meant by that!

Also, I liked the moment where Rita is skeptical that Phil the weatherman knows the business of every local yokel in town. Phil replies, with a kind of existential resignation of a man that has perhaps relived February 2 three thousand times -- given that it takes ten years to become an accomplished musician -- that he knows all about everyone in Punxsutawney. And there is a kind of divine wisdom peeking through in that. We ought to know more about the lives and the needs of our neighbors, not because of prurient or curtain-twitching interest, but because of human concern.

Of course, one major theme in Groundhog Day is the same as America's Big Problem today, the cult among the elite -- even including TV weathermen -- that they are above the ordinary local yokels, the kind of people that dress up in top hats on Groundhog Day, or the fading beauty that makes it to Groundhog Day every year, or the bumbling armored car workers dropping coins on the ground. (Those armored car workers have nothing in common with health bureaucracy professionals making a mess of COVID vaccine distribution.) And, of course, there is the quintessential all-American "sure-as-heckfire" insurance agent, Ned Ryerson.

But ordinary people have a right to live their ordinary lives, and until our best and brightest acquire the wisdom to understand that -- and inwardly digest it -- then they, and America, are going to be living Groundhog Day for ever and ever, until they finally get that teeny-weeny bit of wisdom and release us all from our present Eternal Recurrence.

Meanwhile, like Phil Connors in the early part of the movie, the members of our ruling class, both the ruling clique and the broader educated elite, are in denial.

The Intersection of Innocence, Victims, Chastity, and Complaint

Yesterday I had a brainwave while categorizing a bunch of blog posts into my Culture of Innocence category.

I said to myself: but aren't helpless victims and innocent virgins and Little Darlings and women resisting the public square with their "safetyism" all the same?

They are all humans in the pre-responsibility culture. They are Adam and Eve before that nasty serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted the innocent Eve into tasting the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

So let's rehearse all this:

Three Peoples: The People of the Subordinate Self are people that attach themselves to a lord -- a feudal lord or a political boss -- and they are saying, thanks very much but responsibility is not for me. Of course, the Subordinate has no problem complaining if his loving lord goofs up and fails to protect him.

Little Darlings: If you are a Little Darling of the ruling class, given loot and plunder in return for your vote, you are like the rich man's mistress. One fine day, when your prettiness is not quite what it was, your Sugar Daddy will dump you for a newer model. In politics this is the fate of the white working class. I say that it will also be the fate of the feminists as the ruling class favors transgenders over whiny women. And blacks too as the ruling class pivots to illegal immigrants.

Women in the Public Square: I maintain that women don't want to be responsible people in the public square. That is what #MeToo and "safetyism" is about. Women expect to be protected, and rightly so. But that means that women are never going to accept the proposition of the public square, that you take the good with the bad, the ups with the downs. The very difference between the male Culture of Courage and the female Culture of Chastity that issues from the different conceptions of honor experienced by each sex mandates this. Women are not into courage. Their job is to stay alive and keep the kids alive. That does not include dying in a Forlorn Hope after King Henry V bellows "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more."

Culture of Innocence: I maintain that it is the natural and physical imperative for small minorities to develop a culture of innocence. Small minorities always feel embattled and vulnerable. They never know when they will need to join together as one to defend themselves from the cold cruel world outside. To maintain the necessary unity the small minority has to develop a culture of innocence, that all the world is against us and the only way we can survive is if we all hang together. And when did we do anything to deserve this? Obviously in our own time this Culture of Innocence is most obvious in Jews and Blacks. But I believe that all ethnic immigrants to the United States have gone through this stage. We will probably see it grab hold of the white commoners in the next few years as the implacable acts of the educated elite make life more precarious for them.

 Notice that this Culture of Innocence is mandatory for anyone fighting a war. The leader must unite the country to fight the war if he is to have a hope of winning and he always does this by representing the enemy as a guilty monster and we the people as innocents. If the leader fails to unite his people in this declaration of innocence then he will fail to mobilize the necessary will to win. In fact, if you are the anti-war party you will always try to insist that, hey, we aren't so great. Whatabout such and such... Our liberal friends did a bang-up job on this front during the Vietnam War and also in the the Iraq War after a decent interval to mourn the dead of the 9/11 attacks.

I say that the beginning of wisdom is to get beyond the Culture of Innocence. And that is the meaning of the Garden of Eden story. Once Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge she was no longer an innocent, and Adam and Eve had to leave the pre-conscious Paradise and "eat the herb of the field" and "eat bread." Sounds like the Dawn of Agriculture.

Then there is the human guilt from putting Christ on the Cross. Admitting guilt and getting beyond the Culture of Innocence is the beginning of responsibility, admitting that you are not perfect, and that, here and there, you may have done things of which you are ashamed, and for which you are sorry.

Notice that our liberal friends have a peculiar version of this with their BLM signs and their #WeBelieve yardsigns and their "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative. They are saying "we are the good guys" because we help oppressed peoples and the other guys are the haters. There is not a whisper of doubt, that we think that, on the margin, we are doing the right thing, but you never know. No. We activists are the good guys, and don't you forget it.

To live successfully in the city you have to get rid of all this innocence. You have to accept personal responsibility for your life and surrender to the will of the market. If something goes wrong you pick yourself up and get back in the game. There is a big upside to this: you get to be a happy camper. You ditch the Culture of Complaint for the Culture of Courage and Responsibility. Even if it's not always your fault.