The Idea of Neutrality in Politics

We all know that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. Or, as Curtis Yarvin now puts it:

When we say that the essential political distinction is the distinction between friend and enemy, we say that the military and the political are one.

As he says: "The political war is a cold war." And the military war is a hot one. Then, he adds:

One of my strongest beliefs is that everyone should turn their military emotions off—whether or not they are at war.

Why? Because "the test of humanity is the power to overcome animal emotion." As compared to chimps. In other words, when you are in a conflict you need to think, tactically and strategically. And that means keeping your inner beserker in check.

Except when you are actually fighting in an actual battle.

You may remember, in reading The Last Kingdom books by Bernard Cornwell, our hero Uhtred of Bebbanburg always gets into a battle rage during a battle. Everything blacks out except the fight. But the rest of the time he is strategizing.

Thus there is "neutrality." It helps humans escape the eternal conflict of the friend vs. enemy distinction.

Neutrality made it possible to address the outsider civilly, as neither friend nor enemy, but united under law—owing the due duties and respects due to a stranger under law. Neutrality is the source of all true peace—universal friendship is universal conquest. 

Neutrality. That's the point of law, of prices, of the market, of contracts, of buyers and sellers. You don't think of other people as enemies -- or as friends. That, of course, is one of the reasons why our lefty friends have a problem with law and the market and capitalism. It takes all the emotion and the fun out of things. And if you believe in politics as the road to justice -- really believe in politics -- then every human on this planet is either a friend or an enemy. They are either an ally of the oppressed peoples or a white oppressor enemy. One or the other.

But under neutrality, if a guy kills your wife, you don't make him and all his family an enemy. You just call the cops.

And it makes complete sense that our lefty friends get emotional about everything, whether it's the monstrosity of reversing Roe v. Wade or insisting that trans women are biological males or else. The whole point of logic and reason is to carve out a region in interpersonal dynamics that is free of emotion. The whole point of politics is to classify everyone as friend and enemy. You are either with us or against us. Everyone is either one or the other.

Another thing that Yarvin stresses is that in politics and war today your enemy is not really another human being. The enemy is the system or the regime: a machine, if you like. There is no point in killing people in a rage; they are just servants of the regime, part of the system. So that

the humans who operate this machine may be (and I believe are) entirely innocent and even well-meaning. They are just cogs in it. On the day after it breaks, they will be harmless—like former Stasi officers.

Or former Nazi apparatchiks. Believe me, the day after Germany falls in 1945, just about every Nazi gets it: he realizes he was just a cog in the machine. An he gave the best years of his life away, for nothing.

The point is that all the Sturm und Drang of the liberal race war and gender war and trans war is fake, fake, fake. There is no "essential conflict between black and white, red and blue, rich and poor, male and female, etc, etc, etc."

All these cold civil wars are epiphenomena of a broken political system.

Our liberal friends have to gussy up their identity politics, their armory of pejoratives, because their system is failing, broken. And they can't believe it. And so they regress to the primitive, as described by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

And the fault cannot lie with us. No. In politics the fault always lies with the other guy, the enemy. 

Ain't that the truth about our liberal friends. Bless their hearts.

Washington State Hybrid Electric Car Ferries

My state senator here in the 36th District in north Seattle sent me a nice four-page newsletter cataloguing all the magnificent ways in which he is spending our money.

Sen. Reuven Carlyle (D-36) is leaving the State Senate aftar 14 years of service in the state capital of Olympia, and what he's most proud of is "passing this year's $16.9 billion Move Ahead Washingotn -- a climate-friendly investment package that I believe moves our transportation system into the 21st century."

As the greenest transportation package in state history, Move Ahead Washington invests more than $4.2 billion in transit, bike and pedestrian projects. Notable projects include $836 million to build four new hybrid-electric ferries, $2.4 billion for fish culverts to preserve and protect salmon, $3 billion for road preservation and maintenance, and $3 billion for public transportation.

And not a cent for new road construction.

And guess what! There's $440 million for affordable housing, including $300 million for Rapid Housing Acquisition to house "unsheltered individuals as quickly as possible."

"Four new hybrid-electric ferries?"

I wondered about the hybrid-electric ferries -- meaning car ferries. What does it mean? Apparently Washington State plans to get its ferry system to emissions-free by 2050. Right now, the system burns 19 million tons of diesel fuel every year. Based on this promotional video, it seems that hybrid-electric ferry means:

• Charging ferries at ferry terminals between trips.
• "Using your diesels really just as a backup."
• "You can get over 20 percent improvement or reduction in fuel consumption"
• Terminal electric hookup and charging will be really safe.
• In Pacific Northwest a good proportion of power comes from hydro and wind.
• "25 minutes to charge the boat."
• "Cost effective, efficient, and responsible."
• "There's a lot of really cool technical challenges that we'll have to deal with."
• "Hybridizing the largest ferry fleet in the United States is a really monumental task."

You can see the red flags: 20 minutes to charge gigantic batteries? Cost effective, efficient, and responsible? Cool technical challenges?

You know sports fans, if they had Elon Musk in charge, I might believe they could do it. But a bunch of gubmint bureaucrats? And gubmit contractors? Dealing successfully with "a lot of really cool technical challenges?"

Senator Reuven Carlyle. I gotta bridge to sell you. Real cheap.

And of course it's all going to be more cost-effective, etc. And benefit the fish.

You know what I think. I think that Washington State is going to throw a lot of money down the plug hole for nothing in return.

And the idea of a gubmint ferry system doing a successful project to turn its diesel-electric car ferries into plug-in hybrid Priuses? Please! The current Jumbo Mk II diesel ferries each use four diesel engines developing 16,000 horsepower or 12 MW. So you realize what kind of battery is needed to power a ferry like this on a 30 minute ride?

And then we'll have the worst transportation system in the country, and Gov. Inslee (D-WA), or whoever inherits his lifetime position, will blame the failure on "systemic racism" and "right-wing extremism." Because every problem in this world is the result of Republican malevolence.

Oh. And whatabout when the first battery explodes from all the fast charging. Because the batteries will, no doubt, be under the car deck. At least with hybrid buses, the batteries are on the roof.

This is just an example of the problem with the climate change grift. It encourages government to embark on foolish, conceited, useless projects that will be the modern equivalent of the Soviet Union's White Sea Canal, of which La Wik says:

The canal runs 227 km (141 mi), partially along several canalized rivers and Lake Vygozero. As of 2008, it carries only light traffic of between ten and forty boats per day. Its economic advantages are limited by its minimal depth of 3.5 m (11.5 ft)... inadequate for most sea-going vessels.

We will say nothing about the 25,000 worker deaths during the building of the White Sea Canal. At least nobody will die on the hybrid-electric ferry project. Until the first battery explodes.

Buffalo Massacre: Warning to Liberals

The liberal response to the Buffalo massacre -- a white guy killing 8 blacks and others at a supermarket -- is to blame "white supremacy and violent extremism." Well, of course President Biden would say that. That's the standard liberal line on all interracial conflict: The Other Guys Did It.

But I am here to say: No, liberals, You Did It. Your "allyship" politics, your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion politics, your blame-everything-on-the-whites politics. That's what did it.

Hello liberals. Here's a bit of Bible study for you.

"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." -- Hosea 8:7.

See, liberals, it is a bit cute to say that the perp subscribed to a "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory when not 20 years ago every Democrat was devouring The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. That book confidently predicted a Democratic majority in America courtesy of immigration plus the young, women, and the educated.

I would say that the difference between immigration as a deep dark replacement conspiracy and a noble and just policy to open America to immigrants is not that big.

And what is an ordinary young man struggling to take his place in the world supposed to think when Democrats oppose any attempt to limit immigration?

I mean, the whole point of labor unions is the limit competition from low-wage non-union scabs. So it was OK for union workers to restrict entry to their workplace, but not OK to restrict immigrant entry to America? Explain.

Now I notice that New York Governor Hochul is telling us that the shooting "was committed by a racist snake who came from under the rocks lifted up in 2016."

And Buffalo, NY

Mayor Byron Brown (D) argued that “False information, hateful information,” and “attempts to indoctrinate people in different forms of hate and violence on the Internet and on the airwaves of this nation should just absolutely be banned.”

Of course. Anyone that disbelieves the liberal narrative on race is a "racist snake" and there oughta be a law to silence the racist-sexist-homophobic practitioners of "false information" and "hateful information." 

 But, as I say following Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and Curtis Yarvin, "there is no politics without an enemy."

Anyone and everyone in politics is defending "us" against "them," the enemy. So of course the politicians are coming out and telling us the fear the enemy.

Used to be that the enemy was the bourgeoisie. Then the capitalists. Then the patriarchy. Then the Southern Jim Crow racists. Then the white supremacists. Then the white oppressors. Now the Ultra MAGAs.

But of course. There must be an enemy.

Let's analyze the problem with the notion of "allyship." La Wik.

"Allyship" is an English-language neologism used in contemporary social justice activism to describe efforts by members of a privileged in-group, to advance the interests of marginalized groups[.]

Further:

Its usage has grown especially common in political activism and organizational rhetoric since the murder of George Floyd and the beginning of the international George Floyd protests in May 2020[.]

But suppose that the "privileged in-group" that is practicing Allyship is not in fact advancing "the interests of marginalized groups" but in fact Making Thing Worse, in part by subordinating rising lower-class groups to the leadership of a "privileged in-group" that does not have their best interests at heart, and in part by enraging ordinary Commoners without any particular privilege who are stigmatized as "white oppressors."

The point is: how would we know? How would we know if the oppressed groups really are more oppressed that ordinary white working-class chumps? Experts and fact-checkers say that George Floyd did not die of fentanyl poisoning. But would the experts and fact-checkers have said that if George Floyd was white. Would they even have cared enough to publish an opinion?

See, in my view, the first thing that a wise ruling class does is recognize that, almost certainly, its power and its policy is creating injustice in the land. Not because the ruling class is evil, but because any government action from taxes to spending programs to regulation is almost bound to have unanticipated consequences that hurt ordinary people.

So if I were in the ruling class I would be saying: wow: there sure are a lot of conspiracy theories on immigration these days. I wonder why?

Instead, our current ruling class says that anyone that disagrees with them is a racist-sexist-homophobe and ought to be silenced for committing "disinformation" and "misinformation."

Sorry ruling class. This ain't gonna end well. Not for you, and probably not for America.

Mourning "Neoliberalism"

Did you know that

The neoliberal order that triumphed on a global scale in the Nineties and 2000s aspired to the free movement of goods, capital, people, and information throughout the world.

Apreed? I'd say: sorta. Gary Gerstle, the Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, says that "international merchandise trade" peaked in 2008. Anyway, he says,

The Great Recession, and the widening disparity between rich and poor that followed, shattered the belief that a global world of free trade was bringing prosperity to all.

Yes yes. Quite so.

But now, what with COVID and Ukraine, it looks like things aren't going to get better.

Establishing outposts of free-market capitalism in countries such as Russia and China, it was hoped, would compel the regimes of those nations to liberalise: to institute the rule of law (if only to protect property and contracts), to embrace a free press and free elections, and maybe even to embrace democracy itself. Open markets, it was hoped, would produce open societies.

But now it looks like

Globalisation has strengthened authoritarianism and illiberalism, not weakened them. We may be moving into a world that is not open, flat or harmonious, but fractured and divided into rival geopolitical blocs: Russia at the centre of one, China, Europe, and America at the centre of the others. 

And so on. For there have been flaws in the regime of neoliberalism:

a toleration of too great a level of economic and social inequality; a reluctance to recognise and assist those who have suffered economically; and a flow of political power away from national legislatures and toward international organisations, private and public. 

All this educated-class conceit and piffle got me to thinking. What really went wrong with "neoliberalism?"

Honestly, I don't know. Partly because I'm not sure what neoliberalism is really supposed to be. Because "everyone" uses it as a punching bag. Who exactly are supposed to be the "neoliberals?" It ain't me; it ain't thee. Must be that fellow behind the tree.

Here's an idea. Neoliberalism has died of its internal contradictions. That's what we students -- but not followers -- of Marx would say.

On the one hand neoliberalism suffers from the conceit of its practitioners --whoever they are -- that they are noble disinterested lords of freedom and justice. On the contrary, I would say that, for the most part, the educated ruling class is merely just another ruling class that has developed a political formula that celebrates itself, bribes its supporters with other peoples' money, and then decides what is best for the rest of the world. Because it is special.

Bottom line is that it uses our money to pay off its supporters, whether they are global corporations, NGOs, lower class subordinates, or Lawfare activists.

So, while the neoliberal order has a magnificent opinion of its magnificence and the justice of its rule, the reality is that, as with all humans, it makes mistakes. It is tied by its need to service its supporters. It cannot admit when it makes a mistake.

And, of course, there is the little problem of my reductive Three Peoples theory that instructs us that different people want a different world. Creative people want a glorious stage on which to strut and fret and exhibit their creative magnificence. Ordinary Responsibles want a fairly predictable world in which to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules. Subordinates want a world in which they are taken care of in return for their loyalty to their overlords.

Lord only knows what happens next with Russia and China. I'd say, at least, that we were doing better under Trump who played diplomatic games with them, alternating carrots and sticks with respect to international trade and property rights and tariffs and whatnot, and keeping them on the back foot while not actually going to war. 

Hey, it seems to me that the current regime has provoked a war over Ukraine by goading Russia with threats of getting Ukraine into NATO. And today Ukraine might as well be in NATO anyway. The NATO powers are acting as though their job is to defend Ukraine from Russia. As if it were actually in NATO like Poland or Hungary.

If the neoliberal era was supposed to be the 1990s and 2000s, then maybe we can learn from the previous decade, when the US was led by Ronald Reagan and the UK was led by Margaret Thatcher. 

Of course anyone who was anyone sneered at Reagan and Thatcher: the Amiable Dunce and Thatcher the Snatcher. What they did, if you have forgotten, was fix the national economies of the US and the UK after the economic stupidity of the 1960s and the 1970s that had led, by the end of the 1970s, to "stagflation."

That set the stage for the so-called neoliberals to do -- well what, exactly? Mostly strut and fret their hour upon the stage and making pompous announcements and wasting the dividend from the 1980s.

And golly geewillikins, after the glorious two decades of neoliberalism, whatever it was, now we are back to stagflation. How come, geniuses?

I have an idea. Why don't you neoliberal geniuses just Go Away for a while. Come back in ten years when we in the basket of deplorables have fixed the leaks and repaired the engine and got the ship of state back on track.

Then the peoples of the US and the UK and the EU will probably let you come back and mess everything up again. Just for fun.

Is the Nuclear Family to Blame?

 Over at UnHerd.com they have an essay by conservative philosopher Yoram Hazony that's condensed from his new book Conservatism: A Rediscovery.

Hazony argues that the root of our problem is the post-World War II "nuclear family" where the man goes out to work, the wife is a "housewife" stuck at home, and the kids go to school until age 18 when they themselves head out to more school or work until they form a new nuclear family. And in this world "grandparents and other family relations [are]... impossibly distant."

[T]he household is no longer the location of a common business enterprise, of devotion to God and the study of Scripture, of a direct responsibility for the education of the young, of a direct responsibility for honouring and caring for the old, and of significant responsibilities for the establishment and growth of the community and congregation[.]

So why wonder that everything is falling apart?

What's needed is to restore something of the multigenerational family, Hazoni writes.

[Maybe under COVID many] have had their first glimpse of what the family was like when it was a strong political institution, in which generations worked together to create a permanent community, very much resembling a little tribe or nation.

Or is Hazony yearning for a return to an Eden that never was?

My feeling about modern society is that it "just growed." When Hazony writes about the post World War II

world of detached suburban homes connected to distant places of employment and schools by trains, automobiles, and buses [with] a newly rationalised conception of what a family is

I think it is a mistake to think of it as being rationalized. I think that it just happened from millions of decisions of ordinary people including the Levitts that found lots of people willing and eager to move into Levittowns just out of town from big cities like New York.

For instance, in these days we have people building and buying bigger and bigger houses, with childless couples wanting to live in 3,000 to 4,000 sq.ft. homes. What's the point? Well, humans seem to like living in a spacious dwelling. And the more spacious the better.

People like to be connected to grandparents, and grandparents like to be near their children and grandchildren. But humans also don't like other family members interfering and telling them what to do. On balance, it seems like a lot of people have made a decision to live at a certain distance from their extended family. But why? Who knows?

Maybe we humans would be better off living in multigenerational households. But first of all we have to discover that for ourselves, and develop religion and culture that nurtures such a society. And in any society, some people make decisions that benefit them and theirs, and other people make decisions that harm themselves and others. Which happens after the event looking back at a life well-spent, or a life ill-spent.

And what do we do with the drunken sailor that seems determined to mess up his life and everyone else's?

It ain't gonna happen through politics. 

What if This is 1929 All Over Again

Back in 1929, and 1930, and 1931, and 1932, in the Great Depression, a bunch of banks failed every year. Peaking in 3,000 banks failing in 1932. And the Republicans just stood around and did nothing. Even with Andrew Mellon, banker, as Secretary of the Treasury, they did nothing. Mellon, whose father started the Mellon bank as T. Mellon & Co., was used to financial wipeouts, and learned from his father in the Long Depression that started in 1873 that you just ride these things out and make sure that your bank doesn't go under.

Of course, both the Long Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s were both, in my view, a consequence of the deflation that followed the "resumption" of the Gold Standard after an inflationary war. Apparently the high-and-mighty in 1930 weren't reading Walter Bagehot and his commentary on the 1870s financial crash in Lombard Street. In which the central bank is the "lender of last resort" and prevents a collapse of credit. Oh well.

But now we seem to be in a market rout and the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates in a rather tardy response to the money printing of the last two COVID years.

And we have the Biden administration executing on the ruling-class faith that we are all going to die of climate change unless we stop using fossil fuels.

Back in the 1930s the American people sent the Republicans packing and elected New York princeling Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a very Democrat Congress. Of course, they were fools that mucked around with the economy for eight years as it continued to wallow in depression, and only got the economy back on track by preparing for a nice little world war.

Will history repeat itself, with Democrats flopping around as the economy goes to hell, as Republicans did at the start of the Great Depression? And will Republicans take Congress in a mega-midterm, as the Democrats did in 1930. And will a Republican sweep all before him in 2024 as FDR did in 1932.

We Don't Know. 

But I do think that the Democrats have a problem. We saw the problem in the early years of the Obama administration when its stimulus package was mainly devoted to shoveling money at Democratic constituencies and not getting the economy back on track.

And now the Democrats think that the proper economic policy after the COVID stoppage is to shovel money at climate change. Of course they do, because apart from anything else, it will benefit educated Democratic voters.

I do not think it likely that our Democratic friends will wake up one day and decide that their climate policies are an economic and political disaster. Humans, and especially progressives, are not like that. Even when their religious cult leads them into the wilderness they still believe, and they believe what their leaders tell them, that the fault is all those evil monsters.

But ordinary people and ordinary voters just want the economy to work, and if the Democrats can't or won't make it work then the voters will decide it is Time For A Change, and elect the other guys.

And say what you will about dumb Republicans, they do believe that the number one job of a national government is to get the economy on track so ordinary people -- that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules -- can wive and thrive in this land we call America.

When M2 increases by 40 percent in Two Years...

 I just thought that I would check on the M2 money supply over at the St. Louis Fed's FRED database. Here's what I found.

On March 2, 2020 M2 was $15,493 billion. On March 8, 2021, M2 was $19,727 billion. On February 28, 2022, M2 was $21,712.

So in the year from the beginning of COVID to the start of the Biden administration M2 went up by 27 percent. In Year One of Biden M2 went up 9 percent.

So, President Biden and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and all the ships at sea. What do you think will happen to prices in the wake of all that?

Just to give a little perspective, in March 2010, M2 was $8,599 billion. So M2 expanded by about 6 percent a year during the 2010s.

A decade of M2 increasing by about 6 percent a year gave us 2 percent inflation. What do you think that a year of 27 percent increase in M2 followed by a year of 9 percent increase in M2 will do to inflation?

That's 40 percent increase in money supply in two years.

I'd say we are looking at a couple of years of double-digit inflation.

Oh well. No big deal. Back to normal in a couple of years, no doubt.

Or not.