Hey, Black Americans: Grow Up!

We just finished up a year in which the arrest of a black man, who was high on fentanyl and subsequently died, was the usual election-year pretext for a race-card play by the ruling class.

Wags like Steve Sailer are talking about the new Zeroth Amendment to the Constitution:

That's the new Zeroth Amendment: "No Black man need submit to arrest unless He's damn well in the mood to be arrested."

— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) August 29, 2020

Because what was really going on with George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, was that they were going to jail if the arrest succeeded.

For some reasons these police killings of black men with criminal records a yard long only get publicized in election years.

Since I get to walk past at least a dozen Black Lives Matter yard-signs up at the top of liberal Phinney Ridge every day, my unconscious mind has been pondering the whole question.

And I have come to realize that the whole race politics thing has nothing to do with blacks, or African Americans, or Blacks. It is all to do with the moral posturing of well-to-do whites.

Since the 18th century.

Back in the 18th century, was the anti-slavery movement, William Wilberforce, proprietor, responding to a slave rebellion? Were there Spartacuses all over leading the slaves in revolt? Er, no. La Wik:

Wilberforce was... the only son of Robert Wilberforce (1728–1768), a wealthy merchant[.]

The family fortune had been made by little Billy's grandfather in the Baltic trade. Our William, who became an evangelical Christian, was what we now call an "activist." Hey, it was no skin off his nose to advocate against the Atlantic slave trade!

Fast forward to 1850 and the United States. Was there a massive slave rebellion that prompted the ruling class to ease off on the slave front? Not at all. It was much more a moral crusade, with Ladies' Anti-Slavery Societies having Frederick Douglass in to talk about the evils of slavery.

Then as now, the ruling class had to have an "Other" to blame for all the sins of the world, and the South would fill the bill. So why not have a jolly old war and teach the South a lesson. After all, the young men of he North were expendable, as the young men of 1917 were expendable, and the young men of 1941. Not to mention the young men sent off to Vietnam to prop up the dominoes, and the young men sent to the Middle East in 2002 to prop up the Saudis.

Yes, but whatabout the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? The fact is that the ruling class was down for the struggle. Dr. King was supported by the Northern elite and nice Jewish boys went down to the South to register voters.

Dr. King based his non-violent movement on the non-violence of Mahatma Gandhi. Which is a "tell."

I now realize, having read The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon, that the Brits decided pretty soon after the Indian Mutiny in 1857 that they would be handing India over to the Indians. But not yet, old chap, because the natives weren't yet ready for self government. A real imperial empire wouldn't have given Gandhi the time of day. They would have arrested him and disappeared him, and nobody the wiser. Like the Chinese and the Uygurs.

But if the imperial empire is planning to hand India over to the Indians, why, then it makes sense to permit and even encourage a nationalist Indian movement. That way you have a new ruling class ready to take over when the time comes. As it did come after World War II. And it even makes sense to condone a whacko activist like Gandhi with his taste for young women.

If you condone a non-violent activist like Dr. King it yields all kinds of benefits, like the incident at the Edmund Pettus bridge and all those eevil Southern policemen beating up helpless peaceful protesters. OMG, I can't believe they did that! And all those liberal kids going into the South to register voters as Freedom Riders -- with a book and a movie to follow! Weren't they special!

See, my line is that all this had nothing to do with blacks, and everything to do with liberal moral fluffing and preening. And when the votes in Congress were in on the civil rights acts, the northern liberals were almost completely Yea, the Republicans were majority Yea, and only the Southern Democrats voted Nay. Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) , the Jewish libertarian Republican, voted Nay, because he thought the bill should just ban gubmint discrimination, and allow private citizens to discriminate to their hearts' content.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) recently characterized himself "I am Spartacus." As if. Watch the movie, kiddo! Kirk Douglas, playing a real slave, not a Senator, gets crucified right at the gate of Rome. And, thanks to the movie director, Stanley Kubrick, and leftie scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo, ol'Kirk gets to see his kid just before he expires on the cross. There is a line of slaves, crucified, going right down the Appian Way, or whatever. Just to make the point about who is boss in the Roman Empire.

In the American Empire, blacks kept a pretty low profile until after the passage of the civil rights acts. And I don't blame them. Why put yourself on the line when white liberals are going to do the heavy lifting for you? And then when blacks started rioting in 1965 and thereafter, they were helpless victims reacting to 500 years under the yoke. Pity that Detroit is still hollowed out 50 years later.

Looking back at the whole thing, going back to rich kid William Wilberforce, you gotta hand it to our liberal friends. What a ride! What glorious self-congratulation! What moral peacock feathers! What it is to dine out on your moral specialness for 200 years! And no end in sight!

But I have a question for blacks. Is this all there is to Life, the Universe, and Everything? To be the Little Darlings, the political playthings of the ruling class? To be riled up every even year? To get to do a bit of loot and plunder at Target once in a while? To get to be the First Black President just for showing up? To be the first woman black vice-president just for being a politician's moll? To sire 70 percent of your children outside of marriage? To have your young men committing half of the murders in the US?

Because back in the day there were magnificent American blacks. There was Frederick Douglass, who was sent to a slave breaker and broke the breaker! Who escaped, found his love and married her, and worked his way up to luncheon speaker, first hating America and then learning to love it. Or Booker T. Washington, who traveled half way across America, sleeping under the sidewalk, to get himself an education.

Here's the thing. For a young head full of mush it feels kinda cool for the ruling class to give you free dissing privileges. The white working class had it for a while: they could strike and carry on and bankrupt their employers, and who cared. But then the liberals tired of them and left them to die of despair in the most recent half century.

And now the ruling class has issued free rioting privileges to the white wokies of AntiFa. What fun!

I'd just like to say to my black friends: why not get your act together before your liberal masters tire of you?

Postmodernism! We Hardly Knew You!

We all know that postmodernism is the movement that... Yes, what exactly does it say?

I would say that postmodernism argues that every narrative about Life, the Universe, and Everything is ultimately a narrative of power, the way a ruling class, every ruling class, creates a story that proves conclusively that it has a divine -- or historical -- right to rule.

In part this movement was part of the German Turn, a movement away from the rationalism of the Enlightenment and from the notion that you could establish a just society on Earth from rational principles. A philosophy of reason was just as much an apology for rule as the divine right of kings.

In part, of course, the postmodernists saw themselves as heroic resisters against bourgeois supremacy, pushing against the notion that the philosophy and faith of middle-class property and business owners was the highest and best form of life.

So in the little book I picked up on Nietzsche and Postmodernism by Dave Robinson, we are to understand that 

Postmodernists like Jacques Derrida celebrate difference, diversity and the marginal, those things that flourish in a pluralist and tolerant democracy.

Derrida is against "logocentricity," the idea that languages rule.

The conviction that language can create stable and "total" certainties is dangerous as well as misguided. Language can only be made to do this by excluding alternative readings by excluding what is considered to be "other." 

Quite right, Jacques, mon vieux.

In practice this has usually meant the establishment of hegemonies that marginalize all those whose values and beliefs don't conform to some limited and contingent world view. 

Well, we are certainly a couple of marbles short of the celebration of difference from establishing norms where your average white working-class deplorable is concerned right now. Shall I go on?

Ethical and political doctrines are always founded on some essentialist myth about human nature. But language cannot establish essentialist "truths", so ethical values and political doctrines are nearly always the constructs of authoritarian institutions imposed on the rest of us.

Exactly, Jacques. So that helps us understand the current notion from gubmint "bioethicists" that access to the COVID vaccine should be prioritized according to race. It's just the current ruling class of educated Gentry imposing its world view on the rest of us, because systemic racism.

Or Jean-Francois Lyotard, who decided after 1968 that "Marxism had inbuilt authoritarian tendencies" and that "the latent passions of human beings will always make it impossible for them to be marshalled under some theoretical doctrine."

Guess what postmodernist Lyotard wants instead.

Lyotard himself recommends a society that is tolerant, pragmatic and pluralist, libertarian and anarchist, one which again celebrates difference and avoids monolithic certainties. 

Good luck with that when you chat with our wokey friends, Jean-Francois.

Jean Baudrillard thinks we are all living in "a fragmented world of alienated individuals with no sense of self or history" but "just consumers of media in a world of signs without signifiers." Well, not if our "trained Marxists" at Black Lives Matter have anything to do with it.

Robinson's Nietzsche and Postmodernism was published in 1999, at the last moment before we could begin to speak of "woke leftism" as a movement of neo-Marxism devoted to imposing a single ruling-class world view on the rest of us, because systemic racism.

The funny thing is that all the critiques of the postmodernists, which were sorta true back the bad old days of the patriarchy, now apply in spades. And the reason is that while the old ruling class was indeed a hegemony that dominated society as any ruling class does, it did not do so with a deliberate strategy of liquidating certain groups and classes, and enforcing its class supremacy, but in reaction to actual rebellions and opposition.

The new ruling class -- from its "trained Marxist" at Black Lives Matter to its educated Gentry with a divine right to salaried tenured pensioned positions of power of the rest of us -- has a direct faith in domination and hegemony, that derives from its essentialist doctrine of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

The "allies" movement has a transparent argument for power that blithely ignores the findings of the postmodernists. It denies "difference" and imposes the "monolithic certainty" of systemic racism. It shows, I suppose, that people will believe anything so long as it is to their personal advantage.

In American Greatness, Edward Ring proposes an end to the bitterness and rancor of the last four years by "reaching out" to the good people on the other side and trying to find a common ground upon which to move forward together.

But I think he misunderstands the situation. Right now our educated Gentry friends are in the grips of a religious prophecy, a prophecy that decrees that the world is on a trajectory to climate disaster, unless we act now, and decrees that America is on the way to a racist hell of white supremacy, unless we act now.

They don't just argue this. They believe it as a saving truth.

The point about prophecies is that you can't argue rationally about them. You can only move forward when the prophecy has collapsed in ruin, as argued in When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger et al.

And right now our globalist friends are determined that we must end fossil fuels, because end of the world. What can you say to them? That Derrida says that they have got it all wrong?

What can you say to our Wokie friends that are determined that systemic racism is tearing us apart? Because anything you tell them just confirms their conviction that you are a racist and that racism is systemic, just as they believe.

Humans do not respond to argument. They respond to ruin.

Now You Know Why the Germans Did Nothing

When our liberal friends are in a mellow moment, taking time out from canceling everyone for racism, they like to emit moral lectures about the Germans under Hitler. How come millions of Germans said nothing and did nothing while Hitler's thugs were beating up the Jews in the 1930s.

Let's take the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as a case in point. All the following is official revealed truth from La Wik.

• Heidegger was a student of the Jewish philosopher Husserl.
• Heidegger was rector of the University of Freiberg for a year in 1933. A week before his appointment, his predecessor had suspended all Jewish professors at Freiberg, including Husserl. Heidegger did nothing.
• Heidegger joined the Nazi Party a week after his appointment as rector.
• Heidegger resigned his rectorship in 1934 after about a year on the job.
• Heidegger did not go to Husserl's cremation in 1938.

Here is a quote from Hans Sluga, in La Wik.

Though as rector he prevented students from displaying an anti-Semitic poster at the entrance to the university and from holding a book burning, he kept in close contact with the Nazi student leaders and clearly signaled to them his sympathy with their activism.

You mean, like today's university administrators and politicians turn a blind eye towards BLM and AntiFa activism, "clearly [signaling] to them [their] sympathy with their activism?"

And look: Heidegger had published his Being and Time in 1927 and established his reputation as a philosopher for all time, so why didn't he have the guts to be a Sacrificial Hero against the murderous Nazis? To this day, there is a black cloud over Heidegger.

And to this day, our liberal friends have dined off the horrors of Heidegger, and the Germans "who did nothing," and the Americans who did nothing during the McCarthy period.

Yes, liberals. But now the shoe is on the other foot, as you liberals allow ordinary Americans to be canceled by left-wing Twitter mobs, while university administrators and university presidents do nothing. Here's the latest, a girl's university admissions offer canceled from because of a 3-second SnapChat video she sent in 2016 when she was 15: "I can drive, n***a". I assume that she used the word n***a and not n****r, but you never know. Says The New York Times,

[The young woman] was among many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media of them using racist language.

Pretty cool, liberals isn't it. You chaps boost gangsta rap as really cool, and then your brave college admissions administrators do the cowardly thing and whack a naive little girl for taking you up on it. 

Because, like Heidegger, you wouldn't want to lean against the political wind, no siree.

Earth to liberals: the current leftist cancel culture is exactly like Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Prudent, ordinary administrators and bureaucrats and industrialists go along to get along. Hey, it's the prudent thing to do! After all, who could have known in the 1930s that it would all end in the Holocaust?

The kid that outed the girl on the n-word is proud of what he did.

“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Mr. Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father is white, said of the classmate who uttered the slur, Mimi Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right.

Of course he is proud. That's what he has been carefully taught: to be a noble activist and fight, as an ally, against white supremacy and systemic racism.

Or you could say that he is a dupe of the ruling class, that wants to use blacks as their political tool: on the one hand getting 90 percent of the black vote, because racism, and on the other permanently cowing the ordinary white working class into subservience, because racism. 

Here's a question for you scholars and philosophers. How come the naming and shaming of someone as "literally Hitler" carries a real zing, while calling someone "literally Stalin" doesn't have quite the same canceling power?

And calling someone "literally Mao" has even less zing. Yet, Mao was a bigger mass murderer that Stalin, and Stalin was a bigger mass murderer than Hitler. What gives?

You know as well as I do. It all comes down to what we have been carefully taught. And our noble and dedicated teachers have been more interested in teaching us about the crimes of Hitler than about the crimes of Stalin and Mao. I wonder why?

And meanwhile, all across America noble philosophers and academicians and administrators are "doing nothing" to stem the tide of neo-fascist leftism.

Towards a Critique of Meaning

One of my little conceits is to parrot Douglas Adams' line in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." Only, I got it wrong.

I just looked it up in my five-books-in-one Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, and that is not how it is presented. Chapter 24, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"O Deep Thought computer," he said, "the task we have designed for you to perform is this. We want you to tell us..." he paused, "The Answer!" 
"The Answer?" said Deep Thought. "The Answer to what?"
"Life!"urged Fook.
"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.
"Everything!" they said in chorus.
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.
"Tricky," he said finally.
"But can you do it?"
Again, a significant pause."
"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."
"There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement.
"A simple answer?"added Lunkwill.
"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about it."

Now, at La Wik, they phrase this as the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." And the Answer, of course, is 42.

So I got it wrong. And so did La Wik. But I am going to have to change my quote. I think that I will henceforth refer to "the meaning of  'Life, the Universe, and Everything.'" Just to make it fair.

The thing about the meaning of Life is that everyone wants a short-cut. And why? Because you need to have some idea about the meaning of Life before you get up in the morning. It is much harder to live life in the knowledge of ignorance, that you don't have a clue what is going on, than living life when everything has been decided on the meaning front by your local priest or your local activist.

The fact is that the meaning of Life is unfathomable. Indeed, the more we know about "the Universe, and Everything" the more we wonder. How is it possible? How did it come to be? How big is it? Is there Life elsewhere? What is Life? What is the Universe?What is Everything? And what does it all mean?

Also, the question of the meaning of Life only occurs for a being that has a conscious mind. If you are a dog or a lion or a mosquito, you just live the life you are programmed to live, as we now think, by your DNA. You don't think about it; you don't worry about it: you just wake up in the morning and go about your business.

So our primitive forbears didn't think about the meaning of Life. They just went about it. And as they began to acquire the glimmerings of a conscious mind, they initially attributed all the angst of life to evil spirits. Notice that, at this stage, the human does not yet feel responsible for his life. Therefore, he does not really need to know the meaning of Life. The gods have decided all that. All the primitive human has to do is get on with it. And suffer, if the gods will it.

It is only with the gods of the Axial Age that humans get to be responsible for their own lives. Even then, God has decided pretty well everything you need to know about the meaning of Life. God just says: now you are responsible for organizing your Life according to the meaning of Life that I have vouchsafed to the Prophets.

Indeed, I would say that down to the Protestant Reformation, all the Average Joe had to do was listen to the priests, and do what he was told.

But with the Reformation a new concept arises. With the advent of printing, your bourgeois citizen wanted to read his own Bible. But that meant that the bourgeois citizen was taking on the new responsibility of trying to figure out what it all means in the Bible.

And now, with Nietzsche's Death of God, we are on our own. It's up to you to figure out the meaning of Life on your own.

Only, of course, most people don't do that. If they can't believe in God anymore then they pick up the secular gods of their school teachers. Or the meaning of Life revealed to them by a political leader, or a religious guru.

I would say that the urgency of knowing the meaning of Life has increased radically in the last century. It is not an accident that with Freud and Jung we see the beginning of a new age in which we have highly trained specialists to help us with our angst. And it is not just a question of taking the word of a priest or a guru to solve your existential problems. With "analysis" it is the patient, the analysand, that is supposed to do the heavy lifting, not the expert psychologist.

The less that society has already determined the meaning of Life, the more the responsibility falls on the individual. And the heavier the weight on the shoulders of the individual.

Even so, nearly everyone picks up a pre-packaged Meaning of Life kit at the store, or the church, or the meeting, or the activist group. Because, really, the alternative, to stand in the full horror of not knowing what you are here for, and what you should do next, is a terror that few of us have the resources to deal with.

But I think with my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we should at least begin to recognize that different people need different meanings of life.

In my reductive system, we can say that your average Subordinate should not worry about such things, but just do what his lord orders him to do. The average Responsible has the overall divine plan all set out for him, but he has to fill in the details, and that is not easy.

Obviously we can see that the Creatives, that are supposed to be figuring it out for themselves, are in completely over their heads. That is why, for the last 200 years, they have been grabbing whatever half-baked canned cults and religions are on offer, like passengers on the Titanic grabbing for life-belts.

Maybe that's as it should be. I just wish that the cults and religions that the Creatives have been grabbing for were, as the Brits say, "fit for purpose." That is what my Great Reaction theme is all about. It is about Creatives grabbing for something to steady their lives: only time and time again, they lurch back to the primitive, to belief systems that are more primitive than the Axial Age religions that they can no longer believe in. Because they are not yet ready to face the Universe without he comfort of a ready-made belief system.

That is the real challenge and the real problem. How do you face the world if you accept that you do not know the meaning of Life and never will, and accept that it is a cop-out to just buy a ready-to-wear suit right off the rack?

How About a Critique of Critique?

We all know that everyone who is anyone has created a "critical theory." The current rage for "critical race theory" is just the latest effort from the global sophomores.

Now, in the official introduction to its Critical Theory page, La Wik writes that critical theory is

an approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures.

Very commendable. In case you weren't aware, 

critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. 

And we can't leave La Wik's article without this gem:

Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

"Challenge power structure." "Liberate human beings." Couldn't agree more, Max old chap. Because I'm sure if you were alive today you'd agree with me that today's "power structure" is a lefty power structure, and its objective is to enslave the minds and the bodies of so-called "deplorables." For their own good, of course.

Now "critique" starts with Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason where he argues that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances.

Then along came Marx with his "critique of political economy," that is to say the economics of the classical economists. He was only just in time, because his critique was exploded in 1870 when the marginal revolution in economics completely set aside the opposition of exchange value and use value that the classical economists used and that Marx critiqued. You could look it up.

Our modern critical theory is a post-WWI phenomenon, based upon the post-Marx reality that needed a non-economic basis for its critique.

And in my opinion it is just as wrong. Here's why. It was crazily wrong for Marx to propose that capitalism was an essentially oppressive system. Why? Because in the first place the market economy rewards people for serving the consumers. Because in the second place, capitalism is associated with an unprecedented rise in income, over 30 times in 200 years. Thirdly, because the capitalists then and the ordinary middle class today are not that interested in power.

So, to develop a critical theory based on the theoretical foundation that the one thing needful is to attack and destroy "power structures" misses the point. Under the market system, power structures come and go.

We see this with the fairy tale of "systemic racism." We made systemic racism illegal half a century ago with the civil rights acts. We made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or sex. And ever since we have had lefty activists, funded by lefty billionaires, running around looking under every rock to find discrimination and root it out.

Oh, there's discrimination still, of course. People are wary around young black males. And when young black males mostly peacefully protest a lot of people head for the suburbs.

Actually, city people have been wary around young uneducated unemployed males since whenever. Because young unassimilated males are dangerous and violent. What do you think Dickens' Oliver Twist was about?

So you can see that for me, there is a desperate need for someone to come along and liberate lefty minds "from the circumstances that enslave them."

Now, when I awoke from a dream during the night the book's chapters presented themselves to me thus:

A Critique of Meaning 

A Critique of Religion 

A Critique of Creativity

A Critique of Morality 

A Critique of Revolution 

A Critique of Activism 

A Critique of Politics 

A Critique of Force 

A Critique of Responsibility 

A Critique of Slavery

I think that will do for a start. Of course, you can see what I am about. I am trying to find a framework in which to fit my overwrought ideas, from my reductive Three Peoples theory, to "downstreamism" -- that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- to my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, to my critique of Activism Culture, to my various critique of the Left's Conceits, Crimes, and Errors, to the problem of the Little Darlings.

And it all starts with the eternal question: why do humans seem to need, nay demand, a sense of "meaning?"

Understanding Gender Madness

Guess what! The schientists at the New England Journal of Medicine are proposing that “sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility, and they can be harmful for intersex and transgender people.”

Well, that settles it. The worst thing in the world -- after systemic racism -- is harm experienced by "intersex and transgender people" from the bigotry of transphobes. To paraphrase Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), "if we reduce harm to just one intersex/transgender life..."

But what I want to know is: who is the boss here? I should have thought that the interests of ruling class bureaucrats and administrative Pooh Bahs would come before the interests of the woke radicals. And the more finely graded the data that our rulers have about us, the more wisely they can rule us. But what do I know? Perhaps this is a deeper thing than I can understand.

Maybe as the Biden administration sets forth on its glorious war on climate change and systemic racism, the honor of marching in the vanguard will properly be exchanged between the Imperial Guards Regiment of Administrators and Experts and the Battalion of Intersectional Activists of the Global Guards. These high-status guards regiments tend to be very touchy about the honor and vanity of protecting the monarch. I dare say that back in the day there were a lot of heated words exchanged between guardsmen of the various guards regiments about the size and the shape of their shakos and busbies and bearskins.

Now, I have explained the whole procedure of the left's critical theory stuff, about how it is really a mutton-headed misunderstanding of the whole German Turn in knowledge inaugurated by Kant's notion that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances, driven mainly by a primitive yearning for the good old days of the Age of Politics. Not to mention the tremendous fun of rape-age and pillage in the good old days of the Vikings. I have categorized my critique of the left into the Left's Conceits, the Left's Crimes, and the Left's Errors. And sometimes, when I'm all confused, I just categorize as Liberal Oppression.

One important thing not to be left out of this analysis is George Lakoff's analysis in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. See he says that we initially categorize the world using "basic-level" categories like "dog" and "table." We become expert at this by age 2. But then we get sophisticated, and understand that "dog" is a kind of "animal." But the further we get away from the basic level, the more questions arise, for instance when we are dealing with a form of life that seems to be part animal and part vegetable.

You can see how the gender bender thingy fits into this.  Boys and girls are "basic-level" categories. You know which is which by the time you are 2. But, as you learn more, you get to realize that boys and girls are alike in a lot more ways than they are different. I mean, when you get down to the X and Y chromosomes, you get the notion that the only different between men and women is that out of the total of 46 chromosomes, men have one that is different and that women don't have. Such a tiny difference!

And the point of the "basic-level" category is that it is just an appearance that we humans, from an early age, learn to differentiate. These basic level categories seem to be significant for us at a basic level. But maybe not. And if you are a creature with X-X chromosomes but experience yourself as a man, well, why not?

And how dare -- How Dare -- transphobic bigots suggest that such "intersex and transgender people" are living in a fantasy world!

Mind you, some people might object to the "allies" of "intersex and transgender people" making gender-binary people feel "unsafe." After all, don't believers in traditional morality have their rights too?

It's all very well to invoke Mrs. Patrick Campbell's rule of "do whatever you want but don't frighten the horses in the street." Unless, of course, you are a street urchin and the best fun in the world is frightening the horses in the street.

But the point of moral rules and science is ultimately the survival and thriving of the human race. I mean, the whole point of climate change politics is that, unless we act now! Well, something. And the whole point of traditional gender-binary and traditional morality is that it happens to be the way we get children on the ground and survive to the next generation.

So, if we are going to have carbon taxes and stop the production of fossil-fuel-powered cars by 2030 and stigmatize skeptics as "climate deniers," because climate change, then maybe we should likewise apply force and name and shame and shun people that don't seem to be too serious about getting the next generation on the ground.

C'mon man! We don't know whether carbon pollution will lead to the end of civilization as we know it, but sure as heck-fire we know that if everyone became "intersex and transgender people" then humans would be outta here in less than a century.

COVID: NY vs. FL; Herd Immunity vs. Lockdown

At Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton compares the COVID experience of New York State and Florida. New York is a poster boy for maximum lockdown and mask-wearing; Florida is the poster boy for back-to-normal and don't sweat the masks. They are similar sized states, with about 20 million people each.

COVID Deaths Per Million through 12/20/20:

Florida: 966 

New York: 1,886

Yes, but, New York has a very dense city with mass transit and it is further north. 

Unemployment at the end of November:

Florida: 6.4% 

New York: 8.4% (NYC: 12.1%)

Whatabout state and local government spending in 2018, from usgovernmentspending.com?

Florida: $188 billion 

New York: $367 billion

But, according to our cultural and political elite, Gov. Cuomo (D-NY) is a hero, and Gov. DeSantis (R-FL) is a wretch. You tell me.

Then we have the dueling experts, interviewed by UnHerd.com. Swedish expert Johan Giesecke says that:

“I don’t think you can stop it,” he said, “it’s like a tsunami sweeping across Europe.” The real death toll, he suggested, will be in the region of a severe influenza season — maybe double that at most — so we should do what we can to slow it so the health service can cope, but let it pass.

Then there is British expert Neil Ferguson, who wants lockdowns.

Much as he’d love to be proved wrong, he said, the UK fatality rate of Covid-19 is likely to be 0.8-0.9%, which  will lead to more than 100,000 deaths later this year. We need to prepare for a long fight, a new socially-distanced normal, potentially for years to come.

So what should we do? Let nature take its course? Or work to protect everyone and prevent transmission of the disease? The question comes down to this, writes Freddie Sayers.

Alongside all the metrics, and the vital assessments of the human cost of different policies, where you stand on this wretched virus also comes down to attitude — your world view. Are you more Giesecke or Ferguson? The expert that most resonates is unlikely to be entirely down to your assessment of the science — more likely a complex combination of your politics, your own life experience, your attitude to risk and mortality and your relationship to authority. 

Well, what I say is that it really comes down to men or women. Women, as I say, "expect to be protected," and clearly, from my personal experience, are more likely to go along with the crowd and the pronouncements of political leaders. Men, as I say, "know they are expendable," and they are right.

But I fear that the concentration on the death rate has rather hidden the suffering rate. The sudden lockdown has grievously hurt the less skilled and the less motivated. It has been worse than a war. In war, you draft the young men and the rest of the country flocks to the colors to make themselves useful.

In the COVID crisis, the well-off have done fine, working from home, or seeing their stocks soar in response to economic stimulus -- my net worth is up 25 percent since the end of 2019. But people with marginal skills and without the will to make something happen have been hammered.

So, all is proceeding as Charles Murray analyzed in Coming Apart. The top 25 percent is doin' fine. The middle half is doin' so so, and the bottom 25 percent is being hammered. 

And whatabout you allies in the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" moral equation? I haven't heard or seen much of you in this disease epidemic. Oh, I've seen a lot of mostly peaceful protesters waffling about George Floyd, but I haven't seen folks on the ally front proposing anything that would really help the traditionally marginalized. Does that mean that "allies" take care of themselves before venturing back out onto the Activism trail?

The Woke Cancel Culture is Nothing New

We conservatives and deplorables are just now rather annoyed at the ruling class for insisting that there ain't no election steal, no sir, and you are a racist.

After all, aren't we supposed to have a First Amendment, and aren't we supposed to have free speech?

Truth is: we don't and we never did. If you publish views offensive to the ruling class, in any place and any era, you are headed for oblivion. Oh, maybe not to a concentration camp, but certainly out of the sweet spot of celebration and publicity.

There's an amusing piece about China's lies about COVID from "hacked documents." For instance,

In early February, a directive from President Xi himself directed the CAC [Cyberspace Administration of Chine] in Zhejiang Province to exert efforts to control messaging on COVID-19 domestically and to “actively influence international opinion.” 

Why, the Chinese even pay their citizens $0.40 for flagging a harmful media post!

Gollygeewillikins! You mean the Chinese actually have to pay people to do this? Here in the US we have the bearded @jack and the Zuck that seem to be eager to censor harmful media without even being asked to. And the Twitter wokerati mobs are just slobbering for the chance to cancel someone making wrong comment. Absolutely free!

So then I got to read a Quillette piece about how, sorry chaps, all the systemic racism stuff is a bunch of baloney. Who are doing best in America? Asian immigrants. And whatabout Muslims?

For example, the latest Census data indicate that the median earnings for full-time, year-round female Palestinian American workers ($52,061), female Iranian American workers ($64,220), and female Turkish American workers ($67,759) were all higher than those of white women ($45,581). Turkish and Iranian women also out-earned white men ($57,003). The vast majority of these women have not two but three “oppression variables” because of their gender, ethnicity, and religion (Islam).

Or whatabout this on household income in 2019? 

Indian Americans	$126,705
Taiwanese Americans	$102,405
Filipino Americans	$100,273
Indonesian Americans	$93,501
Pakistani Americans	$87,509
Iranian Americans	$87,288
Lebanese Americans	$87,099
Chinese Americans	$86,281
Japanese Americans	$85,007
Turkish Americans	$83,375
Israeli Americans	$81,901
Korean Americans	$76,674
Syrian Americans	$74,047
Vietnamese Americans	$72,161
White Americans	$69,823

Heck! Who cares? Well, our pal Joe Biden is going to go pedal to the metal on "systemic racism" in the next four years. And you are not allowed to disagree with him, unless you are a racist. And if you are a racist you are going to be canceled, so shut up.

Then there is World War II. Ron Unz has written about the writers of the 1930s that just disappeared. For WrongThink. From them you get the heretical notions that both Churchill and Roosevelt wanted war, to erase their failures. That Churchill started the bombing in 1940 because he was afraid that the British people didn't want the war to continue. So he bombed German cities and the Germans responded. Is that true? And Roosevelt wanted war to erase the utter failure of his New Deal; that FDR provoked the Japanese by freezing Japanese assets and embargoing oil shipments; and by omitting to tell the Navy on Oahu about the fleet steaming towards Oahu to attack the fleet in Pearl Harbor.

Is any of that true? Are you allowed to discuss it?

Or will the official history continue down to the day that our current regime is shown the door?

So yeah. If you are outraged by the narrative control being exercised in the wake of the election, it ain't nothin' new.

But it is so much easier to go with the flow.

Showing the Ruling Class the Door

I don't know whether Joe Biden won the election fair and square, or with the help of shenanigans. Either way, the present ruling class isn't going away, and doesn't have a clue that it has a problem.

OK, no ruling class ever does until it gets shown the door.

Case in point, the Dalton School flap in New York City, where the staff of the swank private school has issued a manifesto demanding total wokerama -- at a fancy-pants private school.

Case in point, the political frou-frah over the school system in swank Brookline, Mass., home of the credentialed and the expert.

Case in point, the move to Biden in white voting districts in the election. Trump did better in immigrant districts, worse in white, and especially white liberal, districts.

It all seems scandalous, but not really when you step back and think about it. The Gentry class is all in on the Woke religious movement, because it gives meaning to their lives to be "allies" helping "oppressed peoples" fight the "white oppressors." The Gentry class is all in on experts and credentials: as in ordering the American people around during the COVID epidemic.

Of course there's a move towards Trump among immigrants; any immigrant with half a brain understands that they are the rising class and that the established class isn't going to make things easy for them. If they aren't consumed with ethnic solidarity, like blacks, then they are going to be populists, voting for politicians that stand for ordinary people.

In an interview with American Greatness youTuber and podcaster Steve Turley says that, with regard to the populist movement, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Up to now, populism has emerged in a "lite" form in the various center-right parties which are a bit embarrassed about the great unwashed, as many Republican officeholders are today. Because, after all, politicians come from the Gentry class. But there will come a time when the center-right parties will become primarily populist. Only we ain't there yet.

Trouble is, in my opinion, we won't get there without the ruling class screwing up royally. That's because the populist masses are not really thinking about politics the way that the upper-class Gentry does. Commoners think about their ordinary lives and how to get a better job. Gentry think about how to change the world.

The upper-class Gentry is all-in on climate change. Why? Well mostly because everyone who is anyone is all in on climate change, darling. Now I believe that, never mind the science, that the economics is going to be disastrous. Of course it is, because it is a top-down quasi-socialist plan that really has no clue what all the unanticipated consequences of a lurch away from fossil fuels will be. Socialist, systemic plans are always disastrous, because the world is not a system, but an emergent phenomenon.

The upper-class Gentry is all in on Wokist racism and particularism, as the foolish Dalton School staff demonstrated to the world. Here's the thing. It may be a horrible moral problem that blacks still aren't wiving and thriving as they should, but to amp up the current racist critical-race-theory successor to the racist "affirmative action" programs is to divide America up. And it violates the basis of modern society, that the individual is the individual first and foremost, and not the member of a race or tribe.

The point is that the upper-class Gentry right now is perfectly happy with their culture and politics. They think they are the good people and they are going to make a better world with their wokism and their climate change and their expert-led programs and their activist-driven agendas that bring more and more of the economy under the supervision of credentialed bureaucratic experts.

Thus nothing will change their minds short of a massive crack-up.

And I am not talking about a crack-up that gets them to change their minds: no chance of that. I am talking about a crack-up that whacks the ordinary Commoner and seriously damages their lives. It might be the damage to lives and livelihoods from the climate change program. Or it might be a rapid increase in human rubble from any number of expert-led programs that provide honor and status to upper-class credentialed Gentry experts.

See, I get the feeling that the Biden administration appointees are all people that are thinking, OK, great, now we can get back to normal, after the stupidities of the Trump years. They have no idea that it is their agenda, the agenda that all good expert, credentialed people support, that is the problem.

Back in 2009 I wrote that this was not the right time to do a huge health-care bill. The only thing that mattered in the aftermath of the generational financial crisis of 2006-08 was the get the economy back on track.

I'd say the same today. This is not the time to do climate change and systemic racism. After the generational smashup to the economy, particularly to ordinary Commoners that can't "work at home," the number one issue is getting the economy back on track.

But do you think there is anyone in Bidenland that appreciates that? No, when they look at the situation, they say that this is our only chance to get our agenda going, to save the planet from global warming and save society from systemic racism. So, pedal to the metal.

In my view, the damage and suffering that this policy will impose on America will cause another Trump situation, and another Trump populist eruption.

But I am sure that our betters in the ruling class have no idea about that. Courtiers in the court of the absolute monarch never do.

White Privilege vs. Little Darlings

Who should get the COVID vaccinations first? Not White Man, apparently, because white privilege and social justice. I love this bit from The New York Times (H/T Powerline).

Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter,” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

So we lordly white "allies" -- no "white oppressors" here! -- will put our social-justice thumbs on the scales of racial justice and fix things.

We are seeing a similar dance with regard to appointments to the Biden administration, where pressure groups for people of color are advocating for more of their kind of color.

Yep. I sure would like a bit of the privilege that gets you -- whatever your color or gender -- into the higher ranks of the ruling class where you become a candidate for promotion into the ruling clique. I suspect that one of the qualifications is to have -- let us say -- successfully "harvested" a million votes or so.

For as I say in my Maxims.

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

And it doesn't matter what the game is, whether it is handing out fiefs to loyal barons, or handing out benefits to the workers, or handing out research grants to the scientists, or starting "to level the playing field a bit" in favor of people of color. Government is in the business of loot and plunder, as a reward to its supporters. Period.

Naturally, when governments do this they enlist the assistance of the priests and the moralists, so that it is only fair and just to hand out benefits to the supporters of the ruling class. Hey! "Equality never hurt anyone," as a rich liberal with a house at the top of the hill announces with a hand-painted yard-sign, featuring a clenched BLM fist.

Whatabout my "white privilege?"

Well, my dad's father lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, as the representative of the family firm, and died before World War I. Then his widow and three children got out of Russia in 1918 with nothing but the clothes on their backs. However, the family knew a friend of a friend that got my dad into St. Paul's public school as a charity case. My dad got an engineering degree as an external student while working as an apprentice at a manufacturer. Then he went out to India to design electric power stations and rose to become a top manager at the firm he worked for. But then, of course, came Indian independence, and white guys need not apply. So he came back to England and eventually rose to being a Director at AEI Export Co. And so I got to go to a British public school.

Privilege? Yeah, I'd say, from a family that picked itself up after reverses and made lemons into lemonade and somehow managed to dodge the Bolshevik revolution and two world wars.

Or maybe an Act of God.

But I want to say a word to the "traditionally marginalized" folks that are to be the beneficiaries of the new level playing field. Take your bennies. But then make it on your own.

Why? Why not just connect your electric car to the free charging station forever and enjoy?

Because people that plug into the loot and plunder handed out by the ruling class are what I call "Little Darlings." The ruling class isn't really helping you because it believes in "justice." It is helping you because it wants your vote. The way a rich guy gives presents to his mistress.

And there will come a time when the ruling class does not need your vote any more. The obvious case today is the white working class. Back in the day, the ruling class loooved the working class, and created programs and benefits and wage-and-hour laws to benefit the poor helpless workers. Because social justice and because the bourgeoisie, like the feudal lords of old, had frankly and brutally exploited the subordinate classes. Yeah! Everybody knew that!

But then came 1965 and the civil rights laws and the ruling class decided to buy the votes of privileged white women and blacks. And in due course gays and all "people of color."

And the white working class got cut loose. It started with Affirmative Action; then segued to sneering at the white working class, as in Archie Bunker and All in the Family. Then, in due course, we had Barack Obama speaking to a fundraiser patronizingly about "bitter clingers." Then it was Hillary Clinton's open contempt for her "basket of deplorables." Today? Well, "society is structured in a way that enables [white people] to live longer."

Wait a minute! Just last March I was reading about the white working class "dying of despair." In The New Yorker, so it must be true. So how does that all stitch up?

So my message to the Little Darlings of the ruling class is: grab your goodies while you can. But know this: the day will come when the ruling class no longer needs your votes. And when that day comes you had better be ready to take up the slack and make it on your own, without benefit of government loot.

Because if you don't, you Little Darlings, you will end up like the white working class, that found out one day that those good union jobs at the steelworks were gone; that the police and firemen jobs had to be shared with the "traditionally marginalized," and that the upper-class white women in HR were making them go to critical race theory training. That the rulers didn't care about people like them. Not any more.

But by all means, enjoy your day in the sun.

Let's Kritik Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

Let's start with La Wik, which says that critical race theory is based on the following notions:

• Firstly, that white supremacy exists and exhibits power maintained over time, and, in particular, that the law plays a role in this process.
• Secondly, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power, as well as achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, are possible.

By "white supremacy" is meant the academic use meaning, per Frances Lee Ansley:

By "white supremacy" I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.

Notice that in both definitions, the writer comes close to, but does not quite say "it's a conspiracy!" They do not quite say that White Men got together and decided to Take over the World!

(Although, parenthetically, our lefty friends do have a plan to take over the world).

The point is: could there be an innocent explanation of white supremacy, that explains it as a consequence of White Man being in the right place at the right time with the right ideas and the right technology? In the same way, say, that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, a man of undoubted skills and smarts, just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right ideas at an opportune technological moment so that, even though Einstein said that "God does not play dice," our pal Zuck won the lottery and here he is, master of all he surveys.

Because that is how I understand "white supremacy." Here is a likely story:

Back in the day, about 1500, Europeans had developed the technology for ocean-going sailing ships. One thing led to another and pretty soon a chap like Vasco de Gama was sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and landing in India. As La Wik says:

Traveling the ocean route allowed the Portuguese to avoid sailing across the highly disputed Mediterranean and traversing the dangerous Arabian Peninsula.

I have a more "overdetermined" narrative.

Back in the day the Europeans were being monstrously oppressed by Arab supremacy and the outrageous and exploitative prices of spices. See, when spices came from India -- and a lot of the spices were grown in the Western Ghats as I have seen with my own two eyes -- they got to Europe by an overland route that went through the desert of western India and through Arabia. And every stop on the way meant a nice little excise tax for the local yokels. Wow! Talk about oppression! Talk about racial power! And whatabout the law! What law in the world could justify all those oppressive princes and potentates making the poor helpless White Man of Europe pay through the nose for spices!

Well, in the event, the Portuguese started trading for spices on the west coast of India, and then the Brits got in on the act. The bloody Brits! Who invited them?

And pretty soon the spice trade through the western desert of India and points westward to the Mediterranean collapsed -- as I have seen with my own two eyes and heard with my own two ears from the guide at the once-powerful desert city of Jaisalmer in western India.

Well, when you set up a trading port on the coast of India, guess what happens? You may not be interested in the various princes and potentates nearby but they are interested in you. And so the Ports and the Brits got involved in local politics, and pretty soon young Robert Clive, East India Company "factor," learned a thing or two about soldiering. One thing led to another and in 1757 Clive won the Battle of Plassey against the Nawab of Bengal. With 1,100 Europeans and 2,100 sepoy troops, and with nine field-pieces, Clive beat the Nawab's army of 18,000 horse, 50,000-foot and 53 pieces of heavy ordnance, served by French artillerymen.

Hello "white supremacy!"

Now, I've read The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon and perhaps the most significant moment of the whole 1,200 pages is in 1825 when some Brit opined that "these people don't really like us," old chap.

Do you understand the importance of this comment, dear lefty friends and all the ships at sea?

The importance is that, prior to 1825, no ruler in the world gave a damn about whether the people he ruled "liked" him. Nobody gave a damn about white supremacy, Muslim Supremacy, Brahmin Supremacy, Western African Tribal Supremacy or any other kind of supremacy. The rule was simple: the strong ruler set the rules, and if he decided to kill every man in town and rape every woman, well, that's how the cookie crumbled. Until 1825.

Notice that this attitude has not exactly disappeared from the face of the Earth. Joe Stalin: do you think he cared whether the Russian people "liked" him? Mao Zedong: do you think he cared whether the Chinese people "liked" him?

Or whatabout our modern Wokies: do you think that a single Wokie gives a damn about what the average white deplorable thinks about him? Exactly. The average Wokie thinks only about bending the arc of history towards justice and crushing systemic racism and white supremacy until the rubble bounces. "Liking" has nothing to do with the case.

No. The interesting thing about "white supremacy" is that White Man is not that interested in white supremacy. Of course, he likes his own people best, and his own religion of logic and reason and market supremacy best. And he wants to water and weed his 401k until it blooms nicely for his retirement. But, all in all, he is remarkable in that, by and large, he is pretty well copacetic with letting other peoples' sleeping dogs lie.

Unlike our lefty friends.

Now let's talk about "intersectionality." La Wik:

Intersectionality is a theoretical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these aspects are gender, caste, sex, race, class, sexuality, religion, disability, physical appearance, and height.

Couldn't agree more, old chap. You certainly wouldn't want to be a young short white guy from Appalachia at a swank eastern selective college that said the wrong thing about trans people of color within earshot of some Good Little Girl that had been indoctrinated in critical race theory and intersectionality since first going to her snobby pre-school in Manhattan. 

And I certainly wouldn't want to be a Dalit working at Brahmin-dominated Google being harassed all the time by snobby Brahmins feeling for my non-existent "sacred thread!" Oh boy!

To say nothing of being a Google employee being fired and humiliated across the rapidly warming planet for innocently writing an essay in response to a solicitation for feedback to say that "while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination."

Now I say that all this hysterical babbling about postmodernism and critical race theory and intersectionality is due to the fact that our lefty friends do not understand the import of Kant and the whole "German Turn."

Poor dears.

Oh, so you want to mend your ways and actually join the human race instead of doing a Koba or a Mao and just eliminating the deplorables?

Well, reduced to an "overdetermined" simplicity, the German Turn says that because we cannot know things-in-themselves it means that all our knowledge -- from our division of life into genera and species to our fabrication of LED Christmas light strings -- is really only "the story so far," be sure to tune into next week's exciting episode. It means that it behoves everyone to cool their jets instead of winding up the turbines preparatory to launching a crusade against the unbelievers. Because next week we will discover something that changes everything.

And anyone that declares that those haters over there are the oppressors and we here are the noble allies and friends of the oppressed peoples might very well be wrong. After all, we can't know things-in-themselves, and for sure what is going to change next week is today's dominant cultural and political narrative.

To suit the agenda of the ruling class of the moment.

Yes, lefties. Did you ever notice that all speech in any society has to stay pretty close to ruling-class orthodoxy? So, if you chaps are allowed -- nay encouraged -- to mouth off about critical race theory and intersectionality and marginalize the notorious White Man it must mean that the ruling class believes that such activity supports the regime and its power.

Hmm. I wonder why.

Woe to the Conquered, writes Curtis Yarvin

It doesn't matter that the ruling class cheated in the late election, writes Curtis Yarvin in "Vae Victis." A ruling class worth its salt is always going to apply the force needed to maintain its power -- and also remind the ruled who is boss.

The Supreme Court has sent a clear and lovely Schmittian message. No court or other official authority will ever consider the substance of Republican allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 elections. All will be rejected on procedural grounds by the courts, and mocked with maximal hauteur in the legitimate press.

And we know that the Supreme Court choked because we have unofficial reports of Chief Justice Roberts more or less wailing like a woman to get the rest of the court to reject Texas's complaint against the cheating "battleground" states.

What does he mean by "Schmittian message?" Merely this: "the sovereign is he who decides the exception." But, but, but! I thought that the current Supreme Court doctrine was the "living constitution," that the Supreme Court gets to interpret the Constitution any way it wants to. Er, no. Not quite. The Supreme Court gets to interpret the Constitution any way the ruling class wants it to. So, gay marriage: yes. Free and fair elections: sorry, pal.

You don't like an election decided by skulduggery? Well, too bad. Elections are like water polo. All free and fair above water, but no holds -- or kicks -- barred below the waterline. So at least the Dems have taught us a lesson: two can play at that game.

You don't like to read that? Then stop reading because it is going to get worse.

Let's talk about the media. Think of it and its pals in the ruling class as a kind of Gigaphone, and the volume, in the month of October and thereafter was turned up to 11. On a scale of 1 to 10.

We learned something else about the real constitution of America: that it is the press, not the courts, with the sacred power to inscribe official reality. The Fourth Estate is the highest estate, not the lowest—and always has been.

That is what the Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, just told us. Really it is good to know. Every ruling class needed a Ministry of Truth. But it is much better if the truth ministry is not an official government bureaucracy, but a volunteer corps of ruling-class suck-ups. 

But really, I'd say, the media is not a Ministry of Truth. It is the Holy Temple of Truth, and the media suck-ups are the Priests and Bishops of Truth.

Then Yarvin speaks truth to the post-Reagan conservative movement. It is not pretty, so I won't comment.

But then Yarvin tells us that the whole Trump phenomenon, from beginning to end, is an Act of God.

Trump had no way to succeed, so the sooner he failed the better. God made him fail. God hacked the voting machines. God performed the experiment. God got the results. And God sacrificed the animal. 

But the Trump phenomenon, thanks to God, was not a waste. "The world-historic purpose of Trump was to validate the market for dreampolitik."

With Trump as his instrument, God has taught us beyond any doubt that, f*cked as America may be, f*cked as America is, we still have a market for dreams. Indeed we are so f*cked that only dreams can save us. We’re going to need better dreams, though.

He means this, from my Maxims:

Politics is downstream from culture (Breitbart) is downstream from religion (Wright) is downstream from “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” (Chantrill).

Did I mention that I have written such a dream? It is in my series on "A Vision of the Good Life Better than the Left." My basic argument is that the left's celebration of the political activist is a celebration of the Ego Hero, he who worships at the Shrine of Power. This is an error, because the real hero down the ages -- that appears again and again in myth and religion -- is the Sacrificial Hero, that dies on the border of Order and Chaos so that the rest of us may live.

And, I wrote on Election Day in "Donald Trump, the Sacrificial Hero," that if Trump were reelected he would go down as just another two-term president. But if he were thrown out, then he would become a Sacrificial Hero, and become a great American myth for the ages. In his Maps of Meaning, Jordan B. Peterson writes about the "hostile brothers."

Or, to use Yarvin's way of thinking, Trump defeated becomes part of the New American Dream.

Getting a Word In Against Liberal Cultural Hegemony

Should all journalists be college graduates, asks Kevin Mims in "Journalism's Ivory Towers"? Because back in the day they weren't. Not Mark Twain, for sure. Not even Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker who was born in a prospector's cabin in Colorado. But now, of course almost every journalist has a college degree. Some of them write sympathetically about the lower orders, but there's a fat chance that any of the lower orders will get to work at The New York Times.

Look out drivers, writes Eric Peters in "No More Camaros For You". In California they are regulating high-performance Chevy Camaros out of existence because they emit too much copper.

The fade-resistant, high-performance pads used in these models “emit” trace amounts of vaporized/powderized heavy metals such as copper and asbestos during braking.

And in five years "California law will require that all brake pads be zero emissions." It's a cunning way of forcing the move to electric cars, because electric cars use much more engine braking than internal combustion cars.

OK, then here is Tom Chivers on "The perils of liberals politicizing science."  Yes, of course we've got to take moral positions on bigots and racist-sexist-homophobes, he writes. But major science journals should not be endorsing Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Hey, we already know that nearly all scientists are Democrats!

Of course science is political: its findings have political implications; its practitioners have political beliefs. But its questions are fundamentally different from moral and political questions: What is real? vs What do we want? 

To which I say, yes, of course. Ruler gotta rule; gentry gotta pursue a life of "ambition, honor, and vanity." Case in point, Joe Biden's wife, who wants to be addressed as "Dr." even though she's not a medical doctor but a Doctor of Education. See, she is a true Gentry, interested in honorifics.

Yes. I get it. Gentry gotta gent. And that seems to involve a lot of virtue-signaling and rent-seeking. You know, as in my liberal neighbors putting out Black Lives Matter signs and buying subsidized electric cars.

No doubt nearly all journalists have college degrees these days. And no doubt nearly all college graduates these days have been carefully taught the moral ins-and-outs of critical race theory. But maybe, just maybe, a few journalists at elite prestige titles should tumble to the notion that not everybody thinks like them, not everybody wants what they want, not everybody has the same moral calculus as them, and that maybe people should be allowed to be different and have a different moral calculus, and that the elite should ease up a bit on sneaking its agenda in the back door by, e.g., mandating zero-emission brakes by 2025.

Here's a group I had never heard of, "Atheism+" that has a very clear moral agenda.

We are:
Atheists plus we care about social justice,
Atheists plus we support women’s rights,
Atheists plus we protest racism,
Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,
Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

Well, I don't know that you chaps at Atheist+ do much critical and skeptical thinking, because the first thing is to decide, well, what do we do about people that don't believe in social justice, or feministm, or anti-racism, or don't want us to cast gay and bi and trans characters in all the movies, and don't want to enforce critical race theory on the world?

Yeah? What do we do about them? Send them to reeducation until they recant? Fire them from their jobs? Name, shame, and shun them? Imprison them? Exile them? Execute them? 

Do we force everyone to pay to support the Atheist+ agenda?

See, for me, it comes down to this. If you believe that the world is composed of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors," then of course the only thing to do is to exile the oppressors to Outer Slobbovia.

But if you believe, like me, that there are three kinds of people in the world: Subordinates that just want to be told what to do; Responsibles that believe in an Axial Age god, and want to live as God directs; and Creatives that believe in creativity for everyone; then you think, OK. That Atheist+ agenda might be just great for Atheists, but whatabout people that disagree with the Atheist+ agenda? What is their place in the world?

And this brings be back to my basic line, about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." The reason that Douglas Adams rehearses this line in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is that he is making a joke about the fact that we don't know the meaning of life and all the rest of it. So we make it up.

What everyone has to do is to sign up to some faith tradition that says: "This is the meaning of life." Like the Atheist+ chappies. And then a satisfying moral calculus falls out naturally.

But supposing you Atheist+ chaps are wrong? Suppose that social justice results in concentration camps and millions of dead, like in the USSR and Maoist China? Suppose that women's rights end up with women not having children and that leads to the decline and collapse of civilization? Suppose that anti-racism ends up in irreconcilable conflict between woke liberals and bigoted deplorables and the breakup of the United States? Suppose that gays and transes are just mixed-up kids wanting out of the heavy-duty life of work and marriage and children? And suppose that Atheist+ chaps are deluded if they think that they are critical and skeptical thinkers? What then?

That, of course, is the moral basis for the notion of tolerance. Cromwell's Rule.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

Only, of course, in reality, Cromwell was pretty well convinced that he was right, and that King Charles should be executed, if that is what it would take. Oh, and the Irish should be taught a lesson.

Yep, this is not that hard, and it is part of the reason for the separation between church and state, including the Church of Atheist+. 

But it is apparently way beyond the comprehension of our liberal friends.

Two Strikes Against the Ruling Class -- in One Day

Here is a piece right out of Mosca's The Ruling Class. In "Our Coddled Ruling Class and All the Pain They Can't Feel," Oliver Bateman and Malcom Kyeyune write that the problem is not that our elite is censoring us deplorables for deplorableness, but that it is insulating itself from the real world. And that is suicidal.

The true goal, rather unfortunately, is to instead insulate our failing elite in a hermetically sealed bubble, where only those who hold unthreatening, regime-affirming ideas are ever allowed to set foot.

For Mosca is quite clear on this: a good ruling class, while keeping a firm hand on the tiller, is also sensitive to the passions roiling the masses. And does something about it. On the remarkable assumption that the bitter clingers may actually have a real claim to their grievances.

Elites who have stopped listening to the pain signals from the body politic not only risk hurting or killing themselves in similarly gruesome ways, but they also threaten the very societies they supposedly rule over, and the countless lives of the human subjects they are committed to neglecting.

Actually, I suspect that the "ruling clique" does have a clue. But the broader ruling class wants nothing to do with the bitter clingers. And the ruling clique doesn't have the cojones to straighten the lower echelons out.

OK. That's Part One. Part Two is the same, only different. "How race politics liberated the elites" by Matthew Crawford is all about how the basic faith of the elite class that their societies are racist-sexist-homophobes but that they are different, because they acknowledge the evil of racism. And this liberates them from loyalty to their nation states into the rarefied air of the globalist elite. Crawford starts with the superrich and totally dissolute media clan in the HBO series Succession.

Dropping down a rung or two on the pyramid of power, consider the moral ecology inhabited by the broader gentility: the salaried decision-makers and ideas-managers who service the global arrangement from various departments of the ideological apparatus... They, too, enjoy a kind of freedom, but it is decidedly not that of the high-spirited criminals depicted in Succession. So far from living “beyond good and evil”, this broader class of cosmopolitans asserts its freedom through its moralism, precisely. In particular, they have broken free of the claims of allegiance made upon them by the particular communities they emerge from.

These elite chappies have invented a moral hierarchy with themselves at the top. Because they have broken free of the Original Sin of racism-sexism-homophobia.

The decision-making class has discovered that it enjoys the mandate of heaven, and with this comes certain permissions; certain exemptions from democratic scruple.

The permission structure is built around grievance politics. Very simply: if the nation is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, I owe it nothing. More than that, conscience demands that I repudiate it.

This actually traps our ruling class masters in a glass cage, from which they cannot escape.

The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained, African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening the social order, strangely enough. For it is now an order governed by the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. 

Imagine that! Blacks have to be victimized, for ever and for ever, because otherwise we Übermenschen lose our super-status as educated lordlings way above the common ruck of humans.

Maybe that explains why Google has branded my "1584 Project" as dangerous and violent speech. For in that article I asked my readers to consider that black slaves were not unique. There were all kinds of slavery and semi-slavery back in the day, and the "waste population," the White Trash of Europe was right in the middle of it, as the agricultural era waned and the ruling class rural magnates "hurled" their "useless retainers" into vagabondage and beggary so they could strut their stuff as courtiers in the capital city.

But what do we do about it? I've got a series of posts under my topic of "pejoratives" where I argue that we must stop cringing under the accusation of "racist." Or fling it back in their face with the Hegelian notion that racism is the same as anti-racism, an unhealthy obsession with race. Etc.

But these two articles broaden and deepen my thought about all this.

In the first place, maybe we should stop worrying about what the rulers are censoring and just go on about our business, thinking and planning about what the next regime will look like, and stop worrying about the foolish and knavish actions of the bearded @jack and the Zuck.

In the second place, we really do need to stop apologizing, stop acceding to the crime of racism, to stop recognizing the elite as our betters, and utterly reject the pomposity of their claim to virtue.

Government is force, politics is power, cultural domination is about marginalizing the plebs. You ruling class think you are our moral superiors? Get a clue: all power corrupts, pal, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Got that, Mr. Moralist?

Here's How to Start That Trust Thing, David Brooks

In an MSNBC on-air piece David Brooks allowed as how "blue cities are thriving" but that many folks left behind in the red states are "threatened economically, culturally, socially and they have no contact with the expert class." 

That set the rubes a-growling, because apart from Silicon Valley and the Capitol of Panem in Washington DC, what blue states states are thriving? New York? Jaysey? I mean, people are leaving blue states in the hundreds of thousands.

But Brooks finished up with the idea that the "expert class" in the Capitol should reach out to the folks in the Districts, for "those of us in the expert class – journalism and academia – have to do a better job of reaching out in post-Trump, establishing relationships and showing some respect."

And this: "the only way to cure distress is through trustworthy relationships. It's by keeping promises to people who are unlike yourself."

Well, yeah, David.

Here's an idea, pal. To rebuild trust relationships.

How about you "experts" decide that the drip, drip, drip move from in-person voting with voter ID to mail-in voting with no checks, no nothing, and anyone can make a provisional vote on Election Day, trust us, we will check to make sure that no duplicate voting happens. How about we put a stop to that, which seems, from our deplorable point of view, to be a way for Democrats to manufacture how ever many votes it takes to win.

Of course we all know that Democrats are as clean as the wind-driven snow, starting with crystal-clear Joe Biden that has never had a hint of scandal in 47 years in the Capitol, and Kamala Harris, who is almost a nun when it comes to purity. But, wouldn't you say that elections should not even have the teenyist smidge of an appearance of skullduggery?

See, from our twisted point of view it looks real weird that, year after year, Democrats keep wanting to change the rules on voting, whether it is Motor Voter to let people register when they get their drivers licenses, to early voting, to all-mail voting like we have in Washington State.

The last time we had in-person voting in Washington State was in 2008, as I recall. And I found it interesting when I went to vote on Election Day that there were a ton more young voters than I was used to. See what I mean? In-person voting gives you a feet-on-the-ground feel about what is going down.

There are a lot of other things on my agenda, but never mind about that right now.

How about the ruling class, the expert class, the graduates from selective colleges, the educated people, the evolved people, how about you chaps all extend the hand of trust. How about you say look, you bitter clingers really have no ground for suspicion, because, after all, we experts are all educated and evolved and anti-racist, and compassionate and passionately devoted to justice, but still, just this once we will do something to show you that we really are the good guys. We will let you have your cringingly old-fashioned and stupid in-person voting.

And meanwhile, we experts and moralists will go full speed ahead on climate change and systemic racism. Because we are special.

Why the Good Guys Always Lose: It's Not Their Fault

One of the perennial complaints of guys like me is that our conservative and Republican leaders are wusses, that they always roll over for the Dems.

Like with the current stolen election. Like with cheap foreign labor for Big Tech. Like with climate change. Like with systemic racism. Like with the eternal entitlement programs.

I'm here to say It's Not Their Fault. Let me count the ways.

Ruling Class Argument -- There is a ruling class in America and elsewhere in the world and it's a kinda club. You wanna be a member? Well you better wear the right clothes, express the right opinions, support the right programs, or you can't advance to higher "degrees." Just like in the Masons. Right now the ruling class is the "educated class" that has been to all the right selective colleges. 

So, if you didn't go to the right college and express the wrong opinions you just aren't going to get ahead in the ruling class.

Cathedral Argument -- Curtis Yarvin argues that reality in the western world is defined by a Cathedral, a quasi-religious cultural establishment that defines what you think and feel.

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

And now, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Google's YouTube is establishing an Index of proscribed videos. You are not allowed to post videos suggesting that the election was stolen.

Truth is, all societies make it very difficult for visions of good and evil that compete with its Cathedral orthodoxy. Usually such visions are considered heresy.

There Must Be An Enemy Argument -- Since whenever, human communities have had to defend themselves from the Enemy. Now, you may think that, in this day and age, we are past all this, because chimps, for chimps survive by defending their food-growing territory in which the females and young can eat and grow, as argued by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. True, because now you can buy food, not grow it. But you think that the defense instinct, that goes all the way back to chimps and beyond, is going to wither away in the two centuries since possession of food-growing land hasn't mattered?

Actually, when the rulers don't have a foreign enemy to rally their people, they invent a domestic one. That's what our rulers' "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative is all about.

The whole point of this argument is to rally the males, because all males are instinctively defenders of the border. It goes with the male Culture of Courage/Insult.

Yes, right now, the enemies of the state are people like you.

All Good People Agree Argument -- If you are a good person everybody likes you; if you are a bad person then everybody hates you. If you are a good person you will go to Heaven; if you are a bad person you will go to Hell. If you are a good person you may be a saint; if you are a bad person you may be a witch.

And if you get on the wrong side of the good people you may find that you have become one of the bad people.

The whole point of this argument is to get all the women conforming to the ruling class narrative, for women must, for good reasons going all the way back to our chimp ancestors, get along as they live with each other every day preparing food and caring for the children. Women have a Culture of Conformity, which is enforced by the women's Culture of Complaint.

Yes, right now all the bad people are people like you.

Failed Revolution Argument -- All religious and cultural and political movements eventually face a "failure of prophecy" moment. Because they are all confidently predicting a glorious future that almost certainly will not show up. The more cunning religious movements prophesy that Heaven and Paradise are the reward for a virtuous life after death. Our modern socialist and culture war religious doctrines prophesy Heaven on Earth.

What do lefty movements do when the promised Heaven on Earth doesn't arrive? They usually amp it up, to keep the sect together. In politics, the ideologists amp it up with a Reign or Terror or a Great Purge, or a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Eventually the amp-up collapses, because, as Crane Brinton says in The Anatomy of Revolution, humans cannot live forever in a state of ideological fervor. Eventually we have to get back to wiving and thriving.

Yes, right now our Wokies are amping it up. Nobody knows when normal programming will resume.

Creative People Gotta Create Argument -- In my reductive Three Peoples theory I suggest that, for Responsibles, God made the Heaven and Earth and the job of humans is to responsibly wive and thrive on the Earth that God created. But I argue that Creatives are called to be gods, to create the world anew.

This means that for Creatives, if they are not creating, doing something new, bending the arc of history towards justice, advocating for traditionally marginalized people, imagining a new and better world, they are nobody.

Yes, right now if you are not creatively advocating for a better world, you are a nobody.

Stupid Ruling Class Argument -- A good ruling class knows that it must refresh its membership with talented people from the lower classes. A good ruling class creates a "political formula" that values all the people in the realm. A good ruling class keeps a weather eye on the passions and the obsessions of the "masses." A good ruling class knows that it is a minority, and that if the people ever got serious they could kick the rulers out in a New York minute.

A stupid ruling class knows that it knows best and it makes sure the plebs keep quiet. A stupid ruling class thinks that only members of the ruling class are smart, and that the lower classes are stupid. A stupid ruling class lives and entertains itself in the Capitol and doesn't get out much. A stupid ruling thinks that the ordinary people are too stupid ever to form a head of rebellion against their wise rule.

Yes, right now we probably have a fairly stupid ruling class.

Why to the Good Guys always lose? I would say that over the last 50 years we have had several political moments where our rulers could have altered their rule to accommodate various populist moments: The Silent Majority in the Nixon years, the Reagan Democrats in the Reagan years, the Ross Perot moment in 1992, the Republican Congress in 1994, the Tea Party in 2010, the Trump election in 2016. But they didn't.

The point is that, of course the Good Guys are going to lose, short of an actual rebellion and civil war, if the ruling class refuses to accommodate to their grievances. The rulers have the upper hand; that's why we call them rulers. And It's Not Their Fault if the rulers outmaneuver the suckers every time, using all the bolded arguments I have listed up above.

And so it goes. Until the day that it doesn't.