Tag: declineandfall

Is one where business is rapidly shrinking. Best Buy’s CEO takes a very converged position on corporate profits:

“The purpose of a company is not to make money,” says Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly, discussing the need for a re-foundation of capitalism. Purposeful leadership is being clear about your purpose as an individual and how it connects to the purpose of the company where you work.

If you can’t see the danger in where this is headed, then you really aren’t paying attention. What is the purpose of the company where you work if it isn’t to make money?  How long do you anticipate working there without making money yourself? And if the purpose isn’t to make money, then why do so many companies nevertheless insist on charging money for their goods and services?

Capitalism doesn’t need to be refounded, it is something to which we should return. The modern day financialized corpocracy which funnels most profits to the financial institutions, the government, and the pirate class is simply not capitalism by any measure.

By the way, there is a whole conference devoted to business convergence. Look at the pictures on the linked Twitter account. There is literally zero productive business being discussed there.

Literally and legally, the city of San Francisco is now a toilet:

Chesa Boudin, the urine-and-feces-plagued city’s incoming district attorney, pledged during the campaign not to prosecute public urination and other quality-of-life crimes if he was elected. Boudin declared victory Saturday night after results showed him winning a plurality of votes in the DA race.

“We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes. Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted,” Boudin vowed in response to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) questionnaire during the campaign.

And let’s not even get started on the moral perspective. This is why freedom is not, and can never be, the highest value. Civilization does not rely upon individual freedom or enlightenment values. To the contrary, it relies upon suppressing them.

Given how haplessly cucked Sweden is in the face of rape and grenade attacks, I suppose it was too much to expect Norway to resist the fascist call of stopping thoughtcrime:

Norwegian authorities have arrested a high-profile American white supremacist, hours before he was due to give a speech at a far-right conference in Oslo on Saturday.

The detained American, Greg Johnson, is editor-in-chief of the white nationalist Counter-Currents Publishing group. He had been scheduled to speak at the Scandza Forum, a network known for its anti-Semitic and racist views.

Norway’s intelligence service considered Johnson “to be a threat, not because of what he could do but because of his hate speech and his previously expressed support for Anders Breivik,” spokesman Martin Bernsen told CNN.

It’s almost cute that the Norwegian government imagines threatening people with jail if they speak openly about the obvious is going to do anything but accelerate the conflict that their past policies have guaranteed. Especially if the penalties for speech are nearly as grave as the penalties for action. What do they imagine is going to happen, everyone is just going to shrug and decide that they’re happy with a situation that literally no human society has ever endured for long?

As the late, great Jerry Pournelle wrote, there will be war. The only question at this point is where it is going to start first, and the alarming thing is that it could be almost anywhere, given the number of flashpoints that have been created.

It will be interesting if the Trump administration will protest the arrest of an American in this situation as loudly as it protested the previous arrest of an American by the Swedish authorities. He should, of course, because Johnson wasn’t arrested for something he said, but rather, for something they believed he might say.

In case you still haven’t accepted that China is going to surpass the United States as the leading global power before the middle of the 21st century yet, consider the difference between the moral trajectory of the two societies.

From budgeting for rural weddings to dressing appropriately and avoiding online porn, China’s Communist Party has issued new guidelines to improve the “moral quality” of its citizens. Officials have released several sets of guidelines this week alongside a secretive conclave of high-ranking officials in Beijing which discusses the country’s future direction.

On Sunday the government published its “Outline for the Implementation of Citizen Moral Construction in the New Era” — which advises readers how to use the internet, raise children, celebrate public holidays and behave while travelling abroad.

The guidelines from the Central Commission for Guiding Cultural and Ethical Progress calls for building “Chinese spirit, Chinese values, and Chinese power”.

The texts urge citizens to avoid pornography and vulgarity online, and follow correct etiquette when raising the flag or singing the national anthem.

Public institutions like libraries and youth centres must carry out “targeted moral education” to improve people’s ideological awareness and moral standards, according to the rules.

The guideline also stresses patriotism and loyalty to the motherland.

“People who have a servile attitude to foreign countries, damage national dignity and sell national interests must be disciplined according to the law,” it says.

Translation: The Chinese leadership is well aware of the long-term program of the Learned Elders of Wye to jump from the United States to China when the former empire collapses and have no intention of allowing them to run that program of subversion and economic ascendancy through invasion and moral inversion to the disadvantage of their nation.

It is more than a little ironic that where Christians failed to heed the warnings of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul, Confucians – and they are Confucians, not Communists, no matter what they officially happen to call themselves – are aware of the danger of permitting a foreign nation to invade and invert their society. Even more impressive, instead of waiting passively for the next attack, they have launched a systematic campaign to seize the strongholds of their long-term rivals and enemies.

As for those who have been predicting China’s collapse due to various economic and demographic indicators, that is a failure to grasp the causal relationship between societal wealth and morality. It is the latter that precedes the former; while there are certainly challenges and structural weaknesses that threaten the stability and well-being of both great societies, the Chinese elite is most likely going to be able to deal successfully with them. The US elite, both foreign and native, is obviously not.

The Z-man doesn’t get the etymological origin of the term “Dark Ages” quite right, but he raises a good question about whether the West has already entered another one:

That’s a good point to wonder if the West has not already entered a new dark age, in which superstition rules over rationality. The concept of the microaggression is something superstitious people living in a dark age would have understood. After all, a microaggression is the idea that certain words and phrases, incantations, will cause a miasma to develop around the people saying and hearing the words. This miasma or evil spirit will cause those exposed to react involuntarily and uncontrollably.

In fact, everything about political correctness and multiculturalism relies on oogily-boogily that people in the dark age of Europe would have found ridiculous. The people of Europe in the middle ages may not have had a sophisticated understanding of the natural world, but they did not think the dirt had magical qualities. Magic Dirt Theory would have struck them as laughably ridiculous. They may not have understood cognitive science, but they knew the apple does not fall far from the tree.

As I explained in TIA, Petrarch’s term was the reversal of an earlier Christian perspective of the time before the coming of the Light of the World by an embittered Italian patriot looking at the ruins of the Roman Empire and despairing of the relatively barbaric German domination of his time.

Which is hauntingly similar to the situation which the people of the West may soon be facing. That is why it is so important to preserve knowledge now. Barbarians have never cared about building or minded living amidst filth, which is why we are already at the point where the fate of our indoor plumbing is in doubt.

It’s not enough to know about things. It’s not even enough to know how to maintain them. It is vital to learn how to design, develop, and build things if civilized society is to be preserved. We’re already bringing back the Junior Classics, but perhaps we also need to create a new series, Core Civilization, comprised of books that teach the core basics of everything from architecture to gardening and water engineering. Because it’s clearly time to begin thinking about these things.

I started to think about those people living in the Roman Empire wondering why the water no longer comes from the big stone thingy anymore. Some may have remembered their ancestors working on them for some reason, but they no longer recall why. The people who knew how and why those aqueducts worked were long gone. No one was around who could figure out how to make them work again, because they lacked the capacity to do it.

Forget bridges, highways, and high-speed trains. Major US cities can’t even build simple buildings without drama anymore:

A large portion of a Hard Rock Hotel under construction in New Orleans collapsed Saturday morning, killing at least two people and injuring 20 others, authorities said. The building bordering the city’s historic French Quarter is considered unstable and officials said further collapse is possible.

Three people were initially reported missing, though one has since been found, according to the New Orleans Fire Department. Authorities said no one on the ground was injured in the collapse.

According to Mayor LaToya Cantrell, 112 people were in the building at the time of collapse. Though the search for those missing was suspended for the evening, Cantrell confirmed that rescuers found two bodies but were unable to retrieve them.

VFM Bear said it best: it’s the indoor plumbing that I’m going to miss the most.

Import the Third World, become the Third World. This really isn’t that hard. Ain’t immigration and diversity grand?

So it turns out the guy behind the collapsed Hard Rock hotel, Praveen Kailas  was previously convicted of ripping off the state, and was allegedly cutting corners by employing unqualified labor.

Or so it would appear:

Never a show to shy from tough subjects, “Sesame Street” is tackling America’s opioid epidemic head on, revealing that Karli, the little green Muppet with yellow hair, was in foster care because her mother suffered from addiction.

When the children’s show returns for its 50th season, Karli will explain that her mom “was away for a while because she had a grown-up problem.”

Never fear, Bert and Ernie can adopt her after getting gay-married, right? Nothing is safe anymore. Pop culture is filth.

As is so often the case, it profits those of us whose understanding of a given topic is insufficient to consider what Thomas Aquinas has to say on the subject:

To take usury for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality which is contrary to justice. In order to make this evident, we must observe that there are certain things the use of which consists in their consumption: thus we consume wine when we use it for drink and we consume wheat when we use it for food. Wherefore in such like things the use of the thing must not be reckoned apart from the thing itself, and whoever is granted the use of the thing, is granted the thing itself and for this reason, to lend things of this kin is to transfer the ownership. Accordingly if a man wanted to sell wine separately from the use of the wine, he would be selling the same thing twice, or he would be selling what does not exist, wherefore he would evidently commit a sin of injustice. On like manner he commits an injustice who lends wine or wheat, and asks for double payment, viz. one, the return of the thing in equal measure, the other, the price of the use, which is called usury.

On the other hand, there are things the use of which does not consist in their consumption: thus to use a house is to dwell in it, not to destroy it. Wherefore in such things both may be granted: for instance, one man may hand over to another the ownership of his house while reserving to himself the use of it for a time, or vice versa, he may grant the use of the house, while retaining the ownership. For this reason a man may lawfully make a charge for the use of his house, and, besides this, revendicate the house from the person to whom he has granted its use, as happens in renting and letting a house.

Now money, according to the Philosopher (Ethic. v, 5; Polit. i, 3) was invented chiefly for the purpose of exchange: and consequently the proper and principal use of money is its consumption or alienation whereby it is sunk in exchange. Hence it is by its very nature unlawful to take payment for the use of money lent, which payment is known as usury: and just as a man is bound to restore other ill-gotten goods, so is he bound to restore the money which he has taken in usury.

The Philosopher is Aristotle. And it’s worth noting how, centuries ago, Aquinas logically concluded the inevitable consequences that we are empirically observing, which is that taking usury for money lent will lead to an unjust form of inequality.

Contrary to the assertion of economists like Murray Rothbard, the gradual acceptance of usury across the West was not a civilizational advance, but rather, a slow descent into misrule and barbarism.

Thanks to President Trump, Maureen Dowd just noticed that the USA is corrupt:

Forget it, America. It’s Chinatown.

Washington, once the guarantor of American values, is a crime scene. This capital of white marble is now encircled by yellow tape, rife with mendacity, cowardice and corruption. It’s Chinatown on the Potomac.

Robert Towne, the screenwriter of the 1974 classic “Chinatown,” wrote the movie as a eulogy to great things that were lost. He said that he was not conjuring a place on a map but a state of mind: the futility of good intentions.

Or, as Raymond Chandler, the premier chronicler of Los Angeles noir, once wrote: “We still have dreams, but we know now that most of them will come to nothing. And we also most fortunately know that it really doesn’t matter.”

This is hardly news to Generation X, let alone Generation Z. But it’s interesting to see that Baby Boomers may be finally losing their childlike faith in The System. Regardless, Baby Boomer columns like Dowd’s are increasingly out-of-touch, referencing as they do former cultural touchstones like 45-year-old movies that are completely foreign to the three younger generations, to say nothing of the immigrants and children of immigrants.

The designer of Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story has some excellent advice that sounds rather familiar:

Widdowson then puts forth four tactics, “never apologize,” cease any support for “people that engage in this behavior (on all sides),” minimize “engagement with these people,” and speak “with your wallets,” and states that these tactics are “the only way to stop this stuff from happening”:

“– Never apologize to the mob, if enough people stop doing the corporate non-apology, or the “I’m sorry, I’m woke now”-apology then the mob loses it’s power and the “game” stops being exciting for the hangers-on. An apology is a vindication, a self-defeat, a statement saying you acknowledge you did something worth an apology. Don’t do it.

– Stop supporting the people that engage in this behavior (on all sides), and stop supporting the companies that employ them. Money talks, eventually…

– Minimize engagement with these people. Starve them of attention; make them feel like they are screaming into a void of exactly 0 people that care. Remember, these people subsist purely on outrage, anger, and discomfort. You don’t have to. So if you really need to engage with these people though, make sure you do it in a way that benefits you. We’ve connected with some great fans and new customers thanks to this.

– Speak with your wallets, if you see a large company bend the knee to the mob, stop giving them your money at all. You don’t need the next AAA  EA/Activision/whoever published game, but they certainly need your money. You guys have 100{20631733b5a15c3694dbfcf360b60a1948a54005354f1d1bb00d126531fe1735} of the power. Never, ever forget that you determine actual success regardless of what those in “power” redefine that word to mean.”

Minimizing engagement and voting with your wallet are the two most important points. The evil power of the Devil Mouse would be significantly reduced if idiot conservatives would simply stop going to Disneyland and buying tickets to Disney-produced movies. Hollywood would be significantly less able to influence minds all over the planet if the people it hates would stop paying for its increasingly horrendous products.

No wonder they harbor such contempt for the men and women of the West. Far too many of us not only materially support, but actually pride ourselves on, destroying our own interests and our own societies.