Ideology is Rhetoric

I wouldn’t get too excited about the election of Javier Milei in Argentina. If there is one thing that we have learned from more than 100 years of democracy in America and elsewhere, it is that ideology is usually an irrelevant mask for the true objectives of those the elected politician serves.

In END TIMES, Peter Turchin cites compelling and reasonably comprehensive data analysis that proves the democratic will of the people in the United States has absolutely no influence on the policies put into place by their elected leaders, by means of a large-scale comparison of their policy preferences with the resulting policies put into place by their government.

The political scientist Martin Gilens, aided by a small army of research assistants, gathered a large data set—nearly two thousand policy issues between 1981 and 2002. Each case matched a proposed policy change to a national opinion survey asking a favor/oppose question about the initiative. The raw survey data provided information that enabled Gilens to separate the preferences of the poor (in the lowest decile of the income distribution) and the typical (the median of the distribution) from the affluent (the top 10 percent).

Statistical analysis of this remarkable data set showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes. This is not entirely unexpected. What is surprising is that there was no—zilch, nada—effect of the average voter. The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent. There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-oriented lobbies. Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Peter Turchin, END TIMES: Elites, Counterelites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, 2023

In a highly relevant essay, the Bronze Age Pervert explains why “economic populists” always end up betraying the nation they are nominally supposed to represent, regardless of whether they are considered “right-wing” or “left-wing”. This is why ideology is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter very much if you elect Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, or the Irish Republican Army, as their collective answer to everything is always: open the doors wider, bring in more immigrants, flood the nation!

It is also why China, and to a lesser extent, Russia, are very good bets to defeat the denationalized remnants of the adulterated nations of the West. In both great powers, the nation always comes before ideology. Stalin transmuted the international socialist revolution into national communism, while in China nationalism is built right into the ideology, as even socialism is required to have “Chinese characteristics”.

Consider for example that the doors of Argentina have been busted wide open to mass migration. This has been done despite the economic populist and nationalist language that Bannonites invoke in America and that Peronists have used even more aggressively in Argentina. I find it fascinating that all left-populist and economic populist platform nations or regions have this same result by the way. Ireland did, so does Basque Country in Spain — ETA being the spirit of that region and along with the Kurdish PKK one of the old and dependable factions of the international “nationalist left.” But all are flooded with migrants. To look into the reasons why I will again leave for another time but I suspect that, although when out of power such parties insinuate that migrants are being let in for “cheap labor” as a conspiracy by Capital or devious capitalists who plan to build an orbital station like in Elysium movie; and so they promise — maybe genuinely — the lower middle and middle classes that they will stop this migration and improve the labor market, wages, and their economic condition. But then once in power, left-populist parties discover that the migrants were never being brought in by capitalists for Machiavellian reasons; that at most, the capitalists were being bought off, and not all the capitalists but only some industries, who were allowed to profit and who therefore complied… although it’s unclear their willingness to comply or not would have been at all relevant. That the migrants were in fact being brought in primarily as political clients and political tools for the left and by those who opposed “the rich” — a shifting definition that often comes to include much of the middle class as well. And so the logic of this is irresistible to “economic populist” parties once in power for some time, regardless of their initial rhetoric about the “pauperization of the proletariat finally coming true through the vehicle of mass migration.” If your position is “the poor and conservative many against the decadent and predatory Elite and rich,” why wouldn’t you come to see millions of foreign poor “decent family people” as your allies? Economic populists, even when they have open nationalist and ethnic rhetoric in their beginnings, will always abandon this in favor of importing new clients, and it is rational for them to do so. In many cases they don’t in fact have specifically racial, or national or ethnic-cultural language even by the way: many rightists are dumbly misled when a leftist starts to inveigh against “globalism,” the “IMF,” “international Anglo-Liberalism,” “the transnational elites,” and many such things, into thinking that such a person must surely want to preserve the demographic and cultural characteristics of a particular country or region. But that’s almost never the case: importing millions of Paraguayans, Peruvians, Bolivians in Argentina, or migrants in Basque Country or Ireland may actually come to be seen as “yes we are importing good family people who will stand with us in native solidarity against globalism, Capital, and Neoliberal atomization.” And that is in fact what happened.

The Populist Moment Never Happened

The point is that if Ben Shapiro is publicly celebrating the election of a political leader who is an immigrant Catholic apostate, the chances that the new president-elect has any intention of governing the Argentine nation to its actual benefit are not very favorable, no matter what ideology he purports to espouse.

DISCUSS ON SG

She’s Far from the Only One

Peter King is an excellent football reporter. While I could do without his occasional editorial sallies into politics, which reliably offer typically retarded left-wing takes, he follows in the well-respected tradition of Paul Zimmerman. If he reports on something football-related, you can guarantee that it is honest, legitimate, and well-sourced, and it is probably true.

But he clearly has no idea how flagrantly dishonest most of the mainstream media is on a regular basis, or he wouldn’t be calling for sideline fabulist Charissa Thompson’s pretty little head:

We live in a time when the media is more distrusted than I ever remember. Thompson is a high-profile person who hosts the Thursday night pregame show on Amazon Prime, who hosts a Sunday pre-game on Fox, who co-hosts a podcast with Erin Andrews. She says on the Pardon My Take podcast that in her former role as a sideline reporter at Fox she would “make up the report sometimes.” It’s outrageous. It’s fireable. Thompson’s not covering the White House, but I don’t care if she’s covering the Chula Vista Little League. Her job is to report the truth, and she admitted she made up things. When Thompson says that, it’s fodder for media-haters to say, “See? They all lie.” Now, in these high-profile roles at Amazon and Fox, how do you trust she’s not inventing some of the things she’s saying? And where are the programming people, the bosses, particularly at Fox, where Thompson said these sideline reports occurred? The silence says one of two things: Sideline reports don’t really matter. Or the truth doesn’t really matter. Or both.

Thompson’s statement after the firestorm didn’t solve anything. Thompson didn’t say on Pardon My Take that she’d almost make it up, or use some qualifying words. She said she “would make it up.” And she repeated it: “No coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over and do a better job of getting off the field.’ They’re not gonna correct me on that. So I’m like, it’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.” In her Instagram statement the next day, Thompson said: “I understand how important words are and I chose the wrong words to describe the situation. I’m sorry. I have never lied about anything or been unethical during my time as a sports broadcaster.” Twice Thompson said she’d made up reporting. A day later she said she never lied or was unethical. So, what’s true? What she said on the podcast? What she said in a clear CYA statement that made things worse?

So she lied a few times. And then she lied about having lied. So what? The vast majority of reporters lie, or at the very least report things they don’t actually know to be true, on a daily basis. It’s not as if Congress is sending tens of billions of dollars to the Carolina Panthers because she gave them cause to believe they might possibly be able to win a few games.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Inflation is Real

Karl Denninger observes that the government’s CPI numbers simply do not reflect the reality at the grocery store:

When I go to the grocery store the register tape — and my Quicken — says I’m spending a lot more money there. Not a couple of percent over the last 12 months, an obscene increase. Shelf prices are one thing, but actual paid prices are truth — and those involve discounts, coupons, BOGOs and similar. I, like most people, buy pretty much the same things to eat. Spending over the last 12 months is in fact up more than 30%, not 2%.

Car insurance is claimed to be up about 20% — and it is. That’s real, and everyone with a car has had to pay it. But the government also claims that health insurance has been down in price by roughly 30%. That’s nonsense, and we all know it, but there it is.

There are some who think the answer is “higher wages!” But its not; you can’t keep up any more than you can with a “roaring” stock market.

The simple reality is that you cannot have Congress emit eight percent, more or less, of the economy in newly emitted credit and not have prices go up by about 8% unless there is somewhere that absorbs it which you do not have to cover. For roughly two decades there was — the increase in global trade, most of which is settled in dollars, buffers that by temporarily capturing the money while goods are in transit.

Note however that a permanent change in trade doesn’t result in this remaining captured; it is the change in level of global trade that does that, and only while the change is taking place. We’ve offshored basically everything we can offshore at this point and thus the available increase has dwindled to essentially zero.

The problem is that during that 20 year period of time we “trained” Congress (and both political parties) that they can run 30% deficits and not have it show up as 8% inflation on a permanent basis. That’s flat-out false.

This in turn means that either we’re going to absorb about 8% inflation (no matter what the government claims), spending must come down by about 30% at the federal level and that is only to stabilize prices, not return them lower, or taxes must go up by about 40% which of course is another expense in the household and reduces disposable income. The latter is politically impossible.

How does this resolve?

Revolution and civil war cometh, if Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics are to be believed. A perfect storm is approaching for the United States, as all four structural drivers of societal instability are not only present, but appear to be at, or at least near, record historical levels.

Focus on what is important, focus on what is going to last. It’s not an accident that Castalia has shifted from ephemeral ebooks to leather books that are capable of lasting for centuries and have been assembling machinery for everything from sewing machines to leather bindings.

It’s going to be difficult. But our community is not only going to survive, it is going to thrive. Because unlike most, we have been repeatedly tested by adversity, and we are hard enough for the hard times.

DISCUSS ON SG

Go Ahead, Make Your List

Michael Rapaport clearly doesn’t understand that the rest of the world increasingly doesn’t want money or investment or anything else from him and his friends when he threatens everyone who will not publicly support the idea that “self-defense” gives Israel a right to commit ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

A lot of conversations about my Jewish friends about the silence, the disappointment, the disappearing acts, the Doug Henning, the David Blaine shit, just disappear – poof! – in the air. A lot of people have disappeared. I’m telling you right now, we are making a list, we are checking it twice. And we already know who’s been naughty or nice. See that pun? Do you see that pun? I’m talking about the Jewish people. But I’m also talking Christmas carols.

We will not forget. We’re not suckers. So when you come around asking for this, that, and the third, come around asking for money, investments, and all that stuff, I promise you, I promise you, it’s being discussed. We’re paying attention to who’s being anti-Jewish, anti-semitic, anti-Israel… or not saying anything at all. I promise you.

I’m an enigma. A lot of Jewish people seem nice, we seem like suckers, we seem like you could kind of convince us… Trust me. Don’t come around in six months, eight months, two years. We’re remembering. We’re paying attention.

It’s always educational to observe when the mask slips. And I expect that a lot of other people are remembering, paying attention, and making lists too. A lot.

It might be helpful to recall that historically, those who have prospered most during an age of low polarization are very seldom those who do well during the subsequent age of discord. In fact, as per Peter Turchin, the ages of discord are usually dominated by disaffected and disenfranchised elites with the mass weight of the unjustly immiserated common people behind them, to the detriment of the previous elite that held a disproportionate amount of a society’s wealth and influence prior to its self-delegitimization.

We are presently in what Turchin calls a precrisis period. The historical patterns are observably playing out again. Which is something that the more perspicacious members of Mr. Rapaport’s list-making elite are finally beginning to recognize to their observable dismay:

Israel appears to have heavily banked on being able to use its various social control technologies—which mostly consists of its various NGOs and global ‘anti-hate groups’ like the ADL—to dictate the narrative around this genocide.

But they failed miserably.

Israel did not appear to have a good bead on the pulse of the global awakening. They were sclerotically stuck just a few years behind the times, still thinking this was the late 2010s with the peak of Big Tech’s sprawling domination of our minds, and the omnipotent Leftist Narrative seizure.

Times have changed, things are unwinding, Israel is losing control.

Now, I think it’s too soon to express any opinion at all on Israel’s military actions in Gaza, much less to describe it as a genocide. On the basis of the limited information available, the IDF’s tactics actually appear to be somewhat on the cautious and ineffective side, especially when compared with the successful Russian tactics used at Mariupol, Bahkmut and now Avdiivka. But there are no shortage of elements within both Israel and the diaspora that are openly calling for either ethnic cleansing or genocide – do recall these are not synonyms, but two different, albeit tangentially-related concepts – and therefore rhetorical fair game for the pro-Palestinian side.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: Why GRRM Can’t Finish ASOIAF

A highly literate reader named JC emails a detailed analysis of George RR Martin’s difficulty in finishing A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, and reaches precisely the same conclusion that I have assumed all along, which is that Martin is too devoted to intellectual subversion to accept the true and obvious heroic end to his fantasy saga, which is to say, the triumphant marriage of ice and fire.

To put it rather more concisely: one can no more write an English-style novel and not end it with a wedding than one can write a Japanese-style novel and not end it with a suicide.

I don’t think it’s so much that Martin won’t finish the saga as that he can’t. And principally for one reason (though I imagine there’s a host of ancillary reasons): Jon Snow & Danaerys Targaryan themselves. He didn’t anticipate when he set out to write his story, I suspect, to write one genuinely heroic character, let alone two.

It’s clear that Tyrion, and the Lannister family in general, are his favoured characters, and it’s the Lannisters who set the tone of the series. I think this is so for both internal-structural reasons and for personal reasons. Martin just prefers them and sympathises most with their worldview. Structurally, I believe the Lannisters are the vehicle through which Martin has tried to accomplish his main artistic goal in writing A Song of Ice and Fire: to subvert the Fantasy genre, with its roots in the heroic and the mythical, by introducing an element of cynicism and realist historiography, a literary Real Politik.

To do this he had to build a typical Fantasy setting with mythological elements, in order to deconstruct them from within. What he didn’t anticipate, I suspect, is that the ‘machinery’ of his writing would churn out two more or less heroic characters, there among all the cynics, warlords, cowards, bureaucrats, hypocrites, mercenaries, careerists et al. with which his universe abounds: Jon and Dany — who do fit the classical standards of heroism, despite Martin’s critique of their characters, as their motivations ultimately transcend the merely self-interested, and they are brave in the pursuit. Martin is, at bottom, a good storyteller with a keen sense of character, so it’s very likely he trusted his intuitions in writing these characters and plotting out their stories, without fully realising the overall structural implications for his saga.

Now I think he’s reached a bind in his grand narrative. There are two irresolvably conflicting impulses acting within him as a writer — and it’s this irresolvability that has given him an incurable writer’s block, sapping him of all motivation to conclude his epic: the first impulse is the conscious wish to accomplish his artistic aim of deconstructing the heroic and mythical foundations of Fantasy; and the second impulse is the novelist’s natural need not to betray his own characters, to provide a coherent resolution to their ‘character arc’. The problem is that, unwittingly, Jon and Dany have turned out to be genuine heroes in their own right, and Martin can’t figure out how to give their stories a fittingly heroic ending without succumbing to classical Fantasy standards, the very standards he set out to subvert in the first place. Jon and Dany narratologically deserve an heroic ending, but can Martin bring himself to do justice to their heroism, or even to spoil it with one last act of cynicism?

It’s clear that the ‘Ice’ and ‘Fire’ in A Song of Ice and Fire are Jon and Dany respectively, and that it’s ultimately their tale. I can only imagine that Martin did this unconsciously, and that it’s made him nauseous now that he’s discovered it. What we see in the TV Show — Jon and Dany having a romantic affair and it being discovered to be incestuous — I think is Martin’s intention, and I think this development shows his good writer’s instinct. It’s what comes after (the final season of the TV Show) where everything falls apart, and I think Martin knows it. He knows the notes he provided to the show directors are sloppy, inconsistent, and unfulfilling. I can only imagine that when he now sits to write the final chapters in his story, he feels a debilitating anxiety over the problem the existence of Jon and Dany, and the challenge their unforeseen heroism, transcending the pettiness of their surroundings, has caused for him, leaving out all that enthusiasm he once had for the narrative and its setting, when he was writing the opening volumes.

Continue reading “Mailvox: Why GRRM Can’t Finish ASOIAF”

Pizzagate Was Always Real

Another elite media debunker is arrested for molesting children:

A mainstream journalist and close friend of John Podesta, who bragged about ‘debunking’ Pizzagate, has been arrested on a sickening slew of child rape charges. Slade Sohmer, editor-in-chief at The Recount and friend of former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, was arrested last month for raping multiple toddlers and babies.

For those who missed the most the most explosive pedophilia exposé to-date, The People’s Voice broke the news back in 2016 that there was evidence of pedophile “code words” used in emails from John Podesta released by WikiLeaks. Numerous emails from the Chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign incongruously referred to food items such as pasta, cheese pizza, and ice cream in ways the FBI warned are used as code-words by pedophiles.

Since then, despite the mainstream media attempting to downplay the story as a “conspiracy theory”, numerous mainstream journalists and figures connected to elite pedophiles have been arrested for the very crime they attempted to “debunk.”

At this point, any public claim that Pizzagate has been “debunked” should suffice to serve as prima facie cause to be arrested and have one’s digital devices searched. And in other news, another elite member of the (((corpocracy))) was just jettisoned from his position after his little sister publicly accused him of sexually abusing her from the age of four.

OpenAI, the company behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT, fired its CEO and founder, Sam Altman, on Friday. His stunning departure sent shockwaves through the budding AI industry.

DISCUSS ON SG

Meanwhile, on Taiwan

The two anti-independence parties are formally joining forces:

Taiwan’s opposition parties have agreed to run a joint campaign in January’s election, raising the chances that a more China-friendly government takes power in Taipei. The Kuomintang and Taiwan People’s Party announced plans to run a united campaign following a meeting Wednesday that centered around how to decide which of their two nominees would head the campaign as the presidential candidate…

“A successful opposition alliance — no matter who is running as president — means it’s likely cross-strait tensions will improve as the opposition has more than a 50% chance of beating the DPP’s Lai according to local polls,” according to Wang Yeh-lih, a political science professor at National Taiwan University.

Lai has benefited so far from a divided opposition to lead most opinion polls. He had a 33% support rating, according to the latest survey by broadcaster TVBS, with Ko in second at 24% and Hou with 22%. Foxconn Technology Group founder Terry Gou had the backing of 8% of respondents. An alliance between the KMT and the TPP could leave Gou out in the cold after the independent presidential contender also floated the idea of teaming up with Ko.

Which means that after the 2024 election, the Chinese will likely be negotiating with a relatively friendly government. If Gou ends up in a position of power, such as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, that may indicate that a sudden reunification announcement is in the cards.

DISCUSS ON SG