Author: VD

WANTS to burn it down?

What do they think happened on November 8th? I would say that we are well on the way toward burning American politics as we knew it to the ground, as the ongoing conservative freak-out over the Alt-Right’s rise, as most recently signified by Steve Bannon’s assignation as Chief White House Strategist.

The Alt-Right wants to burn American politics to the ground.

The Alt-Right most immediately opposes conservatism, as Youth for Western Civilization founder Kevin Deanna explained in his Taki’s Magazine and AlternativeRight.com piece titled “The Impossibility of Conservatism.” The Alt-Right contains a who’s-who of right-wing voices that have been “purged” from the conservative movement by William F. Buckley and National Review, like Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire, and Alt-Right leaders like Vox Day described the movement in an interview as “the heirs to those like the John Birch Society who were read out of the conservative movement.” Steve Bannon, who refashioned the website of conservative icon Andrew Breitbart into “the platform for the Alt-Right,” has encouraged activists to “turn on the hate” and “burn this bitch down.”

But while conservatism is its most immediate target, the Alt-Right seeks to destroy a far older, more central American idea referenced frequently by Ronald Reagan and dating back beyond Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America to John Winthrop’s “City On A Hill” sermon: America as a proposition nation.

As John Red Eagle and I chronicled in detail in Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America, conservatism has not only failed, it was always doomed to eventual failure by virtue of its very nature. It was an attitude and a defensive posture, not a coherent ideology or an identity, and it lacked positive objectives, so it never had any hope of resisting the relentless ideological onslaught of the Left.

And the concept of America as a proposition nation is not only historically false, it is logically and empirically untrue. It’s trivially easy to demonstrate with a number of different logical syllogisms. For example:

  1. X agrees with, and subscribes to, the proposition that defines America.
  2. X is not an American citizen.
  3. Therefore, X’s American citizenship does not rely upon the proposition.
  4. Y disagrees with, and rejects, the proposition that defines America.
  5. Y is an American citizen.
  6. Therefore, Y’s American citizenship does not rely upon the proposition.
  7. Neither an American’s citizenship, nor a non-citizen’s lack of citizenship depends upon his acceptance, or rejection, of the proposition.
  8. Therefore America is not a proposition nation.

Notice that this all-important proposition is never actually defined. The proposition is hinted at, alluded to, and various names are dropped, but the proposition itself remains nebulous. It’s not a coincidence that this lack of definition is precisely the same as the way the Left fails to define what is, and what is not, politically correct, or morally right, because in all three cases, there is a void at the center that allows the non-definer to play the role as subjective judge rather than permit any objective observer to do so on the basis of a specific, identifiable definition.

There is no proposition. There is no such thing as a nation based on a proposition. And there is no such thing as a nation based on a nonexistent proposition. All the concept of “the proposition nation” was intended to do was to destroy the actual, material, cultural, Christian, ethnic American nation on behalf of the second-wave immigrants to the United States, who did not belong to the nation, but wanted to be able to claim that they did.

On a tangential note, the author of The Nine Laws, Ivan Throne, did an interview entitled Your Future Under the God-Emperor with Troublesome Radio.

Identity politics

Like war, it only takes one side to practice identity politics for them to become the operational rules of the game. The reason the Left is reacting with such fear and outrage to the election of the God-Emperor Ascendant is because they understand that the breaking of the so-called Blue Wall and the shift of the white woman vote to the Republican Party means that a majority of whites now effectively subscribe to the same identity politics to which Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, Jews, Muslims, and Africans all subscribe.

The Trump administration need pay no more heed to the anti-White identity interests than the Obama administration paid to the White identity interests. In fact, it should not, because Donald Trump’s second term depends upon continuing to ride the transformation of the Republican Party into the White Party.

It is very hard for those with strong ideological principles to accept this transformation. It was, and is, difficult for me to do so. But the fact, the logic, and the observable reality is that you can no more successfully appeal to ideology in an age of identity politics than you can successfully argue dialectic before an audience limited to rhetoric.

Steve Keen on the fallacy of free trade

Brainstormers will remember Steve Keen, the brilliant iconoclast who is breaking new ground in the field of economics. In Forbes, he points out that Trump’s heretical anti-globalism is actually more economically sound than the fallacy of Ricardian free trade:

Globalization and Free Trade are good.

This belief is shared by almost all politicians in both parties, and it’s an article of faith for the economics profession.

You are right to reject it.

It’s a fallacy based on a fantasy, and it has been ever since David Ricardo dreamed up the idea of “Comparative Advantage and the Gains from Trade” two centuries ago. The best way to prove that (apart from looking at the bitter experience of the millions of once-were-factory-workers who voted for you) is to apply real-world scepticism to the original argument in favour of free trade.

When Ricardo wrote, England was the global economic superpower, and Portugal was its main rival. Ricardo was in favour of abolishing the “Corn Laws” that placed tariffs on grain imported from Europe. His opponents argued that, if the tariffs were abolished, Portugal would undercut England in all industries. Ricardo came up with an example that accepted that Portugal was better at producing everything than England was, but still “proved” that free trade was better than protection for both countries.

He assumed that England would need 100 workers to produce a given amount of cloth in one year, and 120 workers to produce a given amount of wine in a year. Portugal could produce the same amount of cloth in a year with just 90 workers, and the same amount of wine in a year with just 80 workers. So Portugal (read China for today) was absolutely better at producing everything than England (read the USA), but relatively better at producing wine.

Ricardo argued that free trade could nonetheless benefit both countries, if England devoted all of its workers to producing cloth, while Portugal turned all its workers into wine makers, because the total amount of wine and cloth produced by the two countries would be higher. They could trade the two commodities, and everyone would be better off than if trade didn’t occur. So specialization allows “gains from trade”. Drop the tariff barriers, and everyone will win—even the inhabitants of the weaker economy.

The argument might sound convincing, until you ask a simple question: “So how do you turn a wine press into a spinning jenny?”. Answer? You don’t.

Ricardo’s model assumed that you could produce wine or cloth with only labour, but of course you can’t. You need machines as well, and machinery is specific to each industry. The essential machinery for making wine can’t be used to make anything else, if its use becomes unprofitable. It is either scrapped, sold at a large loss, or shipped overseas. Ditto a spinning jenny, or a steel mill: if making steel becomes unprofitable, the capital involved in its production is effectively destroyed.

Ricardo ignored this little detail in his example, pretending that goods could be produced using labour alone. Later economists have made Ricardo’s example more complicated, and included the need to have machines as well as labour to make output. But they have been even worse than Ricardo, because they pretend that you can shift a machine (they call it “capital”) from one industry to another without loss.

That is simply nonsense.

The theory ignores the reality that, when foreign competition undercuts the profitability of a domestic industry, the capital in it can’t be “transformed” into an equal amount of capital in another industry. Sometimes it’s sold at a fire-sale price, often to overseas buyers. Most of the time, as ex-steel-mill workers throughout the Midwest know, it simply turns to rust.

Ricardo’s little shell and pea trick is therefore like most conventional economic theory: it’s neat, plausible, and wrong. It’s the product of armchair thinking by people who never put foot in the factories that their economic theories turned into rust buckets.

So the gains from trade for everyone and for every country that could supposedly be shared more fairly simply aren’t there in the first place. Specialization is a con job—but one that the Washington elite fell for (to its benefit, of course). Rather than making a country better off, specialization makes it worse off, with scrapped machinery that’s no longer useful for anything, and with less ways to invent new industries from which growth actually comes.

Excellent real-world research by Harvard University’s “Atlas of Economic Complexity” has found diversity, not specialization, is the “magic ingredient” that actually generates growth. Successful countries have a diversified set of industries, and they grow more rapidly than more specialized economies because they can invent new industries by melding existing ones.

So, globalization isn’t merely a societally destructive infringement on national sovereignties, and entirely dependent on substituting debt for economic growth, it builds huge economic inefficiencies into the global trade system.

If you’re still a free trader after everything you’ve seen, after everything you’ve read from Ian Fletcher, Steve Keen, and me, it is apparent that at this point, you’re simply clinging to economic dogma you don’t really understand.

Oh, please, YES!

The Washington Post suggests Milo Yiannopoulos may be under consideration for the role of Press Secretary in the Trump administration:

Washington Post: Trump Could Install MILO As Press Secretary If He ‘Really Wants To Shake Things Up’ Guess who Trump’s other Breitbart guest was? If he really wants to shake things up, Trump could install Yiannopoulos — the self-described “most fabulous supervillain on the internet” — as his press secretary. Just imagine briefings with this guy.

We’ll know Milo is being seriously considered for the job by the stricken white faces on the Secret Service agents responsible for doing his background check. As one gentleman commented on Twitter, “they’re going to need a bigger binder.”

Personally, I’d like to see William S. Lind for Secretary of Education.

President-elect Donald Trump announced on Sunday that Stephen K. Bannon will be the White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor while Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus will serve as White House Chief of Staff.

“Bannon and Priebus will continue the effective leadership team they formed during the campaign, working as equal partners to transform the federal government, making it much more efficient, effective and productive,” stated a press release from Trump’s transition team on Sunday. “Bannon and Priebus will also work together with Vice President-elect Mike Pence to help lead the transition process in the run-up to Inauguration Day.”

Not a bad start. Priebus is GOPe, but he played it fair and merits being given a chance to prove himself. Bannon upsets the cucks and liberals, and having an Alt-Right Chief Strategist is about as optimal as it gets. The Left is already freaking out.

“Trump names white nationalist figure ‘Chief Strategist to the President'”

Sounds pretty damned good, doesn’t it. Speaking as a Red nationalist, why shouldn’t whites have a nation too?

Throw out the OED!

Nigerian negresses will henceforth define all words in the English language. You can throw out your dictionaries now.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has no time for white men who want to redefine what racism is. The Nigerian feminist author appeared on BBC Newsnight on Friday with R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., founder and editor-in-chief of the conservative magazine The American Spectator.

Discussing Donald Trump’s campaign, Tyrell argued with host Emily Maitlis’ comment that Trump’s language has been racist.

“Thats not true, he hasn’t been racist,” Tyrell said, but Adichie wasn’t having it.

“I’m sorry, but as a white man, you don’t get to define what racism is, you really don’t,” she said. “You don’t get to sit there and say he hasn’t been racist when objectively he has.”

Redefine? The negress obviously has no idea what the white man’s definition has been for decades. But the amazing thing is that she’s not even the most clueless one there. You simply must watch the video, as when Tyrell asks the woman from the BBC why the media always focuses on the KKK instead of the Knights of Columbus, her response simply has to be seen to be believed.

Now remember, these are the people who consider themselves to be the intellectual elite. Never forget this whenever you’re dealing with the media. They are uneducated midwits with less intellectual curiosity than the average alley cat.

Past and future identity politics

The SJW Narratives on race and society, as well as the Democrats’ Rainbow Coalition, are ultimately doomed to failure because they are all predicated on a nonexistent People of Color vs Whites scenario that does not, and has never, existed:

Decades before Brown v. Board of Education ― the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that found “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” ― a Chinese family from rural Mississippi brought its own legal challenge to Southern school segregation before the Supreme Court.

In 1924, grade school students Martha and Berda Lum were barred from attending their local, all-white school because of their status as people of color. The family sued the school in an unprecedented but little-known lawsuit that made its way to the nation’s highest court.

A new book, Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South, documents the family’s struggle for educational equality.

Although the Lums sought to fight racism against Asian-Americans and provide their daughters with access to a quality education, their lawsuit was itself rooted in pronounced anti-black racism. The Lum family brought the challenge because they didn’t want society to see their daughters as being in the same category as black students, or force them to attend the same institutions as black children.

The girls’ mother, Katherine, “knew that such a classification would have instantly disenfranchised her family,” the book says. “For Katherine to send her children to the colored school would be to yield to the trustees, to agree with them that her daughters were not worthy of the privileges afforded to whites.”

However, there is also an important lesson for the more cuckish conservatives here. Neither the various Asian identity groups nor Jews are actually on the side of Whites. They may have more characteristics in common with Whites than other identity groups, but they also have their own identities and their own tribal interests, which contradict White interests every bit as dramatically as other identity groups, and as the Lum case demonstrates, they will never hesitate to cast aside White interests in pursuit of their own.

Ironically, the Alt-White’s fixation on Jews is not only somewhat misplaced, it actually understates the extent of the challenge facing Whites. The historical fact is that the Jews are not, and were never, unique in being an identity group capable of nepotistically exploiting a high-trust, high-altruism majority for their own benefit, they just happened to be the only group present in Western societies in sufficient numbers to do so. White Americans, and to a lesser extent, several European nations, as well as the Jews themselves, are currently in the process of discovering that various Asian identity groups, particularly the Han Chinese, are not only every bit as accomplished in this regard, but are considerably more numerous, and quite possibly more ruthless.

Various Asian groups are already driving out Jews from the elite universities originally created by and for whites, and the Chinese are now invading the Jewish power center of Hollywood in force. This is not an accident nor is it the usual corporate train wreck. The next step will be for Asians to begin replacing Jews in the media and in the Democratic Party elite; the Chinese-Hispanic political alliance is likely to be even more formidable than the historic Jewish-Black alliance.

This is why the Alt-Right is not going to fade away, but will gradually become more influential in the White Party, which is now the proper name for the Republican Party. The Alt-Right’s conceptual models, which are based on identity rather than ideology, not only describe past and current events much more accurately than the mainstream alternatives, but also provide much more accurate predictive models.

Even his hindsight isn’t 20/20

Nate Silver takes great pride in being less completely wrong than some of the other pollsters, in an article entitled “Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else (Except the LA TIMES/USC and IBD/TIPP Tracking, Who, Unlike Us, Actually Got It Right). NB: I added the bit in parentheses. At no point does Silver mention any polling organization, or individual, who did correctly predict the election results.

Based on what most of us would have thought possible a year or two ago, the election of Donald Trump was one of the most shocking events in American political history. But it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise based on the polls — at least if you were reading FiveThirtyEight. Given the historical accuracy of polling and where each candidate’s support was distributed, the polls showed a race that was both fairly close and highly uncertain.

This isn’t just a case of hindsight bias. It’s tricky to decide what tone to take in an article like this one — after all, we had Hillary Clinton favored. But one of the reasons to build a model — perhaps the most important reason — is to measure uncertainty and to account for risk. If polling were perfect, you wouldn’t need to do this. And we took weeks of abuse from people who thought we overrated Trump’s chances. For most of the presidential campaign, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast gave Trump much better odds than other polling-based models. Our final forecast, issued early Tuesday evening, had Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.1 By comparison, other models tracked by The New York Times put Trump’s odds at: 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent and less than 1 percent. And betting markets put Trump’s chances at just 18 percent at midnight on Tuesday, when Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, cast its votes.

So why did our model — using basically the same data as everyone else — show such a different result? We’ve covered this question before, but it’s interesting to do so in light of the actual election results. We think the outcome — and particularly the fact that Trump won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote — validates important features of our approach.

Translation:

  1. I’m a Gamma and I can’t admit that I’m wrong without explaining how being wrong only proves that I was right to do what I did. 
  2. Almost anyone else means anyone not KellyAnne Conway, Scott Adams, Nassim Taleb, Mike Cernovich, Vox Day, LA Times, IBD, or TPP Tracking.
  3. A 29 percent chance of winning is practically a near certainty. I mean, sure, you might have interpreted that to mean that Hillary was probably going to win, but that just shows how you don’t understand polling as well as I do. The fact of the matter is that we were closer to getting it right than everyone else who didn’t get it right.
  4. And by “29 percent”, I of course mean 28.6 percent.
  5. And by “such a different result” what I mean is “exactly the same result as everyone else, except those other guys who actually got it right and whom I will carefully refrain from mentioning.”

We strongly disagree with the idea that there was a massive polling error. Instead, there was a modest polling error, well in line with historical polling errors, but even a modest error was enough to provide for plenty of paths to victory for Trump. We think people should have been better prepared for it. There was widespread complacency about Clinton’s chances in a way that wasn’t justified by a careful analysis of the data and the uncertainties surrounding it.

Translation:

  1. We strongly disagree with the idea that I could have been wrong. The Secret King is never wrong, by definition! You just don’t understand how the appearance of being wrong only shows that I was mostly right, and that just goes to show how much smarter I am than you. Still undefeated!
  2. Next time, don’t pay any attention to what I say before the election. Just wait until it is over, and then I’ll explain what I meant and how that proves I am right. Always.

Remember, at one point, Nate Silver and 538 gave Hillary Clinton an 87.3 percent chance of victory as recently as October 19. The good news for Trump, the Alt-Right, and even the Republicans is that these hapless morons are too proud to admit or learn from their mistakes, which means they are going to screw up just as badly, or perhaps even worse, in future elections.

#IOVOTONO

On December 4th, Italians have a beautiful chance to sink another knife into the bleeding, wriggling corpse-to-be of the European Union:

Italy referendum result could send shockwaves through markets and DESTROY Europe

THE EU’s days might be numbered with Italy about to vote on a referendum which could send shockwaves across the continent. Analysts believe the outcome of the ballot on constitutional reform could have massive global implications. With many European leaders already coming under severe pressure from anti-EU parties ahead of elections next year the significance of the Italian result is huge.

Defeat for Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi could lead to even deeper social turmoil in countries already struggling with austerity, immigration problems and a growing contempt for Brussels.

Ana Thaker, a market economist at PhillipCapital said the Italian result could be as “significant as Brexit”.
She said: “Britain’s decision to leave the European Union was the first sign of trouble in the European Union. If Italy decides to leave, it is confirmation that the union is in trouble and could spark a long-term market rout which European equities would suffer from the most.”

This is the next major political front against globalism. Show your support for Italy, for Matteo Salvini, and for the Lega Nord. The hashtag is #IOVOTONO

“The Alt-Right Hails its God-Emperor”

Like the rest of the mainstream media, Andrew Marantz of the New Yorker is trying to figure out what on Earth is going on in the aftermath of the God-Emperor’s ascension:

The alt-right is united less by ideology than by sensibility; a hallmark of that sensibility is a careful attunement to social norms, and a perverse delight in desecrating them. This is easy to do on the Internet, where anyone can say anything. Mike Cernovich, whom I profiled last month, became a prominent vessel of pro-Trump populism by saying unconscionable things on Twitter. “This election was a contest between P.C. culture and free-speech culture,” he told me the day after Trump’s victory. “Most people know what it’s like for some smug, élite asshole to tell them, ‘You can’t say that, it’s racist, it’s bad.’ Well, a vote for Trump meant, ‘Fuck you, you don’t get to tell me what to say.’ ” Cernovich, who grew up working-class in rural Illinois, visited his home town in February. He said, “My parents voted for Obama, but they told me, ‘If it’s Trump versus Hillary, we’ll go with him. He gets us. He talks like us.’ Since then, I never doubted that he’d be President.”

The morning after the election, an influential alt-right blogger who goes by Vox Day wrote, “Donald Trump has a lot to do . . . It is the Alt-Right’s job to move the Overton Window and give him conceptual room to work.” Day and his peers have been doing this job for months. They have flooded the Internet with offensive images and words—cartoon frogs emblazoned with swastikas, theories of racial hierarchy—and then ridiculed anyone who had the temerity to be offended. “Racism and sexism are a) human beliefs, and, b) as legitimately held as any other belief,” Day told me in a recent e-mail. No picture is shocking. No idea is bad. Who gets to define bad, anyway? “Remember that rhetoric is the art of emotional manipulation,” Day added. Last week, on his blog, Day wrote, “There is no more Republican vs. Democrat. It is now whites vs. non-whites and white quislings.”

It’s rather amusing to see a political reporter utilizing rhetoric – and less crudely and ineptly than the average journalist – in order to denounce the use of rhetoric in a political campaign. (It’s even funnier to see a presumably secular left-liberal affecting horror over postmodern relativist norms.) You’ll notice that because he didn’t get anything sufficiently strong enough to provoke the desired emotional reaction from his exchange of emails with me, he had to resort to digging up something from Twitter that would serve his rhetorical purpose.

That’s legitimate, of course. I’m certainly not complaining about it, and indeed, I only spoke to him because Mike and I both observed that he gave Mike a reasonably fair shake in the bio-piece he’d written about Mike. And what a fantastic title; it’s truly better than I would ever have imagined. But then, consider what he chose to use from what I gave him, and then think about how he chose to present it. It should be illuminating for those of you who have read SJWAL. As I did not ask for permission to quote his emails, you’ll have to make do with my end of the exchange.


EMAIL ONE

The Alt-Right has a not-insignificant element with #GamerGate experience. While there were more left-wingers in #GamerGate than right-wingers, we all learned how to rapidly blunt the effect of even mass media attacks by dozens of journalists operating in collusion. So, once we saw the mainstream media utilizing the same tactics to attempt to disqualify and discredit Donald Trump that we had seen used against us, we knew that our conceptual shock tactics would be effective against them too. I would say most of the memelords set to work after Super Tuesday, when it became apparent that Trump could win, not only the Republican primary, but the election.


I can’t speak for anyone else, but I would say that we knew people were responding positively to concepts previously ruled out of bounds by the mainstream media by March 2016.


I don’t think the election was about expression at all. I think it represented a significant portion of the white majority shifting from the ideology politics it has historically practiced to the identity politics that the various minorities have been practicing for decades. That’s why policies and ideologies, from abortion to expression to war with Russia, all proved largely irrelevant to both sides.


The next move is to defeat the counterproductive attempt by the cuckservatives and moderates to ease up on the rhetoric. But really, we don’t have to do anything, since the angry, riotous reaction by disappointed Hillary supporters will see to that.

EMAIL TWO

1. Chiefly, agreeing with and amplifying their accusations while demonstrating their collusion, ineffectiveness, and dishonesty.


2. When readers stopped responding emotionally to the accusations.


3. They rendered the various accusations toothless.


4. I doubt they’ll need to change much. What worked with the game journos worked even better with the mainstream media. The media seldom does anything beyond double down, again and again. We openly mock that. I mean, look at how they’re still all screaming RACIST SEXIST blah blah blah. It’s like the Robin Williams sketch. “Stop! Or I shall say ‘stop’ again!”


At this point, who doesn’t know that everyone at the NYT, the WaPo, and ABCNNBCBS believes Trump is an evil racist sexist Nazi badthinker? But if they change their tactics, we’ll adjust.


5. I’m not a memelord. While I’ve been known to meme from time to time, I’m not that dank. I would say “organic harmony” is a more accurate description than “open collaboration”. We don’t do organization or hierarchy. No one is in charge. If someone lands on something that works, or that everyone thinks is funny, others pick it up.

EMAIL THREE

Racism and sexism are a) human beliefs, and, b) as legitimately held as any other belief. Regardless of whether they are wrong or not, regardless of whether they are justified or not, it is no one else’s business what you happen to believe. Given that the definitions of both racism and sexism are in constant flux, that isn’t a question that can be meaningfully answered.


I believe racism is the belief in the intrinsic inferiority of other races. Perhaps your definition is more expansive, more relative, or more nebulous. Hence the difficulty in saying what “actual racism” or “actual sexism” looks like.


But regardless of how you or I would define the terms, no word, image, or meme can be racist or sexist in itself, because an inanimate symbol is not a belief, and furthermore, is an unreliable indicator of any individual’s actual belief, including the original creator’s.


For example, I am an American Indian, but I can certainly create a funny anti-Indian meme about redskins if it happens to suit my purpose. To insist that because X has created, let alone posted, meme Y, you can accurately ascertain X’s genuine beliefs, is to commit a basic category error. Remember that rhetoric is the art of emotional manipulation, and that nothing manipulates the emotions of the US left like racist themes.

What Marantz presented was a fair, but very limited snapshot of an intrinsically complicated subject. And he presented it in a rhetorical manner meant to emotionally manipulate the reader towards disapproval of Trump supporters, the Alt-Right, Chuck Johnson, Mike Cernovich, and me. That’s fine, that’s in line with his publication’s objectives and his responsibilities, and neither Mike nor I was unaware of it. He certainly appears to have remembered the second half of my last sentence, the half he did not quote.

Anyhow, I suspect it will be useful for some of you to see how the media process plays out when seen from the other side of the story.