Cold War 2.0

The strategists of Clown World have belatedly realized that the neocons are not only lunatics, but rank amateurs when it comes to assessing military capabilities and are attempting to establish some sort of Cold War-style detente with China before the asymmetric warfare of the last 25 years goes hot. A 100-page report offers some principles and initiatives conceived to replace the outmoded idea that the US military can simply enforce the will of its masters with regards to the Middle Kingdom. (PDF)

Several broad principles can guide efforts to stabilize intense rivalries

  • Each side accepts that some degree of modus vivendi must necessarily be part of the relationship.
  • Each side accepts the essential political legitimacy of the other.
  • In specific issue areas, especially those disputed by the two sides, each side works to develop sets of shared rules, norms, institutions, and other tools that create lasting conditions of a stable modus vivendi within that domain over a specific period (such as three to five years).
  • Each side practices restraint in the development of capabilities explicitly designed to undermine the deterrent and defensive capabilities of the other in ways that would create an existential risk to its homeland.
  • Each side accepts some essential list of characteristics of a shared vision of organizing principles for world politics that can provide at least a baseline for an agreed status quo.
  • There are mechanisms and institutions in place — from long-term personal ties to physical communication links to agreed norms and rules of engagement for crises and risky situations — that help provide a moderating or return-to-stable-equilibrium function.

Six broad-based initiatives can help moderate the intensity of the U.S.-China rivalry

  • Clarify U.S. objectives in the rivalry with language that explicitly rejects absolute versions of victory and accepts the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.
  • Reestablish several trusted lines of communication between senior officials.
  • Improve crisis-management practices, links, and agreements between the two sides.
  • Seek specific new agreements — a combination of formal public accords and private understandings — to limit the U.S.-China cyber competition.
  • Declare mutual acceptance of strategic nuclear deterrence and a willingness to forswear technologies and doctrines that would place the other side’s nuclear deterrent at risk.
  • Seek modest cooperative ventures on issues of shared interest or humanitarian concern.

I think it is at least 15 years too late for any sort of meaningful rapprochement between China and the Clown World West, because the Chinese now understand what we have also learned in the interim: there is an ancient and malevolent evil that is not limited by human reason or timeframes that is the motivating force behind Clown World. Any compromise with it will eventually result in submission and destruction.

I am not the only one who is skeptical. Simplicius, too, has serious doubts about the ability of the Western states to change their course, as well as the probability that the Chinese will be convinced to alter their own.

It’s clear that RAND is trying desperately to make US policymakers abandon their obsolete and blinkered world view centered on the idea that any challenger must by its nature represent the selfsame kind of hegemonic exceptionalism cultivated by the US itself for over a century. The US views the entire world as a threat in the same light that a thief mistrusts all those around him—it is past guilt sublimated into national suspicion and Machiavellian subversiveness.

The US, being the pernicious by-blow of the late British Empire, has inherited all the hawkish trappings of its former parent. RAND here attempts to ween the US political culture away from this perpetually adversarial and hostile approach to foreign diplomacy because, as it has become apparent, the people ‘behind the scenes’ have slowly recognized not that confrontation with China will lead to some kind of global war, but rather the much barer reality that the US simply isn’t what it once was, and does not have the sheer overwhelming capability to bully the world’s foremost ascendant power. Thus, this RAND call to action is not—as they would have us believe—some kind of de-escalatory peacenik measure, but rather a desperate attempt to stave off the US from a historically fatal humiliation and geopolitical defeat at the hands of China.

I tend to agree that this attempt at establishing a new detente is nothing more than the desperate flailings of a failing power to avoid its now-inevitable decline and fall.

DISCUSS ON SG

Atheism is Autistic Midwittery

It’s always amusing to see atheists make their rhetorical argumentum ad mentum by appealing to the fact that atheists have higher average intelligence than religious believers. This is where the coinage of the term “midwit” has been useful, because it allows people to easily through the irrelevance of this appeal to a nonexistent, and frankly ludicrious, asserted authority, such as this particular denizen of /pol/.

People with low IQ have PROFOUNDLY STRONG common sense because their brain can’t process complex and fancy ways of thinking. People with high IQs are smart enough to understand complex ideas but see thru the athiest psyop and recognize it as the most midwit position possible. Atheism is literally an entire mindset revolving around DESPERATELY needing people to think you are smart because you ARE smarter than the average but nothing too much above it, creating the world inferiority complex and need to pretend to be smart. Whereas the genius, loves looking stupid and thinks it’s funny when a midwit thinks they’re smarter than them for holding the mindset given to them by MSNBC.

He’s responding to the atheists who are confused by the report that most of the most intelligent people in the world not only believe in God, but are self-professed Christians. Which, of course, is because it is impossible for the average midwit to balance the following facts, all of which are true.

  • Atheists have a higher average intelligence than religious believers.
  • Africans have a lower average intelligence than Europeans or Asians.
  • The 10 countries with the highest percentage of self-identified Christians are in Africa.
  • The man with the highest reported IQ declares himself to be a Christian.
  • PZ Myers was the only New Atheist with an IQ high enough to even get into Mensa.
  • There are 11.4x more 2D+ IQ Christians than atheists.

Interestingly enough, science officially supports my hypothesis that atheism is merely one aspect of autism, as both published studies of which I am aware have failed to falsify the link between a personal profession of atheism and scoring significantly higher on various measures of “Asperger’s” and autism.

Combined with what we know about atheists having slightly higher average intelligence but being underrepresented among the high-IQ population, we can logically conclude that atheism is little more than a common characteristic of autistic midwits.

Speaking of atheists, I didn’t realize that the relative silence of PZ Myers was the result of him being banished by the atheist organizations around the world about ten years ago due to his extremist, violent rhetoric. I never paid much attention to him, and just assumed that he was dead or something.

Atheist Ireland promotes atheism, reason and ethical secularism. Our policies are based on a respect for human rights, upon which we can build a just society based on natural ethical values. We meet with and lobby the Irish government, Irish parliamentary meetings, the media, and international human rights regulatory bodies such as the UN Human Rights Committee, the Council of Europe, and the OSCE. We are proud to work nationally with other human rights and social justice groups, and globally with colleagues in Atheist Alliance International, and the International Campaign Against Blasphemy Laws.

Our shared work in all of these areas, at national and international level, is important for the development of an ethical secular world. This work is undermined by rhetoric that associates atheist and secular advocacy with hateful, violent and defamatory speech. Such rhetoric is also unjust to the individual people who it targets.

Atheist Ireland has previously given PZ Myers public platforms in Ireland, both at the World Atheist Convention in 2011, and at our international conference in 2013 on Empowering Women Through Secularism. We now apologise for doing this. We believe his behaviour is unjust to individuals, increases prejudice against atheists, and is harmful to the promotion of an ethical society based on empathy, fairness, justice and integrity.

I have to admit, I find this excommunication from atheism to be both ironic and extremely amusing in light of PZ’s historical attempts, however improbable they might have been, to place himself in a superior moral and ethical position to religious believers. And remember, of all the New Atheists, he was the smart one!

We really need to consider doing a leatherbound edition of THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST with a retrospective chapter chronicling the decline and fall of the New Atheists.

DISCUSS ON SG

Carriers to the Caribbean

Well, at least one carrier, anyhow:

The Pentagon plans to send the Navy’s most advanced aircraft carrier to the Caribbean, marking a major escalation of the Trump administration’s military campaign to target drug smugglers and threaten governments in Latin America. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group, which is currently deployed in the Mediterranean, to the Caribbean, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Friday, bringing dozens more fighter and surveillance aircraft, along with other Navy warships that accompany a carrier.

The further away it is from Russia or China, the better. It would be good if the USA would withdraw all of its military forces from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and concentrate on its own sphere of influence while it still has one.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Consequences of Stupidity

Watching the Vikings implode against a mediocre Chargers team last night would have been painful if I was still capable of feeling anything in that regard. Fortunately, we children of the late, great Bud Grant all have ice in the place where our hearts should be.

The Vikings are in a bind at quarterback.

And they deserve zero sympathy for the dilemma because it is of their own making. This is, so far, a botched situation in which the Vikings sabotaged the Vikings.

The Vikings, you see, could have any of three other quarterbacks starting for them right now and all of them – Sam Darnold, Daniel Jones and Aaron Rodgers – are playing very well elsewhere.

All of them wanted to play this season for the Vikings.

All of them.

I’m absolutely fine with letting Sam Darnold move on to the Seahawks. He’s a good quarterback, but he’s not a great one and he hit his ceiling last year. His price-to-value ratio was just too high. I think, and I thought at the time, that letting an extremely affordable Daniel Jones go instead of telling him that the quarterback job was closed and no competition would be permitted was not only reprehensibly stupid, but indicative of a fundamental problem with whomever was responsible for making that decision.

It was a classic Smart Boy mistake in which no deviation from the plan can be tolerated, a mistake which reliably leads to failure. If I were the Vikings owner, I would fire the individual responsible, because it is a mindset that is very, very unlikely to ever succeed in a world of variables and probabilities.

The Jones mistake was compounded by the Rodgers mistake; who cares if the new star-to-be has to wait a second year before getting his shot, especially when he’s now missed 22 out of the 24 games in his short and thus-far unimpressive career. Rodgers sat for three years himself and Jordan Love sat for three years behind him. Both observably benefitted from their long launch ramps.

The signing of Carson Wentz as a theoretical backup completed the trifecta of stupidity. His decision-making is observably too slow at the NFL level. Sure, the offensive line is terrible, but that means you know you cannot wait to throw the ball! Even an average NFL quarterback would avoid at least half of his sacks and interceptions. And if you know you need two quarterbacks, then why aren’t you signing Jones in the first place?

Now, perhaps JJ McCarthy will show up next week as the second coming of Tom Brady and lead the Vikes to a rout of the Lions, but that’s highly unlikely. And an unnecessary, so-easily avoidable disaster of this magnitude absolutely calls for consequences at the end of the season.

DISCUSS ON SG

Clown World Knows It’s Falling

A leaked report about the UK police shows they’re not even trying to uphold the law anymore because they know that the immigrant populations will respond with violence that will likely cause a reaction that will overturn the system.

SENIOR POLICE OFFICERS ADMIT THEIR BIGGEST FEAR IS “MUSLIMS KICKING OFF”

A leaked discussion among senior UK police officers has revealed that their greatest fear when handling sensitive cases is “Muslims kicking off.”

  • Officers admit they tread lightly to avoid “community backlash”
  • Fear of unrest now shaping law enforcement decisions
  • Britain’s policing priorities have shifted from justice to appeasement

“And then their other fear is that a lot of us now are refusing to go along with the ‘multiculturalism has worked out brilliantly’ and they are now afraid of people pointing that out.”

It’s interesting to see how Clown World has recreated the situation that plagues the USA in the European countries. A significant minority of the native populations now aggressively opposes all forms of multiculturalism and multiracism because the failures of immigration, diversity, and equality are so obvious and undeniable.

And that minority will become a majority within the next decade.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Name is Bezos. Jeff Bezos.

Amazon bought creative control of the James Bond franchise, and for a lot less than you’d probably imagine:

Sooner or later everyone has a price, but in the case of James Bond ‘s former paymasters it’s significantly lower than the incredible sums being reported as recently as last week. After 25 films, six 007’s and countless foiled attempts at world domination, long-term producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael C Wilson sold the hugely popular spy franchise to Amazon MGM for a widely reported £1 billion, in February.

But a recent earnings report from Wilson and Broccoli’s Eon Productions suggests the true figure is notably less than initially thought.

‘On 20 February 2025, the company entered into an agreement for the sale of its interest in the Bond franchise, all associated assets as well as its subsidiary companies, B24 Limited and B25 Limited,’ reads the report, published by Variety. The total consideration for the sale amounted to $20 million (USD).’

The deal gives Jeff Bezos and Amazon MGM full creative control of the franchise going forward, while forming a joint venture with Wilson and Broccoli to manage intellectual property rights.

If Amazon can do for Bond what it did for Lord of the Rings, it should be available for a lot less in the not-too-distant future. Sure, it’s possible they learned their lesson, certainly a lot of other film studios did. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

DISCUSS ON SG

Isolation, Nietzsche, and Politics

Friedrich Nietzsche was a lunatic and his philosophy was little more than pompous Gamma self-inflatery. But one of his observations was not merely cogent, it explains Clown World’s tendency to enervate its allies and

That which does not kill me makes me stronger.

Japanese literature is full of the talented samurai who leaves his liege lord, either voluntarily or dismissed under a cloud of social disapproval, disappears into the mountains or the small villages of the western provinces, and spends several years teaching poetry or performing menial labor in order to survive as a masterless ronin. Eventually, he is summoned back into martial society by someone, where his talents, strengthened and hardened by his years of solitude, allow him to win success on the battlefield and in the courts.

In like manner, those of us who were banished by mainstream publishing houses have prospered considerably more in the era of ebooks and artificial intelligence than the hothouse flowers who are wholly dependent upon the publishing infrastructure to sell their books for them.

And the world of German politics is proving no different, as the repeated attempts of all the mainstream parties to shun, slander, and even legally outlaw Alternative für Deutschland have only resulted in AfD becoming the obvious future of Germany.

The last ten years of German politics have been one unending nightmarish festival of failure and stupidity. All the establishment parties have taken turns implicating themselves in this amazing shitshow, while religiously sparing the AfD any association with their unprecedented failures. The firewall lends truth to the AfD’s name; it has allowed Alternative für Deutschland to become the only conceivable political alternative in Germany. As things get worse and voters grow more desperate for alternatives, the AfD just becomes stronger. The firewall is an AfD-maximising machine.

The firewall is only really bad for the people who invented it and who alone have the power to end it. I speak here of the centre-right Union parties, the CDU and the CSU. They maintain the firewall not because it helps them or because it is a good idea or even because the AfD are evil fascists, but because the firewall has been endified.

In 2018, when the CDU first set up the firewall, it had a coherent purpose. It was supposed to be a means of keeping the AfD small by dissuading CDU supporters from defecting to their upstart rival. CDU leadership had seen how the rising Green Party ate into the support of the SPD after reunification, and they thought they could prevent the same thing from happening to them. They would have been better off doing nothing at all, because after seven years of firewall the AfD are stronger than the Greens ever were. The whole thing has become a lesson in why you should avoid heavy-handed interventions in complex systems.

Sure, it hurts and it’s scary to find yourself banished from the castle and forced to scrounge, scratch, and claw for survival. But the self-discipline that comes from the experience is absolutely invaluable in the long term.

DISCUSS ON SG

Immigration and Military Power

As we know, Martin van Creveld has demonstrated that immigration is simply another form of war, and an invasion is an invasion regardless of whether it is a peaceful, unarmed, and disorganized one that is welcomed by a governing elite or an armed and organized one that is resisted by the governing elite.

But one of the lessons demonstrated by Sir Charles Oman in his The Art of War in the Middle Ages is the way in which immigration and the reliance upon foreign troops is intrinsically deleterious to the nation’s military organization and will inevitably weaken even the most dominant military power. And this weakness is distinct from the separate problem of foreign military commanders whose loyalties tend to be outweighed by either their ethnic interests or their self-interests.

As he demonstrates in the first chapter of his excellent essay, now being serialized at Castalia Library, the Roman Empire suffered both of these negative effects.

The morale of the Roman army was no longer what it had once been: the corps were no longer homogeneous, and the insufficient supply of recruits was eked out by enlisting slaves and barbarians in the legions themselves, and not only among the auxiliary cohorts. Though seldom wanting in courage, the troops of the fourth century had lost the self-reliance and cohesion of the old Roman infantry, and required far more careful handling on the part of the general. Few facts show this more forcibly than the proposal of the tactician Urbicius to furnish the legionaries with a large supply of portable beams and stakes, to be carried by pack-mules attached to each cohort. These were to be planted on the flanks and in the front of the legion, when there was a probability of its being attacked by hostile cavalry: behind them the Romans were to await the enemy’s onset, without any attempt to assume the offensive.

This proposition marks a great decay in the efficiency of the imperial foot-soldier: the troops of a previous generation would have scorned such a device, accustomed as they were to drive back with ease the assaults of the Parthian and Sarmatian cataphracti.

It should not be a surprise that the US military is in observable decline, having lost its global superpower status and has been surpassed in several areas by the Russian and Chinese militaries, given the fact that the percentage of foreign-born U.S. veterans rose from 2 percent in 1990 to 4.5 percent in 2022. And, of course, this doesn’t even count the much larger number of foreigners who were second- or third-generation immigrants whose interests do not necessarily align with those of the native population.

History is an absolute necessity if one wishes to understand the probable consequences of current events. Even if you have relatively little interest in leatherbound books, or in the aesthetic aspects of the most beautiful books in the world, it will behoove you to consider signing up for a free subscription to the Castalia Library substack for the benefit of the daily serial alone. On a related note, I’m pleased to be able to announce that yesterday, Castalia Library reached 3,000 daily subscribers.

In other Castalia-related news, we have completed the interior layout for THE JUNIOR CLASSICS Volume Nine, Sport & Adventure. We anticipate shipping both volumes Nine and Ten to the backers in November, although demi-royal backers will probably need to wait until December to receive theirs. And for those who were not original backers, we anticipate making the regular editions available as part of the annual Thanksgiving sale.

And yes, we will be announcing a 2nd Edition of The Castalia Junior Classics in leather and making them available once the complete set of the Original Backer’s Leather Editions is in production at the US bindery. The difference will be that the 2nd Edition will be bound in pigskin at the Castalia Bindery.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Death of Conservatism

It’s not just in the USA. Conservative parties all over the world are dying because they have betrayed their nations and conserved absolutely nothing of value:

The most noticeable feature of politics in the West in recent years has been the swift and irreversible demise of traditional conservative parties. The disappearance of these parties has been dramatically illustrated by the grim fates that now await the UK Conservative Party and the Liberal/National Party coalition in Australia.

The Conservative Party governed the UK from 2010 until last year. The Coalition government held office in Australia from 1996 to 2007, and from 2013 until 2022. Both of these parties were soundly defeated at the polls by ideologically unified social democratic parties that were led by uninspiring and pedestrian politicians – namely Keir Starmer and Anthony Albanese.

This suggests that voters rejected the conservatives, rather than warmly embracing their social democratic opponents. UK Labour’s rapid fall from grace since last year’s election victory and the party’s current unpopularity confirms the correctness of this view.

More troubling for conservatives in the UK and Australia is the fact that both of these once dominant parties – so shortly after losing office – now find themselves in such acute states of internal disarray and that they have no realistic prospect of regaining office in the foreseeable future. In fact, it is clear that neither party has a viable long-term future at all…

These conservative parties – although in power for most of the past two decades – have resolutely refused to implement the kind of radical economic and social reforms necessary to remedy the serious economic inequalities and social problems that continue to bedevil all Western liberal democracies. In fact, despite their professed commitment to traditional values, conservative parties have – just like their social democratic counterparts – enthusiastically embraced and implemented the economic, cultural, and foreign policies of the new and now dominant global elites.

However, the death of the conservative parties is just the harbinger for the main event, which is the death of Western liberal democracy itself. The only question is if the global elites will somehow manage to hold on to power once their vehicle fails, or, as is much more likely, the new model nationalists will replace them in the West as they have already done in Russia, China, and elsewhere.

It’s telling that none of the self-styled champions of democracy ever advocate genuine direct democracy despite technology that obviously permits it, but instead, always exert their utmost efforts to prevent any and every aspect of direct democracy with the excuse of stopping “populism”.

DISCUSS ON SG