The Rise of Bio-Mercantilism

Today, a shipment of illegal immigrants foisted on the general American population by its irresponsible elites was flown, by a stubborn state governor, directly to Martha’s Vineyard, an exclusive island set aside for the resort mansions of the wealthy and powerful. Those who assumed these wanderers would always be someone else’s problem, namely of their enemies, are now in one fell swoop disabused of that notion. Begun, the Bio-Mercantile wars, have.

I first christened the idea of Bio-Mercantilism in 2018. I thought we all needed a term to describe the role of population transfer and disparities in fertility in the 21st century. The term was a bit of a spinoff of Bio-Leninism, another great concept that helps describe our present age. I couldn’t help but notice that moving around people plays a bit of a different role than at other times in history.

There have always been population migrations of humans but what we see now is made unique by:

1 – The lack of military conquest in conjunction with demographic incursion.

2- The undertaking of non-violent demographic conquest and displacement as a conscious policy decision.

3- Players in the game try to improve the quality of their human capital while degrading the quality available to other players. This is where the mercantilism part comes in. Powers now compete over people rather than bullion.

Since the world wars and the atom bomb, the price tag on conventional warfare has become increasingly costly and the rewards of loot and pillage by itself increasingly paltry next to having functional international trade. Moreover, access to mass media seen by the whole world makes large-scale organized violence even more politically unpalatable.
Never before has it been a viable strategy to send pregnant women to take over territory, nor has a population simply breeding more ever guaranteed political power by itself, but now, in the 21st century, it suddenly has become one of the most successful and efficient methods of achieving geo-political goals.

A war of attrition grinds on between Russia and Ukraine, the offense and defense almost perfectly matched in a near-stalemate for six months now with no end in sight and many thousands dead. Meanwhile, the elite class of the Globalist Empire has typically achieved many of its goals without a single shot fired through the gradual process of demographic displacement, subsidizing the fertility of desired groups, and punishing the fertility of undesirable groups.

These processes have been going on of course at least since 1965 in the US, but the main change I notice worldwide is every major player has become aware of this method of attack.
Within the increasingly fractured US, state governors have been sending busloads of illegals to cities dominated by the ruling class for some time now, but this new gesture of sending uprooted peasants right to the doorsteps of aristocrats represents a degree of deliberateness and strategy we have not yet seen.
Bio-Mercantilism is no longer a one-sided decades-long directive from the Imperial City; increasingly, errant feudatories strive to fight back by playing the same game. No one is allowed to shoot each other yet, so until then pregnant women from far-off lands are the choicest munition of the 21st century.

The Techno Dark Age

At the close of the 20th century the very air was pervaded with total self-assurance and optimism at the end of history. The last great rival, the Soviet Union had fallen and with no serious alternatives out there, it seemed clear that an enlightened golden age was nigh that would culminate in a final singularity and carry humanity past its primitive roots forever into an immortal utopia.

Scarcely 20 years later those golden dreams of grandeur lie wet and muddy in the gutter like discarded scraps of gilt confetti and every day reveals a new crack in the shiny facade of the great globalist empire. The advances in technology that followed one after another with precipitous speed since the beginning of the 19th century have finally slowed down to a relative crawl of incremental advances and the whole system creaks trying to sustain its existing infrastructure. As sclerosis sets in, even basic travel and shipping on the roads and skyways of the Empire becomes ever more difficult.

The managerial elites that sit at the top of this crumbling pyramid flap and agitate furiously lashing out at their own subjects as they try to reconcile the grim daily dysfunction with their high minded dreams of equalism and the eternal blank slate. As crises deepen and multiply, the gnawing suspicion that the eternal revolution is in fact over only spurs their prideful spite and existential rage. They’ll tell the whole world it’s a “reset” or a “transition” and all part of the plan but this is of course delusional. It’s just another of hundreds of hubristic Empires that mark the ages like the rings in a tree trunk. The age of growth must come to an end to be followed by the winter season. Not only is singularity well out of reach now, we are entering a new Dark Age instead. It won’t be a Dark Age as we typically think of it, though. In fact I characterize the order I see emerging as a Techno Dark Age where the persistence of present forces are the cause of the descent.

The simplest way to describe this is that when we look at history it seems there is the potential for ages of cultural and scientific invention when enough high quality people have the luxury of resources and space to experiment. This state of affairs managed to emerge in the West from incentives that led elites and the Church to identify and cultivate top talent.
Stable stagnation happens when pretty much everyone has to optimize existing behaviors to break even against Malthusian pressures and the total saturation of every social niche. This pretty much describes Eastern Civilizations and the Middle East for most of its history.
We might define a Dark Age, then as a state when even with most people struggling, the society operates at a net loss and continues to deteriorate until some sustainable new equilibrium is reached.

The present Globalist civilization has by all indications begun to deteriorate against the best efforts to sustain it. We are entering a Dark Age, but counter-intuitively, it is caused not by a loss of technologies but because of technologies. Furthermore, I imagine that the presence of these technologies in some capacity may well characterize the duration of the Dark period. The pressures introduced by the extreme efficiency of modern life have finally reached a point where they have become corrosive to any kind of dynamic, inventive, or even sustainable society. In short, technology has so completely outpaced the social technology and evolved traits of humankind that modern civilization has become a hostile, acidic environment incapable of sustaining human life. Wherever the modern “1st world” way of life fully holds sway, full demographic and societal deterioration is well underway. Where the machine of society uses people most efficiently, they have nothing left to produce anything on their own and certainly not to reproduce. The genes of the most conscientious and capable get shredded and ground into dust each generation as standards of living and competence seem to keep deteriorating for reasons no one can quite seem to understand…

When I was a child, I would constantly hear about how the personal computer and then the internet would open new worlds of progress and creativity and for the first decade or two it was a colorful Wild West that seemed it would deliver on these promises. Indeed, even amidst the first creeping autumn decay, there was a final efflorescence of creativity and culture at the start of a new Millennium. By 2010, though, centralized search and social media platforms were already causing a mass homogenization of online culture that could be easily curated and controlled. Music was dominated by electronic shrieking of autotune and in less than a decade film, with some amazing exceptions, had devolved from Lord of the Rings to endless reboots of reboots of necroposted nostalgic intellectual properties and bland cookie-cutter superhero movies.
The prediction that modern civilization would become massively more creative failed to come true. Actually, the opposite seems to have happened despite having more people, talent, and money than ever. The indicators of civilizational dynamism and creativity have only grown dimmer over the last decade until most of what’s left is corporate Marvel movies tailored to managerial commissars and the Chinese. This brings us to ask the inevitable question: Why does the information age with infinitely better communication and access to creative tools fail to massively increase creative output and invention?

The answer of course, leads us back to our Techno Dark Age. The United States, for example, is a nation that has long held up competition between individuals as a high ideal, a cultural characteristic that has only been amplified technologies since the industrial revolution. Electric lighting, for example, makes it easier to work around the clock. This makes it possible for a workaholic who sleeps as little as possible to get ahead, which also puts pressure on everyone else to not fall too far behind. Any invention that makes labor easier, counter-intuitively makes output more competitive. When you have enough inventions like this, eventually there exists a state of absolute and perfect competition.
Now take an American society that is Absolutely Competitive and add Absolute Information as well….The intersection of these two forces makes a stable, lasting society impossible even as productivity and profit skyrocket in the short term.
Under these diabolical conditions everyone is in relentless existential competition with everyone else while getting real-time updates about every detail. The inevitable result is mass defection and total social breakdown in a Hobbesian nightmare landscape where fewer every year can afford housing or gain the stability to have a family even as the basic networks for transporting food and fuel teeter on the brink.

This nuclear meltdown of the 1st world mass society is what I mean when I say that technology causes and is an attribute of the new Dark Age. Runaway social competition has always been one of the main threats, if not the main threat to social cohesion in all times and places. The societies that stand the test of time, however, all develop social technologies to moderate in-group tensions so that most people can cooperate most of the time with each other and against outside threats. Any group has to be at least as good at mediating cooperation as its neighbors or else it is either slowly displaced or conquered.

Humanity has yet to develop social technologies that have proven able to deal with Post-Industrial society and the information age. It may simply be the case that humans cannot deal with too much information. We now see a new mass hysteria mind virus sweep through the collective consciousness every few months. We see people brainwashed and ghost-hacked into forgetting their former selves and mutilating their own bodies. We see many more turn on their friends and families as if they were bitten by zombies. It’s hard yet to even begin to internalize the true horror of our age as it destroys tens of millions of lives on an assembly line as surely as the great wars of the 20th century.

The Techno Dark Age will be an age of fracture as smaller and more localized groups figure out ways of not being destroyed by the larger mass culture that drives its adherents by the millions into near-extinction. This is already manifesting as a new age of tribalism where the 19th-20th century nation-state has already ceased to exist. Already there are neighborhoods, cities, and whole states that are difficult to travel to in the US if you do not think and look a certain way, a trend that will only accelerate and solidify. Over time, people will assort by region, make local laws and institutions intolerable to enemy groups and become entrenched tribalistic fiefdoms. The groups that come up with the best answers to the pressures of the information age will crush and displace their neighbors as if without effort. The Techno Dark Age is a necessary testing ground to see which models are suited and which are obsolete and doomed to pass away into a few historical footnotes. As we would expect from a Dark Age, most innovation and culture comes to a halt, but it’s necessary to clean out all the dead wood before a new phase of growth can begin. It’s all part of the process, if we are lucky. Without any new continents to colonize and a dysfunctional culture worldwide we can only hope the present crisis does not lead to permanent decay and primitive, sleepy stagnation until some cataclysm finally leads to extinction of the species.

The Establishment’s Fragility

Soon after the retreat from Afghanistan, the establishment was touting the idea of another lockdown to keep a lid on things. As I mentioned in my last post, I understood that they were going all in on a strategy of hard power meant to keep the populace overawed in the wake of their embarrassing weakness. Any remaining perception of their right to rule depended on the total success of this initiative.

Since then, their success has been partial at best as they busily try to run through the entire Greek alphabet with a new comic book virus villain seemingly every few weeks. With every new attempt to impose new restrictions on this decentralizing empire, emerging divisions within it are only made more clear. At this point, I’d casually estimate there’s at most 20% diehard true believers who really care about the whole mask religion and they are mainly concentrated in the bluest strongholds.

With every failed attempt to impose the disease on the rest of the country, the grip of the flailing central bureaucrats grows a bit weaker. No one seems to have much stomach to actively oppose the present system and there doesn’t seem to be any real alternatives in sight but at the same time there is no enthusiasm to sustain this state of affairs. It is no longer even clear who or if anyone is really in charge or in control and history tells us this kind of gap is always filled, usually pretty quickly.

Even within itself, the establishment’s base of support grows weaker by the day as they continue to engage in cutthroat competition among themselves and alienate their closest supporters.
I see the recent victory of Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia governor election as an important litmus test. While Youngkin is not really any kind of populist, the incumbent Terry McAuliffe is an arch-hatchetman of the establishment probably among the top dozen people invited to Obama’s birthday parties.

McAuliffe as governor of Virginia may as well have been mayor of Northern Virginia, an area that encompasses the pure establishment energy of the Imperial Capital perhaps even better than DC itself. McAuliffe was the steward of Establishment Mordor, had Obama personally campaigning for him, and still couldn’t find a way to win. What happened here?

The tides turned against McAuliffe once the backlash to critical race theory took hold and in response, police physically cracked down on school boards in Loudoun County and the suburbs around NoVa. Overnight what should have been colonies of the faithful were beginning to revolt. To understand what happened we must understand that the government worker, contractor, and bureaucrat class living around DC see themselves as a class of lesser aristocracy, considerably removed from the rest of the country.
The moment police were sent to rough them up at school board meetings, there was an open breach of aristocratic privilege. The American Szlachta class reacted with outrage to being publicly treated like Red-State insurrectionists and McAuliffe publicly stating parents shouldn’t have a voice in school curriculum sealed the deal. In the end, even some of the most powerful people in the world couldn’t tip the scales as necessary to save McAuliffe. Even they couldn’t completely fail to appease the Szlachta petty nobility of NoVa.

It is important to explore this particular case because it is a sign of serious trouble for an elite class when its support is weakening even among their closest retainers. Moreover, the talent bench for the government elites grows ever thinner as they backstab and metoo each other to monopolize positions of power. No new blood ever seems to emerge and at this point we are left with an assortment of the same old Soviet-style dinosaur party hacks trading places in all the highest positions with the President himself an American version of the sick and senile Chernenko.

All across the internet I see everyone still panicking about viruses and New World Order plots to force everyone to live in pods and eat bugs. It’s curious lately how instead of being hip and ahead like it used to be, most online discourse is now at least 6-8 months behind trends in the real world.

Few of any opinion right now seem to understand how desperately fragile the position of the present establishment really is. Globohomo, at least as we’ve known it, is swiftly crumbling and there is already a huge power vacuum. The first jackals and vultures are already circling around and it behooves us to consider what power coalitions of oligarchs are likely to emerge next.

We should also be aware that we are on the verge of a time of great opportunities as public opinion continues to shift steadily towards populist and dissident views. I for one find it hard to be discouraged when the most popular newsman in the country has pretty much quoted from dissident sources for a few years now and has had a famous neo-reactionary on his show. At the same time, an up and coming candidate for the French presidency sounds like a deep internet message board from around 2014.

The establishment grows ever-weaker outside of its core blue-zones of control, leaving huge areas wide-open. I have followed this so-called dissident section of the internet for over a decade and while the exercise of hard power and censorship is at an all-time high, the position of the globalist oligarchy has never been more precarious. This is a time to prepare for opportunities as they open up, because if you are not ready as they appear, you will miss out.

The Empire Decentralizes

The fall of Afghanistan is a major show of weakness from the Globalist American Empire that will have as strong of an effect domestically as internationally.
Indeed, the intelligentsia class seems to be aware of this as they have begun to refer to Red-State Americans as “American Taliban.” As silly as this comparison may be, it shows they understand on some level the implications of institutional failure at this particular moment in history… It is not the act of withdrawal that is dangerous, but the collapse of order and authority much sooner than anticipated.

Since Trump began his presidential campaign in 2015, the ruling establishment has gradually removed the velvet glove and resorted ever more to the iron fist of overt coercion and hard power. The trouble is our present rulers are scions of what is sometimes called “the new left,” the 20th century movement away from hard power in favor of dominating culture, institutions, and information. This strategy has been so successful for so long, it beggars belief that the establishment wants to reduce the fox strategy it has mastered in favor of a lion approach at which they are unpracticed.

Faced with Trump, all they had to do was play within the letter of their own rules to neutralize him and patiently wait four short years to get him out of office. As it was, the permanent bureaucracy, the courts, the pentagon successfully contained and encysted Trump by sabotaging, disobeying, and getting their own appointed as the president’s personal staff. The GOP leadership successfully co-opted and diverted Trump into squandering his limited political capital on harmless initiatives like tax reforms.

The ruling class had already won easily but they could not help themselves. They had to keep attacking, even if it meant damaging the rules and institutions they relied on to legitimate their power. In retrospect it is clear that they did not understand themselves correctly as a priestly caste built on ceremony and consistency. The rules and processes they began to abandon to increase pressure on Trump were their own best protection. Foolishly, they flung open the gates of their impregnable fortress to give battle on open ground.
Even worse for them, Trump, who was by a nature a New York City centrist in the mold of Giuliani or Bloomberg, was forced to become more like the man they thought he was. Trump was a real-life Jay Gatsby who desperately craved approval and respect from the old money and the power elite. Instead of disarming him with false friendship, they forced him to really rely on his own supporters and by the time of the 2020 election he was drifting towards becoming authentically opposed to the establishment.

In early 2020, the establishment ceased to selectively break their own rules and started to openly wield hard power in the most ostentatious way. They used this direct coercion not to achieve any decisive objective but simply to cow and intimidate the populace with the flimsy pretext of preventing disease. Then came a long summer of astroturfed riots in which entire neighborhoods were burnt to the ground unopposed with the implicit blessing of the state.
The ability of Washington bureaucrats and the corporations joined together to micromanage every aspect of daily life with masks, lockdowns, and controlled chaos was a truly awe-inspiring display of raw strength and even many long-time dissidents were intimidated and demoralized.

The rulers, though, never seemed to understand their power was drawn from a deep well of legitimacy established by 250 years of relative political stability and prosperity, by the Allied victory in WW2, by the defeat of the Soviet Union, by a civic society that followed due process regardless of politics… In reality, they were burning up vast reservoirs of this legitimacy on a great funereal pyre with only vague goals of getting rid of Trump and launching a “Great Reset.” By using all this built-up trust and good will to close down small businesses and force people to wear masks, they were like America in Vietnam clumsily napalming and defoliating endless miles of jungle with great destruction, but no decisive strategic aim.

The trouble with squandering accumulated legitimacy is it takes much more time and effort to earn it than it does to spend it, so competent rulers are slow to burn it up more than they must. When the ruling class holds a gleeful bonfire instead, they have surrendered whatever appearance they had left of holding the Mandate of Heaven.

The disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan comes at a moment when the old legitimacy is nearly exhausted. Worse, the last 5 years of the elites publicly breaking their own rules have now established multiple disastrous precedents.
From the moment sanctuary cities simply ignored the directives of the US President and from the moment the president’s executive orders were struck down by random federal judges, the power of the federal government itself was severely weakened and a path towards greater local autonomy was opened wide. Somehow, the rulers, never imagined these new precedents could end up benefiting political enemies as they traded temporary benefits for the permanent reduction of their power. At every turn they were willing to damage Trump when it meant damaging the very concept of the presidency and the whole central government along with him.

At the same time, the central bureaucracy has been threatening renewed lockdowns and strict vaccine passports for months now without being able to deliver much more than talk outside of a few of the biggest cities where their control is strongest. If by the normal fall flu season, masks and vaccine passports are not in effect in most places, they will begin to seem weak and full of hot air. In the aftermath of total collapse of order in Afghanistan, it is incumbent on the establishment now to demonstrate they are still firmly in control in the USA. Unfortunately for them, there is now blood in the water and if they cannot fend off the sharks, the sharks will rapidly multiply.

Within days of the Afghan puppet president fleeing the country after his whole army deserted within hours, the governments and courts of conservative states are testing the boundaries as never before using the precedents created by the establishment as their own weapon. For days, the elites have screamed in a fury about the state of Texas deputizing citizens to circumvent the letter of the law. This would not have been such a problem had they not deputized antifas and NGOs to attack citizens without any process or accountability for years now.
This is why even in war, people can agree to some rules…because if you do it, the other guy can do it too. But the present rulers are just that stupid and now they face the price.

The trouble with being a regime that relies on hard power, is you have to be ready and willing to apply hard punishment the moment anyone gets out of line or your authority swiftly ceases to be credible. This is why anyone competent prefers to rule with at least some measure of legitimacy behind them. The Globalist American establishment now finds itself in a tough situation where it must very soon impose tight order by force or else face accelerating decentralization of its empire until it resembles a patchwork Holy Roman Empire with regional elector princes able to do as they wish. It may be in everyone’s interest to retain a polite fiction of a United States even as individual regions mandate face-coverings by secular sharia and have their own borders, citizenship, and passports, but everyone will understand a new reality that can no longer be disguised.

At this moment, the ball is in the court of the rulers as even their anointed puppet struggles to keep up appearances for another day. It’s up to them to explain quickly what makes their puppet here different from the one they had in Afghanistan. It’s up to them to figure out what to do as mass virus welfare programs expire, millions who’ve as of yet been bribed into docility suddenly sent back out into the world. Their move.

The Maskites

The air we are born into is full of eternal sin.

The virus of a thousand years.

That waited outside the walls of Eden.

Without the mask we breathe it in and

Contaminate our precious souls.

We must ever wear the mask.

From the first breath to the last,

The priest finishes his incantation and holds out his forearms to intercept a small head poking forth from a convulsing uterus.  His hands shake as he poises ready with a tiny elastic black mask stretched between his thumbs.

He is poised there almost motionless for the next hour of relentless contractions.  At the very moment the baby’s head emerges, he forces the mask over the newborn’s face as it opens its mouth to take its first breath.

The priest breathes a sigh of relief.  Once, when he was new, he missed his timing, and the baby had to be discarded as Unclean.  He knew he would be demoted if that ever happened again.

The newborn’s screams are muffled now beneath the fabric it must wear for the rest of its life.  The umbilical cord is snipped and soon the mother is squeezing dabs of colostrum onto the black fabric to be sucked up bit by bit by hungry infant lips.

He congratulates the mother but the priest cannot pause long for there is battle not far away.  He hasn’t slept in two days, he rushes from the hospital now to the battle front not two miles away.  Adult soldiers with steel masks fused to their faces long ago greet him in the trenches as the perpetual rain of shells arcs over head, with the waspish buzz of bullets zipping about just inches above ground level.

“Father,” cries one of them. “Lead us now in our charge.”

“Gladly,” says the priest, “I just gave life with these hands. Now we will take their lives.”

The men murmur with appreciation.

“Boy or girl? One of them asks.”

“I…I don’t know.”

“Now!  Let’s go!”  An officer screams through a mask with a megaphone built into it.

Within seconds, the Maskite forces have gone over the top and begin to charge across a muddy hellscape churned about by explosive plows drawn by devils for the last year.

Hundreds fall as bullets streak back and forth but the swarms of the Masked are unperturbed as they always have been. The sacrifice of one is a small thing next to the perfect safety of the rest. Despite horrendous losses, they reach the enemy position and fling themselves screaming as best they can through their identical facemasks.

As they overwhelm lines of trenches one by one, enemy soldiers wave their arms in surrender, always the youngest ones.  Anyone with experience knows better.  Convulsing with glee, the soldiers call upon the priest who carries with him a supply of complementary masks.  Masks of metal in the shape of an emotionless human face.

Everyone looks in disgust at the prisoners with their faces uncovered, their lips, mouths, and tongues waving about like exposed sexual organs.

The priest strides forth, metal mask in one hand, drill in the other.  He begins to chant.

Those who dwell apart from Righteousness

Must also wear the mask

Against the never-ending virus that tries every soul.

Where in life they deny the true teachings.

May their end set them aright in the fiery eyes of Absolute Purity.

The priest sets to his sacred work as prisoners are held down screaming. He notes again the particular sound and feeling a bladed screw makes as it sinks into wet flesh and fastens into bone with a hollow thud.  

In the light of dawn, a mass of revenants is sent back to the enemy lines groaning in pain and despair.

A horde of teenage conscripts who did not know to either flee or kill themselves reaches out for the mercy of their comrades, their masked metal faces impassive as they groan in agony and despair.  Streaks of dried blood trail down the edges of their permanent masks from wherever a screw was driven into their faces.

Looking on, their comrades can only imagine one thing.  Their officer gives the order and they raise their rifles.  Though many are blinded by tears, there is only one more thing they can do.

***

“God damn!  God dammit all! I told them if they did it again that would be it!”  yells the General. “I have tried to reach a measured peace with these savages and still they insist on the most brutal torture.  I must relay to the Emperor that every so often there is a culture that must perish from the universe for the good of all….This…this is their last planet and they still cannot behave as humans.  Commence orbital bombardment.  I refuse to waste more young men trying to quell them through measured means.”

***

Hundreds of thousands of Maskites cheer together across miles of front as their enemies begin to withdraw, soon they emerge from their defenses and begin to traverse miles of unguarded ground, waving rifles over their heads and firing wildly into the sky.

“This is a day of deliverance!”  Yells the priest with arms outflung, his voice amplified by speakers in his mask.  As the last dropship disappears into the atmosphere, the sky lights up with a thousand glorious comets.  The armies of the Righteous cheer until incandescent flashes make everyone shrink away.

As the blinding light resolves, tremendous mushroom clouds are visible in the direction of every town and city.  Shockwaves are on the way and the priest wishes that is the last thing he ever knew.  As ashes settle, he crawls about for another day or two vomiting inside his mask, he barely opens the emergency drainage slat on time to avoid drowning, then left trapped next to the ammonia stench of his own crusted puke.  Thirsty beyond thirst, no amount of canteens pilfered from the dead amend his ferociously peeling skin.  The priest screams at the grey sky one last time as he thinks of the newborn he just inducted into life already dead by now, his whole civilization and culture extinct with his passing, all his own life a waste.

Trolley Problems on the Island of Sodor

“Thomas! Thomas, wake up!”

Thomas the train engine lurches into the drowsy beginnings of consciousness.

A familiar voice comes from the darkness and a few moments later a dim pendant lamp snaps on as someone pulls on its chain. Standing there, casting shadows across the room is Sir Topham Hatt, controller of all the railroads of Sodor.

“Thomas, it’s urgent! An emergency! Oh my, you’re our only hope!”

Topham Hatt flicks a stiff switch and the garage door begins to open with a metallic groan, letting in at first a blinding slit of daylight and then a flood.  Thomas squints as he struggles to come fully awake.

“Thomas, I mean it.  We must go! Now!” Thomas is confused.  He can’t remember the last time the jovial railroad controller was actually screaming. To his astonishment, Topham Hatt himself climbs inside his cab.

Within minutes, Thomas roars at full speed from the Tidwell Sheds onto the main line across the island. Right away, he notices a smaller set of rails now alongside his own.

“The Duke and I thought it was a good idea!” blurts out the controller. “It’s a disaster.  Look, there he is!”

“It’s Trillions the Trolley, Thomas!”

A small red trolley car off in the distance closes the gap in just a few minutes.  As the interloper draws near, Thomas catches a glimpse of a twisted face with bloodshot, fixed, veiny eyes and a tongue that lolls out of its constantly-contorting gap-toothed mouth.

“Oh, no, he’s gone insane!  Whatever shall we do?!”

At that moment, Thomas notices assorted human limbs and a couple twisted bodies caught in the slats of the trolley’s front buffer. The staring faces of the dead with their filmed-over eyes nod gently to the rhythm of the rails.  Within a few more seconds, the trolley catches up with him and as it passes, he sees it is packed with as many passengers as its compartment can carry with limbs sticking out of each window. Everyone on board is screaming in terror and despair as Trillions the Trolley races past.  Thomas tries to keep up but the lightning-fast trolley soon vanishes over the next hill.

“He’ll be back for another lap soon enough.” says the controller with a sigh. “You see…you may not realize it but you and your friends have been asleep for the last forty years…Well, I tried to revive Percy and Henry and the rest, but no one in Sodor makes the parts for them anymore. I’m afraid we’ve lost them, Thomas.”

Thomas throws on the brakes with all his might sending sparks flying as grief and shock overwhelms him. He nearly derails as his eyes stare in horror and his mouth hangs agape.  In that moment he discovers a torture even the devil couldn’t have come up with, the feeling of trying to scream only to remember he has no lungs or larynx. Then, a keening wail and tremendous tower of steam bursts from his whistle that can be heard across the island. Thomas screeches to a halt with the tracks behind him still smoking.

Topham Hatt gets out of the cab, climbs onto the soft grass of the Sodor countryside and stands right in front of Thomas’ twitching face turned a much paler shade of grey than usual, his unfocused pupils reduced to pinpricks.  The controller removes his top hat from his bald pate for the first time and somberly addresses the last of the Sudrian engines.

“Oh, Thomas. We have made a bloody mess of things.  When we realized you and your friends only go forty miles per hour we imported a trolley that could go eighty miles per hour and put all of you away in your sheds.  At first everyone was overjoyed but over time, they had more children and we had a couple more million people move to Sodor. Soon even Trillions the Trolley couldn’t keep up.  We kept upgrading him and pushing him until now he travels at 160 miles per hour.”

“But now that’s too fast and we can’t slow him down.  The commuters on board are making just enough pay to get by. They can’t afford to stop or even slow down a little bit.  Now Trillions is running over anyone who gets in his way, especially the old and disabled who can’t move quickly. Now everyone is faced with sacrificing their parents and grandparents to keep working…Thomas, I need you to come out of it, I need you to listen to me.”

The little train engine’s gaze gradually refocuses and his face is now crumpled with sorrow around his big, expressive eyes.

“Thomas, we only really have two things we can do.”

“If we stop the trolley, we’ll stop people from dying right now, but even with your help not enough people will be able to get to work and the factories and the quarry will all shut down.  Then people will be penniless and desperate and I am afraid, Thomas, that will be even worse in the long run.”

“If we leave the trolley alone, it all goes on as you see now and Trillions will keep going even faster.  I can’t do this anymore, Thomas. There is a fork up ahead. One way leads to a switch that will divert the trolley to a dead end.  The other way will take us back to Tidwell. You’ll have to make the choice. I’m…I’m so sorry.”

Topham Hatt solemnly puts his hat back on and with stooped shoulders climbs back into the cab.  In moments, Thomas is moving, slowly and hesitantly at first, then starts to pick up speed. In the cab, Topham Hatt pulls out his gold pocketwatch from his coat on its delicate chain and flips it open looking for some small comfort.

Somehow Thomas can suddenly hear the relentless ticking of the watch over his engine and it grows steadily louder as time seems to slow down and the fork grows nearer.  Thomas’ brow is stern and eyes fierce but his mouth writhes with agony. Tears of jet black oil begin to well up around his eyes and streak down his face. The sound of the ticking is now almost deafening.  The fork is just ahead.

The camera zooms on Thomas’ face as the moment of decision approaches.  “Tohhh…misss!” Topham Hatt’s voice sounds slowed and distorted.

As the train engine furrows his brow even tighter, a line of static flickers across the screen. Then again.  And again. More lines of dancing snow appear, shimmer, and disappear. Suddenly there is a descending discordant orchestral glissando and atonal pizzicato strings.  As the glissando bottoms out, the screen goes black…

The animator jolts awake in a cold sweat, his heart pounding.  It’s an ordinary morning before another work day. He breathes deep and climbs and sits on the edge of his bed.  By his bedside is a large poster of a smiling, happy Thomas, the character he helps to create for a living. Those big dinner-plate eyes have been blandly watching over him while he was sleeping.  It was nothing. Just a nightmare. The animator shakes his head, gets dressed and heads out to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and to check the news on his phone. Looks like it’s going to be gray day at the beginning of Spring.  It’s early March in the year 2020.

Stark Truth Podcast: Neuro-Tribalism

My latest podcast with Rob Stark radio:

This time, we focus on how the internet is a new printing press that abolishes many of the constraints of geography and makes possible the formation of groups with relatively rare traits that would never find each other in a purely face-to-face society.
The internet makes possible a process of distillation.  If you have a trait that is 1/1000, you can find 350,000 people like you in a sprawling empire of 350 million.  That small but substantial minority, if truly cohesive, has the potential to steamroll countless millions who are isolated and weak in an atomized consumer economy.

I anticipate that while some of these new neuro-tribes may be dysfunctional crabs-in-a-bucket echo chambers, others will concentrate excellence and capability.  These latter will be the new ruling tribes over a de-facto caste system as the emergent peoples establish a pecking order.

We analyze how even within the roughly related populations we call “races” there are clusters of personality types.  Those who are roughly related and share key personality traits are those who form post-internet, post-nation neuro-tribes.  The black sheep of every family with mass communications are soon able to have a whole herd of black sheep where their particular aberrance is the norm.

To hear more listen to me and Rob at:

Robert Stark talks to Giovanni Dannato about Neuro-Tribalism

 

Time For America To Grow Up

Since the founding of America, it’s always been a dumping ground for the rest of the world’s problems and a laboratory where those who come out on top can work their wills without any traditions or custom to hold them back.  Instead of a City on a Hill, it’s been more like that Randian city on the bottom of the sea from Bioshock.

From the beginning, it was a money mill where Whites and Indians were used as slaves until they were replaced by imported Africans.  Since the 1600s, it’s been about importing ever more unskilled labor to undermine the power of normal people who get just comfortable enough to decide they don’t want to be exploited to death.

Over 150 years later Benjamin Franklin was scratching his head wondering why average people defected to the Indians whenever they got the chance and only came back kicking and screaming.  What we call America has always been a game of hucksters and exploiters.
Most of the Founding Fathers were rich smugglers, slave-traders, and slave-owners who were de-facto New World aristocrats.  The American Revolution did not lead to chaos because it was the revolt of one elite against another elite.  There is a lot to be said for that; I favor an enlightened elite.  But their narrow view led to them getting deposed within a couple generations in a pointless and bloody civil war.

The American scheme proved to be sustainable for nearly 400 years because there was an entire continent to expand into.  Now there’s not.  Every easy corner has been settled and then populated to saturation.  If you want to found a colony now, you’ll be homesteader in Montana or Alaska.

Now, the American people have to grow up.  They have nowhere else to shove their problems.  In fact, we are so weak and divided that surrounding states that could never challenge us militarily easily shove their surplus populations through our porous “borders.”  They may be less wealthy and powerful, but they win in the game of genetic mercantilism.

All the rest of the world lives adjacent to groups of comparable power and few have two gigantic oceans to protect them.  Nor did they have whole continents to colonize.  Every other society on earth has had to reach a state of equilibrium within Malthusian limits and develop culture and traditions to limit disaster to manageable levels.  Those that could not were subsumed by more competent groups.

Now America is in the same situation as everyone else and we have to establish a sustainable civilization for the first time and in a very short time.

It is not cause for despair though.  Let us look at Africans in America who always vote 90% for the same party and move in lockstep whenever it matters most.  They are pound-for-pound the most powerful electorate in American politics simply because they can actually work together sometimes in a land where everyone else is out slit the other guy’s throat as soon as he falls asleep.

It has often been pointed out that Americans are not like other Europeans.  We are mutts of a 100,000 different admixtures, descendants of the misfits who couldn’t make it in Europe.  So it has been argued relentlessly we are a cursed people with no name, no nation, no inheritance, no future.

But what about Blacks?  They came from hundreds of different tribes taken from a couple thousand miles of coastline and from the interior of their native continent.  They have a decent level of admixture with European colonists.  None of that has been a barrier to their greater commonality when subjected to outside pressures.

We have already seen that a roughly-related race undergoes a process of ethnogenesis in a new homeland, especially when it becomes a minority beset from every side.
Many dissidents suppose the descendants of Europeans in America becoming a minority would be an apocalyptic end.  No, it would be the beginning of a new ethny who emphatically and viscerally know who they are.  An America that’s 60% European-descended remains in free-market slumber, working their lives away to out-compete the other guy by a few thousand bucks.
An America that’s 30% European is a fanatical tribe that engages in aggressive conquest against its blood enemies.

As pressure makes loose river sediment into hard rock, it can make a population of mutts into a new pure breed that back each other up and screw over outlanders whenever they can.  Americans will become their own European ethnic group alongside Germans or British.  There will be no “nation of immigrants” pablum.  Everyone will know who Americans are.  But first, it is time for America to grow up.

An Alt-Centrist Look At UBI

Now that Andrew Yang has popularized universal basic income into a meme, it’s important to remember how it would actually work in real life.

The most obvious problem with giving everyone $1000 is prices just go up. Prices adjust to what people can pay.

Yang recognizes this is a problem and argues like most free-market types that it would barely make a dent in basic food supplies and mass consumer electronics.

Like pretty much every other Market Worshiper, Yang focuses on bulk goods and commodities while neglecting positional goods.

Positional goods are those with prices mostly determined by one human’s situation relative to everyone else.  Positional goods have no intrinsic absolute value.  They can be worth nothing or infinity.  There is no bottom above zero for the shell of a house in the worst parts of Detroit; there is no top for a degree from Harvard.

If you think the most important cities are unaffordable now, guaranteed income would hit the most desirable places hardest, forcing even more people into the economically dead hinterlands where they have nothing left but opiates and suicide.

We need only look at the disaster that is college loans.  If anyone can get a college loan, prices adjust until you need a loan to go to college.

Or health care.  When the system assumes everyone has health insurance, you can’t afford healthcare without health insurance.

Maybe a bag of rice only goes up so high in price absent runaway hyperinflation but imagine what happens to local rents as soon as everyone has $1000 extra dollars per month!  The bidding war for apartments, credentials, medicine, and used cars are the silverback gorillas in an ever-shrinking room for most people, not buying ramen and plastic junk at wal-mart for a few pennies cheaper.  Those who focus on consumer goods while ignoring positional goods are either stupid or actively malicious.

A UBI that goes to everyone is not a solution.  If you have a basic income or any other systemic advantage, it can’t go to everyone(smart socialism) if you want it to be an effective policy tool.  If you want to have a handout, you have to choose winners and losers in a way that benefits society overall.  Who does the society want to subsidize?  Who does it want to disadvantage?

Our present elites love having a “level playing field.”  If you need a loan to go to college, insurance to get a surgery, and your UBI check to pay the rent, they own you more completely than the owner of an Ancient Roman latifundia mega-farm owned his slaves.  They own every breath you breathe and if you say something they think is mean, they pull out your heart-plug like the Harkonnens did in David Lynch’s Dune and laugh a hearty, villainous laugh as you flail about as your arteries drain dry in less than a minute.

It’s a dark time at the bottom of the second act, like The Empire Strikes Back, and lots of people are tempted to say “Fuck it, I can get 1000 dollars while I watch it all burn.”
Don’t think like that.  Nothing good ever comes from that kind of negativity.

It seems like Trump has totally caved and even started attacking his most ardent supporters.  Andrew Yang wants to lure in the whole population of Guatemala with promises of $1000, no land, no mule.

In a way, Trump has accomplished what we really wanted him to in our darkest hearts.  The present system with his final surrender stands totally and utterly discredited, the last shreds of the Mandate of Heaven sent to the winds.  It’s now just a race to see what replaces it all.

No US president has had any real power to influence policy for almost 20 years now.  It is now clearly a position about as ceremonial as the Japanese emperor.  People who were die hard WN 1.0 guys now promote Andrew Yang because they know it’s all a joke.  Nobody cares anymore.

Instead of the Search for Spock, it’s the search for who actually has real power and to formally recognize them and endow them with the responsibilities that come with rulership, whether they like it or not.

Multi Neuro-Tribal Society

The futuristic elite living within the beltway of Washington and within sight of Starfleet Academy in San Francisco see themselves as the leadership of an Empire of Globalism endowed with Divine Right.

As they wear pristine white jumpsuit uniforms in oblong post-modernistic white penthouses with amorphous furniture that practically glows, they ponder the state of the world in front of pale blue holographic screens they manipulate with deft motions of their gracile hands.

For some reason, Iran furrows their brows to no end while their “own” rural provinces in Pennsylvania and Ohio escape their notice altogether.  Or at least, if these provinces force themselves into their attention, it irritates them to the core of their perfect beings.
*Error! Error!* Chimes the holographic display.  *There is an anomaly from the world of Covington IV in the Cincinnatus system.  The Harmony has been breached by a group of pilgrims sent to the Imperial Homeworld.  Class V discord detected! Warning! Error! Error!*

An agitated hand makes swatting motions now at the display to no avail.  The annoying red messages keep popping up and alarms blare…

In real life, no one truly believes in their gut any more that there is a single nation in the sense of a 19th and 20th century.  There’s a few places within the Pale where most institutions and production are centralized and then there is everywhere else, a flyover land full of barbarians that trade their raw commodities for the crafts of the cities.
Thus the geopolitics of Iran, Syria, or Russia matter far more to important people than the agitations of backwards people in nearby hinterlands.

If we could ever doubt it, let us look at wildly inconsistent immigration policy.  Beltway and Starfleet Academy cherry pick the best talent from the best institutions all over the world, making entry into their midst an exclusive privilege.  Everywhere else. outside of these walled-in green zones, anyone can show up from anywhere in the world and compete with the locals for their daily bread.
Not only are these policies complete opposites, the failure of elites to protect a larger territory belies the idea of citizenship within a nation-state—the idea that people are tied to a piece of land by birth and in return, the rulers give land-members certain claims and privileges over outsiders.
One way or another, the nation-state is over.  Without the protection of the state people both high and low turn to tribalism.  Yet with our new technologies, tribalism does not work the same as before.

Modern tribalism does not align neatly with any nation-state or piece of land.  It aligns with the interests of its members, wherever they may be.  The territory is wherever its people and its interests exist.  The territory of the state is concretely defined by borders drawn across pieces of land.  The territory of neuro-tribes is defined more abstractly, land is controlled only where it furthers their goals and is not too much of a strategic liability.

As the last of the fantastic economic elbow room freed up by the World Wars is taken up and we return to the Malthusian status quo, we are all forced to find groups that have our backs if we have any hope of thriving in this world.  History is not only not over.  History is just back to normal.  Now, with access to everyone online, we find those most like ourselves.

As people find their groups, the groups interact in a greater ecosystem, a multi-neural-tribal society.  These groups, like modern groups will not at all be equal.
We already have a caste system in all but name, but neuro-tribalism will develop and formalize it to a science.  The most effective tribe rises to the top and rules.  The people in this tribe are high intelligence, high agency, high creativity but recognize that most people need guidance and rules to function at all.

So while pursuing their own ways suitable to their kind, the golden-souled master morality rulers back a strict state religion and rigorous code of law that proscribes the lives of those who need it most.
The key problem of secular egalitarianism is it tries to treat everyone the same.  Worse, it tries hold everyone to the standard of the aristocracy of cognition and character.  Every one of us supposedly has the potential to be an intellectually-curious entrepeneur best-selling novelist astronaut.  Looking back, this will be seen as one of the most tragic and disastrous ideas of all time.

The freedoms that high agency people thrive on destroy those who need structure.  The rigid routines and strict punishments that make most normal people feel safe and secure are an unbearable burden for natural cognitive aristocrats who chafe until either they sabotage the social order or are killed off.
Secularism makes the society like a single aquarium with both salt and freshwater fish.
An aristocrat of the soul thrives on freedoms and spiritual challenges.
An ordinary guy turns to TV, drug abuse, and despair if he’s not given something to do at all times.
The obvious solution is to have them in separate societies with the aristocrat managing things, the ordinary guy following their lead.

The aristocrats, of course have to be a responsible elite that creates a social order that allows ordinary people to have families, friends, and healthy amounts of leisure.  When they fail at this, they lose the Mandate of Heaven and with it the ability to exercise their sacred freedoms.  With aristocratic freedom comes the responsibility to rule.  This is the post-secular social contract.

Interview With Rob Stark on Culture and Aesthetics

Our latest podcast:

Rob Stark, Matt Pegas, and I had an in-depth discussion on the importance of aesthetics and culture in determining the trajectory of societies and civilizations.
This is one of the most important subjects to discuss because these are qualities often ignored in favor of charts of markets and economic output.

At one point I reflect how the aesthetics of a society are a dialogue between ruler and ruled, between society and the individual.  Whatever official propaganda might be, some part of us always knows the real score from our surroundings.  If we are told society is equal and yet we see palatial mansions looking down on slums from the hilltops, we know the truth.
If we are told everything is progress and our ancestors lived in darkness, we have only to compare a painting from centuries ago to a nonsensical drip painting.  Written in those drips is the abolition of purpose and meaning, plain for anyone to see.

We also see a ruling class that broadcasts their unwillingness to take up their natural responsibilities by their avoidance of appropriate grandeur.  A nobleman who wears hoodies and skinny jeans like a petulant teenager past age 40 not only fails to assume his rightful role; he purposely counter-signals and deprives his people of leadership.

We especially focus on the interaction of aesthetics and social capital.  We note that modern capitalism has produced impressive architecture and can reproduce charming villages whenever demand is sufficient.
What it has not been able to do is produce a society-wide shared cultural vision.  On one hand there are suburbs and strip malls cranked out for maximum short-term efficiency creating miles of soulless sprawl accessible only by car.  On another extreme are a few gorgeous hotels, villages, and pastel-painted row-house neighborhoods commissioned by the wealthy.

One thing that sets apart our society even from many ancient counterparts is that access to even the simplest sorts of beauty has become a privilege of wealth.
It is a clear signal that most of us are not really a meaningful part of this society.  It is a metaphor for how all real wealth and power is centralized in a few parts of a few cities.  It is also a metaphor for all the young women who flock to the cities for comfortable office jobs, leaving the hinterlands bereft of mate prospects for young men.

If you’re not in on the game, in one of the few places where it’s actually played, you may as well be dead.  A message that’s whispered in the ear of every human being in our cultural zone whether they consciously hear it or not.

We examine what goes right and wrong with modern forms of art.  Why are grand buildings still possible in commercial real-estate while other art forms, even Hollywood movies, are all but dead?
Looking at great art of the past, many works had limited patronage in common.  The artist could work within the parameters set by one or a few men.
Mass market demand for art is far more tyrannical by comparison and selects for the lowest common denominator.
Thus, Hollywood movies have declined precipitously in quality since China and the rest of the world became major markets.  What’s for everyone is for no one.
Meanwhile, a fabulous casino or resort is still the project of just a few who are capable of realizing a single united vision.
The flaws of cultural democracy become readily apparent from this basic examination and the rightful place of responsible elitism becomes clear.

If that catches your interest, please join us.

Also, Rob and I have another talk coming up about neuro-tribalism and its ramifications.

Neuro-Tribalism

The internet allows types of people to find one another and gather wherever they’re from. Always before, people have assorted by families and clans they are born into, by ethnic groups and race.  These groups have always been bound by certain limits of geography.

The information age has revealed there are very finite limits to traditional social organization.  Families always have black sheep who don’t fit in.  Races and ethnic groups are most meaningful in contrast with alien peoples.  The average person of an ethnic group competes at least as much as they cooperate with their own people.

Worse, families, clans, and ethnic groups are complete ecosystems with predators, prey, and parasites.  Even siblings ruthlessly compete for resources and the runt of the litter gets thrown out in the cold.  Modernity could not have been so divisive so quickly if a multitude of people did not wish to escape from the equilibria they were born into the instant they had the hope of a better option.  This is why restoration of an older order is hopeless absent some kind of cataclysmic collapse that takes billions of lives with it.

The answer to modernity is neuro-tribalism.  The black sheep and the runts of every litter of similar breeds find one another and form associations.  People come in a range of neurotypes and certain people are simply on the same wavelength.  They think in a certain rhythm, see the world in a certain way.  It’s almost like an extended mind that for many even an extended family has never offered in this atomized society.

Even on perfectly anonymous internet forums, one cannot fake their personality for long.  Any woman who goes into the manosphere lasts maybe a few posts before everyone knows she’s a woman, even though they’ve never seen her.  Patterns of writing and thought betray sex, race, and class as readily as a picture of one’s face.

An aethereum of written words alone can lead to face-to-face meetings and these meetings further distill new identities of compatible types of people.

While the internet is new, game-breaking revolutions in communication are not.  The printing press and mass literacy doomed the old order of hereditary aristocracy and the entrenched clergy.  The telegraph, railroad, radio, telephone, and finally the television made larger nation-states and larger wars possible and doomed the last trappings of the old world.  The internet makes our present aristocracy obsolete, a reality that is in the process of making itself felt.  Banning and censorship were tried during previous information revolutions with much more vigor than now, but it never quite worked.  There were always at least a few elites willing to defect for the chance to screw all the other elites.
Hence, we had noblemen who were willing to shield Martin Luther (a result of a critical mass being able to read the bible for themselves) to further their own geopolitical interests.

The secular state religion is much weaker than Christianity ever was and will shed followers at the slightest sign of weakness.  It seems indomitable now but is in danger of falling apart forever in a few short years after just a few decades of predominance.  Those who revile Nazis as the devil in their religion will no more have a thousand year rule than the Nazis did.

Bio-Mercantilism

The backdrop of the film, Scarface, was Fidel Castro’s exile of Cuban criminals to the United States.  The bargain of a lifetime for Castro that allowed him to die securely in power with a millionth excellent cigar in his mouth; an unending parasitic burden on his mortal enemy, the United States.  Winning.

The idea that you can fix problems in your own country by exporting all of your problem people to the United States was one of the smartest ideas Fidel Castro ever came up with.

Castro sent us his Tony Montanas in 1980, and died in his bed at 90 in 2016. https://t.co/Ybz2KOQCYj

— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) November 28, 2018

This success of Castro’s policy was somewhat by happy accident or by concealed red-pill understanding.  Today, Mexico, Central America, and much of the third world behave in very similar way dumping their failures into gullible and soft first world plutocracies as they try to boost themselves relative to failing enemies and simply rid themselves of problems with as little effort as possible.

At the same time in these first world countries, we see the brain drain of the best professionals from high IQ populations around the world.  The smartest people in China, India, and Eastern Europe go to Silicon Valley.  In what is supposedly the same country and city we see both world-class talent and world-class dysfunction aggressively recruited.  Which you encounter depends on what class of society you fall in.

If towards the top, San Francisco seems like a gleaming Star Fleet Academy; a veritable city-on-a-hill.  If anywhere else, the rising tide of peasant mediocrity becomes ever harder to ignore as tiny nuclear families flee to a new suburb every 5 years if they can even avoid divorce.

Post-Modern America is defined not just by the growing disparity of wealth but also by the growing gaps in human capital.

The dissident sphere generally agrees on HBD(Human Biodiversity) the idea that human populations have distinct differences, rejection of the blank slate(nature over nurture), and that within populations some people are intrinsically more able than others.

As the dissident model of human society becomes the new orthodoxy it is inevitable that we see the emergence of Bio-Mercantilism.
Like a bunch of mid-90s elementary school kids trading baseball cards and pogs, all nations will try to dump their rejects and steal the best as a matter of normal policy.

It will be very like the days when nations competed over stores of bullion and favorable balances of trade.  So urgent were the pressures of the old mercantilism that the need for control of gold and trade could precipitate worldwide wars like the 7 Years War between Britain and France, of which what Americans call the French and Indian War was just one theater.  It was enough to propel Spain and Portugal to do their very best to loot the whole planet of precious metals for about 300 years.

Or we might consider the Opium Wars prosecuted by Britain in the 19th century.  After centuries and two dynasties of the Chinese demanding silver in payment for their goods, the situation finally became untenable in a mercantilist world where a money supply limited by precious metals was a zero-sum game.
The British got extremely creative as mandated by urgent necessity.  They found that opium was the one good that could reliably get them some of the silver back despite the strict prohibitions of Qing dynasty authorities.
So opium became their key import to bring the mercantilist equation back into balance at the expense of millions of drug-addled Chinese and two imperialist wars that utterly humiliated the swiftly declining Qing.

So let’s use our imaginations a bit and project wars over opium and silver to wars over the best human capital and the power to dump the worst people elsewhere.  In an increasingly overpopulated world, that is the dynamic that defines post-modern society.
In fact, the disparate flows of the best and worst into the nominal United States of America already make that entity inherently fictional and un-sovereign.

There is one group that gets the best people that it wants from all over the world.  There is another group in approximately the same area that gets swamped with the worst and most dysfunctional from everywhere.  These latter are the losers of a Bio-Mercantilist system that ignores the borders of mere nation-states made obsolete by the World Wars.

The irony that eludes our idiot elite is Bio-Mercantilism will lead to more brutal wars and exploitation than gold and silver ever did.

 

 

My Response to Ginsburg’s Fall

The High Priestess was slumped over in a high tower of the palace after she had fallen the day before and broken three of her ribs. Soon the word of it was all about the City.
For decades she had been an unquestioned bastion of the Revolution of Light and Togetherness clad in shining robes as she expelled the intolerant and the enemies of Humanity.
But now, an Evil Emperor had usurped the throne and with every day tried to summon more demons to aid him.
The High Priestess’ very life force kept away the demons of the rift and no matter how stooped her frame she lived on to protect her people against the forces of sin and destruction.

As the sun sank beneath the horizon tonight, a sense of trepidation settled over the City. In the splendid cathedral, the faithful clad all in white assembled in tight rows murmuring their prayers. Priests strode down the aisles swinging censers of incense, perfuming the entire sanctuary wrought in ponderous marble domes with purifying resinous fronds of smoke.

One woman with a long, severe face, tight white bonnet and resplendent robe came forward, spread her arms and closed her eyes. Her lips were stretched tight in anticipation of holy delivery. A priest took a heavy steel mallet and with a single sharp blow struck her in the ribs. She crumpled to the ground, squealing in pain as much as fractured bones next to her lungs would allow her. Her friends and family stepped forth to carry her away.

As the night wore on, the rituals grew more solemn. Finally a woman came forth saying she had volunteered her ribs for the High Priestess. The crowd hushed altogether and only the sputtering of braziers could be heard as she stepped forward, even purer than the rest with a perfect rectangle of fabric cut away along her torso.

She lay back on the altar and somehow stayed still as a priest began to saw through her flesh. Her lungs were exposed and everyone could see them pumping like a bellows. She was abruptly carried away from the blood-spattered altar before the congregation could fully grasp the horror of it.
Her rib bones were burned in a pyre of incadescent heat that burned pure white in offering to the Priestess.

Finally, a woman volunteered every part of her body for the preservation of the High Priestess, but as the knife was about to descend, she screamed, wailed, and struggled away from danger.

Now everyone rose in a clamor, shouting at the unfaithful woman who had promised everything and delivered nothing. She tried to argue back, shout, and insult, kicking out indignantly with her white high heels as they tried to grab her.

They had only to make it through the long night to defeat the Evil Emperor and establish the faith of Eternal Progress forever.
It was five minutes until daybreak when the death bells began to toll and the ceremonial candles all sputtered out at once. The high priestess was dead. With a concerted wail the mass pummeled the unfaithful woman with every solid object at hand until she was reduced to a spasmodically twitching pulp.

She had died just in time not to hear the laughter of the chaos lords as the rift ripped open and legions of demons poured through. The sun would now never come and the lights of the stars went out one-by-one as they fell from the sky in despairing showers.

In complete darkness, the faithful felt mercilessly sharp claws tear into them as glowing eyes drew near, a mercy as the world already descended in the eternal chill of deep space.

The Changing of Power

Not that long ago, President Eisenhower presided over the construction of the interstate highway system and the formation of suburbia as we know it. Lyndon Johnson created social security, medicare, and medicaid as we know it. Nixon took the dollar off of the gold standard, making it the currency we know today and opened trade with China. A little further back, Woodrow Wilson gave women the vote. Modern political discourse is just discussing incidental details of the state of affairs put together before Watergate forced Nixon to resign in 1974.

The magnitude of decisive policy changes these previous leaders regularly participated in dwarfs anything that has been possible for decades.
As we bicker for years over the trivial funds needed for a border wall, keeping roads repaired, keeping consumerism chugging by keeping interest rates eternally low, or cooking up convoluted subsidies to health insurers as the next social safety net, we are but children playing among the ruins built by giants who came before us.

Since the last powerful presidents, power has become increasingly informal and has been diffused across the vassal states we often call the “international community” through state and non-state entities.
A warning sign of the trend of de-formalization was declarations of war becoming obsolete since World War 2. It is now taken for granted that a basic diplomatic procedure even Empires observed is simply ignored as less obvious forces guide the direction of hostilities towards causes and places that neither pose a direct threat to the state nor offer prospects of profitable(to the nation) conquest.

Bill Clinton squeezed off some decent-sized legislation. George W. Bush got a little bit more through before he was completely a lame duck, mostly to lower the standards of the already-crippled education system. The creation of Homeland Security might have been the last long-term significant legislation ever supported by a US president.
Barack Obama heralded the post-formal age of US politics. He forced through one last piece of pork barrel for health insurance companies as arterial plaque sealed up the last wiggle room. Even that very modest action cost him dearly in political capital and cost his party hundreds of seats. He never recovered.

Obama resorted to the executive powers of his office to get anything done. The formal power that remained was exercised ever more through appointed officials and bureaucrats while circumventing elected assemblies as much as possible.

Trump is a far-diminished version of Obama when it comes to the exercise of power. Obama had a friendly bureaucracy and his “thousand statesmen” who worshiped him. Trump is despised by these same unelected officials and they do everything they can to impede even the exclusive powers of the executive. Collaboration with elected officials is almost out of the question.

Trump has spent the last two years making appointments and promotions that will allow him to become capable of things Obama could do on a whim during breakfast. Obama could have had some soldiers build a border wall with no trouble.

The trouble with the extreme constriction of power is it either becomes formally ceremonial at some point, meaning people look somewhere else for the real power.
Or else, like a faucet plugged by a thumb, it goes spraying everywhere out of control as that pent-up pressure surges through. Trump is on the verge of assembling his first batch of loyal statesmen, perhaps ten or twenty instead of a thousand, but it will enable him immensely to further erode the opposition that faces him from un-elected and non-state sources in the very limited time he has left. Blog.jim is fond of pointing out that Trump must understand he, his kids, and grandkids will not be simply left alone if he leaves his position of power with the present elite intact. Now that is a powerful incentive. If power must turn inward on itself, perhaps at some point, the elected assemblies simply get left out.

Stopping the Race to the Bottom

A strong authority is necessary to stop a society-wide race to the bottom and tragedy of the commons, especially when the internet gives every individual actor highly accurate information.

Some problems are pretty obvious.  A lot of the dysfunctions with European-American flight and the hand-wringing over “good schools” can be solved by simply allowing freedom of association.  If neighborhoods can decide what kind of people belong in their territory, millions of people are suddenly free to become more stable and rooted, giving trust and social capital a desperately needed boost.  Sometimes, an inept or malicious state can break what naturally fixes itself.  This has been a main theme of Western politics since the 1960s cultural revolution.  Fixing this problem no doubt would also help with low Western fertility but that problem is more complex.

Even countries like Japan that experience minimal pressure from the expansion of hostile outgroups have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world.  There is a measure of altruism involved in having children but if it’s all headaches and sacrifice, no one wants to bother if they can avoid it.
If the state wants more kids from its core polity, it must take measures to make the prospect of fecundity more tolerable.

Western countries are extremely punitive towards men in every aspect of life while women have very little responsibility.  Women work, but they generally get first dibs on part-time middle-paid jobs in safe air-conditioned offices.  If they don’t want to work there is always state assistance, sex work, or a man who supports them.
In the inherently unstable modern mating market, men cannot continue to be held to 19th century expectations.
Draconian child support laws make it so even the horniest men above 90 IQ are going to be very thorough about using condoms or making sure she really is on the pill.  This is a recipe for underclass dysfunction and eventual idiocracy.

There’s millions of men and women holding out until they start to turn grey for the “right one” by the standards of a society that no longer exists.  The fields of the first world will remain barren and cracked so long as cooperating men are expected to make lifelong commitments to partners who can leave them at any time while plundering their assets.  The problem with going back to traditional marriage is in an urban, wired society, people have too much information to be easily content with one partner their whole lives.  Men crave variety.  Women always want to move up or at least diversify the genes in their child portfolio to hedge their bets against nature.

The way forces and incentives are aligned, it may make more sense to ease up on male penalties rather than mandate Sharia law.  Perhaps cooperating men get a slap on the wrist or no penalty for knocking up women, so that the anti-natal equilibrium becomes defect-cooperate rather than cooperate-cooperate.  If one side has little incentive to care about contraception, there will be more babies.  Perhaps there would still be state assistance for single mothers, but the amount would depend on who the father is.  If her drug dealer gets her pregnant, not a single penny of taxpayer money is forthcoming and perhaps she gets paid to get the abortion.
And of course, we must understand that marriage is a 5 year dating arrangement below the upper middle class in modern society.  There is no need to take half of a man’s stuff when it goes sour as it typically does.  If she wants to leave, she leaves with her stuff.  Period.  And the man gets some kind of guaranteed access to the kids if he wants it.  Maybe she even has to leave them behind with him.  Furthermore, in a promiscuous modern society with little means of enforcement, DNA tests need to be a default made mandatory under law before a man invests one penny in a child that may not be his.

Without some form of guaranteed paternity and freedom from state punishment for men, first world fertility is certain to continue its downward spiral.  And it’s our fault, not that of any other group.

I mentioned schools earlier but that is another area where the competition of individuals has gotten out of control.  First of all, the corrupt state gets a huge population addicted to public daycare for 12 years so both men and women can work full time.  This gives the economy a short term boost at the cost of cannibalizing future generations.  By age 18 a young person should be ready for adulthood.  There should be no such thing as a “teenage” state of limbo, a bizarre pathology that only emerged in the 20th century.  Since the dawn of time, the mission of young people has been to learn from adults, not to spend all day in an insane asylum full of other kids taking pointless classes about things that serve no use and which they will never remember.

Worse, schooling has only continued to become more bloated as many now spend 16 or even more than 20 years in school.  For those older workers making good salaries, it is always tempting to keep the young warehoused for as long as possible in an already over-saturated economy bombarded with illegal immigrants and H1-B visas.  College tuitions have been spiralling now for decades.  It is a dysfunctional race to the bottom that only the virtuous state can bring to a stop and which the corrupt and evil state aids and abets.
Contrary to the rhetoric of libertarian shills, corporations are happy to have a taxpayer-funded system that churns out certified conformists with a ball and chain of debt around their ankles to doubly ensure their meek compliance.
This undeserved support needs to be torn away and the monasteries dissolved.

The solution here is to limit compulsory education to reading, writing, and arithmetic for most people.  In the 19th century, most kids could be taught these skills in a few months here and there at minimal public cost when they were not needed for the planting and the harvest.  How far we have fallen.

Then, further education must be limited to people who are genuinely curious and able to learn.  In my own time in the public education system, nearly every class was packed to capacity and any attempt at teaching was sabotaged by kids who did not want to be there, all in the sacred name of Equalism.

College must be limited to the best of the best and the aristocracy only.  This way the righteous ruler can arrest a race to the bottom while nurturing geniuses who will shape history.  For hobbyists, there is always the internet and perhaps some of them will rise to the highest level on their own.

Health care is another area that has suffered from “cost disease.”  It’s the same problem as college tuition, really.  If everyone can get college loans, prices adjust to assume everyone has a loan.  If everyone gets health insurance, prices adjust so you can’t afford healthcare without health insurance.
The solution here is more obvious.
Populations at the first world level do pretty well with a single-payer system.  Mixed populations do well with both systems in effect.  If you are a cooperator who pulls your own weight, you can tap into the single-payer free system.  If you are underclass, you have cash for your treatment or you die.  That’s how it works in many countries with high levels of stratification.  The US has just had enough wealth so far that it has managed to avoid facing reality with stupid schemes like trying to have mass subsidies for health insurance.(Affordable Care Act.) The inevitable result of this disastrous policy is even higher prices.

As you can ascertain from this essay, most of the solutions to these seemingly intractable problems are not that complicated if the ruler has an accurate understanding of reality and human nature.
The root cause is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be a ruler and what duties that exalted social position entails.  The people must be protected from self-destructive game theory equilibria as zealously as they must be defended from outside invaders.

There’s No Real Freedom Without Authority

The people always want to be free but they are their own worst jailors. If everyone can do what they want in their own best interest, a ruthless race to the bottom is assured. If we know others face no restraint we won’t exercise restraint ourselves in the lifelong competition for food, shelter, money, mates, and prestige.

The information age has outstripped the ability of traditional social technologies to limit individual choice in ways that yield a net benefit to everyone. It is now too easy for individuals to circumvent the customs and soothing myths that create an illusion of harmony. They can get very accurate real-time information to optimize their self-interest whether in the job market or the dating market.

When everyone has access to networks, no one wants to be the 5 that settles for a 5 in life and so all the rest is a game to outmaneuver and sabotage one’s way to a better spot in the great game of musical chairs as society falls apart. Instead of getting things done, most energies are devoted to finding out who has to jump on the grenade and take one for the team. Then arises even more social strife when the despised loser nominated as grenade jumper refuses to jump.

It is impossible to reinstate rules that no one really wants to practice in real life. Nor does acting as if older customs still existed do anything to resurrect them. These systems existed by being airtight constructs that very few could successfully defect from. With that seal broken, they are imaginary fancies.

So the question lies in how to adapt to the problems of modernity in an efficient and realistic manner.
Policy in most other areas of public life suggests we need to arrest the relentless race to the bottom at strategic points.

Without safety nets like EBT cards, soup kitchens, shelters, and minimum wage there would be bread riots and people working for less than a dollar an hour to be able to afford just enough white flour and rice to keep them alive. Desperate people with nothing to lose would force anyone with surplus wealth to live in compounds guarded by private armies.(aka the 3rd world)

Without solid rules, there would be no 40 hour work week with a cushy weekend for those lucky enough to have jobs. There would be no holidays, paid vacation, or benefits. Many would be simply be worked to death. The marketplace would have no use for useless old people sticking around.

Without free association and strict controls on real estate, bidding wars impoverish even the highest paid workers, ensuring they never have kids and their high IQ breed goes extinct.

Without land forcibly set aside for parks, every urban area would be an unbroken sea of grey and all old buildings would be demolished to make way for cookie cutter tenements.

Without force itself, there would be no taxes, nor any polity at all.

The best kind of rules aren’t heavy-handed, stupid rules no one wants like forcing all American women to wear hijabs or banning plastic straws.
The rules that work best are those that force people to do what they’d like to do anyway by using the authority of the state to make sure everyone else has to do it.

No one could afford to pay taxes if the IRS didn’t maintain an airtight seal with extreme aggression and precision. Otherwise any sucker who paid up would live at a disadvantage to everyone else.

The state is truly legitimate when it becomes not just a parasitic occupying army but a broker that relieves the tensions in the endless struggles between humans. Without such an intervention, the natural state of man is Malthusian squalor. Hobbes was right.

We can see that the legitimacy of our present system really went into steep decline right as it broke the back of the old labor left that Bernie Sanders tried and failed to resurrect. The negotiation between labor and the state ended, and with it their role as a broker sustaining balance for the average worker.
Ever since, there has been a wasteland of open borders, free trade, corporate welfare, and parasitic wars to enrich the military industrial complex.
I am critical of corrupt unions and of the borderline communists who did their part to bring a hostile reaction down on them, but the “cure,” I think, has proven far worse than the disease. When the duty of easing tensions is not fulfilled, a swelling volcano cone rises up under the ruler’s feet.

The result of these modern pressures is both sides of the political spectrum now demand a return to authoritarianism. Most people, whatever their politics, understand intuitively that their freedom and empowerment have enslaved them to one another more than ever, the great game board a terrible gridlock of collective checkmate further than the eye can see. It has become self-evident that any kind of modern society requires the intervention of a strong state at carefully chosen points.

When everyone has excellent information and mobility they are forced to beg for a legitimate ruler to mediate between the people on earth and the powers of heaven.

Seattle Airplane Suicide Is A Barometer of Culture

In a society where most people have lost hope in a worthwhile future, the creep of nihilism gains ground in human hearts.
A mild-mannered airport worker with an affably broey affect commandeered a huge prop plane in a daring last act on earth rather than eke out another four to five decades as a wage slave in a drab and pointless neo-liberal society.

What is most telling about this event is not the actions of a single man, but the overwhelmingly positive public reaction I’ve seen so far on social media. Some are even calling him “Sky King.”
People often identify with the motives of mass shooters more than they admit but selfishly taking the lives of others dampens any sympathy they may feel. Even in the darkest and angriest periods of my life I was disgusted by the thought of petulantly lashing out against people I didn’t even know.
Sky King Russell sets a new precedent by going out in a stoic and affable manner while harming no one.

This may be a natural reaction to incentives as mass shootings are now so common that like car crashes, they cease to be of much note. It now takes some more flair and creativity to get the mass society’s attention and hold it for a news cycle or two as one’s final legacy to the ages. A fleeting reward but still better for a few than to labor a whole lifetime away, appreciated by no one.

In this time of constricting internet censorship, this suicide is an important indicator of the culture. The more the system takes away from people, the less they have to lose. Isolated suicidal people and nutjobs are harmless on their own, but the crowds regard the Sky King as almost a Robin Hood kind of figure. He hurt no one else, showing millions a glimpse of real freedom, while putting a dent in some impersonal corporation’s bottom line. When crowds begin to support this kind of behavior, the real trouble for elites is just beginning. It is a sign that under certain circumstances, certain targets are seen as legitimate by most people.

Very tellingly, Russell was a European-American, especially when most airport workers I see running around are minorities. Suicidal behavior, especially that requiring real initiative and planning is endemic to higher-agency Euros and Asians. The Africans and Indios of this world may groan from time to time under the lash of their overlords but they resign themselves to the grimmest slog of daily life and always manage to push out progeny just the same. I honestly cannot completely blame the world elite for wanting to replace a troublesome population with more pliant and domesticable strains. If that task were completed, there would be no more airplane thefts and no more flamboyant aerobatic maneuvers born from heightened existential consciousness.

Attack on Titan and Modernity

I watched the first two seasons of the anime, Attack on Titan and was quite impressed. It was the darkest and creepiest concept I’d seen since Berserk. The Japanese have an amazing eye for visual details in the natural world I never tire of whether it’s falling rain or cherry blossoms. That comes across strongly here too conveying visually both the sweetness and impermanence of our brief lives.

The basic premise is a great walled medieval city has been under siege by shambling giants for hundreds of years, as long as even ancestral legends can remember. Life has gone on normally inside the walls while only a handful of scouts have to deal with the harshness of the outside world. Then one day, a giant even taller than the walls peeks over at the terrified people below and everything goes to hell from there, complete with a breach in the wall.

We soon see these giants attacking the city itself, forcing the locals to retreat behind one inner wall after another as they are forced back.
The titans themselves are the most unsettling creatures I’ve seen since the titular Aliens with their chestburster larvae.
The Alien Xenomorphs are designed to appear as foreign as possible. The titans are possibly even more terrifying because of their familiarity. They look like very large, naked people at first but something is missing. They have vacuous facial expressions and their eyes are totally innocent like those of a baby. Even as they approach with mouths eagerly open and hands outstretched their pupils are dilated as though they may be friendly.

The human foolish enough to fall for this ploy is scooped up with a firm hand and promptly chopped in two by a great set of teeth, the hulking beast oblivious to their desperate pleading as they go in. If their whole body somehow goes down the Titan’s gullet without immediately debilitating blood loss, they get to perish in the steaming heat of the Titan’s stomach amidst a clutter of twisted corpses they are soon to join.
What’s more horrifying still is for all the titans’ hunger for humankind they don’t need the nourishment and periodically cough up “hairballs” of undigested human body parts. To add insult to injury the butchery to which they are single-mindedly devoted serves no apparent natural purpose.

I see this new Japanese Titan myth as a natural descendant of the African zombi myth that later became popular in the West.
Zombis were originally an allegory among African peoples for humans torn away from all family and identity by the slave trade, the living dead. In the modern West, zombies live on as atomized individuals in a post-Western atomized society where nobody cares about anyone else because all others are just adversarial competitors in the market economy whose main contribution to one another is to drive down each others’ wages.

The Japanese have one of the last, best societies on earth that is high trust and homogenous with low crime and world class health care and education. They have refused to have third world immigration on anywhere near the scale of other modernized societies preserving their ethnic domain and culture. The fertility rate is among the lowest in the world with a large and dysfunctional culture of incel outcast males but the Japanese have weathered population contractions before when hitting the very limited natural carrying capacity of their mostly mountainous, resource-poor island chain.

The variables that are different this time are those introduced by the modern neo-liberal capitalist economic system that pits all humans against one another in a fight to the death in a single grand arena.

The adversarial nature of man vs. man is the very core thesis of Attack on Titan. The overt adversaries resemble humans, but like zombies lack empathy or any trace of human spirit. Man vs. man is a strong direct theme in the series. As the humans are forced back by the Titans, there is less food and resources to go around, meaning much of the population becomes unsupportable surplus. At one point, the unimportant, the useless, and the old pretty much draw straws to go on a mass suicide offensive against the Titans so the rest don’t starve.
Furthermore, it is strongly hinted throughout that the central government of the great city is highly corrupt. To everyone’s astonishment, the most promising Titan fighters from boot camp are funneled away from the front lines to the government enforcers and secret police instead. Amidst an existential crisis of the entire species, scheming politicians are still up to no good. As if that were not enough, a religion of evangelical fanatics also vies for power and influence in the dying embers of the human world.

Even in the most dire circumstances, humans still engage in relentless zero sum games against a heavy backdrop of nihilism.
What is most shocking is this narrative comes from one of the best-off societies on the planet. Yet they too are consumed by the malaise and despair and decline that besets everywhere else.

History tells us there are sweeping trends that affect everywhere. A Japanese mercantile elite overthrew landed warrior aristocrats just like in the West when exposed to the same technology and pressures. They pursued a flavor of nationalism very similar to that in Europe and America at the time. The outcome was inevitable and so it is now.

Even if all the foreigners were instantly expelled from the United States, the intractable questions remain as we can see from the example of Japan. If these questions were answered, foreigners would be little threat and kept as powerless guest workers or expelled at will rather than function as a civilization-destroying political wedge.

Japan shows us that modernity poses a spiritual and cultural challenge that every 1st world country must deal with as roughly the same historical forces are in play from one end of the globe to another as it has been before.
Caught in a vice between attacking swarms of Titans and the backstabbing tendencies of our own treacherous kind, we seek a way towards a worthwhile future where people can cooperate again against common threats.

The society that figures it out first seizes the unclaimed prize. Or perhaps we all sink back into a great Dark Age.

Rob Stark’s Journey to Vapor Island, A Review

We first meet nerdy Jewish kid, Noam Metzenbaum, at a heavily multiracial urban high school where he takes solace in his books as star Black athletes monopolize the few pretty blond girls. While everyone else goes along to get along, Noam intensely resents the perverse social order he’s forced to live in. He dreams every day of a society that actually rewards people of culture and intellect with aristocratic status, money, and beautiful women. The people he sees receiving society’s best gifts in the real world are almost always the lowest IQ, the most brutish, the most crass and lewd.
Above the plebeian press of sweaty bodies, there’s just one towering modern figure Noam admires, a dissident version of Trump named Blackstone. Like Trump, normal people both high and low in society who benefit from the status quo instinctively loathe him.

After every humiliating day in his grinding reality of crushingly low incel status, Noam confides in his diary how even though he is an outcast, he knows he has a sort of greater vision that people who just want to be popular at school can never understand. This made me both laugh and reminisce. I can remember thinking a lot like Noam at his age. Adults would praise my bookish abilities yet their approval never turned into real advantages in life. To the contrary, anything the older generations encouraged was counterproductive to any sort of real-life success. So as with Noam, I experienced an extreme dissonance as I was despised for trying to develop my gifts and to be the best I could.
As it turned out, everything I had ever been taught was a lie and Noam finds himself trapped as I was, forced into visions of desperate grandiosity to shield himself from truths that are too harsh for sanity to bear.

Noam forms a crush on a blonde Jewish girl he once met who goes to another school. To his delight, he discovers he is transferring to Chadsworth Academy, the preppy private school she attends. Suddenly he has the chance to escape his daily grind, unite with his crush, and finally vindicate himself as a true Platonic aristocrat ubermensch(as anyone in the dissident sphere has probably dreamed of.)
Chadsworth, though, is full of Chads. They are handsome, athletic, with Dads who are big bankers and hedge fund managers. Yet in spite of these noble qualities they are as debased and lewd as the minority athletes Noam despised at his old school. Noam’s sense of betrayal reaches a new level. Before, he could tell himself he only had to escape the bottom of society. Now, he faces the fact that social order is in its sorry state because the whole hierarchy is rotten from top to bottom. If there had been a true nobility steering the ship, things would never have gotten so bad to begin with. Instead, the aristocracy snorts coke, listens to vulgar rappers, and finds time to virtue signal as society continues to fall apart.

Noam’s transition here again resonates with my own experience. As an incel bookworm myself in high school, I could still hope that maybe society as a whole was headed in the right overall direction. As George W. Bush came to power with his contrived Texan accent and thrust the nation into one pointless war after another on behalf of Lockheed Martin and Halliburton, my faith in the entire system went into freefall. The perversion I had experienced was no accident. Even the very highest and most powerful people in the world were insipid, mediocre tools and from them, waterfalls of venom rushed downward. When one is forced to conclude that they’re a majority of one against a fallen world, the dissident path can no longer be avoided. Though Noam’s pretensions to aristocratic ubermensch status are an obvious desperate coping mechanism that is often darkly humorous, it is difficult for the reader to avoid thinking “he’s not wrong.”

Noam is frustrated by the failure of the elite to show elite leadership. He is blocked from being with his one true crush just as surely as before. His disenchantment grows and he must find a way to solve his problems decisively. You’ll have to read the book to find out how.

As the story progresses, there are whole segments of it that I could only describe as pornographic with enormous amounts of all kinds of bodily fluids and bizarrely kinky behavior. Not my thing, but I saw the emphasis on non-penetrative sexual fetishes as a metaphor for our debauched sexual culture that somehow produces practically no offspring or families.
Moreover, Noam’s never-ending longing for his one true crush that he missed in high school despite the unlimited sexuality that surrounds him contains a poignant message about our culture.
We spend decades “dating” around, always wondering what it might have been like to be with that one high school crush and have a family. But the whole mendacious society rotten from top to bottom relentlessly pushed our young and idealistic selves away from the one thing that might have fulfilled us, continued the cycle of life, and sustained the ruling order’s and the culture’s mandate of heaven over us.

Rob Stark’s story makes good use of dissident symbols such as the various colored pills and the religion of Kek.
In one of my favorite scenes, students at Chadsworth Academy have a debate where they form into groups and represent political parties. The smarmy son of a Jewish millionaire and his JAP hangers on get assigned to the Dem establishment faction. The Chads have fun affecting fake southern accents as the establishment conservatives. The nerdy kid who’s just cool enough to be socially accepted speaks for the libertarian candidate no one cares about. Our protagonist, Noam, is the only one who stands up to speak for Blackstone, the Nietzschean dissident Trump figure. The exchange that follows is hilarious. What’s more, the Blackstone platform includes “smart socialism,” a phrase that may well be borrowed from my own blog. I find this sort of cross-pollination of ideas encouraging.

Another thing I would note, is the trend of almost everyone in the story calling out Noam as a virgin, with his Mom as almost the only exception. It’s so exaggerated that it started to remind me of the kid from a Christmas Story getting told “You’ll shoot your eye out!” every time he brings up his desire for a BB gun for Christmas. Almost all the Chad antagonists act like they could have walked right out of Back to the Future. This emphasizes where Noam is at in life as a vulnerable teenager approaching peak sexual frustration. I came to read Noam’s narration as semi-unreliable and it was amusing to try to filter the real world from his perception of it.
As the story reaches its later stages, this unreliability seems to be confirmed. But what should we expect from a story called “Vapor Island?”

Overall, this is perhaps the first novel I’ve read that I would place squarely within the dissident sphere and totally independent of the philosophy and tropes of the neo-liberal order. Despite the strange fetishes that take up quite a bit of this story, I found it to be a poignant parable of growing up as a majority of one in a deranged society where all anyone cares about is popularity, “networking,” and the top 25 pop songs.

Podcast: Pragmatic Dissidence With Robert Stark

Robert Stark and I focused on the specifics of an Alt-Center that recognizes the essential role of effective redistribution in a successful society and rejects worship of the “free market,” critiquing its role in the creation of culture. After all, we can look at all the great art, encyclopedias, and fan made mods people make for free. How do we manage this massive leisure economy? Furthermore, much great work of the past resulted when single, or a few patrons, rather than the mass market was the source of funding for creative work.

Also, I make mention of my dissident fantasy fiction story, Apostasy, and mention some of the inspirations for its setting.

Robert Stark talks to Giovanni Dannato about Pragmatic Dissidence

Human “Stupidity” Comes From Conflict of Interest

Humans are remarkably good at coordinating when everyone’s interests align. Every day there is heavy traffic on the roads because no one gains from crashing. Tens of thousands die every year but in that same time hundreds of millions drive trillions of times. Thus, the incentives for driving to work year after year are correctly aligned.

Markets find a price to a fraction of a cent because an equilibrium between competing interests is arrived at.

But government, politics, sexual and status competition involve a zero sum battle between interests that never ends. This disputed territory is the slice of life that most human energy is devoted to.

When I go on message boards, the most common comment I see is some variety of “OMG people are stupid.” People are not so much directly stupid as they are personally self-interested. The core difference between high and low IQ countries is whether the average person can ask themselves. “What if everyone did it?”
IQ as far as I can tell is a way to get a rough idea of someone’s ability to handle abstraction, and that, as it turns out, is decisive.

Let’s imagine for a moment we’re typically corrupt third world traffic cops. We’re just using a position of power to maximize our leverage in a cutthroat society where a few winners take all. If you don’t take as many bribes as you can, someone else gets ahead of you.
Even if you have 150 IQ in an 85 average IQ society, it doesn’t matter much, because you know that even if you choose not to take bribes, no one around you will follow suit. So even though there are some very intelligent outliers, they are drowned out in the larger culture and its institutions. Some of the smart ones may rise to the top, but they are smart enough to understand minimally abstract crowds require immediate threat of force to keep them in line. Given more than just enough to eat, they breed without abandon until the whole society collapses. So if you are one of the smartest guys in power in a benighted African “republic” why not be a ruthless kleptocrat?
When everyone is maximally self-interested, a single dollar beyond subsistence in another man’s pocket is just a weapon he will one day use against you. If all these countries end up with kleptocrat strongmen, regardless of the nominal form of government, then we must conclude it’s no accident and that’s what the incentives select for.

Third world people are highly effective and rational when it comes to survival. But when everyone is like that, it’s like a Chinese finger trap. The harder you pull away in the direction of societal-level defection and competition the tighter and more inescapable it becomes. Until you have enough people of sufficient intelligence, no one figures out that if you forgo total competition, humans can reach a negotiated truce that allows for higher trust and a superior standard of living for everyone.

Those who cooperate by paying for goods, get more and better stores to choose from. Those who defect by stealing whenever they can are rewarded with “food deserts.” What few stores remain in these districts lock up anything that’s small enough to conceal and worth more than $10.
Whenever I go to the liquor store, single malt scotch is out in the open up to about $100 a bottle. Meanwhile, even lower shelf brandy, especially the Hennessy gets kept behind the cash register where sticky fingers can’t reach it. It is easy to tell which community prefers which.

It plays out the same way in every aspect of life that lies in that disputed sector. For populations of smart people, the contested area is just a bit smaller and that makes a huge difference.

Because lower IQ people are more or less rational. It is easy to have casual conversations with them and not think them especially lacking. This is why people who disparage their capabilities in any way seem like “racists” and why “oppression” seems at first like the best explanation for their consistently poor fortunes. Their deficiency manifests most greatly not on an individual but a group level. The scions of the Enlightenment ultimately abolished the group and therefore regard the study of the interaction of collectives in aggregate as a mortal sin. This neglected and most important of the social sciences, which all advertising and electoral politics are steeped in, is an open opportunity for dissidents of all stripes.

There’s No Power Without “Downward Distribution”

“Downward distribution” or worse, “socialism,” gets muttered in tones of dread from vanilla conservatives to hard core dissidents. This is a sign they are deeply confused since distribution of resources is what makes a ruler to begin with. In primitive societies, there are big men who work hard to throw the biggest feast and win followers. In early cities, the civic life and religion revolves around distributing grain from the temple granary. It is only in mega-societies of millions where flows of wealth are less transparent that anyone could forget the ruler rules by largesse.
As it is, the roads, the parks, libraries, schools, the military and police, the utilities, the courts, public entertainment, are all forms of downward distribution that establish the legitimacy of a ruling class. If the rulers did not redistribute in ways that provided a net benefit against any alternative, no one would suffer them to rule if they could possibly help it. Even if a local gang is the strongest power, it taxes for protection and its godfather may grant a favor in return for your loyalty on his daughter’s wedding day.

When I see rants about downward distribution on message boards, I understand they are really concerned about the wrong kind of redistribution. Yet these critics are almost unanimously unable to make this critical distinction because they buy into an idea of a mythical independent man who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps. This attitude may not have been wholly delusional in an immature frontier society but in the US the frontier started to close off in the 1890s, helping to trigger a wave of populism then as the pressure release valves suddenly stopped working as well. Now, the frontiers are long gone and there are 330 million mouths to feed in an ungovernable omni-ethnic empire.

Until those with that conservative impulse examine themselves, they are doomed to abject failure. They idolize the lone wolf stronger than all the rest or the elite cadre but all social animals decide affairs by politics, or in other words, alliances rather than individual prowess. This is why an alliance of women and gays can effortlessly push aside the protests of individual men. Even an alpha chimpanzee has to be careful about making too many enemies. Thus we need not dwell on theories of Biological Leninism. If one philosophy encourages individual competition and another encourages collective action, an alliance of children throwing dirt clods triumphs just as easily.

Those who like to call themselves right-wing typically exclude more than they include. Joining their group is supposed to be a hard and selective process. This is the fundamental mistake they make in politics. The right fails to distinguish the ethics of the close-knit tribe from the process of making alliances, even with people and groups they may not like.

The right also lacks any introspection about what kind of group it is. Conservatism, for instance, only really appeals to the white upper working class to the middle of middle class outside of major city centers plus some well-to-do country club types. Nothing they do can broaden that appeal. Neither “natural conservatives” nor Prester John will ride out of nowhere to save the day. Conservatives are the classic case of a static tribe that thinks it is an alliance. Since 2016, reality has caught up with them no matter how they might weep and gnash their teeth. They are but one part of a coalition now, unable to decide elections even on their home ground.

The right wing desires power but it always floats outside their grasp and it will always do so until they recognize that that downward distribution is a tool for sealing alliances that help get them what they want. For decades, their reaction has been to thrash and flail like a drowning man, giving anyone who tries to rescue them a sharp elbow to the face in their panic and paranoia. It is a mathematical law that the party of the 48% loses every election by at least 4%.

First, the faction that wishes to assume power must assess who they want to include and who to exclude from a hierarchical alliance while maintaining strict standards for their core tribe which they intend to occupy the top rung. So the problem lies not in whether or not to redistribute, but in how and how much to redistribute to each included faction. Then, when that is decided, it remains to figure out which enemy factions the alliance should attack first and most intensely.

Lately, the term “incel” has entered into the popular consciousness after possibly a decade of it being common parlance in the manosphere. Incels are men who have nothing to lose in the present system, many of them skilled and educated. They are the very stuff from which a re-alignment in power is made. The cost of their loyalty is very little as a plant kept in the dark loves dearly a single hour in the sunlight. Yet right wingers want only Christian married men with solid careers and successful businesses who can spit tight game when needed. They just don’t get it. The people they want most are those least likely to rock the boat.
The raw material is already abundant. Someone astute just needs to throw a few bones in the right directions.

The core thesis of an alt-center is the golden mean where the interests of a neo-tribal aspiring upper caste and its supporting alliance intersect. Instead of shaming the man who doesn’t get laid, offer him virgins if he’s willing to take big risks against the common enemy.

My Parser Computer Game

Programmed in Python 3:

https://github.com/GiovanniDannato/Do-Anything-Text-Game

Growing up I had a special affection for games where you could type commands into a parser because unlike a mouse interface you could attempt anything you could possibly think of and play with language itself.  In puzzle games this made it so you had to actually think things through and no clickfest could save you.  One could try to cheat by typing “use x with y” for every combo of items in your inventory but designers were usually more clever than this.
Frederik Pohl’s Gateway, one of my favorite games of all time, had limited graphics but understood the fun and capricious nature of the text interface better than any other.  The designers actually made an effort to think of all the dumb stuff you might type in. Here’s a couple of screen shots I just made:

messing around in Frederik Pohl’s gateway

 

 

What’s more, Gateway was a very well-made game when you actually took it seriously.  I loved that kind of depth.  For years I wanted to make something similar.  So I did as a way to learn some python a couple years ago.  I’m sure my code is terrible by any professional standard but it seems to work.  There are still bugs of course.

I tried to add some of the whimsical flavor I loved so much back in the day from games like Zork and Gateway. Come to think of it, death sequences were definitely inspired by reading too many Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid.  I have monsters, puzzles, and an ending.  The player character can take 3 hits before dying.  There is an optional item that will improve your chances at the end but solving that puzzle requires thinking a bit immaturely. If a monster seems overwhelmingly difficult, you probably haven’t found the right item/solved the puzzle yet. If you have a weapon but use the word “hit” you will still be attacking with your hands. For those who have never played these kinds of games:
‘i’ =”look at inventory”
‘n, s, e, w’ = “go x” direction
‘l’ = “look at room”

Finally got around to putting it on github:
https://github.com/GiovanniDannato/Do-Anything-Text-Game
DoAnything is the executable and it should run in python 3.

To Stand Within or Without the Circle of Life

Every thinking person at some point confronts the trap of nihilism.  One is faced with a fork in the road.  Down one way ultimately lies detachment and resignation, down the other way the undivided embrace of life in all its primal vigor.
In my own journey, I would reflect how even insects with grotesquely broken limbs crawl desperately onward until the very last spark is gone out of them.  Those living things that cannot think, I observed, are pure life force, never doubting.

In my own life, I noted that any practice I adopted that went against the pure will to live proved to be ineffective and destructive.  I hadn’t believed in the gods of religions since I was a small child but it became increasingly clear to me that there were objective rules, like laws of physics that govern the outcomes of our beliefs.  I thought it a bit like the concept of the Tao, that there is a Way of the universe and if you try to fight it, it’s like standing in the way of an oncoming ocean.

There was a period in my mid-20s when I had an interest in mysticism and read about figures like Gurdjieff and Aleister Crowley.  At the time, I thought it somewhat disgusting to be a meat robot acting out algorithms that would help me survive and reproduce just like bacteria and insects.  Part of the appeal of mysticism to me then was that my algorithms could be re-directed and the ability to do that might even be equated with humanity, transcendence, and consciousness.  Colin Wilson was one of the authors I read at the time who showed me the way toward a more life-affirming mindset.  He examined men like Nietzsche or Van Gogh who he saw as outsiders who were full of life and creativity but died defeated and broken.  He distilled the problem that faced them into the ultimate ‘yes’ or ‘no.’  Wilson gave a memorable example of the ‘yes’ state by telling a story of a man who was put before a firing squad and had all the beauty and possibilities of life suddenly dawn on him only as he was about to die.

There came a point where I had to admit the mystical thinking was holding me back more than it was helping.  Actually, I noticed on a meta-physical level that living by those rules and mindset not only didn’t work, it created more problems.  Every single time, as if I were testing out the pull of gravity by dropping a pebble.  I came to understand that most of the time detachment is really just a way for losers without hope to accept their lot.  I was reading Will Durant at the time of my transition on the history of the ancient world and on the history of philosophy.  A common theme he noticed is that fatalism and detachment always thrive when bad times or bare subsistence has gone on awhile and isn’t going to change anytime soon.  Whether Stoicism in the West or Buddhism in the East, it was impossible to ignore the conclusion that these belief systems are in large part learned helplessness writ large.

As soon as I began to think of myself as a pure living thing in the natural world with all the physical and meta-physical laws that govern it, my life steadily began to improve, which prompted me to continue in that direction to the present day with consistent results.

Having gone through this journey I may have a glimmer of a fundamental divide between “leftist” enlightenment secularism and everything that now gets called “right wing.”
I remember how the primal life force seemed grinding, mechanical, and crude to me back when I was trying to redirect it.  I still do value the development of consciousness and hate the idea of subsuming myself into an unthinking state.  What changed in me is that I resolved to use my state of consciousness in service of the meta-laws of nature rather than trying to circumvent or defy them.
I can perhaps understand though why a secularist recoils on a visceral level when they hear talk of fertility rates and population replacement.  As scions of enlightenment thought, they see it as blasphemous to weigh down transcendent rational man with the sweat, blood, and rutting of of lower animals.

The secular world view also depends on a notion of relativism, the idea that there are multiple equally valid solutions—at least when it comes to how society is organized.  When they denounce a belief as “radical” or “far right” they mean to say it challenges this doctrine.
The moment one starts to examine how societies throughout history work with a clinical eye it’s clear that some solutions are objectively better than others and that there is often a clearly optimal solution.  One begins to notice persistent patterns across thousands of years of migration, trade, and conquest.  The affairs of humans on a large scale resemble any other natural phenomenon no matter if it’s a blizzard or a beehive.  Yet under the strangling grip of secularism, the same science that dutifully measures the circumferences of a thousand galaxies can’t encompass the dimensions of culture here on earth.  It is bizarre and unholy for them to contemplate the gears and tickings of millions humans as a whole sorted into categories when each person must be considered a rational agent desirous of endless goods and services but bereft of any group.

The emerging anti-secular thesis rejects societal relativism and embraces the laws of nature as the rightful guiding star for all life.  This is why there’s that irreconcilable chasm.  For even an attempt at discussion to take place, some basic premises must be agreed upon.

We might consider Conan the Barbarian, a wild wanderer who is practically apolitical even once he becomes a king, yet few would hesitate to call him a right-wing character, even if they cannot say why.  In every story he appears in he’s likened to big predators preparing to pounce.  He embraces the pure passion of being alive over intellectual detachment:
“Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”
Just by existing, Conan embodies the primal life force, objective reality, and the circle of life, making him the opposing principle of priestly idealists.

The great circle of life is not just a cycle.  There are those who stand within and without it.  Within are those who simply have kids as well as those who understand there are Malthusian pressures, Nash equilibria, and endless competition between groups.  These people all share a sense of seriousness about existence.  Like hatchling sea turtles striving towards the waves as waiting predators pick them off, they stay fixed on their mission.  Life must find a way wherever it finds itself.

Those who stand outside the circle of life are fixed on the injustice of the natural world and hold its harsh attrition in contempt by trying to remove themselves from its demands.  They base their lives around vacations, hobbies, “soulmates,” and their hopes for progress towards heavenly Utopia.  Their lives are never quite serious.  There is no wrong way to live.  The sun eventually explodes, the universe one day ends.   Yet despite these superficially callous attitudes they regard their values as their children that will take over the world when they are gone.  This willful delusion that their pseudo-intellectualism lives after them obscures the truth that by Divine Justice they already are fossils to be excavated some millions of years later with a petrified deck of Cards Against Humanity alongside their contorted skeletons.