"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!

If Discrimination is Outlawed, Then Discrimination is a Police Problem, Not a Moral Problem

One of the marvelous things about our era is that, fifty years after we made discrimination on the basis of race and sex illegal for governments and for institutions, we are more worked up about racism and sexism than ever.

This is something I marvel at all the time, and was brought to my attention in a video about Christianity and Critical Theory featuring mixed-race Neil Shenvi.

Now, I agree with Neil that racism is a moral horror. But as a legal question, it ought to be done with, finished. Because 50 years ago the government declared that racial discrimination is illegal.

(OK, I know. Ever since, the government has been discriminating on race and sex, just like in the old days of Jim Crow. Only now the government and big corporations are discriminating in favor of historically marginalized races and sexes. What a world! But let that pass!)

The point is that first, everyone is a racist. We are human; we prefer our own kind, and we are rather appalled at people not like us. For instance, I read recently that liberals are much more offended by people that vote differently from them than conservatives are. In other words, liberals are more groupish than conservatives; they cannot abide being around people that don't think like them. No surprise really. Liberals think that voting is a moral act; conservatives rather believe it is a civic duty.

Now, I am perfectly happy with religions railing against the moral horror of racism. Very good idea. Let's "nudge" everyone towards a more inclusive moral framework.

But, of course, nobody is content with mere moralizing. We all want to make a difference! If we are women we want to name and shame and shun the immoralists. If we are men we want to teach 'em a lesson: right in the solar plexus.

But I say, look. We are all nasty pieces of work. We all do nasty things, not just to strangers of another race, but to our own kith and kin. It is notorious, for instance, that at holiday gatherings we Americans tend to get into political arguments with each other instead of just celebrating the season.

But the main thing is to keep government out of the discrimination game. Because that, I suggest, is 97.2 percent of the problem. If government can't discriminate and can't, like in the Jim Crow era, force private institutions to discriminate as well, then we are half way home.

And let us note the mechanism that gets around discrimination. If, say, good conforming employers won't employ members of a certain race, because racism, then there is money to be made from hiring those folks!

And here's a thought. Suppose some woman in a think tank commits the moral horror of saying that women are women, thank you very much. Now really, think tank, is it really the best solution to fire her? Is it really a good idea to get a judge to rule that the two-sex view is "is not worthy of respect in a democratic society"? Is it a good idea to let her make herself into a martyr and get the whole thing publicized by Harry Potter's mom, J.K. Rowling? Or would it be better to take her in hand and have everyone else in the think tank explain to her at coffee breaks and at the water cooler how morally reprehensible she is? Normally, that is all it takes to sort a woman in the traditional community of women.

Because I thought that witch hunts and expulsions from the community was the sort of thing that they did in the bad old days of Puritan New England, and the McCarthy era right at the beginning of the Cold War. Why, they even got Arthur Miller all riled up enough about witch hunts to lift his head from bonking Marilyn Monroe and sneering at salesmen to write a play, The Crucible, about the horrors of witch-hunting back in the day in Salem, Massachusetts!

Once upon a time there was a wise old bird that said that there should be a separation between church and state, between the world of morality and the world of force. There was another wise old bird that expanded this notion into the idea of a Greater Separation of Powers, to keep the three sectors of force, of work, and of moral/culture from ganging up on each other, two against one.

You can see why those wise old birds might have had a point. Because people, all people, just cannot resist the temptation of legislating morality, their morality, and forcing their moral beliefs on other people. And the beginning of wisdom might be to make it difficult for people to do that.

On the other hand, let us marvel that, in the descent of man, there have actually been geniuses to suggest to us that our normal way of making morality and conformity to social norms all into one coercive culture is defective and oppressive, even dominatory. It is really astonishing that anyone should ever have proposed to tease apart moral disapprobation and criminal wrongdoing and suggest they we humans should insist that the priests should stick to morality and the jailers should stick to incarceration: in other words to differentiate between the raised eyebrow and the raised execution axe.

But while you and I inhabit the ethereal realms of glorious tolerance and merely shake our wise old heads about the follies of the fools and knaves among the lower orders, the fact is that we live in a fallen world, and there are people out there convinced that the only way forward is to fall on moral lepers like a ton of bricks.

And teach 'em a lesson they will never forget!

My Three Peoples vs. Yarvin's Three Layers

It was pretty exciting to read part one of Curtis Yarvin's "Clear Pill" a month ago. He has a three peoples theory just like I do. Here is how he describes it.

As Orwell wrote, all societies have three human layers. We may call ours gentry, commoners, and clients. The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

He inspired me to catalogue all the three layer systems that I knew about, thus:

Author	Top	Middle	Bottom	Relig/Culture/ Political
George Orwell	Inner Party	Outer Party	Proles	Political
Karl Marx	Bourgeoisie	Communists	Proletarians	Political
Auguste Comte	Positive	Metaphysical	Theological	Cultural
New Left	Racists, etc.	Activists	Victims	Political
Woke Left	White oppressors	Allies	Members of oppressed groups	Political
Charles Murray	Belmont	Everybody Else	Fishtown	Cultural
Curtis Yarvin	Gentry	Commoners	Clients	Political
J.R.R. Tolkien	Elves	Hobbits	Dwarves	Cultural
Joel Kotkin	Clerisy	Yeomanry	Serfs	Political
Z-Man, Z-man	Cloud People	Dirt People	[lower classes]	Political
Dennis Price	Cloud People	Dirt People	[dependents]	Political
David Goodhart	Anywheres	Somewheres	[Inbetweeners]	Political
John Derbyshire	Ice People	??	Sun People	Political
Vikings	Earls	Peasants	Thralls (slaves)	Political
Hammurabi	Superiors/ Propertied	Commoners/ freed men	Slaves	Political
Christopher Chantrill	Creatives	Responsibles	Subordinates	Cultural
Christopher Chantrill	Ruling Class	Middle Class	Little Darlings	Political
Christopher Chantrill	Hero (sacrificial or ego)	One God	Many Gods	Religious

When Yarvin gets into part two of the "Clear Pill," he sets forth what I think is the key to understanding our liberal friends in the educated liberal gentry. Yarvin says that the ruling class obtains the support of the gentry class by playing "thymotic anthems" to the gentry, where "thymos is somewhere between ambition, honor, and vanity."

Update 2/3/20: See also Yarvin's latest on pistos (loyalty) and thymos (ambition) in a later piece.

And it's not just anthems, but cold hard cash delivered to supporters. You are ambitious? Easiest way forward is to help the ruling class with one of its projects. You want honor? Well so do we all, but the short way to get it is to help the ruling class. You are vain? Of course not. But if you were it sure would help if you joined the ruling class and made out that you were helping fundamentally transforming America from its shameful past of racist sexist homophobia and bending the arc of history towards justice.

My maxim that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice" is supposed to poke a hole in the above conceit. Because the point is that everything any ruling class does is force. Of course it is, because otherwise it would happen on its own. And so everything a ruling class does amounts to injustice. And so all the gentry in the ruling class's officer corps are conceited creeps promoting injustice.

I've been having a lot of fun with Yarvin's three layers in the past couple of weeks, and the only problem is that I'm not happy with "clients." I converted "clients" into "victims" in a piece for The American Thinker over the weekend, but that was really about "fake victims" or gentry people -- such as feminists and gays -- defining themselves as victims in order to beat up on the commoners. But identifying the "clients" as "victims" doesn't quite do it because, after all, most of the lower class are not victims; they are just dependent. So I think the best word for the lower class is "subordinates."

So I'd define Yarvin's three layers as: gentry, commoners, and subordinates.

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious, and interested in power; the commoners are suburbanites, moderately skilled and competent; the subordinates are dependent and tribal, candidates for victimhood.

 But how does Yarvin's layers intersect with my Three Peoples theory? When I think about it, I reckon that my three sectors do not exactly match his but rather overlap.

I think that my People of the Creative Self is the top end of Yarvin's gentry layer, who I expect, see themselves as more responsible than creative. There are, for a start, a lot more people that think of themselves as "creative" than are really creative, in the sense of Nietzsche's "free spirits" or Bronze Age Pervert's "pirates." If we think of the educated liberal Subaru-driving gentry, we would expect most of them to experience themselves as responsible citizens, concerned about justice issues, rather than as creative free spirits.

I think that my People of the Responsible Self overlaps the low end of Yarvin's gentry layer and the top half of his commoner layer. We see that in the Trump phenomenon. In my view, the enthusiastic "white working class" are clearly commoners, but barely responsibles. Trump supporters clearly see President Trump as protecting people like them. On the other hand, Trump has clearly driven away educated gentry women from the Republican Party, for he clearly offends their sense of honor and vanity.

I think that my People of the Subordinate Self tracks pretty well what Yarvin calls clients. The point about subordinates, clients, proles, victims, whatever, is that they expect to be protected at a closer level than the nation state. Since they are not really literate, they conduct their lives at the person-to-person level. They really need to have personal contact with some leader or patron to whom they owe fealty. The bureaucratic welfare state is not the ideal way to socialize such people.

One way of understanding the Three Peoples, or three layers, is through belonging. Creatives and gentry clearly feel they belong to something higher and better than nation states. Their world is clearly supranational, although not quite global. Responsibles and definitely commoners are nationalists, they identify with and belong to the nation state. The reason for Trump and Boris and the other national populists is that they have exploited a hole in the world view of the oh-so-sophisticated suprnationalists in the gentry.

The thing about the subordinates and clients and proles is that they cannot relate to being nation-state citizens. They need a loyalty closer to home. However, I would say that they are suspended part way between sub-national tribalism and nationalism. For the left found out long ago that their working-class supporters identified themselves as German workers, and British workers, and never identified with "workers of the world unite."

Notice how clients, victims, and my Little Darlings track. In all cases we are talking about how the ruling class or their gentry supporters enlist the subordinates into their political battalions -- in return for free stuff -- where the subordinates in their ranks-and-files are to be the shock troops of the ruling class's power project. And the whole point is to use the clients and victims to keep the commoners from getting any ideas above their station.

Soldiers Sending their Officers "Over the Top"

Remember back in the good old days, when the ruling class sent their sons "over the top" in another Big Push on the Western Front in World War I?

You don't? Well. It's part of the Narrative. That's why all those poets were writing meaningful verses about life in the trenches. And why everyone, after the war was over, agreed "Never Again."

Only the geniuses wrote a peace treaty that humiliated Germany according to the good old rules of loot and plunder, and so when a cheeky chappie called Adolf objected, the German people had to agree with him.

But, on the other hand, would J.R.R. Tolkien have written his Middle Earth fantasies if he hadn't been sent to the trenches?

Still, sending the young men to defend the border is part of the collective unconscious of mankind. Right there in the middle of our archetypes.

But here is an interesting notion.

At the end of National War 2016 when upstart General Trump unexpectedly won the war, the generals of the Democratic Party did not send their troops home.

Field Marshall Hillary Clinton was doubtless drunk on Chardonnay on the night of November 8, 2016. And next day she omitted the traditional concession speech and the usual invocation of "we are all Americans" and the passing shot to "wait until next time."

So, what has happened since is that the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party -- who are not really rank-and-file but educated liberal gentry subalterns -- has been pushing the generals to return to the fight in The Resistance against the winning General Trump, and indeed throw him out of office with an Impeachment in the House of Representatives and Trial in the Senate.

Now, General Nancy Pelosi knows this is a stupid idea, but what can she do? I mean, who else can be Speaker of the House of Representatives than the Woman in White -- only she was in black for the impeachment vote. I mean think about it if you are Our Nance. Who can possibly replace her?

Hey, I will tell you what you could do, Nance. You could act like the Sacrificial Hero of legend and history, and fall on your sword. You could say: "I am not going to dignify this mutiny in the foc'sle with the name of Impeachment. If you mutinous scum don't quit it right now, I will resign my commission and take my captain's gig and leave you to certain death by losing your seats."

Yes. Our Nance could threaten to resign. And then actually do it! It's not as if she will be throwing away a promising career in politics. She has already achieved immortality by becoming the First Woman Speaker. And by throwing away her majority in the House by twisting the arms of moderate Dems out of their sockets to pass Obamacare in 2010. Now she could make a dramatic exit by resigning rather than sending the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate.

I thought, as a profound sexist, that women had a natural talent for fake drama! Apparently Our Nance has lost the flair for this. Perhaps because she is 79. Good Lord! Do you mean she is going to be 80 next March 26. I wonder if President Trump will do a tweet!

But of course, women do fake drama, not the real drama of being a Sacrificial Hero according to religion and modern pyschology, where you sacrifice your life that others may live. Nothing personal. It's just the way that the collective unconscious of women works. Men are expendable; women are not.

Really, I should be delighted. Because Our Nance doesn't want to do the Sacrificial Hero bit, and because the educated liberal gentry are idiots that have never read a book, or commanded a stricken field.

So, as they say, they "literally know nothing."

And I suppose we should be grateful,  because the truth is that since our liberal gentry friends pretty well own the culture, they ought to be beating us deplorables five ways from Sunday.

But they aren't. They are getting beaten by men that everyone agrees are complete buffoons, from Trump to Johnson.

There must be a lesson in that.

Hey lefties. It's the job of general offficers to send the rank-and-file to their deaths, not the other way around.

Cleaning Up Afer Hurricane Lefty

After the destructive winds and flood tides of a great tropical storm comes the cleanup.

And that's what came to me in the early morning today as I thought about the century-long hurricane of the left. I got to thinking about it after reading a piece in American Mind by Jeremy Carl writing that ordinary America is now "culturally conquered territory," and it will take a "reconquista," like the Spanish reconquest of Spain from the Moors, to restore America.

Quoting Hunter Hearns, he writes of the liberal cultural hegemony,

Republicans have controlled the presidency for 32 out of the last 52 years, appointed 15 of the last 19 Supreme Court justices, and controlled much of Congress for the last 25 years as well. “For a party to be so remarkably successful politically while losing on practically every issue requires a deep rethinking of where things have gone wrong.”

There is a lot of woulda coulda shoulda like this going on in the scattered homes of Conservative-ville: the assumption that someone has failed. That Bill Buckley should have done better than make the Republican Party into an Outer Party to the Democrats' Inner Party. That the Bushes should not have been such squishes. That the neoconservatives ended up betraying us in the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq. That the billionaire libertarian globalists should not have hollowed out the manufacturing economy. Etc.

But I think all that kind of thought misses the point. It assumes that, e.g., government coulda woulda shoulda take enough precautions so that, when a hurricane shows up in Florida, that everything should already be hurricane-proof. And Someone Is To Blame if a few roofs blow off.

But when there is a hurricane or some other great storm, it really is not possible to take enough precautions so that there is no damage. You board up the windows, you encourage people to drive their SUVs inland, and then, after the storm, you go to work and clean up.

The basic problem we righties have on the "far-right" of which you've heard tell is that we don't really believe in politics. We think government is a necessary evil to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic, and beyond that it goes south pretty quickly.

Wanna protect seniors with retirement income? Well, pretty soon it takes over the budget, and one thing it does not do is save present income to provide the jobs for the kids that will be working when we geezers are retired. Wanna educate the kiddies? You end up with an education bureaucracy that is messing around with diversity and inclusion and bathrooms and pensions and not doing much about educating the kiddies. Wanna curb dangerous monopolies? Great, except scientists say that the regulated monopolies end up "capturing" the regulators.

And that is just the boring part of government. The truth is that, for many people, politics is their religion. They practice politics as part of a movement to save the world and give meaning to their lives.

We have a rather terrifying word to describe the combination of politics and religion. We call it "totalitarian." And there are 100 million graves in Russia and China that bear silent witness to the horror of this toxic combination.

To say that we woulda coulda shoulda stopped all this is to say that, when a new religious cult forms we should send wise men to talk the cultist out of it, before they become a problem.

Who really could have known that the minor kooks Marx and Engels with their shabby critique of classical economics would have spawned the Bolsheviks and the Maoists? Who was anticipating The Sixties and forecasting a sexual revolution and the sacrament of abortion?

And who forecasted the Woke Revolution of the present time? And who can keep track of the follies of progressives in government, proposing stupid de-carbonization, ridiculous regulation of the workplace, and the use of words as weapons in the pejorative search-and-destroy mission of canceling all the racist-sexist-homophobes?

The truth is that all we can do is batten down the hatches when the storm clouds threaten and hope we are still alive after it has spent its force so we can help the Cajun Navy rescue people and clean up afterwards.

The thing is that every successful religious and political enthusiasm ends up as a manifestation of my maxim: "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." Every great political movement and every great religious movement leaves devastation in its wake. Or if you prefer, victims of injustice.

One of the things that our lefty friends are very good at is reminding us how the gales of economic change cause suffering and heartache: the closed manufacturing plants, the ruined lives, the hollowed-out cities. It's true; we can do more to help those whose boats have ended up holed and beached on the headland.

But when you have politics you have a war of words. When you have religion you have a battle between good and evil. And when you have government you have force.

So when a religious movement or a political movement or a combination totalitarian movement reaches hurricane strength, thousands, maybe millions of people are going to be flung around like matchsticks. That, in any language, is injustice. And injustice builds rage and pushback.

I don't think that people like me -- who, using Curtis Yarvin's language, are "gentry" that try to understand the point of view of "commoners" -- can expect to anticipate and head off the latest politico-religious enthusiasm from the left. But we can champion the right of "commoners" to live their modest lives in their own way without being drafted into the ideological army of the lefties.

And without being send to reeducation camp for failing to get with the left's program.

And the least we can do is help clean up after the storm has passed.

Politics and Honor Among Thieves

The point about the Horowitz Inspector General report is that it didn't offer a narrative. It just discussed the various ways in which the FBI violated its rules in gussying up documentation for its FISA applications to surveil the communications of Carter Page.

One of those violations was not to mention that Carter Page was a CIA guy. That is, the CIA used him because of his Russian connections.

Really? The FBIs didn't know that Carter Page was supposed to be mixing it up with the Russkies, because CIA. Or they did know, but "forgot" to tell the FISA court? Really? Stepping on the CIA's toes? Where's professional courtesy, not to mention honor among thieves?

Here's my problem with all this munching over the details of coulda shoulda woulda. Someone, somewhere in the "intelligence community" or the Department of Justice should have said: "hey kids, let's cool our jets for a moment. Do you realize what we are doing here? We are spying on a presidential campaign. Are we really, really sure we want to do that? Hey, I know! Let's give Donald Trump a heads-up on this."

Because, you see, I'd say that the intelligence community ought to presume that any ordinary US political campaign is on the up-and-up.

Call it honor among thieves. You don't snitch on your fellow thieves.

Hey, there are all kinds of shenanigans in every political campaign, and all kinds of marginal characters that want to get involved. But if there really is some connection with a foreign power, you want the campaign managers to be warned. You want to say: "Hey, Bill, did you know that Sam has been a bit too close to the Russkies over the years?"

But the Obama Justice Department and the Obama FBI didn't do that. Really?

Now I just read a guy that said that all organizations are like a living organism:

Take a few individuals and put them together in an organization of almost any sort and an amazing thing happens. The organization effectively becomes alive. It now has a heartbeat of its very own and it, the organization, will fight to stay alive from that point forward.

So, somehow, all the folks at the DOJ and FBI knew what was expected of them. And they just went along. Whether there was an explicit order from the top, or just a nod and a wink, like the famous line about "who will rid me of this turbulent priest." Most of the time, the monarch doesn't have to issue a specific order. People just intuit what is expected of them and get on with it.

So. I don't know if President Obama personally unleashed the FBI on the Trump campaign, but certainly someone in the chain of command intuited what was expected of him. Maybe they just knew that Donald Trump was a threat to the "living organism" we call the "deep state." And certainly, people in the FBI would understand that such behavior would be rewarded by a President Clinton.

What bothers me is the utter stupidity of all this.

If the folks at the top of the food chain had half a brain, they would have been saying, well, the Dems have been in power for two terms so we are almost certainly looking at a change election, and if we start mucking about with that we will create more problems than we solve.

It's the same with Supreme Court nominations. Back in 1987 the Dems decided to "Bork" the Supreme Court nomination of conservative Robert Bork. Why? Because Bork threatened all the liberal agenda they had "legislated" through the Supreme Court. So they stopped him. Bully for them. But now every GOP Supreme Court nominee gets Borked, and Republicans have learned to resist, and now have a conscious policy to replace all retiring justices throughout the federal court system with reliable, vetted conservatives. And so Democrats have upped the ante every time, so that now we are dragging up alleged misbehavior in student parties from 30 years ago, as in the Kavanaugh nomination! Really Dems? Did you really want to go here?

Do you see what is happening, Dems? You are teaching us deplorables how to do "activism" and go mano-a-mano against you guys. Is that what you really want?

What bothers me is the utter stupidity of this.

Now we have the impeachment of President Trump on the flimsiest of pretexts. I get why we are getting this, because Hillary Clinton didn't properly concede the 2016 election, and because there has been a revival of left-wing activism partly encouraged by President Obama. I also understand that Nancy Pelosi doesn't want to lose control of the lefty activist wing of the party, so she is playing the Duchess of Plaza Toro and leading her regiment from behind.

But is this really what you Democrats want? Routine impeachments of presidents because the activists are mad about losing the last election, because you didn't have the cojones to tell them to cool their jets?

I was talking to my Greek friend this morning, and he mentioned that a few years ago some Greek priest from Buffalo wanted to change the bylaws of the US Greek Orthodox Church to make the priest the president of each local church governing council. But then some bishop intervened. No! He exclaimed. The priest is the spiritual leader in the church, and the council is the "corporation." Forget it! Golly. Imagine! Separation of powers, even in a local church.

Here's the problem. You get traditions, like the separation of powers. Like alternation in office and conceding of elections. Like only using impeachment for really egregious "high crimes and misdemeanors."

But over time people forget why. Separation of powers? But we want abortion, because justice. Concede an election? But Trump! Using the FBI to spy on an election campaign? But Trump!

The point is not that these people are evil. I could live with that. The point is that they are stupid. They are breaking up the furniture and using it for firewood and they have no clue what they are doing.

I suppose I should be grateful. I should be grateful that the boobs that have turned Supreme Court nominations into straight partisan dogfights are idiots. That Hillary Clinton is a corrupt fool. That the woke left literally knows nothing, AOC. That the global elite just talks to each other and has no idea how it is screwing up the lives of ordinary deplorables.

Because if the "deep state" had a brain they would have the whole world locked up, instead of stumbling and bumbling from one stupidity to another.

Still, the whole Trump surveillance thing puzzles me. I thought there was supposed to be honor among politicians, as among thieves.

But maybe the current generation of thieves didn't get the message from their seniors.

The Weird Benefit of the NYT "1619 Project"

As you would expect, conservatives have been in the forefront of mocking the New York Times "1619 Project" that proposes that African slavery is the story and the meaning of America.

But I must say that it helped me think a bit more deeply about slavery.

Because it encouraged me to think instead: why should we, in the last two centuries, have been the ones to experience slavery as a scandal, and do something about it?

And it encouraged me to think up a counter-narrative, that we might call the left's "1848 Project" to reinvent slavery as socialism and to create the two biggest slave states in history.

Anyway, now the Wall Street Journal has published a pay-walled opinion piece "The '1619 Project' Gets Schooled," in which it takes the NYT to the wood-shed on the 1619 Project with the help of historians and Trotskyites.

The project's creator, Mikole Hannah-Jones, is proud that it "decenters whiteness" and disdains its critics as "old, white male historians."

It would be funny, if not so serious, that this woman, who has "an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master's in journalism", is so up-front and, dare I say, mindlessly racist.

But, in a way, it is helpful for The New York Times to front such a superficial project, because it makes people like me think about the issue. Why did we, the paragons of "whiteness," abolish slavery?

Was it because of moral superiority of our white patriarchal culture? Was it because of the moral fervor of Christian evangelism in the 18th century? Was it because slavery does not pay, compared to free labor? Was it because the North hated the South and cooked up the slavery issue in the 1850s as a club to beat the South?

Or was it because of popular literature like Frederick Douglass's 1845 autobiography and Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin? Or was it because of black Americans that, according to Hannah-Jones, "fought back alone" against racism?

Whatabout a Brit sailor like William Richardson in A Mariner of England that in 1790 joined a slaver bound for Guinea as Fourth Mate, and spent six months at anchor slowly buying slaves on the Bonny River from the local African chief?

Or whatabout the white slave trade in Circassian beauties from the NE coast of the Black Sea -- sold by their families into slavery -- that were trafficked to harems in the Middle East?

The truth is that, when we construct our historical narratives, whether as a credentialed historian or as a young journalist that "literally knows nothing," we are picking documents to tell a story. Some people want to celebrate the glorious arc of "white" progress; others want to "decenter whiteness." We all pick the items that help us tell the story we want to tell.

My own approach is the notion that slavery does not pay, compared to free labor. So no moral story. Just bottom-line thinking. Just as, in WWI and after, the Germans changed the basic organization of the battle by assigning responsibility downwards from commissioned officers to NCOs because, in the "lethal battlefield" of machine guns and artillery, there was no way for the higher officers to supervise every detail of the battle.

In other words, the world does not change from brilliant strategic thinking. It just reacts to the facts on the ground.

You could have the same argument about labor unions. Some people say that it was unions that raised the wages and benefits of workers; others that it was "productivity" and the simple action of supply and demand for labor. Some people say that it was unions that forced companies to treat their employees like human beings; others that unions make a company so inflexible and uncompetitive that unionized companies just can't survive in the global marketplace.

Hey, whatabout my argument about the welfare state being neo-feudalism? You can argue that the serfs of the old feudal system, abandoned by their lords in the agricultural revolution of the 16th century, voted for a resumption of feudalism in the modern administrative welfare state that tasks the ruling class with looking after the welfare of the workers. So you have the voters of Britain voting for a little more NHS from Boris Johnson rather than a lot more NHS from Jeremy Corbyn. But nobody is proposing to put the responsibility for health care on the shoulders of each individual citizen.

So, is the modern feudalism a step towards slavery? Or what? I doubt if the young journalists of The New York Times would have a clue about that, beyond what they had been carefully taught in our nation's schools and colleges.