Quotulatiousness

February 15, 2023

Refuting The End of History and the Last Man

Filed under: Books, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Freddie deBoer responds to a recent commentary defending the thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man:

… Ned Resnikoff critiques a recent podcast by Hobbes and defends Francis Fukuyama’s concept of “the end of history”. In another case of strange bedfellows, the liberal Resnikoff echoes conservative Richard Hanania in his defense of Fukuyama — echoes not merely in the fact that he defends Fukuyama too, but in many of the specific terms and arguments of Hanania’s defense. And both make the same essential mistake, failing to understand the merciless advance of history and how it ceaselessly grinds up humanity’s feeble attempts at macrohistoric understanding. And, yes, to answer Resnikoff’s complaint, I’ve read the book, though it’s been a long time.

The big problem with The End of History and the Last Man is that history is long, and changes to the human condition are so extreme that the terms we come up with to define that condition are inevitably too contextual and limited to survive the passage of time. We’re forever foolishly deciding that our current condition is the way things will always be. For 300,000 years human beings existed as hunter-gatherers, a vastly longer period of time than we’ve had agriculture and civilization. Indeed, if aliens were to take stock of the basic truth of the human condition, they would likely define us as much by that hunter-gatherer past as our technological present; after all, that was our reality for far longer. Either way – those hunter-gatherers would have assumed that their system wasn’t going to change, couldn’t comprehend it changing, didn’t see it as a system at all, and for 3000 centuries, they would have been right. But things changed.

And for thousands of years, people living at the height of human civilization thought that there was no such thing as an economy without slavery; it’s not just that they had a moral defense of slavery, it’s that they literally could not conceive of the daily functioning of society without slavery. But things changed. For most humans for most of modern history, the idea of dynastic rule and hereditary aristocracy was so intrinsic and universal that few could imagine an alternative. But things changed. And for hundreds of years, people living under feudalism could not conceive of an economy that was not fundamentally based on the division between lord and serf, and in fact typically talked about that arrangement as being literally ordained by God. But things changed. For most of human history, almost no one questioned the inherent and unalterable second-class status of women. Civilization is maybe 12,000 years old; while there’s proto-feminist ideas to be found throughout history, the first wave of organized feminism is generally defined as only a couple hundred years old. It took so long because most saw the subordination of women as a reflection of inherent biological reality. But women lead countries now. You see, things change.

And what Fukuyama and Resnikoff and Hanania etc are telling you is that they’re so wise that they know that “but then things changed” can never happen again. Not at the level of the abstract social system. They have pierced the veil and see a real permanence where humans of the past only ever saw a false one. I find this … unlikely. Resnikoff writes “Maybe you think post-liberalism is coming; it just has yet to be born. I guess that’s possible.” Possible? The entire sweep of human experience tells us that change isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable; not just change at the level of details, but changes to the basic fabric of the system.

The fact of the matter is that, at some point in the future, human life will be so different from what it’s like now, terms like liberal democracy will have no meaning. In 200 years, human beings might be fitted with cybernetic implants in utero by robots and jacked into a virtual reality that we live in permanently, while artificial intelligence takes care of managing the material world. In that virtual reality we experience only a variety of pleasures that are produced through direct stimulation of the nervous system. There is no interaction with other human beings as traditionally conceived. What sense would the term “liberal democracy” even make under those conditions? There are scientifically-plausible futures that completely undermine our basic sense of what it means to operate as human beings. Is one of those worlds going to emerge? I don’t know! But then, Fukuyama doesn’t know either, and yet one of us is making claims of immense certainty about the future of humanity. And for the record, after the future that we can’t imagine comes an even more distant future we can’t conceive of.

People tend to say, but the future you describe is so fanciful, so far off. To which I say, first, human technological change over the last two hundred years dwarfs that of the previous two thousand, so maybe it’s not so far off, and second, this is what you invite when you discuss the teleological endpoint of human progress! You started the conversation! If you define your project as concerning the final evolution of human social systems, you necessarily include the far future and its immense possibilities. Resnikoff says, “the label ‘post-liberalism’ is something of an intellectual IOU” and offers similar complaints that no one’s yet defined what a post-liberal order would look like. But from the standpoint of history, this is a strange criticism. An 11th-century Andalusian shepherd had no conception of liberal democracy, and yet here we are in the 21st century, talking about liberal democracy as “the object of history”. How could his limited understanding of the future constrain the enormous breadth of human possibility? How could ours? To buy “the end of history”, you have to believe that we are now at a place where we can accurately predict the future where millennia of human thinkers could not. And it’s hard to see that as anything other than a kind of chauvinism, arrogance.

Fukuyama and “the end of history” are contingent products of a moment, blips in history, just like me. That’s all any of us gets to be, blips. The challenge is to have humility enough to recognize ourselves as blips. The alternative is acts of historical chauvinism like The End of History.

QotD: The divine right of kings

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The best case for divine right monarchy is the voters’ behavior in a democracy. Unfortunately, the worst case for divine right monarchy is: divine right monarchs.

England’s James I, for instance, was a deeply weird dude. Though he wrote a whole book about his divine right to rule, he kept his weirdness sufficiently in check so as not to alienate his court. Alas, his heir didn’t bother, and we know how that turned out. And so it went with just about any divine right monarch — the more people who actually saw him, the flimsier the theory seemed. History is full of examples of kingdoms “ruled” by insane kings, but not too many of kingdoms thriving when the people knew the king was a lunatic. Feebleminded monarchs are generally kept under lock and key by their courtiers, or they end up Epsteined.

Even democracies once understood this. Pick any 19th century American legislator, for example. As P.J. O’Rourke once said about rock stars, to call one of these guys a drunken, borderline-illiterate pervert just means you’ve read his autobiography. But they knew enough to keep it sufficiently in check around the voters, so that so long as they didn’t actually Chappaquiddick someone, they’d face no repercussions.

Speaking of Chappaquiddick, the Media has always been complicit in the great game of Fool-the-Rubes. They only do it for Democrats now, of course, but that’s the real problem these days: the Media has been doing all this for so long, and so successfully, that they no longer feel the need to bother. Just as Charles I decided to let his freak flag fly because hey, why not, I’m the king, so the Democrat-Media complex went all-in in 2008. You watch these guys — Don Lemon, say, mocking Trump voters as illiterate hicks — and the expression on their face is one of relief. It feels good to finally let it all out, and the more you do it, the better it feels.

Severian, “Rule by Lunatic”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-29.

February 3, 2023

QotD: Democracy

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

They’re all, Democrats and Republicans alike, playing Washington Bingo, which is the Glass Bead Game for retards — nobody really knows what it is or why anyone bothers, but it keeps them occupied in nice cushy offices, with weekends in the Hamptons.

Democracy always devolves into ochlocracy, as some Dead White Male said, but since the last Dead White Male died centuries before Twitter, he didn’t realize that ochlocracy was just a pit stop on the way to kakistocracy.

“Democracy” only works — if, in fact, it does work, which is a very fucking open question — in a stakeholder society. When Madison and the boys pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to each other, they meant all of that literally — Washington could well have died a pauper, Alexander Hamilton ordered his cannon to fire on his own house, and so on. They had skin in the game, which is why they were so public-spirited — if they screwed up, they personally would have to live with the consequences. These days, of course, getting “elected” — or even selected to run for “election” — is a free pass to Easy Street. The rules apply only to the plebs, and only so long — and, insh’allah, the day is soon coming — as we have to pretend to let them “vote” on stuff.

Severian, “The Stakeholder State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-22.

December 13, 2022

Well, the modern Weimarites were getting overdue for another putsch…

Filed under: Germany, Government, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Apparently, we just missed having a new German Reich last week, due to the lack of a few key ingredients, including mass support, weapons, good planning, and competent coup leaders … or maybe the German government just over-reacted to a non-existential threat:

The proclamation of Prussian king Wilhelm I as German Emperor at Versailles, by Anton von Werner. The first two versions were destroyed in the Second World War. This version was commissioned by the Prussian royal family for chancellor Bismarck’s 70th birthday.

The German state oversaw one of its largest anti-terror operations in its modern history last week. Approximately 3,000 police officers arrested 54 suspects in raids carried out on Wednesday morning. Those arrested were members of the Reichsbürger – one of the oddest and most obnoxious movements to have emerged in Germany in recent years. It is alleged that those arrested were conspiring to overthrow the state and install a shadow government headed by an obscure German nobleman.

German chancellor Olaf Scholz was clearly pleased with himself after the raid. He hailed it as an example of Germany’s “defensive democracy” (wehrhafte Demokratie) in action. This refers to the modern German state’s willingness to curtail certain democratic freedoms to protect itself from the far right.

The Reichsbürger are deeply reactionary, anti-democratic and conspiratorial. They claim that the old German Reich, which collapsed at the end of the First World War, was never legally abolished and that modern-day Germany is therefore an illegal construct. They believe Germany’s democracy is a sham, which conceals a secret deep state pulling the strings behind the scenes. In its place, the Reichsbürger want to recreate the Germany of the late 19th century, which includes reinstalling a Kaiser as ruler.

The fact that such a bizarre movement has been growing in size – from around 19,000 supporters in 2019 to an alleged 23,000 in 2022, according to the police – shows us that something is clearly going wrong in Germany. The Reichsbürger have not been growing in a political vacuum. Indeed, they have grown partly as a response to the German government’s authoritarian handling of the Covid pandemic. The Reichsbürger’s black, white and red flags (the colour of the flag of the old pre-1918 German Reich) could often be seen at anti-lockdown demonstrations. This made it all too easy for the pro-lockdown lobby to present any opposition to Covid restrictions as the product of far-right conspiracy theorists.

The Reichsbürger have also been violent at times. During a raid on a Reichsbürger building in 2016, three police officers were injured and one was killed. Earlier this year, one member ran over and seriously injured a policeman with his car. They also have members with military skills. Some of those arrested last week were former German soldiers, including a member of an elite military unit (the KSK).

Yet it is important not to exaggerate the threat the Reichsbürger pose to the German state. Which is what the government deliberately seems to be doing. Interior minister Nancy Faeser spoke of the alleged plotters as a “terrorist threat”, despite the fact those arrested looked more like confused pensioners than hardened insurgents. Indeed, the alleged head of the conspiracy, a 71-year-old member of a largely unknown former noble family, is called “Prince Reuss” (or Prince Henry XIII). A relative of the prince told reporters that, while the “prince” does have nutty ideas and is bitter about his loss of social status, it is hard to imagine him as the ringleader of a conspiracy. At the time of writing, there is also no trace of the huge cache of military hardware that was alleged to be somewhere on the prince’s estate – although some swords, rifles and crossbows have been found.

December 11, 2022

QotD: Democracy

Filed under: Football, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… “democracy” seems to generate a unique kind of idiocy. This too is no unique insight — William F. Buckley meant the same thing when he said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard — but like all obvious things about human nature it’s lethally easy to forget. A politician in a “democracy” is an unholy mix of circus performer and whore. Somehow convinced that the audience’s applause comes from its appreciation of her own superior virtue, not rude biology, she slips further and further into narcissism, never bothering to wonder why, if the house is packed to the rafters every night, she’s still sleeping three to a room while the circus owner has a mansion and rides around in a limo.

Democracy’s founding fictions reinforce this. It’s easy to see yourself as the People’s Tribune, I imagine, if you just look at the numbers. All those people voted for you, which confirms how wonderful you are!

A better analogy is the professional sports team. Lots of people wear the team apparel of the Los Angeles Chargers. You can find lots of online forums passionately devoted to them. Lots of L.A.-area bars are festooned with Chargers’ stuff. The bobbleheads at ESPN talk about the Chargers several times a day. And yet, come game time, the Chargers only get about 32,000 fans at the stadium. Those are the actual voters — the rest is just social media noise. And it’s worse than that, actually. We all know that the vast majority of people who picked up a Chargers’ shirt because it was in the clearance bin, or ordered a drink at a bar with Chargers’ memorabilia on the shelf, would never bother to attend a game. So even people who think of themselves as “Democrats” or “Republicans” barely bother to vote, much less follow “their” team in office. Even the groups that get pandered to the most — old people, veterans, union goofs — don’t turn out in proportionate numbers.

Come election day, the People’s Tribunes are decided by old cranks on loan from the home, a few office drones on their lunch break with nothing better to do, and homeless people lured in with a promise of a short dog and some change.

But since no one without a vast, yawning chasm in her soul would ever submit herself to the indignities of “democracy” in the first place, these newly “elected” fools hie themselves to Washington, where the money boys feed their self-delusion. They read about themselves in the newspapers, see their names on internal party polls, and since none of their “constituents” could pick them out of a police lineup, they learn that the only way to keep the applause coming is by doing what the newspapers and the money boys say.

Severian, “Impeachment Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-19.

December 9, 2022

QotD: Computer models of “the future”

Filed under: Economics, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The problem with all “models of the world”, as the video puts it, is that they ignore two vitally important factors. First, models can only go so deep in terms of the scale of analysis to attempt. You can always add layers — and it is never clear when a layer that is completely unseen at one scale becomes vitally important at another. Predicting higher-order effects from lower scales is often impossible, and it is rarely clear when one can be discarded for another.

Second, the video ignores the fact that human behavior changes in response to circumstance, sometimes in radically unpredictable ways. I might predict that we will hit peak oil (or be extremely wealthy) if I extrapolate various trends. However, as oil becomes scarce, people discover new ways to obtain it or do without it. As people become wealthier, they become less interested in the pursuit of wealth and therefore become poorer. Both of those scenarios, however, assume that humanity will adopt a moral and optimistic stance. If humans become decadent and pessimistic, they might just start wars and end up feeding off the scraps.

So, interestingly, what the future looks like might be as much a function of the music we listen to, the books we read, and the movies we watch when we are young as of the resources that are available.

Note that the solution they propose to our problems is internationalization. The problem with internationalizing everything is that people have no one to appeal to. We are governed by a number of international laws, but when was the last time you voted in an international election? How do you effect change when international policies are not working out correctly? Who do you appeal to?

The importance of nationalism is that there are well-known and generally-accepted procedures for addressing grievances with the ruling class. These international clubs are generally impervious to the appeals (and common sense) of ordinary people and tend to promote virtue-signaling among the wealthy class over actual virtue or solutions to problems.

Jonathan Bartlett, quoted in “1973 Computer Program: The World Will End In 2040”, Mind Matters News, 2019-05-31.

November 29, 2022

In a dangerous and insecure world, the EU appears to feel that the greatest enemy is on the other side of the Atlantic

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander on how the EU’s movers and shakers (i.e., mostly not democratically elected leaders) seem to have decided that their one true enemy is the United States:

If you are an American who lived on the European Continent, specifically Western Europe, you’re very familiar with an exceptionally sharp strain of anti-Americanism that resides in a significant percentage of their ruling elite – an adult version of the middle school mean girls. Though present in all nations to one degree to another, it is especially acute in Germany and France for slightly different reasons but are all working towards the same goal; degrade American influence in Europe.

The best way for this political and corporate anti-Americanism to find a lever of power is through the the trans-national and anti-democratic modern iteration of the European Union – made even more problematic with the departure of Great Britain who once played a balancing role between the Continental powers as she has for centuries.

Why primarily France and Germany? To start with, this is part of the sibling rivalry between the children of Charlemagne for primacy in Europe that has churned Europe over the last thousand years. The Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic kept getting in the way of their return to the struggle.

Their armies under various blood-soaked leaders moved across Iberia to Moscow and back for centuries in order to be THE driver of power in influence on the continent. The European Union, once the “trade association” nose was in the tent, is now seen – fairly – as a mechanism to centralize power so The Smartest People in the Room™ no longer have pesky minor powers and – Buddha forgive – voters getting in their way. Without checks, power only seeks more power for itself. The morphing of the EU is just the latest example.

Not unlike their American counterparts who would like the USA to extract itself from foreign entanglements (NB: as I have written through the years, I am sympathetic/supportive of these efforts), many of the strongest proponents of the EU just want the USA to go home.

The Europeans, while benefiting from the WWII/Cold War leftover presence of the USA, want it to end and the influence that comes with it. If any opportunity to push back against the USA appears, they have their talking points ready to dirty up the reputation and standing of the USA. If that can be done while blaming Eurocrat failures on the USA as well, even better.

You know the Americans, citizens of that mongrel nation whose gene pool is full of religious zealots, failed revolutionaries, slaves, economic refugees, grasping second sons, criminals, and their descendants – spoiled with a continent overflowing with food, water, minerals, forests and open land they don’t even appreciate.

Loud. Fat. Pushy. Americans.

The usual snarled insults cobbled together by smug people who get much of their opinions of the USA by reading The Washington Post or The New York Times. “I know America, I read your newspapers.” That is right after, “I’ve been to America. I spent a week in DC/NYC/Boston/Chicago. I studied a semester at Brown.”

[…]

The smaller European nations don’t trust France and Germany all that much, for good historical reasons. Most of the Europeans in the “new territories” in the east like the USA. They see the Americans as a more reliable guarantee of safety from hostile powers in the East, having a few centuries of experience of the Western European Frankish tribes carving them up for fun and profit – irrespective of local desires. Collectively these nations are not that large in GDP or population – not much more than Italy (for now), but that’s OK. They have the correct geography.

If we shape this relationship correctly, we don’t have to permanently garrison this part of Europe. Poland is already establishing a new paradigm of proper levels of security investment. Once NATO’s eastern front calms down a bit, we can rotate through forces for exercises and training. Perhaps even create some combined training and logistics bases ready to scale up in case of trouble in Mordor. A template we should have put in place in Western Europe decades ago.

Reward positive behavior and let the French and Germans continue their millennium-length struggle – peaceful this time – in the west; keep them frothing in Brussels and Strasbourg while the forward-looking nations try to set up the next thousand years of Western progress in a positive direction.

Perhaps.

November 2, 2022

QotD: Being “the world’s policeman”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Middle East, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The British spent most of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries as the world’s policeman, responsible for keeping the peace, and for maintaining a balance of power. They were usually pilloried by all about them for this role, particularly by up and coming powers who wanted a “place in the sun” — Germany and the United States being the stand-out examples (though there is a lot of whinging from old allies like Russia). For the last half of that period, the British voter was having serious second thoughts about the whole concept.

The United States took on the mantle of world’s policeman in the post-Second World War world. They have spent much of the last 60 years trying to keep the peace, and, interestingly, to maintain the balance of power. (Do not be fooled by the concept of the overwhelming superpower. Britain was a lot closer to being able to take on the rest of the world in the 19th century, when it really could defeat every other navy in the world combined; than the US is now, where it could perhaps face Iran, Russia and India simultaneously, as long as the European Union is friendly. Whoops, forgot China, the Balkans, Palestine, Syria, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and other little blips on the US horizon. Well let’s be honest, no one has ever been able to take on more than a few of the other powers simultaneously. NO one.)

For their troubles, they are usually pilloried by those all about them, particularly by up and coming powers who want their “place in the sun” – the Soviet Union and China being the stand-out examples. (Though there is a lot of whinging from old allies like France). For the last forty years (since Vietnam, and certainly since Gulf War One), there have been signs that the US voter is having serious second thoughts about the whole concept.

Britain was quite reluctant to take over later imperial dependencies, particularly leftover states of defeated Empires like Turkey, such as Iraq and Palestine: but also parts of Africa and Asia “of interest to no bugger”. They were never part of the British ideal of commercial empire, and were almost impossible to govern. They were abandoned as soon as possible.

The United States is currently experiencing the joys of taking over, or being responsible for unwanted bits of empire. Strangely the names Iraq and Palestine are occurring on that list, as well as Afghanistan and possibly other commitments to come. (The US has interfered in these areas far longer than Britain had before she was stuck with them). They cannot be considered part of a logical geopolitical empire (not even for oil conspiracy nuts), and will be abandoned as soon as possible.

The British voter responded to the world wars by wanting out of empire. Now. Some of the states thus “released” were well-developed societies with decent infrastructure and good literacy and rule of law concepts. India, Malta, Ceylon, Bermuda and Singapore spring to mind. Others were abandoned prematurely: without literacy, rule of law, good infrastructure, a developed civil service, practice of voting, or any of the other minor necessities for establishing a democratic state. See any list of African dictatorships.

The US voter is responding to current events by wanting out of the Middle East ASAP. They are intent on abandoning states to “democracy”, regardless of a lack of literacy, rule of law, good infrastructure, a developed civil service, practice of voting, or any of the other minor necessities for establishing a democratic state. Whoops.

Britain suffered from an immense artificial economic high after the Napoleonic war. This left the British economy extremely artificially inflated for eighty years, and still well above its realistic weight in the world for another fifty (and only really brought back to the field by the immense economic losses of two world wars). In the last twenty years Britain has held a more realistic place in the world economy for its population and industrial level (though still relatively inflated by an immense backlog of prestige and sometimes reluctant respect.).

The US suffered from an immense artificial economic high after WWII. This left the US economy artificially inflated for the rest of the century, and still well above its realistic weight in the world to the present. … Sometime in the next few decades, the US will probably return to a more realistic place in the world economy for its population and industrial level. (Minor variables like World War III may make this projection uncertain as to actual timing, but it will happen: simply because the US will not be able to largely sit out most of the next world wars and profiteer from everyone else’s ruin the way she could in the last two).

Nigel Davies, “The Empires of Britain and the United States – Toying with Historical Analogy”, rethinking history, 2009-01-10.

September 19, 2022

QotD: Representative government

Filed under: Government, Law, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If it’s to work at all, representative government has to be representative. That is, it must be consented to by the governed. But not only did we not consent to be ruled this way, we couldn’t. Just to take the most obvious problem: We have no idea who our rulers actually are.

Hawaiian judges are our kakistocracy‘s public face, but all the decisions that matter are made long before the hacks in black get involved. As we know, we Americans commit, on average, three felonies a day. If, when, and how these come to the State’s attention are almost completely random. This is true for any law, actually, and because it is, it’s not really an exaggeration to say that your livelihood, and often your actual freedom, depends on what side of the bed the cop got up on this morning.

If The Authorities notice you when they’re in a good mood, you skate. If The Authorities are in a bad mood, though — tired, hung over, had a fight with the spouse, whatever — you’re screwed. What actually happens to you depends on the lawyers, a.k.a the most incestuous little fraternity on the planet. Whether they choose to prosecute or not, and for what, and what deals they make over a drink or seven determine what happens to you once you get in front of hizzoner … who, of course, is also butt-buddies with all the lawyers who appear in his chambers, since he was one of them not too long ago and they remain his entire social circle.

Who in his right mind could possibly agree to this? No, forget “right mind” — it’s simply not possible for anyone, not even someone as far out on reality’s fringes as the SJWs, to consent to this. Those “people” (in the strict biological sense) think houseplants have human rights, but not even they would agree to have their life’s course determined by two dimbulbs with great hair and ugly neckties cutting deals with each other in a dive bar.

But so long as we fetishize the form of “representative government,” it can’t be otherwise. As folks in Our Thing never tire of pointing out, had The People ever been consulted about our preferences, at any time after 1963, we’d still be living in a White Christian nation with a solid manufacturing base and a minuscule military footprint. If it were possible to throw the bums out, we would’ve thrown out every bum on every ballot since at least Calvin Coolidge. But we can’t throw the bums out, because the process is rigged.

Severian, “Form > Process > Outcome”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-06.

September 4, 2022

Extreme Ultra-MAGA terrorist Trump voters are endangering “our” democracy!!!1!

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Perhaps I exaggerate a tiny bit in my headline … but events here in Clown World metastasize so quickly that parodists and satirists are becoming an endangered species because it’s nearly impossible to come up with more incredibly stupid stuff than the political class do for real:

Over the past couple of weeks, it seems that the Regime has really been ramping up its rhetoric against its political and ideological enemies. In a coordinated rollout, talking heads across the media have been stating that “MAGA Trump voters” are “threats to democracy”, “trying to take away our freedoms”, “stochastic terrorists”, and so forth. This all has been timed to culminate with the pResident himself going on national television to explicitly state that the entire half of the country that didn’t vote for him are mortal enemies of the state. This takes on a somewhat more ominous tone when we remember that just a few days previous, this same pResident essentially threatened to use F-15s to bomb patriotic Americans who believe in the Constitution.

While these could be dismissed as the senile ramblings of a doddering old dementia patient, the thing to keep in mind is that Biden himself is merely a sock puppet. What he says reflects the words put into his mouth by the progressive theatre kids who staff his administration, as well as other elements within the Regime. Indeed, all of the huffinpuffery about how “your hillbilly AR-15 can’t take on tanks and fighter jets hurr durr!!” is basically the sort of thing you’d have heard on Reddit for years. But the fact that official channels are now openly talking about using the military against their own people for mere ideological purposes suggests that there is an acceleration going on in the Left’s subversion of this country.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — if there is to be an open civil war in the USA, it will almost assuredly be instigated and started by the Left. However, it is not one that they are likely to win, for a number of reasons that I will elaborate briefly below. They are ones that I suspect the Regime itself knows, which makes the current trajectory they seem to be setting appear all the more desperate. Common sense would dictate that they should try to keep the repression at just a high enough level to intimidate the citizenry into compliance without actually provoking a broad response, even if not a violent one. Yet, the Left is dynamiting what is left of the social contract because once they’ve got started down this path there’s no stopping.

So briefly, let’s talk about why the Regime would not win a war against Red America, despite the hopes and expectations of thousands of redditards across the country. First and foremost there is the unreliability (from the Regime’s perspective) of the current military. Simply put, most military personnel below the O-4 or O-5 levels are not ideologically indoctrinated into woke progressivism and are unlikely to be willing to wage war on their own countrymen. They’re especially not likely to go along with wokester fever dreams of bombing Red cities into oblivion and turning the heartland into ashes just to stick it to those Trumpsters. So there would be deep fractures, mutinies, fragging incidents galore.

Of course, that’s why the Regime is trying to wokify the military to be more ideologically compatible with the Left. In a sense, for the Left the drastic recruiting shortfall that the military is currently experiencing is a feature, not a bug, since it provides them with the justification to make up the difference by recruiting foreigners with no connexion to the American people (and thus no compunctions about shooting at them). Which then introduces a further competency factor in that when you recruit a third world army, you … have a third world army, so you’re sacrificing competency for reliability. Nevertheless, as it currently stands most enlisted men and lower-level officers are not going to be inclined to incinerate their buddy’s parents for believing in the second amendment.

As Severian posted right after the “Triumph of the Shrill” speech by Biden:

I’d like to address the “they’re going in for the kill” argument, eloquently argued by MBlanc46 and others. I agree, there is exactly as much, if not more, evidence for this thesis then there is for my “they’re panicking” thesis. And whatever else they thought Brandon was doing last night, there’s definitely a “throw down the gauntlet” aspect to it.

The reason I favor “panic” over “going in for the kill” is that as hard as it is to believe, the Left always see themselves as the heroic underdog, struggling against a rigged system. Even when they’re throwing you into boxcars, they’re bewailing the fact — and in what passes for their minds it IS a fact — that you forced them to do it.

They cry out in pain as they strike you, as another demented shitbag collectivist said about a different group in an eerily similar context.

What all this — Biden’s big “My Struggle” speech (hereafter to be known, as Mmack put it, as “the Triumph of the Shrill”), the hiring of a zillion new IRS agents, the works — is designed to do is: provoke a reaction. To put it bluntly, there is no “domestic extremism”. Of course there really are some retards out there doing retard shit, but as we all know, the typical “Klan” meeting is an ATF agent trying to entrap a DEA agent who’s trying to entrap an FBI agent who is trying to entrap his own informant. Hello, fellow patriots!

But they keep failing to do roll-the-tanks-level shit. Which is a problem for the Apparat, because the ATF agent can’t get permission from the DEA to provide enough guns to the FBI agent to really kick things off (not least because he’s going to be foiled by the other undercover FBI agent who’s trying to entrap the other DEA agent and so on).

So they just keep upping the ante, hoping that maybe this time, finally, somebody will do a terrorism.

If they’re confident enough to put Brandon in a Darth Vader suit on national TV, in other words, they long ago passed the point where anyone not crippled by the psychological compulsion to see himself as a victim would’ve said “fuck it, drop the hammer”. We wore diapers on our faces for two fucking years, for Christ’s sake, and shot ourselves up with mystery goop because the same evil little goblin who turned AIDS from an easily containable plague of deviants into a legit public health crisis told us to.

July 30, 2022

Alexis de Tocqueville

Filed under: Books, France, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Paul Sagar reviews a new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz:

Alexis de Tocqueville came perilously close to never existing at all. His parents, married in 1793, spent 10 of their first 18 months of matrimony in jail — arrested for the crime of being aristocrats during the height of the French revolutionary Terror. Tocqueville’s great-grandfather was guillotined in April 1794, after being forced to watch the beheadings of his daughter and grandchildren. His newlywed parents were in the queue, awaiting the same fate, but the fall of Robespierre in July meant they were spared.

Alexis, the third son of the family, would be born in 1805, and go on to write not one, but two, of the most influential works in the history of ideas. His two-volume Democracy in America (published in 1835 and 1840) has been hailed as, variously, the first work of political science, a founding text of sociological analysis, and a landmark in the history of political philosophy.

It remains a touchstone for those attempting to understand both democracy and the United States, as well as post-Revolutionary France (Tocqueville’s animating point of comparison). His later The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856) attempted to locate the long-term causes of the events of 1789, and inaugurated a school of French Revolution historiography that remains alive and influential to this day.

He also enjoyed a moderately successful career as a practising politician, directly involved in France’s tumultuous political upheavals from the 1830s to the early 1850s. Constitutionally frail, and wracked by tuberculosis for the final nine years of his life before dying at just 54, he nonetheless packed a lot in.

As a narrative biography, Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy succeeds tremendously. The details of Tocqueville’s life — and the events he lived through — are rendered with engaging clarity. The detailed reconstruction of Tocqueville’s nine-month trip to America in 1831–32 is especially valuable, shedding a great deal of light on what Tocqueville saw and, crucially, who he spoke to and took his lead from. Zunz does not shy away from dissolving the myth to reveal the man. Sometimes treated as though he were a gimlet-eyed sage who saw through to the very soul of the fledgling United States, Zunz shows instead the extent to which Tocqueville tended to take too much at face value, especially regarding what he was told by less than impartial interlocutors, frequently failing to scratch below the surface on his whirlwind tour.

Thus, for example, he went on to write in Democracy in America that the liberty of the United States meant that secret societies were unknown there, entirely failing to recognise not only the extent of Masonic influence in local politics, but also how objections to Masonic influence were a core feature of contestation. A young man, dazzled by the hustle and bustle of the New World, he tended to see what he wanted to see — or what others hoped he would.

July 29, 2022

QotD: The US Civil War as a “revolt of the elites”

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

They don’t teach it this way in college (for obvious reasons), but the Civil War was a revolt of the Elites. Put polemically, but not unfairly, The American People were offered four choices for President in 1860:

  1. tacitly pro-slavery;
  2. pro-slavery;
  3. fanatically pro-slavery; or
  4. fuck you.

These were embodied by John Bell, Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and Abraham Lincoln, respectively, but the names on the tickets really didn’t matter, because it all boiled down to two options: Some flavor of politics as usual, or fuck you. And here’s the important part: The vast, vast majority of the country voted for politics as usual. “Fuck you” got 39.82% of the vote, which by my math means that 60% of a country that would soon be conducting the largest military mobilization yet seen in the history of warfare wanted things to keep going as they were.

In fact, it’s worse than that. As much as I hate to credit him with anything, Barack Obama was right — He truly was a Lincolnesque figure, in that Lincoln was vague to the point of incoherence about his origins, aims, and platform, too. A vote for Lincoln wasn’t a vote for disunion; it was a thumb in Dixie’s eye, no more. In other words, it was a vote to put the ball in the South’s court — an electoral-college version of the double dog dare. We voted for “none of the above,” pro-slavery people, now whatcha gonna do about it?

We know the answer — they haven’t yet forbidden us from teaching the fact that secession happened sorta-kinda-quasi democratically — but for obvious reasons they don’t teach that the secession conventions were all rigged in favor of the fire-eaters, and even then the motions barely passed. Which, again, means that “politics as usual” was nearly the default position of guys specifically summoned to discuss ending politics as usual. If you want to say that the Civil War was started by about twenty guys nobody’s ever heard of, with names like “Louis T. Wigfall” and “Laurence M. Keitt,” you won’t hear much argument from me.

Severian, “Misunderstanding the Civil War”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-29.

May 15, 2022

QotD: Parliament

Filed under: Britain, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What is the use of Parliament if it is not the place where true statements can be brought before the people? What is the use of sending Members to the House of Commons who say just the popular things of the moment, and merely endeavour to give satisfaction to the Government Whips by cheering loudly every Ministerial platitude, and by walking through the Lobbies oblivious of the criticisms they hear? People talk about our Parliamentary institutions and Parliamentary democracy; but if these are to survive, it will not be because the Constituencies return tame, docile, subservient Members, and try to stamp out every form of independent judgment.

Winston S. Churchill, speech around the time of the Munich crisis, 1938.

April 7, 2022

The EU only cares about democracy as long as the voters make the “correct” choice

Filed under: Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Tom Slater points out the most recent proof that the EU’s principled defence of democracy fades out quickly when the voters don’t vote the way they’re “supposed to”:

Remember the other day when the European Union was pretending to care about sovereignty and democracy? When Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine had supposedly united European elites in their staunch, unflinching belief in a people’s right to determine their own destiny and shape their nation? You’ll be shocked to learn that they didn’t really mean it, at least if their reaction to the Hungarian election is anything to go by.

On Sunday, Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party won a landslide victory. Already the longest-serving EU leader, Orbán is now heading into a fourth consecutive term, with a two-thirds majority in parliament and an increased mandate. United for Hungary – an opposition coalition stretching from ex-communists to ex-fascists – defied the raised expectations of Euro elites and put in a dreadful showing, capped by gaffe-prone leader Péter Márki-Zay failing to win his own constituency race.

In the election, Orbán presented himself as a doughty defender of Hungarian national identity and interests against a meddlesome European Union and international set. Budapest and Brussels have been locked in a years-long battle over alleged “rule of law” breaches and LGBT rights. The EU is currently withholding €7 billion of coronavirus recovery funds from Hungary as part of a bitter legal standoff. In this, Márki-Zay was an all-too-willing foil, arguing that his government would be a “grand prize” for the EU.

In February, the European Court of Justice rejected a challenge by Hungary and Poland, upholding the legality of withholding funds from member states if they fail to adhere to “core values”. It sent a clear message to the Hungarian electorate in the run-up to the election: reject – or at least humble – this troublesome government or else. Now that Hungarians have politely refused to be pushed around, the European Commission has said it will press ahead with the formal mechanism that will deprive Hungary of the funds indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the European liberal media took a break from piously intoning about the defence of democracy in Ukraine to decry the election result in Hungary. Timothy Garton Ash even linked the ballot-box revolt to the barbarism in Bucha. “The Ukrainian horrors are clearly far worse than the Hungarian miseries, but the two are fatefully connected”, he wrote in the Guardian, accusing Orbán of being a Putin stooge. “Europe should now get tough on both the Russian enemy without and the Hungarian enemy within.” A Guardian editorial similarly called for swift EU action against this pesky central European state.

February 10, 2022

QotD: Classical Greek Polis governance

Filed under: Europe, Government, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Before we dive in, I want to give a brief primer on the basics of how nearly all Greek poleis – Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Plataea, Tegea, whatever – are structured, because it’ll help in understanding Sparta. (Reminder: the polis, sometimes called a city-state, is the basic unit of Greek governance – these are all independent micro-states).

The standard ingredients of a Greek polis are an assembly of all adult citizen males (often called an ekklesia, meaning “assembly”), a smaller advisory committee (frequently called a boule), and then a set number of elected officials who carried out the laws of the other two (magistrates). I’ve given the common names for these components, but they often have different names in different poleis.

Those basic units don’t change from a democracy (like Athens) to an oligarchy (like Corinth) or even a tyranny (like Syracuse) – the type of government just reflects the division of power between them, and the method of selection. In a democracy, like Athens, the ekklesia will have most of the power, being able to overrule the boule or the magistrates. Often the members of the boule can come from a wide range of wealth classes or even be randomly selected.

In an oligarchy, power is generally focused in the magistrates – drawn from the upper-crust of society – and a smaller boule, with the ekklesia having much less power to restrain them. Alternately, the ekklesia may be restricted in size to only a wealthy subset of the citizenry. In a tyranny, a single person (the tyrant) is able to gain control of the system, through a mix of demagoguery, charisma and well-placed cronies. Even under a tyranny, the basic three-part system still exists, it is simply subverted and controlled by one person (much like how some modern dictatorships have all of the institutions of a democracy – courts, elections, etc – but all of the power is still in one set of hands and the elections are shams).

I want to note this up front because it is important to recognize that the existence of a popular assembly does not make a Greek polis a democracy, nor does the existence of a powerful magistrate make it a tyranny. As we’ll see, Sparta has an assembly, it is just laughably weak; it also has two very powerful magistrates, but their power is strongly checked. What matters is the division of power between these parts. I also wanted to start here because Sparta follows this basic model, but with some interesting variations. Knowing what the normal model looks like will make it easier to spot the variations that are unique to Sparta.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part V: Spartan Government”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.

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