How Do We Push Back: Left, China, Germany?

I just saw a piece by Victor Davis Hanson, basically arguing that Germany was up to its old tricks. He quotes Angela Merkel:

She insisted that Germany views the democratic United States as not much different from autocratic Russia and Communist China: Urging Europe to present a united front in the face of Russia, China, and the U.S., she said, “They are forcing us, time and again, to find common positions.” And Merkel concluded that therefore Germany must find “political power” commensurate with its economic clout to forge a new independent European path.

Or China. Stephen Hayward wonders whether the cool way to stop China would be to ban its students from US universities, rather than by tariff wars. This would also hit elite Chinese who like to get capital out of China by getting their student children to buy expensive houses and cars in the US. Oh, and

This would have the added bonus of depriving many liberal universities of revenue, since they love Chinese students because they pay the full tuition sticker price.

 And what about the left? Funny, isn't it, how the left is everlastingly peaceful protesting all and sundry -- right now Trump in the UK -- yet yells "hate" and "white supremacy" when some rightist nobodies march with tiki torches around the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville.

Hey, lefties! How come you guys get to have "mostly peaceful protests" but the white nationalists are always rioting?

See today we are celebrating the 77th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, which the US won due to staggering luck and staggering initiative from a couple of flight leaders. And also the 75th anniversary of D-Day. And the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres. But I argue that the way to deal with today's frenemies like Germany and China probably should not include actual armed conflict.

Why? My argument is that the good old days of conquest, loot, and plunder are over, because laying waste to Germany and China doesn't help us. We can't loot the only thing that matters, which is the "intangible capital" in those countries, the capital that exists between the ears of the German and the Chinese people.

And the same thing applies to our frenemies here at home. Some people are proposing to end universities as we know them. Then there is the question of what to do about abortion. And really, what is the point of looting the market economy of 35 percent of GDP to fund old-age pensions and health care, something that average people should be doing for themselves? OK. But how do we push back against the lefty idiots?

Honestly, I don't know what we should do. But there is my maxim: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. I take that to mean that the trouble with politics and government is that they are always mobilizing against enemies, because that is what political leaders are for. But all government action, in my view, is creating injustice, because government is force.

Now right now our Chinese friends imagine that they can dominate the world with Huawei dominating g5 and dominating Africa with port and infrastructure deals. The Germans are dominating Europe, because their alter ego, France, doesn't have a clue. And the left in the US is mounting a reign of terror and virtue against "hate" and "toxic masculinity"as their cultural revolution seems to be falling short of its promise.

I guess that my notion is that it is the injustice that the Chinese and the Germans and the left here at home deal out that creates the movement of rejection. And the more that they think that power is the answer the bigger movement of rejection they inspire.

The point is that in the interaction of power politics and market economics we have two opposing notions. Politics is all about domination and hegemony and loot and plunder. Economics is all about cooperation and trust and finding out how to serve the other guy with products and services.

Actually, they are not really opposites, in the sense that Hegel uses when talking about the opposition of the two poles of a magnet. Politics and economics are really orthogonal, operating at right angles. One says that there gotta be an enemy out there. The other says there gotta be a customer out there.

So I think the strategic thing to do is to highlight the monstrous injustice that, e.g., Germany, deals out in Europe; that China deals out to its people and its trading partners; that the left deals out in its domination of media, education, and culture.

But some people will have to go to jail or exile, courtesy of the ruling class, just like the Voltaires did in the waning days of the ancien régime. And in China, per the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, there will probably have to be actual martyrs. That's just part of the experience of injustice.

Maybe there's a better way. But not yet.

Prophecy, Prophecy: All is Prophecy

I used to be a proper modern, believing in logic and reason. But now I believe in prophecy.

Well, not exactly. It's just that now I get the point of prophecy.

Back in the day, before science, humans had very little idea of how the world works, and very little ability to predict what other things and animals and people might do to them.

So humans imagined everything animated by its familiar spirit. Including rocks and rivers. When you think about it, it makes sense. There is no predicting what the folks in that village on the other side of the hill might do next. Nor is there any predicting when the river will suddenly drown half the village in a flood and leave rocks behind the size of lions and tigers and bears.

But it sure would be nice to know what the rocks and the rivers and the guys in the village on the other side of the hill might get up to next. Enter prophecy.

Today, of course, we have science, and it is real good for the design of bridges and cars and jet airplanes. But we still don't know what we really want to know, like will it rain next week. So yeah. There's a real demand for people who can predict the future. And like in olden times, these prophets often get their secret knowledge from divine sources.

I've found it really helpful to read When Prophecy Fails, a scientific study of a group of ordinary Americans by three social scientists, Festinger Riecken, and Schachter. These ordinary folks received information telling them that the world was going to end in a great flood, but that they would be saved by extraterrestrials that would fly them away in their flying saucers.

It seems to be a common theme: end of the world; a big flood; only the chosen will be saved. I suppose that, down through history, the world has indeed ended for many small communities in a flood. And only a very few, a chosen few, have survived.

We have the same thing going on right now. End of the world due to climate change; rise of the oceans and coastal flooding; only the few will be saved. If we act now. And like in olden times, the science is pretty skimpy, because we just do not know very much about how the climate changes. It might be due to carbon dioxide levels; it might be all about the level of cosmic rays seeding clouds. It might be the precession of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Or something else, about which we are totally ignorant.

And then there is the whole question about the nation's future: Trump or No Trump. Or children: will they grow up to be healthy and wealthy and wise? Or that tall handsome stranger.

It's comical really. Even with all our science and logic and reason we still do not have knowledge of the really important things: the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. We do not know why there should be a universe rather than no universe; we do not know why there is life rather than no life. We really don't even know how life works, even though our bodies and our minds are coded to create and continue life.

I mean: how come scientists haven't yet strung a bunch of DNA together to create a new virus, from scratch?

And so, we are tempted to take the short cut to knowledge, and fake it with prophecy. Everybody does it, so don't be ashamed. We would do anything to reduce the uncertainty in life and know what the future will bring.

But the truth is that life is a mystery, wrapped in an enigma. And nobody knows nothing, at least not about the future, which is the only knowledge really worth having.

Meanwhile, we can at least fake it, and prophesy. And how.

Abortion: Career is Not The Meaning of Life

In the New Yorker Katha Pollitt writes about how abortion has changed the arc of women's lives.

Access to legal abortion, whether as a backup to birth control or not, meant that women, like men, could have a sexual life without risking their future. A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm.

Most women don’t enter fields that require years of graduate-school education, but all women have benefitted from having larger numbers of women in those fields.

See, I think that the idea of women "having a sexual life" is a lie. It is only men that can separate sex from love and marriage and children. I'd say that the more that a woman has a sexual life the more miserable she is likely to be.

See, I think that the idea of a woman "plan[ning] her life" free of the derailleur "single sperm" completely misunderstands what life is all about. Any woman with half a brain is going to steer clear of rogue "single sperms."

See, I think that the idea that "all women have benefitted" from having more women in fields that require graduate-school education is a ridiculous conceit.

So I think that Katha Pollit is full of it.

Of course, I understand where she is coming from. I get that from German sociologist Georg Simmel and his talk about women coming into the public square and adjusting it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

I think that the fact of men being perfectly happy with "having a sexual life" and using women as masturbatory appliances is the reason we have marriage laws and that we used to regard abandonment and divorce as scandalous and disgraceful. Before the glories of the sexual revolution.

I think that any plan of life that does not include the generation and raising of children at its center is a foolish plan of life, and a plan for misery and despair.

I think that any notion that more women in certain educated fields is a Good Thing misses the point. What we observe about the work force is that women tend to enter and dominate fields that involve person-to-person communication and caring. Men predominate in fields that involve danger and things. Doesn't mean that the opposite can't happen, but certainly it should give us pause before applying government force to direct outcomes.And men have careers because that is how you get laid and get to marry high-status women.

I'm watching 56-Up, the latest in the TV documentary Up Series following the lives of 14 Brits born in 1957, and checked up on every seven years since. The lefty BBC producers picked a diverse bunch of youngsters from children abandoned in a orphanage to total rich kids with plummy accents. You could tell that the BBC thought they were getting ready to celebrate the wonderful lives of working-class kids that were in the process of benefitting gloriously from the wise and compassionate post-War welfare state. Only it didn't turn out like that.

And, after watching 56-Up, which looks at the kids that are now 56 years old, I'd say that abortion and contraception and the sexual revolution have played merry hell with the lives of pretty well all the kids except the richest ones. But that's just my opinion.

And the richest ones did well not because of their parents' riches but because of the upper-middle-class culture they inherited and breathed into their very souls.

However, in 56-Up almost all the kids are now entering a dignified late middle age, even the ones that went through what I would call welfare-state-hell for years.

See the difference between the right and the left is that we righty racists, sexists, and homphobes think that the folks migrating into the city from the country should be taught the culture of the middle class and its responsibility culture. They should not be encouraged to remain in a working-class or lower-class ghetto, or the neo-feudal culture of the welfare state, because that is not the way to wive and thrive in the city and the market economy.

So I think that Katha Pollit is clueless, and ought to watch the Up Series from start to finish and then answer the obvious question: why are we spending political and cultural bandwidth worrying about high-class women like her when the white working class is dying of despair? And the black community is marinating in self-pity. And gays are the worst bigots on the planet.

But others may differ.

What All Rulers Do

Every political project is a project of force. Every political leader is summoning supporters to war. And the reward of the war is loot and plunder.

Generally, of course, the leader does not put his project in quite those terms. Usually his justification for war is that we must act now before the enemy strikes us. He must arouse in his followers the natural fear of the tribe next door, that they might suddenly strike us in a dawn raid, kill all the men and rape all the women.

Another casus belli is that the other guys are robbing us blind. You can see that at work in everything from the justification of taxing and regulating corporations to the renegotiating of trade relations with China.

And what about the workers! They are being screwed by their greedy employers! And what about women that only earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man. And blacks, cheated since forever by racism.

And always, if "you join in our crusade" as the Les Mis chorus sang, there will be rewards: loot and plunder.

In domestic politics with an established ruling class, this program is effected by the tactics of "divide and conquer." You set different groups against each other, all the better to tax and dominate them. For imagine what would happen if men stopped fighting with women, and blacks with whites? Why, they, er, we might all join up and decide that it is time to loot and plunder the ruling class and put them all in jail! Yay!

Notice that if a government does not have much spending, then the people need not be too concerned about getting their share, because there is not that much to share out. But if the government spends as much as ours, in the neighborhood of 35 percent of GDP every year, and taxes each of us to the tune of 30 percent of GDP, then every citizen has a vital interest in making sure that he gets his share of the loot and minimizes his share of the taxes paid. So a big-spending government is dividing and conquering by supervising the squabbling over who gets what out of the government goodies. What a concept!

My question is whether it is possible, short of a complete meltdown, to get humans to dial down their demands and refrain from trying to blame other people for their problems, and making them pay!

The only possible strategy seems to be indirection. President Trump is a master of this. He has run on Making America Great Again, making Mexico pay for the wall, stopping China from robbing us blind. But all the while he has been lowering tax rates -- on corporations! -- and cutting regulations -- on businesses!

Whaat? So President Trump has been putting Our Money into the hands of eevil corporations and rich investors! There oughta be a law!

Maybe there is genius in the Impeach Trump thingy. Because if the Dems and their willing accomplices in the media are filling their channel with Trump Orange Head Bad, then they have no bandwidth left for attacking his economic policies. And politics only has enough bandwidth for about one-and-a-half issues.

What I want to know is if there is a possible politics that would be able to reduce the power and looting of government, whether we could persuade ordinary people that their economic interests lie in smaller government, and that it does nobody any good if we are all concentrating on making the other guy pay.

Maybe the only way is the Trump way. The only way to bring America together is to stop scapegoating each other and scapegoat somebody else. Anybody else, from the Mexicans to the Chinese to the Iranians. And don't forget the Fake Media.

But let's try to keep it short of a shooting war, OK fellahs?

My Questions about Bob Mueller -- and Collusion

Here's what I want to know, in the aftermath of Special Prosecutor Mueller's Parthian shot at President Trump.

What was the quid pro quo that led to Special Prosecutor Mueller's late great statement that he could not "exonerate" President Trump on obstruction of justice?

Was it that, if he tossed that grenade at President Trump, that the Dems would not subpoena him to testify before various House Committees?

Was it that it avoided answering the question: "when did you know that President Trump and his campaign hadn't been 'colluding' with Russia?"

Oh, and the next question: "why did you continue your investigation for x months afterwards?"

There are other interesting questions about the whole Trump Russia business. One of them stares right out of Mark Steyn's interview with low-level Trump campaign operative George Papadopoulos. Just what exactly were the Brits doing in the middle of all this? And the Aussies? And this guy Joseph Mifsud who seems to have been an instructor at the CIA's school for spying in Italy. Really? The CIA has a spy school in Italy?

So to the next question: will the declassification of intelligence community documents extend to communications between the US intelligence community and their good Anglophone friends in the intelligence communities in Britland and Oz? And if not why not?

And what about the question of Christopher Steele getting all his anti-Trump dossier material from the Russians? What's that all about, given that the British Steele talks to Hillary's US campaign folks and US intelligence community folks and Russians? And Uncle Tom Cobbley and all? Collusion, anyone?

Really, if you ask me, we need an embarrassing declassification that embarrasses everyone from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton to the US intelligence community to US media to the Brits and the Aussies. Because if you ask me they were all in on it: the effort to entrap and embarrass and October Surprise the deplorable candidate Donald Trump.

And if it damages our relationship with our allies: who cares? Maybe it's time they learned a hard lesson that if they get mixed up playing sides in domestic US politics then they could get into a heap of trouble.

Really, when you think about it, we need a wall-to-wall embarrassment of our ruling class about once a generation, on principle, so that all the up-and-coming deep state actors know of some mentor that got caught in the undertow and therefore have determined that the price of glory in the higher echelons of the deep state is too high if it means doing what the Brennans and the Clappers and the Comeys and all the small-fry Strzoks and Pages did.

And, the question remains, and probably always will remain: what did the President know and when did he know it?

Because my experience of men and affairs leads me to believe that none of this would have happened without a nod from President Barack Obama.

Oh sure, there will never be a paper trail that leads right into the Oval Office. That's the whole point of having aides and assistants and law firms and cut-outs.

But for those of us that weren't born yesterday...

Nationalism, Socialism, Patriotism, and So On

What is the Brexit/Trump/Populism revolution trying to tell us? That is what everyone is trying to figure out, whether you are a far right nationalist, a far left socialist, or some kind of squishy moderate in between.

The answer is pretty simple, and it has been right before us for decades. The guy that got it right was Hitler. He just said to the Germans: whether you are a nationalist, a socialist, a German patriot, or a worker, come and get your identity and your protection right here. I'm your man. Or leader as he liked to say.

Let us delve into Mein Kampf and figure out where he was coming from. Before World War I Hitler was a twentysomething in Vienna -- a millennial of the 20th century if you like -- and a rabid consumer of social media, known in those days as "newspapers." And as a German living in Vienna, capital of the Austro Hungarian Empire, he was really pissed off at the multicultural politics of the Hapsburgs, because it made German-speakers into a minority, just one group in the multicultural mix of the Hapsburg realm. He hated this multiculturalism because the Hapsburgs, in his view, kept short-changing the German speakers in order to keep the non-German speakers from rebelling and bolting out of the Hapsburg-ruled empire. The German speakers, he thought, always had to pay to keep the empire together. Hitler was all in favor of unions, by the way, but strongly opposed unions getting mixed up in lefty politics and the Jewish intellectuals that ran it.

The answer, for a German-speaking guy like him, was to redraw the borders of Europe so that all the German speakers could be in a Grossdeutschland of the German speakers. The Austrian Germans would no longer be a minority in Austria-Hungary and the Sudeten Germans would no longer be a minority in Czecho-slovakia, and the Germans in the Danzig corridor would no longer be a minority in Poland.

Oh well. The plans of mice and men.

That's why I say: You get idiots like Hitler, Trump, Farage, & Co. when the usual idiots have screwed up.

Any questions about the usual idiots screwing up between 1918 and 1938?

Of course, after World War II the usual idiots decided that they weren't the problem. The problem was the voters that had been bewitched by the evil H-word. The only solution was the rule of the usual idiots, now called educated Europeans, and various checks and balances to make sure that the wise ones would be in control and that the people could never elect a Hitler again.

Hey wise ones! How's that grand political and cultural strategy of yours doin', pal?

Oh, I see. What is needed is to silence the racists and the sexists and the xenophobes of the "far right" to make sure that only approved ideas are allowed into the public square. Yup, that's turning out to be a real winner, isn't it, especially when the racist sexist Nigel Farage can win an election in Britain with a Brexit Party three months after its formation.

But let us return to the Nazi Party, the National-Socialist-German-Workers Party. I'm willing to do a deal if you wise ones are up for it -- and if you can prove you can be trusted, which you can't, not right now. I suggest that we dump the "national"and the "socialist" part of it. Those two bits are what you lefties might call the "far right" and we righties would call the "far left." Let us reduce our politics instead to a party called the Patriotic Workers Party.

In Germany, I dare say that this party could be called the German Workers Party. In Britain it could be called the British Workers Party, and in the US the Keep America Great Party. These parties would all be about, first, the protection of the homeland from un-assimilated immigrants, and second, the economic protection of the people with a modest but effective set of government programs to help people when they got into economic trouble.

Nothing really radical here: just the basic things that people expect from their government in return for submitting to the government's taxes and sending their kids to go for a soldier when the nation is threatened by foreign enemies.

When you think about it the "far right" nationalism of which we've heard tell is all about making the national community into something of a national cult: a quasi religion, if you like. And I'd say that we level-headed folks don't want that level of enthusiasm. But equally the "far left" socialism, which today seems to include a rigid censorship of non-lefty voices, a huge administrative state, a quasi-religious greenie cult that demands we save the climate by surrendering ourselves to the Green New Deal, and the racist sexism of identity politics, is also something of a cult, a quasi religion that believes that certain people, prophets of race, gender, and climate, should lead us to the Promised Land, and you better shut up if you know what is good for you.

Over at the British Unherd site they describe the Brexit voters like this:

These are the aspirational ones, the hard-workers who lean Left on economics but lean Right on culture and identity, who want to level the economic playing field, want people and business to play by the rules but who also desperately want to leave the EU, slow immigration and get tough on crime. They feel that a way of life is slipping away, they loathe nothing more than being made to feel like they have been duped, and they have had enough.

If I had my druthers I wouldn't "lean Left on economics," because what I want for the workers is a non-system where get to combine private insurance with private wealth-building through paycheck deductions that would not go to the government but to voluntary social organizations -- from fraternal lodges to Fidelity and Vanguard -- that were not trying to buy votes with other peoples' money. But I recognize that most people feel safer with a comprehensive and mandatory approach through government. I don't like it but I get it.

But I would "lean Right on culture and identity." I think that the nation state is the best way of ginning up what I call a "fake tribalism." that makes people feel part of a community. I certainly think it is better than the racial identity politics and the gender identity politics of the left. Really it is "language tribalism."

It makes sense, you know. Politics and culture operate through language, and I'd say that it is ludicrous to believe that people can form a political or cultural community without sharing the same mother-tongue. That's what makes us hu-man, rather than ape-man: the fact that we can exchange ideas and knowledge and friendship through speech rather than grunts and body language and social grooming.

Notice that the global elitists feel like a global elite because they can all talk to one another, probably in English. I am sure that all the elite in Germany is fluent in French and the French elite is fluent in German. But the average German and the average Frenchie? Not so much.

Now I believe that everyone ought to have a religion. I just don't think that anyone's religion should get its paws on the powers of government. As I understand it, about 200 years ago, some crazy white supremacists thought the same thing.

Memorial Day: When We Remember the Fallen

Veterans Day is the day we remember all who served in our nation's wars. Memorial Day is the day we remember those in the military that were killed in the nation's wars.

In my view Memorial Day, that began as a movement of Southern women decorating the graves of the Southern soldiers in the Civil War, is more important. That's because history is told by the victors, by the survivors. It is hard enough to remember those who died fighting for the winning side. But those who died for the losers!

History is written by the winners, we are told, and of course those who supported the losers, or who died for the losers, get very short shrift in the narratives of the winners.

We like to brand the soldiers with the virtues of our side and the vices of the other side, but in truth the young men called to serve their governments have little choice in the matter. They must serve and they must fight, and many of them must die. The victors usually brand the loser soldiers as villains, for fighting for the bad guys. But who really has the wisdom and the virtue to know who is in the right, and who indeed possesses the insane courage to kick against hearth and home when the call to the colors is made?

So what about the young American men that fought and died for the Brits in the Revolutionary War? What do we know of them? The soldiers that fought and died for the slaveholding South in the Civil War? The young Germans that fought for Hitler?

The truth is that those that died in the losing cause are lost to history and to memory, for it cannot be that the winners were wrong. And as we see, with the recent demolition of monuments, there are plenty of people that want the inconvenient past to be obliterated. And young men are scooped up to fight in today's war whether they will or not.

This was brought out to me by a tourist guide in Guatemala, who told how brothers could be found fighting on opposite sides in the long civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996. Why would they do that? Because young men could be drafted by the government or the rebels: whichever was in town on the day that a young man would be scooped up and set to fight. And once you are drafted and enlisted, desertion is desertion.

Let us all remember the young men chewed up in the government meat-grinders since time immemorial. The politicians don't care; the generals don't care. Only the families care, so long as the family even survives in this murderous and merciless world.