The Political Wages of COVID

Now that the COVID deaths and hospitalizations are trending down, and Joe Biden is safely in the White House and all the misinformation is being safely "curated" and Donald Trump is reduced to saying wait until next time, what next?

A good safe pair of hands like Victor Davis Hanson says that the Bidens will enjoy a couple years of stimulus growth through 2022 but then watch out.

Maybe. But I think that we are going to see the people that were wasted by the epidemic get really angry, starting this spring and summer.

• Whatabout all the small businessmen that lost their businesses?
• Whatabout the ordinary people that lost their jobs?
• Whatabout the people put on "furlough"?
• Whatbaout the people that have not being paying their mortgages and rent and now must pay the piper?
• Whatabout the "homeless" cast upon the waters as the Skid Row bums were nearly a century ago?
• Whatabout the women that find out that they weren't protected after all?
• Whatabout everybody except upper-class Gentry that are really struggling right now?

And whatabout millions of people deeply damaged that I haven't even listed here because I am too stupid to have thought about them?

Part of the problem is the foolishness of our ruling class, and its inability to think beyond the boundaries of its political world where everything is a question of division and accusation, and every solution is a question of dividing the loot and plunder among the supporters.

See, to make the economy recover after a financial crisis or an epidemic what you do is lower the costs of doing business, with lower marginal tax rates and reduction in regulation -- you know like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. What you do not do is hand out loot to your supporters, as FDR did in the 1930s and Barack Obama did in 2009 and Nancy Pelosi is doing now. Why? Because loot and plunder just impoverishes everyone -- yes, even the beneficiaries who learn the wrong lesson that the name of the game is to be first in line for the handouts.

I imagine that the major items in the fabled $1.9 trillion stimulus is handouts to teachers unions, Democrat-run states and localities, government employee unions, and well-connected corporations. It will be money that will not benefit Americans as a whole. Politely, this sort of governance is called "make-work." And it doesn't work. It didn't work after the Crash of 1929. It didn't work in the inflationary 1970s. It didn't work in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. And it won't work now. Our rulers Have No Idea.

And that is saying nothing about the bigger problems, the wasteland from a century of progressive and lefty dominance and hegemony with its conceits, its crimes, its errors. Of which our gentry rulers Have No Idea.

For some time I have been blogging variously on the Left's Conceits, the Left's Crimes, the Left's Errors. But I can see that I need to boil it down into one itemized list, simply stated first as problem, and then as consequence.

Because I think that the accumulation of lefty detritus, multiplied by the COVID cock-up, is going to be the Big Thing in the next few years.

Allyism, Republicans and Democrats

Yesterday I posted the results of a post-election poll. Republican voters believe that the three most important issues are:

Illegal immigration
Lack of support for the police
High taxes

Whereas Democratic voters believe that the three most important issues are:

Donald Trump's supporters
White nationalism
Systemic racism

You will notice that the concerns of Republican voters are not particularly blared through anyone's bullhorn. I wonder where they get their concerns? FoxNews? Qanon? Far-right websites? Donald Trump's secret decoder ring? Couldn't be from Twitter or from youTube or Facebook because eevil far-right ideas get censored on social media as fast as you can say @jack.

But it is not hard to figure where Democratic voters get their concerns. White nationalism and systemic racism are right now the obsession of the mainstream media and the educated gentry class that runs the media, the universities, the bureaucracy, the non-profits. If you lend half an ear to the gentry liberal class you will probably be persuaded that white supremacy and systemic racism are tearing the country apart.

Let us look at this through the lens of Allyism, understanding the America as "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Because pretty obviously, if you are an Ally, doing activism 24/7 on behalf of oppressed peoples, then it stands to reason that Donald Trump's supporters, white nationalism and systemic racism are the reasons why those oppressed people are oppressed. And they will go right on being oppressed until the power of Donald Trump's supporters are well and truly extinguished at a class on systemic racism where they work or go to school.

How systemic is racism? It's a good question. If a half-black man like Barack Obama could be elected president, how bad can things be? If a part black half Brahmin like Kamala Harris can be elected  vice-president, how bad can things be? If a black like Tim Scott can be elected United States Senator as a Republican from the former Confederate state of South Carolina, how racist can those Trump supporters be? If black church ladies are counting the ballots in cities like Philadelphia, how bad can things be? If just about every ad and commercial has "people of color" in it, how bad can things be? If just about every big corporation is a supporter of Black Lives Matter, how bad can things be? If anyone that utters the pejorative "n-word" gets utterly humiliated, how bad can things be?

Obviously, more research is needed. Not.

You know what I think.

I think that every ruling class needs one of two things, preferably both. It needs an existential peril to battle against. Climate change will do nicely. And it needs someone to blame when things go wrong. Yeah! Sytemic Racism! These issue, I argue, from the basic condition of ancient humans. 

First, it is the job of any ruling class to defend the borders of its realm -- although not so much these days since food-growing land is not as critical as it used to be. The enemy used to be the tribe next door. Then it was the barony next door, then the nation next door, then the Communist threat, then the Islamic threat, and now the threat of climate change. Notice how the threat keeps getting bigger. First a local problem with the chaps next door. Then the nation next door. Then the secular religion next door. Then the future of the planet itself! Wow! We are really getting into the big leagues these days.

Second, rulers need someone to blame when things go inexplicably wrong. Take your pick: the crabby older woman living just out of town; the neighbor woman that you are never gong to speak to again; the evil spirit in the tree that just fell on your house; the wrath of God that sent a hurricane and flooded the plain; "malefactors of great wealth;" big corporations. Or the systemic racists in a conspiracy on the Internet.

Our liberal friends have plumped for two threats on which to justify their rule. The first is the existential peril of climate change. The second is the evil of systemic racism. See, without the need to battle these two threats people might start to ask: "why do we need these guys?"

And, of course, the point isn't whether these are real threats and real evils. The only question is whether the rulers can persuade the ruled that their power is needed to fight the existential perils and evils.

I say that the reason that our ruling class has been upping the amplitude on its claims of peril and evil is because of its accumulated failures and its evident incompetence are raising the unmentionable question: what are these guys good for. Anything? Bueller?

Let's put our liberal friends to the test and inquire into its moral narrative of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Liberal allies have been fighting for almost two centuries to bring justice to the workers. And yet we read that the white working class is "dying of despair." How come? The ruling class has had all the money and all the power in the world to help the working class. If it is dying of despair then something is wrong. Maybe the whole program to help the workers was a mistake? Could the problem be white oppressors? Who would that be other than white educated gentry that style themselves as "allies?"

It was 50 years ago that the United States declared racial and sexual discrimination illegal and then set up racist "affirmative action" and quotas to help formerly marginalized peoples. If that hasn't solved the problem then maybe our rulers have been barking up the wrong tree. Maybe the completely wrong thing to do is to give the rulers more power to track down and destroy the "white oppressors." Hey, maybe the problem is something else. Maybe it's aliens.

Or maybe the whole notion of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Or maybe the whole problem is the fault of liberals that have spent the last 200 years discouraging the immigrants from the city from acquiring middle-class culture and instead has encouraged them to become the serfs and slaves of the educated ruling class, relying on the rulers for benefits and set-asides instead of acquiring skills and culture that help them thrive in the city on their own.

As you know, I think what we are seeing is the self-destruction of the ruling elite of the last century, as a result of its false conceits, its accumulating errors, and its foul crimes.

Because the problem is that your average ruling class just can't bring itself to say: "sorry fellahs, we screwed up. Your turn now." Instead failing rulers always turn up the heat, and beat up the plebs and the peasants that dare to point out their conceits, their errors, and their crimes.

What a pity.

See, Even Democrats Don't Care About Climate Change

You've probably already seen the opinion poll about the top concerns of Republican voters, and, separately, Democratic voters in the aftermath of the 2020 election. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. 

For Republican voters the following are the top three concerns.

Issue	Percent Very Concerned
Illegal Immigration	81%
Lack of support for the police	79%
High taxes	77%

For Democratic voters the following are the top three concerns.

Issue	Percent Very Concerned
Donald Trump's supporters	82%
White nationalism	79%
Systemic racism	77%

Here are the tweets in question:

Fascinating look at the top concerns for Democratic voters: 

https://t.co/i5dP3fe26O

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 24, 2021

 Do you see the difference? GOP voters are interested in "Issues." Democratic voters are interested in "Hate."

Well, you can certainly see that politics works. Our Democratic friends have spent the last five years in a 24/7 effort to terrify their supporters about President Trump. They have called President Trump and his supporters every insult in the book. And then invented some more. And they have succeeded!

Mind you, I can see the logic behind the hatred of President Trump's supporters. 

Suppose those Commoner Trump supporters should get another Republican president elected. And suppose they elect a Republican House and Senate.

Maybe. Just maybe the Republican leaders would enact policies to reduce the sinecures and the pensions and the bureaucratic powers of the educated Gentry class.

Boy, if I were a Gentry liberal voter with a nice gubmint sinecure and an electric car in the driveway and solar power panels on the roof and a #WeBelieve yard-sign in the front yard, I'd be terrified of a GOP president and Congress.

But like I say: when a religious cult or a ruling class discovers that its prophecies are failing it doesn't just fold its tents and wind up the cult or the regime. No. Insread it redoubles its efforts, and gets out the machete and starts whacking away at anything and everything.

Because it cannot be true that our Truth is in fact a lie. There must be Evil Spirits at work. And we will dig them out and exorcise them. See if we don't!

But. How come nobody cares about Climate Change? I thought that was the defining issue of our time. Saving the Planet! Halting Runaway Global Warming! Stopping the Rise of the Oceans!

I guess not so much.

The Problem with Anti-Whiteness

All the usual idiots are coming up with comical indictments of "whiteness." There are several charts about "whiteness" in Edward Ring's American Greatness piece on "The Origin and True Agenda of Anti-Racist Politics." I wrote about it last week. They really are sophomoric.

The problem with "whiteness" as the foundation of all evil in the world is, of course, that those bloody whites are the ones that invented the modern world -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. And everybody else is playing catch-up.

So why did Western Europeans pwn the world from about 1500 to 2000? How did they do it? What was the secret to their success, their Baldrick's Cunning Plan?

It wasn't just one thing; it was everything. Europeans had developed ships that could sail around the world. They had developed financial systems to finance long trading voyages. They had guns. And they had young men that were prepared to go to the ends of the Earth to earn a living.

Now I've been doing a bit of reading about pre-1500 Europe. If you read "The Saxon Chronicles" of Bernard Cornwell you read about a world where the bloody Danes had developed amazing longships which were dandy for raids on the bloody Saxons in England. But the Danes couldn't really think beyond capturing slaves and looting silver and seizing good arable land.

Or there is Britain's Edward II that I am reading about through a biography of his Queen Isabella. You see the beginnings of reliance on Italian bankers. But otherwise kingly life was about juggling earldoms and valuable agricultural estates, and tuning up for the Wars of the Roses in the next century.

But read what this Chinese guy, a "Dr. Wu," said about Europeans at the beginning of David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing published in 2003. Dr. Wu and others had been tasked with accounting "for the success, in fact, the preeminence of the West all over the world."

We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism, and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this.

Somebody tell President Xi about this.

The error that our lefty friends make about "whiteness" is that they cannot think outside of a political context. They seem to imagine a white conspiracy to conquer the world, and to dominate and subjugate all non-whites.

Not at all. For instance, the conquest of the world began with a bit of a cock-up on the exploration front. Christopher Columbus was not trying to discover America in 1492; not at all. He was trying to find a sea route to India. For trading purposes. Guess why they called the native Americans "Indians?"

When the Portuguese started trading with India around the Cape of Good Hope it was to avoid having to pay the high prices for spices from the Arabs. And it is pretty amazing that you could make money on months-long voyages from Europe to India. The Portuguese weren't trying to conquer India. They wanted to trade with India.

But here's the thing. What do you need to organize a round-the-cape trading system with India? You need ships that can do the trip. You need guns to keep the pirates down to a dull roar. And you need capital, to fund the months-long trip. If you ask me, it ain't as easy as gussying up some Critical Race Theory training course in "white fragility" and forcing all the white kiddies to show up, or else.

One fine day the current religious, cultural, political and economic society variously created by peoples out of Western Europe will be superseded by something else. Not a doubt about it. But the superseders will not be CRT academics or activists. I promise you that, on a stack of Das Kapitals.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of mysteries to ponder over.

Why did the Brits and others create the anti-slavery movement in the 18th century? What did they mean by that?

And why did the US write the Civil Rights Acts to give full civil rights to a small minority population of ex-slaves from Africa? What did they mean by that?

See, it's easy to understand our liberal friends today who want to change the world for climate change and beat up racist whites because systemic racism. That's easy. Every ruling class needs to be heroically battling against some existential peril, or against some frightful and hateful enemy, otherwise who needs the bloody ruling class?

But why bother about slavery? Why bother about civil rights? That is the mystery.

Our Liberal Friends Won't Know What Hit Them

Let us interpret the last five years as a continuous desperate attempt by our liberal friends to Stop The World I Wanna Get Off.

Because Trump should not, could not have happened. Not unless the Ruskies did it. Not unless FoxNews and Newsmax and OAN flooded the highways and byways with conspiracy theories and misinformation. Not unless "hate."

It has been helpful to me that several years ago I abandoned my conventional understanding of the world through logic and reason and reality and facts and accepted the German Turn that we don't know what reality is. In "reality" we humans, like the rest of creation, are stumbling and bumbling along in our lives, doing the same-old same-old until, all of a sudden, we nearly get killed by something.

It could be a truck at an intersection that nearly ran us over. It could be a cold spell in Texas that shut down all the wind turbines. It could be an Orange Man Bad that got elected President of the United States. It could be a theory that space and time aren't absolute, but relative.

When an animal or a human gets blindsided it responds in one of four different ways.

1. Nothing to see here, move right along.
2. OMG It's the End of the World!
3. It's Evil Spirits (or racist-sexist-homophobes)
4. Wow, maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I did a long post about this when I was reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning. "Maps of Meaning: What Failure to Respond to Chaos Looks Like." As I interpret Peterson:

You put a rat into a new cage, or introduce a cat into its life and it freezes up in terror. For a while. But then it starts to explore and figure out what the new situation means and where the dangers are, and it starts to relax.

See the difference between a rat and a human? A human has the ability to ignore the new situation and just carry on in the old way. Or, of course, it can imagine that it can destroy the threat. Part of the reason for that is our conscious mind. We humans can construct a theory of the world consciously while your average rat cannot.

Now, I believe that our lefty friends have built up a whole world view on the idea that we can and should live in the good old way of pre-market culture. They have an imagined Garden of Eden in which everyone lives in equality and community, and everything is shared and equal, and everyone is benevolently advised by evolved, educated liberals. They experience living in the market system as living under the tyranny of the market. 

Thus Ellen Meiksins Wood in The Origin of Capitalism argues that in the pre-capitalist world many rural humans lived in a world of "customary use rights... or the right to subsistence." But then along came capitalism and "market as an imperative:" Everyone had to surrender to the dictatorship of the market. Yes, but. In the pre-capitalist world everyone lived under the dictatorship of a feudal lord. If people were enjoying "customary use rights" it was because the feudal lord was too busy playing politics with the other feudal lords to exploit his lands -- and his peasants -- to the full.

Actually, I get it. Wouldn't it be loverly if we could escape the treadmill of the market and live in a simpler,  more companionable way? Yeah! Imagine there's no market, as the Beatles might have said. Thus the whole nostalgic culture of the left's Great Reaction, its yearning for a lost world of perfect community.

(Notice how Jordan B. Peterson deals with this fantasy with his "lobster" narrative. Animals don't live in equality; they live in hierarchies, and the reason for hierarchies is that they reduce the need for violence.)

All this is fine. Our liberal friends managed to make the Trump Effect go away by... Well, we are not allowed to say this, but mainly by skewing the system, by censorship in the media, by mail-in voting and I know not what.

But I think that the worst is yet to come. Sorry liberals.

Whatabout the anger of the small businessmen and women screwed by the COVID lockdowns? Whatabout the folk that have given up and gone homeless? Whatabout the folk that have stopped paying rent, and now have to face making up the arrears (estimated at $70 billion nationwide) or eviction? Whatabout the people on the receiving end of the current anti-white witch-hunt in our schools and corporations? Whatabout the rage of people confronting $4 a gallon gasoline? Whatabout the rage of people in blue states that find out that they have been screwed, and that the red states that reopened early made the right decision.

Let's set up the bleachers, because it's going to be quite a show.

Moths Attracted to the Flame of Power

In American Greatness Edward Ring is spinning a tale of conspiracy, of the globalist billionaires willing the hell of Critical Race Theory upon us, with "The Origin and True Agenda of 'Anti-Racist' Politics."

Well, first of all, I don't think that really "anyone" is leading the Woke religion. Ring notes that the left's funding is coming from lefty billionaires and corporations.

It is coming from global corporations and leftist billionaires. The intent is to destroy the sense of shared identity that defines America. By doing this they will eliminate unified opposition to their agenda, which is to remake America into a mere economic unit where the vast majority of residents are of limited means and dependent on government entitlements, the middle class is wiped out, and the upper class exists to serve an elite oligarchy.

Well, I don't think the lefty billionaires and global corporations are that smart. I don't think they have a power plan of that depth and sophistication.

For instance, the corporations. They are just playing the angles. They know that their pots of gold are an eternal temptation to all governments and politicians, for politics has forever been a game of loot and plunder. So they are pal-ing up with the activists in the hope that they will be eaten last.

Then the lefty billionaires. I don't think of the @jacks and the Zucks as dark malevolent forces. They are just picking up the Zeitgest and going along for the ride. That's what humans do. There are only a couple of prophets in any era that redefine the meaning of life for everyone. Everyone else goes along to get along.

Now I believe that the religion -- Wokism if you like -- is a foolish and false religion. But it answers the call of 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[.]

Doesn't that describe our lefty friends to a "T"? There cannot just be different groups with different genetic and cultural inheritances optimized for life in different parts of the world. There must be a fault, the fault of racism.

And really, we are not just talking about primitive religion. All religion is trying to deal with the problem of suffering, and all religion tends towards the notion that someone is at fault. In religion this fault is assigned to evil spirits or to Satan. In Communism the fault is assigned to the bourgeoisie. In New Deal politics the fault is assigned to the "big corporations." In politics, of course, the fault is assigned to the out group, the hated enemy. So, of course, the practitioners of "anti-racism" have as a hated enemy the "white oppressor."

As I say in my maxims: "politics is division."

Then there is the other thing, issuing out of my maxim: "the only warrant for government power is existential peril."

If you are a ruling class courtier or a billionaire, you can probably find your "meaning of life" by battling some existential peril, because battling an existential peril requires more power to government and the ruling class. The current peril du jour is climate change. It really is  magnificent. It is something you can't really measure, except through ruling-class-financed computer models. And it requires immense new powers for the ruling class and for their bribed apologists in the corporations. And unless we act now...

But I think that the salient question of our age is that the old instincts of defending the patch of land from marauders -- or alternatively attacking the neighbors and looting them -- doesn't work any more.

And that is due to a simple reason. In the old days the best patch of land for growing food equaled wealth and life. Everyone had an interest in stealing the best patch of land from its current owner. If you succeeded, you were rich and he was poor: Yay! If you failed, well, better luck next time.

But that is not how things work any more. The best thing now is for everyone to stay on their patch of land and make stuff and trade it. If you loot some guy's property you don't really make yourself richer; instead you have removed his contribution to the common wealth and made everyone poorer.

But, we are still programmed the other way, that loot and plunder benefits me if I loot my neighbor before he loots me. And we are still programmed to believe that if anything bad happens it has to be the result of malevolence.

Hey liberals, I think the next outbreak of malevolence will be the ordinary middle-class folks devastated by the Year of Lockdown. Old folks like me are looking at the booming stock market; gentry liberals are enjoying issuing rules and regulations. The poor are enjoying being able to stop paying rent.

But when it is all over, the people in the middle, that took in in the solar plexus, will be looking for someone to blame, and I don't think that the MSM and social media will succeed in pinning the whole thing on Trump and on "white oppressors."

Just sayin'.

Yes, What Should We Do About Public Education?

The problem with government, all government, is that it comes down to loot and plunder. What supporters of government want is free stuff, whether they are Viking raiders or today's "oppressed peoples and allies." The oppressed peoples just want handouts, the allies want government grants to support their activism -- to help the oppressed peoples, dontcha know.

And the same goes for public education. What may have seemed like a good idea 150 years ago, Horace Mann, is now just another special interest group. And since gubmint employees are allowed to form labor unions, politicians are scared stiff of the women teachers.

Notice, that when Florida Gov. DeSantis called for schools to reopen he didn't criticize "teachers" or "teachers unions," but "education unions and special interests." I wonder what he meant by that?

But the question is: do we need gubmint schools at all? Read this, from the MIT Technology Review by Nicholos Negroponte about an experiment in Ethiopia with computer tablets in villages where the children "had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them[.]"

OLPC [One Laptop Per Child] workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Do you see the point here? If you can hack Android to re-enable the camera, you are literate. And you did it, all on your own, with the other kids in the village.

Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different.  We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

Remember, these are kids that were completely illiterate. Although, I suppose, if they opened the boxes, powered up the tablets, they musta heard some weird rumors about tablets and computers and stuff.

So, just what exactly is it that "our teachers" are doing for us these days?

Now I'll bet that there are some drawbacks to the tablet thingy. I'll bet that the village bullies and the kids of the village Big Man get first dibs at the tablets, and the poor kids in the village get to suck. Oh yeah. All kinds of possibilities. But the point is that it didn't take teachers, didn't take gubmint, didn't take experts. The kids took those tablets and made themselves literate.

So what do we do about education?

First of all three doses of reality:

1. All kids want to do social media, texting. You need basic literacy for that, even if you are a gangbanger. So every kid is going to get literate enough for that.
2. Most kids learn by doing.
3. Most kids want to get out in the world.

But the education system is designed by the educated Gentry for the kind of education that the educated Gentry wants for itself. And that is directed towards the credentialed, literate, top-down world that the educated Gentry lives.

Most people learn by doing. They get a job and figure: hey, if I learned this skill I could get a better job. Do they really benefit from an academic education? Remember colleges were originally designed to train state-church priests and future rulers. Today they have been adapted to train deep-state functionaries and ruling-class activists.

Certainly, gubmint schools permit parents to drop kids off at school while they do other stuff during the day. But, for that we spend a trillion dollars a year in the US?

I gotta say, I really don't know what happens next in education. I just know that the current system is rotten to the core.