Social Media: Let's Call 'Em All Commies and Nazis

As I go about my life as a Grumpy Old Man, I like to grumble about Trash Nazis when I dither over which bin to use when throwing away trash at the coffee place.

And when some cyclist in invisible artistical black swishes by in the bike lane as I am trying to cross the street, I grumble about Bike Nazis.

Because of course the reason we have insanely complicated trash laws is the Nazi-style environmental groups that want to Save the World from plastic straws.

And the reason we have insane traffic congestion in downtown Seattle is that Nazi-style "urbanists" want to make the cities of the world safe for single progressive twentysomething cyclists dressed in non-reflective artistical black.

Of course these nasty power-mad progressives are not really Nazis. They are really Commies. But ever since Seinfeld invented "The Soup Nazi:"-- Well, whaddya gonna do but subscript all officious people with the all-purpose label -Nazi.

Course, the Seinfeld kids didn't invent the -Nazi modifier. That was Rush Limbaugh, who popularized the word "Feminazi" to describe people that I believe are now called "Basic White Bitch." Not that this is anything new. I was re-reading the good bits of Pride and Prejudice last night and I would say that Jane Austen invented the Basic White Bitch 200 years ago. Hello Miss Bingley! But of course, the correct term has to be "basic white RICH bitch." You can't be a real bitch unless you are rich.

I think it is a pity that we have to use -Nazi as a modifier. As in #MeToo Nazis and #BelieveAllWomen Nazis, and #AntiFa Nazis. Because they aren't really Nazis. They are lefties, and that makes them worse than Nazis. So I think we should append the word Commies as a pejorative modifier, any time we want to make the merely descriptive into a pejorative.

Thus Bike Commies, Trash Commies, Soup Commies, #MeToo Commies. Because just about any group that wants to use government power to impose their agenda to bend the arc of history towards a just world is on the left.

Notice the big difference between Nazis and Commies? The Nazi movement was birthed by a half-educated son of a customs official. The Communist movement was birthed and renewed by rich kids, and imposed from above right down to the present day.

So I think that the discerning pejorator should understand what he is dealing with when he wants to sneer at a political group. Is it made up of deplorables or rich kids? Tea Party? Nazis. AntiFa? Commies. #MeToo? Commies.

But I think that, to be on the safe side, we should pejoratize these Social Media mobs as both Nazis and Commies, keeping a careful watch to make sure that we are perfectly balanced in our use of pejoratives.

Thus we should be balanced about referring to Trash Nazis and Trash Commies. Or Bike Nazis and Bike Commies. Or #MeToo Nazis and #MeToo Commies.

Because, after all, the word "Nazi" will trigger one kind of person to frothing rage, the chap with straggly facial hair that is still a couple of years short of a beard, and that is fine for us shadowy string-pullers. But to cover the ground we should not hesitate to use the word "Commie" to take care of the Gen. Jack D. Rippers of the world, They need to be provoked into frothing hatred as well by us conspiracy mongers.

I just think that if the left is going to get its kicks by running around calling everyone racists, sexists, and homophobes, then the non-left needs to chime in with the name-calling.

Until the left cries Uncle.

Chantrill's Law of Incoming Rounds

Meet "Chantrill's Law of Incoming Rounds." The idea is simple. We humans are really sensitive when someone is attacking us. But when we are attacking someone else, hey, what's the fuss!

The way to understand this is by way of a military metaphor. Imagine you and your buddies are defending a fire-base on a hill-top in Vietnam. Nearby there's an enemy fire-base. You can imagine that when your mortar detachment fires off a mortar round at the other fire-base it is interesting to see where the round lands: the puff of smoke, the crump. Did it hit the target or not?

But things are very different when incoming rounds are hitting your own fire-base. Why, it's a matter of life and death! Incoming! Hit the deck! Then it's all about counterattack, killing every last one of them.

The same is true in politics. Political activists are warriors in the political wars; their job is to fire off squibs to hit the opposing campaign right in the solar-plexus, whether it is a negative ad or an October Surprise that digs up some embarrassing scandal from the past. Hey, they had it coming! But when the opposition starts firing on your side, why, that's an outrage! How dare they traffic in rumors and innuendo! Let's stick to the issues!

You can see this playing out in the current war between the Trumpists and the Resistance. For instance, whaddya think of this list of mortar rounds from the left, compiled at American Greatness?

• Public performances of plays that depict the execution of Trump-like figures.
• Publishing a Trump assassination fantasy in the New York Times.
• The constant, deliberate misrepresentation and denigration of mainstream conservative policy positions {by the MSM e.g., immigration].
• Barack Obama advises supporters to oppose opponents by saying if “they bring a knife, we bring a gun.”
• [V]irtue-signaling celebrities who make threats against the president’s family...
• Antifa’s (and associated groups’) violent responses to peaceful exercises of conservative speech in public spaces.
• Leftists running high-profile conservatives out of restaurants.
• Maxine Waters’ encouragements of those who would use violent methods to signify their opposition to the Trump Administration.
• Hillary Clinton’s call for a hiatus on civility until Democrats regain control of the government.
• The widespread, false, and cynical equivocation between conservative speech and hate speech.
• The would-be assassin who almost killed Rep. Scalise.
• Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder saying, “when [conservatives] go low, we kick them.”

If you are a conservative like me, this sort of thing makes you furious. You say to youself: yeah, imagine if some conservatives ran Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) out of a restaurant. Imagine the media outrage!

Against this, American Greatness's list of conservative originated outrages.

• The use of disparaging metaphors in reference to the media or political opponents on the Left—because the words the Right uses really do matter.
• The Deplorables—especially the ones who vote.
• The (comparatively small number of) conservative media outlets.
• The purportedly inherent association between right-wing politics and domestic terrorism.
• President Trump.

And, of course, whenever there is an act of violence, by anyone right or left, liberals blame it on eliminationist rhetoric, white-supremacists, far-right conspiracy theories, and Trump's rhetoric.

But of course. If you are a conservative, you are sick to death of liberals accusing you of being racists sexists, homophobes, and sick to death of the hypocrisy of calling riotous behavior "peaceful protest." Because it hits you where you live and you know that it is meant to hit you where you live and cow you into submission.

But, with the Trump era, suddenly our liberal friends are experiencing incoming rounds, and, in the words of Corporal Jones of the British sit-com Dad's Army, they "don't like it up 'em."

The fact is that people don't care about other people. We only care about ourselves and our kind, and we really care when someone is attacking us, rhetorically on social media, or with fake bombs, or real bullets. Of course we do. We are humans.

Free Trade vs. America First

What should we do about free trade vs. America First? The logic of free trade comes from the law of comparative advantage,  that everyone should concentrate on what they do best. The medical doctor may be best at every job in his medical office, but there are only 8 hours in the day. So it pays for him to hire less-able assistants who can do the grunt work for him at lower wages.

So we offshore all the low-skills jobs to East Asia and concentrate on the high-skills jobs like designing Apple computers.

But what about the low-skill people in the US? Do they just go to the wall? Or live a living hell on welfare? That's the question raised by Spencer Morrison at American Greatness. He chides Andy Kessler at The Wall Street Journal for a simplistic approach to economics: that we move up the value chain, concentrating on high margin activities while outsourcing the low margin work to Asia:

We’ll design (high margin), and they’ll manufacture (low margin). We think, they sweat. It’s the “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China” label.

Problem is: not everyone has the smarts and the skills to do high margin, thinking, creative work. So what happens to them? Do we "let them eat cake?"

Or, do we protect our industries from foreign competition, and guarantee that America remains the land of opportunity for all Americans? 

The truth is, in my view, that this isn't an either/or question. Sure, we don't want to abandon the low skill folks to unemployment, opioids, and existential despair. On the other hand, propping up industries and protecting them from foreign competition is not necessarily going to maintain America as the land of opportunity.

In reality, it's a messy business. In the United States, for about a century, we put the thumb on the scales to help the workers, by privileging labor unions. This was nice for workers in the unionized steel and auto industries, except that the above-market wages and salaries and general bloat made these industries vulnerable to foreign competition, and slow to update and improve their act. So what should the politicians do? Give industries an eternal subsidy? Give them a brief assistance so they can get more competitive?

This is not a new situation. The whole economic history of the last 200 hundred years has been about the decline, one after another, of one proud industries, beginning with farming. Well over half the population used to live on the land, farming. Today, in the United States, less than 3 percent of the work force works on farms. What happened? All sorts of things. Mostly, the children of farmers went to school and left the farm for the city.

But it wasn't always as easy as that. Sometimes the suffering farm workers rioted, as in 1830 and the Captain Swing riots in Britain in 1830. Or the populist revolt in the Great Plains states in the late 19th century. Or the Dust Bowl in the US in the 1930s.

Or railways. According to RailServe.com, railroad employment in the US was 1,500,000 in 1947. Today in the 2010s it is 235,000 employees. So was it just gradual attrition, or what?

In other words, on a decadal time-frame you will see huge changes in the employment of American workers. The question is not saving jobs or moving up the value chain. The question is how to get there, wherever "there" is, without major crisis and hardship. We cannot preserve the past and the incomes of the past. But we can certainly help people to transition from a declining industry to a growing industry.

Problem is that once people get to be established, they don't want to change. They hate the idea of losing wages and status, and usually look to government to help them when they get in a jam. And indeed, it is the job of government to protect people from existential peril. But obviously we cannot maintain everyone in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

On the other hand, every soldier needs to keep his powder dry; every bourgeois needs to to save against a rainy day, every family should prepare against disaster.

So you tell me what government should do to keep America healthy, wealthy, and wise in the coming years.

Two Economies: Remember Charles Murray

Joel Kotkin has a good piece today about "One Nation, Two Economies" right here in the good old USA. About how the Obama era benefited the post-industrial economy in the Blue States and how the Trump era is benefiting the industrial economy of manufacturing and energy in the Red States.

A point that he makes is that the new post-industrial economy is very hard for the lesser-educated to navigate. But I had already been thinking, in my early hours brain-dump, that I need to rehearse the work of Charles Murray, he who is too much of a hater for the tender Special Snowflakes at privileged Middlebury College to tolerate.

Because, taken as a whole, Charles Murray's big books are a devastating takedown of today's liberals and everything they stand for.

First, Murray wrote Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950 - 1980. It was first published in 1984. The argument is that Great Society liberals fully instrumented the Great Society social programs of the Sixties, fully expecting to report on their triumphant success and make the triumphant liberal social scientist researchers and reporters into household names. Only the research showed that the social programs weren't working. They were making things worse. So what did liberals do? They said nothing and did nothing and let the disastrous programs continue to this day.

Then Murray wrote, with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. It was first published in 1994. The argument is that the importance of IQ, or intelligence, in the economy of the future means that there is a real danger of America becoming a two class society, with the intelligent ones on top and the less intelligent ones on bottom. But Wait! said liberals. This is flat out Racism. Go and stand in the corner, Charles Murray, you eevil racist. (See the problem is that black people right now have lower IQs than whites).

OK. So Murray came back with Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. It was first published in 2012. The argument is that white America was sorting into three classes. The top 25 percent -- the sort of people that live in Belmont, Mass. where Mitt Romney lived -- were doing fine with education, great careers and merger marriages. The middle 45 percent were doing so-so, with rather too much divorce and employment problems. The bottom 35 percent -- the sort of lower-class whites that live in Philadelphia's Fishtown -- were not doing well at all. Basically the men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much.

Now, if you are a right-wing nutcase like me you say that, while it is probable that the folks that will wive and thrive in the new world order will be the people with good cognitive skills, the kind of people that do well in school and in tech bureaucracies, there are other people in this world, and we are social animals. So what should we lordly cognitives do to help the cognitively challenged?

Never mind that. What should we definitely NOT do? Well that is easy. I'd say that we want to throw out the entire welfare state from free education to welfare-on-demand.

What we SHOULD do is encourage the SJW chaps to bully billionaires and centi-millionaires with social media to sponsor bourgeois-boot-camp schools and get-back-into-the-game job-retraining camps.

What we should NOT do is encourage the artistical-black twentysomething culture and the gang-celebrating hip-hop culture.

What we SHOULD do is change the culture from top to bottom -- from TV to music videos -- to encourage marriage and children and stigmatize easy sex and divorce and abortion.

As they say: if you finish high school, get married before you have children, and don't have children until you are in your twenties, you will almost certainly live a useful life.

In my view, there is no hope of implementing this program without absolutely delegitimizing liberals and lefties and the whole ruling-class culture that supports the welfare state and identity politics. I've been reading a book on "revolution" lately and found it unsatisfactory. What is revolution? Well, if you ask me, it is a big social turning, when by means hardly understood a society changes direction, probably including the ejection of the Old Regime.

In other words, we should understand that the French Revolution could not have happened without the discrediting of the Old Regime of monarchical absolutism by a rising middle class that wasn't getting no respect.

We should understand that the New Deal could not have happened without the various lefties succeeding in discrediting the Coolidge-Hoover era as hopelessly out-of-date and uncaring.

We should expect that, if we are to change America from its globalist/identity-politics present course we have to discredit the current crop of lefties and everything they stand for. We have to persuade ordinary middle Americans that the left does not care about people like them. It shouldn't be that hard, because it's true, you deplorables and bitter clingers.

This isn't hard. But it will be difficult.

How Do Democrats Return to the Middle?

Over at Steve Sailer, there's a chart showing that Democrat belief that "racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can't get ahead these days" has gone from 28% in 2010 to 64% in 2017. Really, what planet are these people on? So racial injustice has gone up in the Obama era?

Or what about the Kavanaugh nomination, where crowds of educated white women were ululating in misery when nominee Kavanaugh was approved by the United States Senate? Really, what planet do these women live on? Are packs of men really preying on innocent helpless women?

I mean, has there ever been a society in history that has shown more concern for a minority population than the United States has shown for black people? Or more concern for women than the United States has shown for educated white women?

So why are Democrats all wigged out about racism? And why do well-born educated white women think that it is the end of the world if the Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade?

The answer, of course, is religion. It is an error to think of Democrats, especially educated Democrats, as merely supporters of a political party. Anti-racism is their religion. Anti-sexism is their religion. And the point of post-Axial Age religion is to keep the Good vs. Evil opposition at white heat.

No matter that civil-rights laws were passed 50 years ago. Racist Satan is still a threat! No matter that well-born women have been educated to a fare-thee-well for the last generation and now represent up to two-thirds of youngsters in higher education. The forces of evil are still there. Sexual harassers are out there in the bushes; glass ceilings are stopping women from succeeding in their careers; a world without abortion on demand is unthinkable.

My point is that what we see about us today tells us more about the religious needs of well-born educated Americans than the real facts on the ground.

You see the problem at its clearest in millennarian cults that are predicting the end of the world. End-of-the-world is what you need to keep your members energized and committed. It is a question of morale. You keep morale up, in an army or a religious cult, by reminding your members that they are special, members of an exclusive elite, people with a special insight on "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything," and that they must stay mobilized and alert, anxious to stay the course and win their way to Heaven and/or the perfect society. And when the predicted millennium fails to appear? Well, there is only one thing for the leaders to do, and that is to double down.

This fits into the Reign of Terror notion in the analysis of political revolution. Political revolutions are messy and ultimately failed endeavors. Because, after all the speechifying and organizing and revolutionizing and promising and all, we all still have to get up in the morning and go to work. And so, as a revolution proceeds, and the promised heaven on earth fails to appear, the revolutionary leaders have to amp up their rhetoric to keep their supporters mobilized. Until the day of Thermidor and inevitable reaction.

So is that where we are today? With the promise of the civil-rights revolution and its heavenly justice receding inevitably into a messy everyday existence? With the promise of heaven on earth for educated women -- where wages would be equal, where women would move comfortably up the corporate ladder, where sexuality would be safe and predictable -- all dissolving into the truth of life as uncertain and imperfect and contingent?

Don't worry. If today's millennarian hopes collapse, there will come a new religious awakening and the whole process will start all over again. Maybe they will be on the right this time.

Meanwhile Democratic pollster Doug Schoen is warning Democrats that they have gone too far leftr. But will anyone listen to him?

Oh No! Trump Uses "N" Word

OK. Now President Trump has gone and done it. He's uttered the N-Word. You know what I am talking about. It was at the notorious Houston rally on October 22, where the president called Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) "Texas Ted." (The noive!)

“You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK,” he said to “USA!” chants. “I’m a nationalist. Use that word.”

Yes. I can't believe he said that. The President of the United States said he was a "nationalist." Oh no! The Huff Post reacted with proper alarm:

To many, the comments were a dog whistle evoking both racism and anti-Semitism[.]

Oh I get it. If Trump says he's a nationalist it must mean he's a Nazi. Cut to tweets:

Robert Reich: "The stakes of this elections couldn't be higher for democracy."
Amy Siskind: "This is a big admission which should terrify us all."
Justin Gibson: "This was said seconds after he used the anti-Semitic dogwhistle term 'globalist' to denigrate Democrats."
Imran Siddiqi: "*white nationalist."

As they say down South: "Bless Their Hearts."

Of course, in fact this is a stroke of genius, because Trump takes the word "nationalist" out of the basement where it has been languishing in quarantine, say, ever since World War II because of the "H" word.

Yes, you see, because of Hitler and the Nazi horror we must never ever allow the banner of "nationalism" to rise again. We must keep the people quiet and subordinate and we globalists must rule wisely and well over them. Because the people can't be trusted. They might create another Hitler.

To which I say, again, that Trump is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have failed. I am looking at you, globalists.

Never mind that your Communism, your Socialism, your identity politics is designed to rile up the natives and get them to hate on the "other." Never mind all that vile stuff for which at least 100 million humans have died. Never mind that. Just stop Nationalism before it, it... Well Nationalism is bad. And racist. And sexist. And anti-semitic. Oh, and xenophobic.

Wait. Trumpian nationalism is anti-semitic? You mean the chap that moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem? That chap?

And our lefty friends get all worked up that we call them NPCs. Because you don't think, lefties, do you. You just mouth the peaceful-protest slogans you learned at your teacher's knee.

See here is what I want. I don't want civic-nationalism, or white-nationalism, or posterity-nationalism, or anything like that.

I want just straight-up all-American nationalism, for which anyone and everyone can apply. I want everyone in the United States to glory in the wonder of America: its founding, its Constitution, its economy open to talents. Its ability to turn its immigrants into rock-ribbed Americans.

See, I want African-Americans to stop their defensive crouch in their ethnic enclave, obsessing about their injuries and their sufferings. I want them to come out into the public square and put their shoulders to the wheel and Make America Great Again.

I want Latinos and Hispanics to come right out and enjoy the prosperity they are earning every day in these United States and turn themselves into good red-blooded Americans, albeit that bring mariachi music right into the mainstream.

I want East Asians to knock down the vile Asian quota at our favorite colleges, and I want them to bring the particular talents of 4,000 years of Chinese civilization to bear on the fruited plain and I want them to Make America Great Again.

I want South Asians to stop their current plan of sucking up to the liberal agenda, like Cong. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Seattle's irrepressible Kshama Sawant, and flat out bring the wonders of 3,000 years of Indian civilization to Make America Great Again.

And so on.

Now, I'm a little worried about the East Asians. I'm worried that the basic culture of East Asians is the Mandarin culture of getting good marks in your national examinations so you can be a Mandarin bureaucrat and take your place in the ruling-class's administrative state. I hope that our East Asian friends see their way to something higher and better than the dead end of bureaucracy.

I'm a little worried about South Asians. I'm worried by the class division of the caste system, with the Brahmins cunningly staying on top for 3,000 years by whispering into the ears of the powerful and cunningly setting up a culture that puts them on top forever. I'd like my Brahmin friends to mix it up a bit with that notorious "bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar," my guy Alexander Hamilton.

But hey. After a possible 8 years of Trumpian nationalism, who knows where America will be. Hopefully we will all be rambunctious All Americans and the rest of the world will be sick to death of that horror of the ages, the loud American tourist in his dreadful MAGA hat.

And yeah. I'd like someone to gin up a Cinderella movie called Crazy Rich Americans that makes delicious fun of all the ethnic groups in America mixing it up and making fun of liberal conceits and making HuffPo readers and writers apoplectic.

Wouldn't that be fun!

How Do You Measure Hope?

Like everybody else I want to know what is going to happen in the mid-terms. Hey, I even have a website, usmidtermelections.com, to prove it.

A year ago the Democrats and their Democratic operatives in the media were telling us about a blue wave this November, where Democrats would take back everything they lost in 8 years of Obama. But then, as the Brits say, they would say that, wouldn't they?

Still, it's hard relying on opinion polls to clear the fog. Dov Fischer at The American Spectator goes through all the Senate polls in 2016, and how they consistently underestimated the GOP vote. In the Senate races with GOP Toomey (R-PA), Young (R-IN), Johnson (R-WI) and so on, the polls either had the Dem winning or the Rep by a whisker. But the GOPers outperformed the polls by about 4 percent.

Which is a lot. Or maybe not. Because, presumably it is hard to measure enthusiasm and anger and all the passion and emotion that enter into politics. But how do you measure these non-rational factors? Today there's piece on Breitbart about people camping out 24 hours in advance of President Trump's rally tonight, October 22, in Houston, Texas. These people are really enthused about Trump. How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand, as the song goes.

Before the days of opinion polls we had veteran politicians who talked to people who talked to people and they used to come up with their gut feeling about how the nation, or the state, or the district was going to go. I wonder how they would stack up against today's pollsters?

The point is, of course, that politics is not a rational thing, or a scientific process. It is tribal. It is pre-rational; it is humans clinging to each other for mutual protection. And the purpose of elections, in my mind, is to allow that ancient tribal mind to be measured and accommodated to our modern world.

Salena Zito, a hard-working journalist, that seems to have found a good way to talk to the heartland folks that nobody cares about on the Coasts, got to interview President Trump before one of his rallies. Said he, in almost a throwaway line:

"It really is all about hope," he says as his aides take him toward [the] stage. Seconds later, the arena shudders as the crowd welcomes the president of the United States.

Of course that is what Barack Obama said: "Hope and Change." The question is whether politics is always a betrayal of hope. Every politician is in the business of raising hope, of getting voters to identify him with their hope for the future and invest that hope in him with their votes.

The question is whether any politician ever really delivers on that hope. President Trump, for instance, has sown a lot of hope by his promise to renegotiate trade treaties and bring jobs back. What he is really doing, I reckon, is sparking the economy with tax cuts and regulatory roll-backs. So  you can see that he is really playing Three Card Monte with the voters: promising one thing and delivering another which is close to what he is promising, but no cigar. And yet. Republicans have been trying and failing for years to sell voters on "orthodox" economics. What voters understand is "bring our jobs back." So you could say that Trump is not really hoodwinking the voters but practicing the art of the possible.

Will Trump disappoint the voters and eventually slink off the stage after the next recession? The simple answer is, of course, yes, because every eight years we almost always get a "change" election where the voters express their disgust with the past and their desire for a fresh start.

But here is another interpretation of history. In the Kennedy tax cut, the Reagan tax cut, and now the Trump tax cut, a leader proposed a reckless idea that all the safe people said would never work. And after a few years politics resumed its normal zero-sum assumptions, and it seemed that nothing had changed.

But the fact is that the Kennedy-Reagan-Trump tax cuts have all stirred the US economy out of the doldrums for a season. And that is a cause for hope.