"A Healthy Appetite for Free Stuff"

The woke patrol at Patheos recently noticed me for the hate crime of being a "far right misogynist," God bless @EdBrayton.

But what I am really interested in is the profound differences between men and women, and, as Steve Sailer says, "noticing" them, or rather, "Noticing" anything you are not allowed to notice.

And this is at no time more obvious to me than at Christmas, our midwinter festival of feasting and gift-giving.

• That women have been shopping for gifts for family and women friends for over a month, while men run out and get gifts at the last moment as they realize they have to reciprocate, at least a little, the tidal wave of gifts being heaped up by the women.
• The internal decoration of houses, and perhaps an uncurtained window to let passers-by get a glimpse of the perfect jewel of a home within.
• The gathering of the family, from all across the city, or the nation, or the world.
• The feast, to celebrate the comfort of abundance.
• Santa Claus, the gift-giver.

I don't know about you, but every year I stand back and marvel at the remarkable energy of the world's women.

And then My Man Kevin Williamson writes about the mess of Obamacare, and the "healthy appetite for free stuff" both from Republican and Democratic voters that prevents either proper repeal or proper paying for the benefits.

Can we stop ourselves and our fellow Americans from gorging on free stuff before it takes the very food out of our mouths, like our friends in Venezuela?

I think that the appetite for free stuff and for loot and plunder comes from this, that I read in Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger. In the deserts of Arabia humans lived by grazing sheep. The problem is to find grazable land, and that is not easy, because in the desert rain will fall, and stimulate plant growth, in a particular area perhaps once in two years.

You can see that finding grazing for your animals is not just a matter of skill and experience, but outright luck. And sometimes you run out of luck. Then what?

Then, what you do in the Arabian desert is you raid a neighboring band that has had better luck than you, and you steal their livestock. But, interestingly, the rules are that you don't touch the women. You just rob the other guys of a grub-stake, to get your band restarted.

So loot and plunder does have a sensible survival value. In pre-agricultural human bands. Of course, sometimes it can get out of hand. See Mongols, invasions and conquests of.

And you can see that this applies to the agricultural era. If our food-growing lands are afflicted with drought and our people are dying of hunger then it only makes sense to make a last go-for-broke effort and plunder the neighbors for food.

However, in my reading of The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon, we begin to see the modern experience of drought and famine is different. As the 19th century advanced the Brits -- eevil colonial rulers in India -- started to experience famine as a failure of government, a scandal. And you can see why. With steam transportation, rail and water, the means are at hand to relieve famine.

Let us understand the earth-shattering importance of this. It means that for a people to wive and thrive and survive it does not have to occupy food growing land. Not any more, because food can be obtained from across the world for mere money.

But it takes a while for humans to adapt their instinctive culture to the new reality. Evidence: Adolf Hitler, leader of the most advanced country in Europe that invented everything from modern philosophy to modern relativity and quantum mechanics. He felt that, of course, the Germans needed Lebensraum in eastern Europe. No, Adolf, they didn't! All they needed to do was to be able to trade for food and let the Mittelstand do its thing.

Here's another thing. Back in the 19th century the big surges of labor-union membership were in the Great Depression that went on from 1873 to the 1890s. Do you know what that was all about? Mostly, the aftermath of the US government getting back on the Gold Standard after the inflation of the Civil War, which threw debtors and workers for a loop. So the debtors and workers attempted to seize the means for survival.

Then there was the Great Depression of 1929-39, caused by the Allied nations getting back on the Gold Standard after WWI and then the new Federal Reserve totally effing up the Crash of 1929. More growth of unions and also of left-wing politics until national hero FDR led us into the War of the Ages and needed manfacturies to churn out tanks and planes and Jeeps for his glorious war.

But guess what. In the aftermath of the 2008 crash we did not have a surge in unions or in left-wing politics, even though the crash was another classic bungle by the ruling class. And even though Little Ben Bernanke broke the first rule of central banking, to be the lender of last resort to the banks, like, you know, Lehman Brothers, whatever. Oh Ben. And we now know, Little Ben, that if you had bailed out Lehman instead of whining that you didn't have the legal authority, the Deep State would have rallied round and made sure you didn't go to jail. Hey, they might have given you a medal. Silly Ben. Cowardly Ben.

My analysis of the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2006-08 is that the social safety net actually worked. The people thrown out of work got tided over by the welfare state with its unemployment benefits and its food stamps. So no mobs in the street. No surge in union membership. And no left-wing revival.

Therefore no need any more for desperation efforts to stay alive by plundering the neighbors.

But it will take centuries for humans to adapt our culture to the new reality.

Meanwhile we free spirits can start thinking about how to imagine the new human world in which dawn raids and loot and plunder and "a healthy appetite for free stuff" are no longer needed.

That is what my Great Reaction notion is about. It proposes to understand the present as an attempt bythe educated gentry to recover the past -- the good old days for political elites when rulers really ruled -- with socialism as neo-slavery, the welfare state as neo-feudalism, identity politics as neo-tribalism, etc. When what we need to do is to get away from those cultural echoes from the past.

My reductive Three Peoples theory and Little Darlings notion are all about taking the next step in understanding, to try and understand why the educated gentry is doing this to us. I am attempting to think about how we can first understand and then find a way of neutralizing the edcuated gentry's exploitation of the proles to advance their reactionary power project.

Part of that process is understanding what drives the left's Activism Culture and enumerating the Left's Errors,

Also, we can explore how The Road to the Middle Class is paved with the cultural moving sidewalks of monotheistic religion, education, law, and mutual aid, which teach the workers and peasants just off the farm and the feudal estates how to wive and thrive in the city.

And we can construct An American Manifesto to imagine life after liberalism where the coercive dominations and oppressions of educated gentry rule are replaced by a new culture of responsibility and voluntary exchange, and yes, exciting cultural adventures for the children of the educated gentry: something for everyone.

But perhaps the most important thing of all is the greatest challenge and adventure for creative spirits ever conceived by the mind of man. To create great seminaries all across the world to induct the young sprouts of the educated elite into a great spiritual movement to teach their fellow humans how to rise above "a healthy appetite for free stuff."

Wow! Someone ought to write a book about that!

Scott Adams: Four New Types of News

I just took the trouble to transcribe a piece of Scott Adams' daily podcast, where he develops the idea of four new types of news in "The Golden Age of No Real News." Says he:

There used to be a time what news was something like: Hey, some events happened; let us tell you about the events. Then we called that news.

But now things have changed. So Scott Adams comes up with four new types of news.

Fake News. "Something that didn't happen; something taken out of context... In this case The New York Times simply denying that an event happened." Adams is talking about John Harwood and Maggie Haberman denying the plain text of the leaked NYT editorial meeting where they said they were going to go after Trump because of his racism.

Hypothetical News. This probably always existed, but now it is more prominent.Hypothetical news is like this:

If there is a recession, Trump might not get reelected. If the meteor hits the Earth, we're not prepared.

It's like they ran out of real news!

Mindreading the News. It is "based on what we imagine... other people are thinking. Now, that goes well with taking Trump out of context" and substituting your assumption of what people are thinking.

Reframing History News. This, of course refers to the New York Times "1619 Project" keying on the first year that slaves from Africa arrived in North America. Hey, it's great to get beyond the textbooks and look at history again. But this is not an innocent exploration of the past. The purpose of it is to think differently about the present, i.e., Trump Racist.

It is really not hard to understand what is going on here. It is the liberal educated ruling class thrashing around trying to figure out what to do now that the good old narrative that they inherited from their good old liberal parents is not keeping the rubes quiet and respectful.

And of course the big thing is race. For half a century our liberal friends have ruled us and kept us down on the farm with the accusation of racism. But now, the race card is not working very well any more.

Think about it this way. What would you do if the method you used for keeping the peasants quiet no longer seemed to work, and you started getting reports that the natives were restless? Well, the simple answer is that you wouldn't know what to do because nothing in your life had prepared you for this day.

When you are a ruling class the point is to rule. You think up ideas that you decide are good for people and you enact legislation and write regulations and hand down legal decisions about what people may do and not do, about which group is to be privileged and which group is to be marginalized. I've been reading the history of the Brits in India in The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon, and it all comes down to the ruling Brits at the time deciding, well, we are going to issue this proclamation; we are going to formulate that regulation; we are going to cut the salt tax in half; we are going to split Bengal into two halves because right now it is too large for one regional government to handle.

That is what our liberal friends have been doing for the last 50 years. Oh, there aren't enough African American firefighters, so we need Affirmative Action. Whatabout women fighter pilots? We should change the rules to increase the number of female pilots in the Navy. There aren't enough women in STEM, so let's change the rules to increase the number of women in tech. All the money in college sports is going to men's sports and that is wrong, so let's force equality in colllege sports.

But, of course, our lords and masters are not thinking about the lives they are wrecking, the injustice they are creating. They merely think, well, here's a racism, here's an oppression, here's an injustice, so how do we fix it?

And then when the peasants rebel they are genuinely shocked. Hey, all they were trying to do was to creat a more just and equal society! How can anyone be against that? Unless they were racists inspired by Trump's dogwhistles!

Well, I don't suppose any liberal is going to listen to me, but here goes.

The reason our Founding Fathers wrote down in the First Amendment that there should be no "establishment of religion" is because people disagree about things, especially morality. So the idea of limited government is to restrict the agenda of government to those things that nearly everybody can agree upon.

Nearly everyone agrees that murder is bad, theft is bad, rape is bad, and that the perps should be locked up.

But what about education? Education of children, nearly everyone agrees, is a good thing. But what should we teach the kids? That's where people start to disagree. Problem with a government education system is that the government tends to limit the range of educations available to children. And there are activist groups with agendas that want to force all children to be educated in accordance with their agenda.

Of course, when you are the ruling class and, say, the natives get restless about Drag Queen Story Hour at the local elementary school, you are outraged! Who do these homophobes think they are!

Hey Fredo! That's what I think about wind and solar power. Who do these watermelons, red on the inside, green on the outside, think they are! But we have to save the planet! Sez who? The scientists getting government grants? The corporate shills getting green energy subsidies? The little rich kid with a family foundation that wants to "make a difference" with activism? You gonna force me to ride a bike to work?

So my judgement about the four new tpes of news, as described by Scott Adams, is that they represent a flapping around in the liberal bubble. They tell us that our liberal lords and masters don't have a clue.

And the big thing they do not get is that there is really very little the government can do outside of keeping us safe that really benefits us.

And the big question is this. After you have created all your wonderful programs, what happens when the world changes and all the conventional wisdom assumptions you made back in the day no longer apply? Are you chaps going to revise and reform all your programs? Or are you just going to tell the rubes to shut up and take their medicine?

And flap around inventing new types of news to muddy the waters and confuse everyone?

In the Aftermath of the Mueller Debacle, Who Will Bell the Cat?

The thing that bothers me about the whole Mueller affair, that ended with the exhibition on Wednesday of Robert Mueller as an old man past his prime, is what it tells us about the ideology, the culture, the religion -- call it what you will -- of our liberal friends.

Our liberal friends now think it is OK to use the full might of government to demolish the opposition. Because it is evil.

This is particularly stark for me because of my current reading of The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon, all 1245 pages of it. The genius of the book is that it tells the story of the British conventional wisdom on India beginning back in the 18th century.

So, after the Indian Mutiny of Sepoy regiments in 1857 what did the Brits do? Well, they were a bit ashamed that some of their officers that had wreaked revenge on the Indians that had massacred a few handfuls of British women and children. And they realized that the idea of keeping India in subjection forever was a pipe-dream. Sooner or later, they realized, they had to hand India over to the Indians. Because democracy. Meanwhile they should be building roads, railways, canals, and building an Indian national education system, as any modern responsible government should do, according to the conventional wisdom of the time.

This is rather different from the ideology of Gen. Siad Barre, dictator of Somalia in the time when Rep. Ilhan Omar's (D-MN) grandfather was head of Somalian lighthouses. Barre combined Marxism and Islam in his regime ideology. That gave him license to do pretty well whatever was needed. Steve Sailer:

 [T]he Somali Government was vexed to find conservative religious leaders preaching against equality of the sexes and supporting their arguments with readings from the Koran.
It decided to stop the dissent. 

Eleven of the religious leaders were rounded up, and early one morning they were executed by firing squad. 

Notice that Barre did not think, well, I know that progress according to the truth of Marxism and Islam is inevitable and that, in the long run, all the old ideologies will fall by the wayside. Because progress. No. His ideology permitted, even encouraged him to get rid of the inconvenient "conservative religious leaders" right now.

It is clear to me that the current ideology of our ruling class, the religion of intersectionality, of race cards, and the apocalyptic doctrine of the End of the World, because climate, is a millennarian doctrine, a secular religion, a follow-on from Marxism, which does not, as the Brit ideology of the 19th century did, advise the ruling class to cool it and permit government for the Natives, by the Natives -- however backward and primitive compared to Us they may be, darling.

So our liberal friends do not think that, well, those deplorables and bitter clingers may be a bunch of superstitious idiots living in the past, but, they have as much right to live their bigoted, and superstitious lives, cramped by horrific racism, sexism, and homophobia, as we have to live our glorious creative, compassionate and enlightened lives. They think that extreme measures are needed to keep bigoted hands away from the levers of political power.

When George W. Bush won the normal change election of 2000 our liberal friends were beside themselves. The psychiatrists even invented a mental illness for them, post-election stress disorder. Really? You chaps can't handle the disappointment of losing an election?

Same thing when Donald Trump won the normal change election of 2016. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth. And a deep state movement to reverse the election and get rid of Trump.

Sorry liberals. If you think like that you have a dangerous and antisocial ideology. Because the first principle of democratic elections is that there are two kinds of elections: Four More Years, and Throw the Rascals Out. In more polite circles this is called "alternation in office."

The point of "alternation in office" is that both political parties can confidently say, after an election that goes against them, that we will "wait until next time." But if there are no normal change elections every eight years, then there is no "wait until next time." If you want to get out from under the knout of the present unjust rulers you have to form a head of rebellion and literally throw the rascals out in an armed revolution.

Many people think that living for a few years under, e.g., the awful Trump, is much better than going through the horrors of revolution, of young men drafted off the street into someone's army, and summary executions.

I don't know what is behind the Democratic habit of not conceding elections, but I am inclined to think that it is telling us something. It is telling us that a lot of Democrats are thinking that something has gone wrong with the march of history. The glorious bend of the arc of history towards justice does not seem to be happening. So democracy isn't working, and this must be the work of the racist, sexist, homophobic Devil. Thus, in order to bring justice to this racist, sexist, homophobic society we have to resort to force. The other options aren't working anymore.

So the chaps that think that the thing about democracy is that it is the worst form of government, except for all the others, we have to get together to form a political movement that will form a political coalition to teach the liberal totalitarians a lesson.

I don't know which of the 47 types of nationalism that are contesting for the right to define the future is the right one for the present emergency. But we need to come up with something.

It is not going to be enough to sit around, like the mice of Gloucester, and argue about Who Will Bell the Cat.

My feeling is -- from my maxim that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice" -- that the way to deal with our liberal friends is to put together a political movement solely based on the monstrous injustice of the current ruling class and its monstrous self-dealing, and its use of the justice system and the intelligence community both to punish its enemies that merely follow the law and exempt its friends from living in accordance with the law, and its monstrous importation of immigrants against the interests of native Americans.

Used to be that our ruling class taught the white working class that they were horribly exploited and oppressed by the bosses. Vote for us, and we will smash the bosses. Then the ruling class abandoned the white working class to unemployment and opioids.

Used to be that our ruling class taught blacks that all the whites were horrible racists and were just waiting, in the words of Joe Biden, to "put y'all back in chains." Vote for us and we will give you Freedom. Then the ruling class started importing refugees and migrants to take the jobs of blacks and abandon them to the killing fields of inner-city gang warfare.

See what I mean? Whatever the political line is, however it seems that the electorate is divided up by race or class or whatever, the fact is that the dividing lines are sitting there waiting for some damn politician to redraw them. If he has the chops.

That's what I mean by "whoever shows up" nationalism. It's all down to what some damn politician can say to persuade the voters that he cares about people like them. Race, class, gender, national origin: these are all fake tribalisms waiting for some low-rent genius to stir the pot and reorder the fake tribes of politics to give him 51 percent of the vote and/or a majority in the Electoral College.

Then we can get down to worrying about the Deficit.

The Brits in India, Part One

On the last day of our India trip last winter, I got to go to a bookstore in a New Delhi shopping center. Nearly all the books were in English. Hmm.

But what caught my eye was a two volume epic, The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon. Hmm, I thought, and looked it up on Amazon, where it appeared as a 1,200 page single volume doorstopper, two volumes in one.

In the end I bought it from Amazon when I got back to the US, and it's been a real experience.

I started out with the idea of finding out when Indians started to develop a notion of India as a nation. In other words, when did an Indian National Movement emerge from out of the chaos of history?

The story starts with the Brit East India Company in 1705 with its trading ports at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.

The situation was that there was always a border between the Brits and some native prince, and the Brits would always find a reason to teach that native prince a lesson. When they did they would establish suzerainty over him and demand revenue to pay for the troops to garrison his state and make everything "safe." Of course, wherever the border is, the native princes beyond the border end up being a problem...

From time to time, the East India Company would have a Governor who was extra aggressive with the native princes. This happened first during the Napoleonic War when the Brits were worried about the French, especially if some native prince had a French officer as an advisor. The second time was in 1840 when the Brits started to worry about the Russian Threat, and so started a foolish incursion into Afghanistan.

But, as I say, I was wondering about the Indian national movement, and this is what I experienced.

In about 1825, some Brit noticed that the people in India didn't really like the Brits. They seemed to prefer to be ruled by their own native princes, corrupt and disorganized as they were, rather than the modern and efficient Brits.

In about 1840, the Brits started to think about internal improvements, roads, canals, even education. But they found that they didn't have any money to do it, because of the expense of the war in Afghanistan.

By about 1850, you get a Brit governor mentioning "Indian opinion" and when a legislative council was proposed they were a little taken aback when "some young Indians" saw it as "the beginning of a Constitutional Parliament in India." No, no: not what we had in mind at all, old chap.

Then there is this, during the Crimean War and the Siege of Sebastopol from 1854-55.

Educated Indians were now sufficiently awake to the outside world to follow with close interest this European war in which their masters were engaged, and ill-wishers of the British, of whom Azimullah Khan was an example, discussed with malicious glee the ill-success of British arms.

Do you see what is happening here? Under Brit rule the inhabitants of South Asia are starting to develop a national "public opinion," and the Brits are conscious of that. And the thing is that by uniting most Indians into a single state, they are in fact, willy nilly, creating an entity that could be called and experienced, by Brits and South Asians alike, as "India."

Also, about 1850, the Brits actually have in hand actual projects: to build irrigation canals -- starting with the 525-mile Ganges Canal; to build railways; and to create an education system.

Then, of course, in 1857 came the Indian Mutiny, or Great Rebellion. But what was really going on? Partly, no doubt it was this.

It was becoming increasingly evident that the now unquestionable supremacy of the British was likely to lead to the cultural extinction of the old ruling classes and feudal aristocracy, and also posed a threat to the long-established influence of the Brahmans.

Hmm. Our modern politics tends to revolve around the poor helpless victims and what "we" must do to save them. But there is also, even in the United States, the thing you are not allowed to discuss: the impact of change on the traditional ruling class. In India in 1850 it was the old feudal Nawabs and Rajahs and the Brahmins that were feeling the pinch. But you would not expect them to oppose the Brits on the grounds of the extinction of their ancient right to rule and plunder the agriculturalists. No, just as in our own day, the threatened ruling class would argue that The People would suffer, and that they were valiant champions of The People advocating valiantly to protect them from the existential peril of white supremacy of our day and the Brit imperialism of 1850. We well-born activists are doing it For The People!

The other takeaway, for me, is the power of the European nation state when compared with the feudal native princes. Throughout the story, the contrast is stark. When a European nation state, with its central banking, its access to the world credit system, its organized and disciplined army, its administrative bureaucracy, goes up against a feudal ruler that thinks no further than his feudal revenues, his harem, his succession, and the occasional raid on his neighboring prince the result is no contest.

And, of course, that is why India had to come up with a National Movement in order to deal with the Brits on their own terms. But how that happened is, no doubt, the subject of Part II of The British Conquest and Domination of India.