Why the Attack on Syria?

I won’t mince words: Trump’s decision to launch missiles into Syria is a disaster.  In reactions across the internet I am seeing justifications but in no way do the advantages come close to outweighing the costs.
I will address a few:

Trump wanted to intimidate China and North Korea
I doubt the Chinese president is easily frightened and making Kim Jong Un too nervous or desperate could turn Seoul and then the whole Korean peninsula into a smoking crater.

Russians and Syrians had time to evacuate/runways weren’t destroyed etc.
It’s still an act of war on another nation’s territory.  You don’t get brownie points or gold star stickers for playing nice at war.  These measures prevented immediate escalation to actual war but has worsened relations that were already pretty bad for no real reason.  If the goal was to get rid of ISIS why is the US attacking the people who were successully getting rid of ISIS?

That’ll Shut Up the Media About Russian Conspiracy Theories!
This didn’t stop Trump in the election when he was far more vulnerable, it certainly wasn’t going to stop his presidency. Wiretapping ploys and Rice unmaskings were already effectively countering the fake hysteria. Nothing about this relatively small problem required a risky foreign policy move.

Trump showed those pansies he’s not another wimpy Obama!
Trump got elected in part because his opponent was openly agitating for war with Russia and Syria that no one wants.   Obama and Hillary’s disastrous Syria policy helped ISIS form in the first place! Now we’re back to square one after spending nearly two years on the election?

The Syrians were gassing their own peoplez! Look at the cute dead kidz!
We all know this was just an excuse.  It’s irrelevant whether it’s fabricated or not. Trump’s whole America First campaign was a reaction to this kind of moralistic world policing.

The most rational possible reason I can think of for this idiocy is Trump has to make some concessions to the neocons or they would have just let the democrats filibuster Gorsuch indefinitely. 

Trump’s administration desperately depends on getting new justices into the supreme court.  For millions of American voters who did not like Trump, that’s the one issue that pushed them over the edge.  Furthermore, he desperately needs to break the impasse that is preventing him from acting decisively on immigration, the single biggest issue that put him in power.

I recognize it’s a tough situation, a sacrifice of some kind may have been necessary to grease the wheels, but I do not think this sacrifice was worth it.
The optics of attacking Syria right as Hillary came out and asked for it, with all the neocons celebrating afterwards is terrible.

It has just been openly demonstrated that no matter who you vote for, you still get pointless bombs and wars in the Middle East while the same old elites pat each other on the back.
Over $100 million dollars worth of cruise missiles just got dumped on a distant land most Americans could care less about for no real gain.
These conspicuous displays of waste while dams are crumbling and highways are burning down at home starts to sound a lot like just another chorus of “let them eat cake.”

So now Gorsuch is in, a key victory for Trump.  But the meta is even more important.
Now that Americans have seen appointed federal judges can block anything they don’t like…
Now that they’ve seen you get war and bombs in the Middle East no matter who you vote for…
The whole democracy really starts to look like a thinly veiled fiction.  And if that last veil gets stripped away, judges are just silly ugly old people in robes playing make-believe and all you have left is force.

From the start of his campaign, Trump shrewdly sought to curry favor with the military.  He understood if he was going to go against the entire political establishment, he would need solid backing to stay in power against contrived coups.

Unfortunately, we might be discovering a hard truth that neo-con politicians are just the political arm of the military top brass.  

Generals tend to be establishment to the core and incestuously in bed with military industrial contractors.  So perhaps we’ve found the limits of what voting can accomplish.  
Some grudging concessions on immigration and jobs perhaps, but the flow of trillions to contractors who pretend to design fighter planes and wars in the interests of the US’ biggest arms customers must continue.

The problem is the country is being bled dry and the farce is becoming obvious to millions.  Generals can’t really seize power directly until their troops are willing to fire on fellow citizens and if they tried that, they’d find their authority doesn’t go as far outside the beltway as they think.

So Trump still has considerable bargaining power even though he’s under a lot of pressure—if he wants to use it.  In retrospect perhaps we can now see the coils tightening.  Flynn replaced with someone more in line with the innermost circles and now possibly Bannon getting edged out of favor?
At this time all we can do is wait and see what happens next.

White Collar Criminals Are Worse Than Street Criminals

Street criminals commit their acts of violence and theft against a few people to get small rewards.  Beyond beating them, keeping them in a holding cell for a few days, sending them to penal reservations/other countries, or in the worst cases, execution, there’s not that much to do.  They’re a problem.  They get dealt with. Street criminals will always be there, but the damage they do is limited in scale, they have limited agency over their actions, and they’re not much of a threat to the social order.

White collar parasites, on the other hand, have the potential to hurt thousands or even millions of people with embezzlement, corruption, insider speculation, and ponzi schemes.  They are many orders of magnitude more destructive than the worst possible street criminals.  Worse, because of their wealth and prestige the people who commit these crimes are leaders of society—people naturally look up to them as examples.  In the cosmology of the social universe, they are angels in heaven.  With their higher intellects they have a greater understanding of the import of their actions that might escape a simple street thug.  In a fair caste system, higher castes would be more morally accountable for their actions as it would be understood by all that they possess greater agency.
When a lowly imp rebels against heaven, it gets unceremoniously struck by lightning, that’s it.  A fallen angel, however, demands the right ceremonies to cast it down into the burning fires of hell.

The hypocrisy of our present system is that lowly imps get smashed with the full force and contempt of the celestial rulers while the truly great sinners who plunder entire nations get fines they can easily pay, just have to leave the country, or if they really must go to prison, for much shorter sentences than a simple-minded mugger who stabs someone for their wallet.  What’s more, we can imagine your typical ponzi scheme guy won’t exactly be in general population but like any “important” prisoner have a relatively nice stay in the Tower of London rather than the dungeon.
This solidarity of elites protecting their own from justice based on status nepotism undermines the legitimacy of the entire system.
When a guy who runs a ponzi scheme can pay a fine, spend a few years in prison and walk free while a small-time drug dealer or thug is punished worse, how can anyone take the system seriously?

This is why white collar defectors have to be punished harshly by the righteous ruler. They must be destroyed in proportion to the destruction they wrought. To begin with, all their worldly assets get immediately confiscated, their mansions, cars, bank accounts, clothes, shoes, pocket change, everything. This is only just because they have betrayed the social order that allowed them to accumulate their property. By stabbing their benefactor in the back, they surrender their rightful claim to ownership. They’d be forced to watch as all the things they spent their lives striving for get taken away from them.
Next, quick and simple execution does not do justice. That easy way out is for the worst perpetrators of street crimes.
Those who effectively mug and murder thousands of people from behind a desk would not be facing the SEC. Perhaps they’d be tracked down by something like an Inquisitorial Board run by zealots of the state religion. Their punishments of pain and humiliation might be administered by darkly robed, armored, and masked high priests of the most forboding aspect atop a great altar wreathed in whisps of sacred incense—in the public square. Finally, they’d perhaps be handed over to an angry mob of their victims to poetically finish them off.
But that couldn’t be all, as terrible as this would be. Individuals can be tempted put themselves at great risk if they know it will benefit family and friends. Inquisitors would investigate all family and associates and likely strip them of most of their wealth so they’re forced to start anew among the working classes. Parents, spouses, children would be publicly disgraced, the possibility of a return to social prominence made impossible for them. The class of white collar elites tends to be incestuous—so a return to collective punishment would be necessary both as a deterrant and a preventive.

The scenario I ponder here may seem to us barbarous in the extreme. But this is because of the disconnect between our monkey instincts and the sheer scale of mass society. One death is a tragedy, a million just a statistic.
We happily agree someone who savagely stabs one person to death deserves to be imprisoned for a very long time or even killed. We likely agree a burglar should be sent to jail and don’t feel that sorry for them if they get shot trying it.
Yet when someone steals millions of dollars from thousands of people, ruins their lives, drives some of them to suicide, we hesitate to put him into an electric chair as the worst sort of perpetrator. Even when we capture death camp commandants all we do is make them sit in comfy chairs in a courtroom for awhile before we give them quick and easy deaths by hanging. I suppose that because we each are only one person, it is difficult for us to imagine the sum of the suffering of a thousand people.
So we have to think to a greater level of abstraction to grasp what punishment someone deserves when they severely harm many people, threaten the entire social order, and by being of higher caste possess greater culpability for their actions.
It is hard to escape the conclusion, if we really think about it, that the ponzi guy is much worse than even the most violent of muggers, murderers, and rapists. To uphold legitimacy and keep the mandate of heaven intact, they must be dealt with as befits the enormity of their deeds.

See also: A Fair Caste System

Abolishing Compulsory Schooling

The problem with compulsory public schooling is most kids don’t want to be there.  It’s really just taxpayer daycare while parents are busy at work.  My whole youth I remember two dominant emotions most people had for school: boredom and contempt.
I remember well the textbooks we were issued, that must have cost 200 dollars apiece and each of them was trashed and filled with the lewd graffiti scribbles of a captive audience.  Nobody trashes resources they care about and respect.
In a properly run state, the people have a sense of awe and respect at all levels and the way public daycare works now gives its inmates 18 long years of instruction in official incompetence, undermining the credibility of the ruling order for anyone inclined to think for themselves.

The first step would be to stop making school compulsory.  One of the best and most reliable ways to earn contempt in this world is to keep giving people nice things they haven’t earned, even after they spurn your offerings.  They learn you’re an easy mark—that they can take a steaming dump on your face and won’t get called out.  The parents learn they can just forget about their kids for 18 years using taxpayer nannies and the kids learn that no matter what they do, they’re stuck there getting thousands of dollars spent on them every year.

Society has forgotten that school is for those who want to learn and the needs of those who learn best come first.
All through my youth in public schools even the most competent teachers struggled against the dead weight of students who were forced to be there. These students weren’t interested to begin with, but being forced encouraged them to passively aggressively disrupt classes for everyone else.
Teachers could have found ways to mitigate this if the system had backed them up, but instead the bureaucracy forced them to teach to the lowest common denominator, a decent strategy for an ant colony perhaps, but not the way to success for a civilization.

The purpose of schools is to teach willing, sufficiently talented students. People who don’t want to study have no business being students. That’s all.
I look back on my first 18 years of school and ask myself “In all that massive investment of time and taxpayer money, what did they teach that I’ve actually used in the real world?”
I could think of two things everyone needs to know for basic participation in society that school teaches, if we don’t learn at home.
-Basic literacy
-Basic arithmetic
That’s all most people will need or ever want to know.
And a decent proportion at the bottom of aptitude will never learn even these very well.

So I would posit that we could still have a compulsory workshop on the public dime, a year worth of classes or so spread out over a few years of life perhaps where everyone still gets taught to read, write, and perform basic mathematical operations. Before public schools, a few months of school here and there when not needed on the farm seemed to get the job done for most people. Those kids that like it and can handle the basics can then go to school.
For the rest, maybe we still have state daycare just to prevent the emergence of child gangs roving the streets, but there would be no more confusion. It would be called what it is. The kids there wouldn’t go to classes. They’d get movies, lunches, maybe some activities. No one will consider that 14 year old that still goes to daycare a student. They’d just be children, no higher ranked than 1st graders. It would still be a bullshit waste of millions of people’s time but still better than what we do now: almost 2 decades of make-believe.
This distinction would be important, because all taxpayers would pay for real schools, just like we all pay for roads and the military. However, those who want to use public daycare would pay all the taxes for it, so they can’t just waste everyone else’s time and money.

A better way I think, would be to keep children busy even if they don’t go to school. They might learn and practice work-related skills until they reach minimum working age and can go out and get a job. Most 10 year olds would be better off learning how to type fast, mop a floor, cook the perfect burger, use microsoft office, or how to use basic tools rather than learning earth science or “social studies.” They’d be better off by age 15 than millions of 20-somethings coming out of college with 0 experience and unemployable degrees.

I thought of a lowering in working age so kids could join the job market earlier but it quickly occurred to me that jobs are already scarce in a post-industrial economy and one of the functions of public schools is to delay the entry of young people into the job market. Even colleges serve to relieve pressure on older workers and give warm bodies a way to stay on the shelf until the economy actually needs them. One of the ironies of our entire modern lifestyle is how we destroy huge amounts of youthful productivity and wealth on a big ceremonial pyre for the sake of wealth production and call it the best system on earth, the best of all possible systems.

So, really, our underlying problem is the hollowness of The Economy as God. With no higher purpose or mission, we struggle along aimlessly applying flimsy bandaids or even eating our young to keep the status quo superficially intact. The truth is modern labor has become so productive that we don’t need to work that much but The Economy requires that every adult seems busy in a way that shows up on the balance sheets. It would be much harder to maintain the illusion were we to abolish the public daycare system and return education to its rightful place in society.
Millions of kids would go home and maybe some millions of adults would realize it’s more profitable just to stay home with the kids than pay for daycare, relieving more pressure on the job market than locking up teenagers ever did.
Millions more kids might spend their formative years learning how to be successful workers rather than learning boring facts about the Earth’s core or the Founding Fathers that they will soon forget.
Millions more kids with even a bit of brains and curiosity would be sent by their parents to school where they would learn a broad range of knowledge without constant disruption.
Because non-students would be filtered out, public schools would have a reasonable baseline of quality anywhere you go. Middle caste and above would no longer be forced into just a few crowded neighborhoods with “good school districts” where all the money that would have nurtured children goes into the mortgage instead. Those starting out their lives among the lower castes would get a chance to rise.

Celebrities are Folk Heroes Risen Above Their Proper Place

Celebrities are Gods to masses, mythical figures that loom large over adoring millions.
So one way to establish dominance over the multitude is to cast down their Gods. In the ancient world, it was very common to consolidate victory by publicly crushing the idols of the defeated before them to conclusively demonstrate the truth of their superior power and legitimacy.

Let us imagine, for example, a typical arrogant, loud, foul-mouthed singer who teaches millions of young men to be violent and greedy. He acts tough and powerful on camera and society heaps its best rewards on him, giving credence to his claims. Because he is successful, millions want to imitate him. Enabling such a person to become a God in the heaven of apex social status demoralizes and corrupts society.

The correct heavenly order is re-established when the rulers show themselves as the True Gods. Because our example idol is built on being tough and rebellious, he needs only to be humiliated.
Imagine this swaggering tough guy celebrity forced to wear a pink tutu on national television, forced to kneel humbly on the ground while whipped with rods by hysterically laughing clowns mocking him with boastful lyrics from his songs. Then, humbled and bloodied, he might be made to crawl to the feet of an official and have to kiss his ring and beg for forgiveness. And afterwards, pictures of the fallen God’s tear-streaked defeated face spread all across the internet.
The fallen God could never recover his aura of invincibility and prestige. Though people might understand intellectually no one person can stand against the state, their primal lizard brains couldn’t unsee their God scraping on the ground in ridiculous clothing, getting beaten down by ridiculous people.
I think back on some MMA fights I saw on youtube and recall how even the most hulking warrior could appear small and weak while on his back, scrunched up defensively against the attacks of the guy on top. Though I understand intellectually the shabbiest of these fighters could destroy 99.9% of people within a few seconds, instinctual gut perceptions of bodily positions of submission and dominance are as strong in the deep human psyche as they are in dogs.
It is not without reason that statues and stelae since ancient times depict the conquering ruler on top and the defeated crushed underneath to illustrate the outcome in the most visceral way possible.
Because human animals deal in symbolic systems like language the impact is greatest of all when the person ceremonially dominated is no mere human but a powerful symbol.

Celebrities are like traditional folk-heroes, pagan anthropomorphic Gods, or modern comic book heroes. Their larger-than-life powers and exploits are combined with an abundance of human vanities so they can provide moral examples to the common people. In their proper place they are a positive influence in a vital mid to lower caste culture.

Celebrities, stars, and idols are folk heroes that have risen beyond their proper place. When they become Gods of the entire social order, the earthly flaws that make them appopriate symbols for simple souls drags down the entire culture. Without greater values to guide them from further up, they soon promote vice as virtue and rot society from within.
When Hercules commits a murder, he has to perform labors, when Zeus cheats his wife gets revenge on his mistress, Iron Man pays for his pride and recklessness by accidentally creating Ultron, King Arthur accidentally creates his arch-nemesis, Mordred, by cheating with Morgan Le Fay.
Each hero, while powerful, is steered back on course by a greater moral universe, so when Hercules is made the supreme power, he can murder all he likes. The force that corrects him and completes the story is removed.

It becomes necessary for the wise ruler to systematically out-alpha usurper celebrities and cast them down where they belong.
The former stars respond by just going underground and that is where they should be, out of sight of the higher echelons, known only to their proper audience, never to stand in society’s limelight.

See also: Pop Music is Folk Music Elevated Beyond its Proper Place

Trump and Sanders Are Part of the Same Political Movement

Trump and Sanders are poles of a new political strain.  Trump populism appeals to the working class.  Sanders populism offers programs that appeal to the middle and upper middle classes.  Together, these form a complete platform.  Illegal immigration reform and trade tariffs for blue collar.  Regulations on the finance industry, legal immigration reform, and college loan forgiveness for SWPLs.  I could easily see such a cohesive platform as a solid base for the new opposition—21st century populists replacing republicans as the original republicans replaced the whigs with a new, more viable coalition.

Class warfare, however, still presents a significant obstacle to forming this coaliton. The “real Americans” look down on SWPLs as effete twats. The middle class whites look down on working class whites as biblethumping trailer trash. Members of both communities signal status by disdaining the other and have competed against one another for political influence.
However, more are realizing as they feel the pinch that pro-life doesn’t put bread on the table and blank slate doesn’t pay the bills.
Working whites will be forced to work together like other ethnic groups do. The blue collar guy votes for the populist because of illegal Mexicans, the white collar guy will vote Populist because of H-1B visas. When common interests are strong enough, people start to overlook the window dressing that once seemed so important to them. That’s why “values/single issue” republicanism is dying alongside “social justice” democratism. People can no longer afford these luxury boutique issues. That’s why I see tidal forces pushing these factions together as both discover that neither can carry elections alone.
The white republican base has already discovered it no longer calls the shots. Now democrat whites are making a huge discovery as the bloc of the black vote sinks their favorite candidate in favor of a discredited party hack. They will be forced to admit they are no longer enough to carry their own party and must join a coalition that better reflects their interests.
It’s just a matter of time.
The old consensus is fading right on schedule as Boomers start to retire and die and a new generation comes of voting age that can’t even remember the 90s. All they’ve ever known is incompetence and decline. For them the America of optimism and meritocracy is something out of a history book. They won’t have time for the ideological issues that obsessed Boomers and Xers with secure careers.
The pie is shrinking and ranks will close as each group gathers to fight for the crumbs.

Markets Exist To Benefit Society

If money is blood, the market is the circulatory system..
I have pointed out before that it’s impossible to have a market without the state, whether it’s run by an emperor or local gangsters. A store without protection is quickly looted.
So it’s up to the state to regulate markets so that they fulfill their mission— to serve as a substitute for small scale systems of status-based exchange.  It’s necessary and right to regulate the market as the market depends on regulators to exist in the first place.
Those who are most important to the survival of society naturally should have the most influence points, while there is a natural duty for society to protect itself from malicious people by denying them influence points. Those with low potential to return value or who are sure to make bad decisions with their influence have to be kept near enough to subsistence that they can’t do much harm.

We’ve established free markets are highly volatile and far from perfect in coinciding with the interests of society.
Even in an American culture that worships the market economy, there are plenty of laws dealing with everything from monopolies to insider trading. The existence of such laws in even the most permissive states is tacit admission of the necessity of state interference. The only question is how much interference there should be.
The market is a tool to further the good of a people, since it is an extension of customs of redistribution that further the good of small tribes, thus the purpose of regulation is to keep the system to its purpose. We suppose it is a good use of a hammer to drive in a nail and a bad use to shatter someone’s kneecaps. We can suppose a good use of a market is to make a people strong and a bad use to weaken everyone to enrich a few parasites and entertainers.  Used well, the market allows a group to get rich and outcompete less wealthy groups. Used poorly, it allows an entire society to destroy itself.
The trouble with a system of “free market” capitalism is the implicit belief that the market exists for its own sake, not to serve the best interests of the social body in which it is but an organ.   We should do as well to conclude that our own bodies exist for the good of the heart and arteries.  So if the brain, liver, or muscles were to suffer a blood shortage it is the will of the almighty drop of blood and evil for the brain to regulate the heart to more evenly distribute the blood supply throughout its organs.  Or if there were parasites in the blood, to conclude the veins “know” what’s best and to restrain the immune system because the parasites “earned” their place.
Isn’t it odd that when we examine more closely, the very idea of a “free market” sounds like a scam?

An Aesthetic Declaration of Independence?

Rebel against an established order all you like, but it’s all for naught if you have wallpaper, music, and food characteristic of your people.
Archaeologists characterize ancient peoples by their dwellings, pottery, decorations, and trash piles.  Why doesn’t anyone think to analyze modern peoples in a similar way?  Perhaps the absence of contemperologists is just another blind spot in our established world view.
If we were to make stone spearheads in a particular way, we would be Clovis people, regardless of what we thought about the local chief.
If you like the same top 25 songs everyone else likes, you declare allegiance to your people, no matter if you dislike some politicians.
We’ve established that governments are just outgrowths of the people, therefore it is futile to change a government unless the people change first.  Or rather, if we changed the people, government changes naturally.

There never was a very rebellious soul who had Jif or Skippy peanut butter and Campbell’s soup in their pantry. Brand-name comfort foods connect people to childhood memories of nurture and care, allowing people to feel like warm fuzzy parts of a meaningful tribe even as mass society parasitizes them.
By the same token it is extremely powerful to dismantle these visceral attachments and replace them. To do this is to truly rebel and turn one’s back on a corrupt culture that feeds on its own.
To follow a culture’s aesthetic is an act of powerful ritual significance that ties one to it on a subconscious level. No matter how people might hate their lives within a society, they are trapped so long as peform the rituals of obeisance.
Confucius got it right. He understood the importance of ritual in everything we do—its connection to the movement of societies as gravity shapes the course of celestial bodies.
So by deliberately engineering the rituals on which we base our lives, we shape ourselves.
From the carpets in your dwelling, the architecture of all the buildings around you, the flavorings in your food, the most frequently occurring colors, the shows on tv, the advertisements, the holidays. All these together create an attitude and way of perceiving the world. It’s all around us and influences every thought we think. For example, how does the architecture of a big box strip mall identical to dozens of others make us feel? What more powerful ritual could there be to bolster a philosophy of every place being identical with people plugged into one mass culture and people themselves interchangeable economic units?

So when someone begins to change the cultural environment and how it influences them, they move towards an aesthetic declaration of independence, a sort of hellish, Luciferian defiance magnitudes greater than defying mere governments.

A Creative Culture Requires A Leisured Elite

Trying new things is a luxury.  A wild animal that tries to play with its default script probably ends up dead.  Human societies, though, are actually required to try new things or else a more inventive society outcompetes them.  How a society manages its creative output is a matter of existential importance.

The greatest breakthroughs and masterpieces have always come from those who can labor at their work without distraction and who have significant creative freedom.
The ancient world produced works of genius that still stand out today.
This is completely astonishing when we consider that population size, wealth, and the distribution and storage of information were pathetic compared to now.
Surely the works of Ancient Greece ought to compare to our own as petroglyphs compare to Renaissance painting.  This may hold true if we consider technology, but not in the realm of culture and creativity.  Even when we consider technology, it’s amazing what they could accomplish with limited knowledge and resources.  Amazingly, much of what we have now is merely derivative of what the Greeks had 2500 years ago.

If we look at the creativity of societies in the past, one thing we must notice is that the creators weren’t ordinary people who worked on philosophy or poetry after a day in the fields.
Without exception, the people who produced the best and highest culture came from a small but leisured and insulated class of individuals.
For most of history, 90%+ of people were subsistence farmer peasants, yet so long as even a tiny fraction of 1% had the freedom to be professional creators, it was enough to create enduring culture.

Modern American culture idolizes the myth of someone who can work full time, take night classes, raise a family, and write the next great novel all at once. Thousands of years of human experience, however, tells us that the highest quality creative work requires complete devotion just like any other discipline.

There are of course professional creative people today—far more by numbers and proportion than there ever were in previous societies. There’s a big difference though. Modern creators are still paid workers.

The most creative people in older societies were invariably allowed to live free from the concerns of the market economy. They belonged to a leisured, aristocratic class that would have seen such affiliations as vulgar, even if they lived an ascetic lifestyle. They understood that if you depend on the next paycheck you can’t say what you really think. You have to give your audience what it wants right now or else you’re broke.
When it comes to modern creative talents people throw around the words “authentic” and “sellout.” These distinctions are an illusion when everyone lives in the market economy. Everyone is a sellout when everyone has to sell themselves.
This conflict of interest ensures that great creative work is scarce when everyone is busy earning a living. The market will produce plenty of what sells right now, but precious little anyone cares about 100 or 1000 years from now.
The market knows only the present, so a high quality creative class requires some degree of insulation from its caprices.
In the past, most advancement came from the few people who didn’t have to worry about wealth. Even where they did not have talent themselves, they might become patrons. Patrons were not really the same as employers because they were not directly trying to turn a profit. Moreover, patrons were a single person whom an artist could reason with. Artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo both negotiated with their patrons in the middle of the creative process and had some measure of control.
There is no arguing with market demand. The many wants what it wants right now. So when the market prevails we will never see epic works that take half a lifetime to produce, nor works that don’t ape today’s popular taste. Worst of all, the market forces creative people to answer to the masses.

In the past, the few professional creative people were protected by forming tight knit peer groups.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle represented three generations of master and apprentice, each of them supported in leisure by their society within a school of their making.  We might also consider that Pythagoras or Epicurus thrived as well within their own tribe of students.
In the past, ascetics and mystics formed another sort of leisured aristocracy.  Consider Diogenes who lived on public charity, or that the very name ‘dervish’ originally means a beggar,  or the experiences of John the Baptist, Jesus, any number of saints in the wilderness.   Across the planet, societies that nurtured their mystics have developed lasting spiritual traditions.
Even consider how modern science and education was largely pioneered by monks who had the rare leisure to study and question within the protected environment provided by the clergy.
A universal market economy, though, by its nature has no place for such “low productivity” slow growing endeavors.

Consider how the Romanticist poets all knew each other, most all of them from leisured aristocratic backgrounds.
Tolkien and C.S. Lewis knew each other, both academics with tenure at a university that still had a strong aristocratic tradition.
Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft profited richly from corresponding though both suffered terribly from being trapped in the market economy.  It speaks volumes that like their spiritual predecessor, Edgar Allen Poe, they had to sacrifice themselves to create enduring work.   Imagine what they could have accomplished had they been leisured aristocrats.
One small group of creative peers who needn’t fear for money are a more powerful force than an entire modern hive cluster of hundreds of millions where everyone is slave to money.
Constant busyness at pointless jobs is one of the biggest drains of productivity, the slayer of creativity in a population. The overworked do not tolerate idle creativity in others. Like-minded people are the substrate on which the individual grows. Just as guerilla insurgents cannot survive without a sympathetic population to harbor them.

Not long ago, societies could only afford to have a tiny number of people trying new things. But like efficient bodies honed by evolution, they made the small amounts of energy they spent on their R and D departments count so they were not subsumed by their competitors.
Now with greater modern wealth, we may do well to observe the successful practices of leaner times and apply them on a larger scale.

See also: Smart Socialism,
How the Middle Class Used to Be Affordable

Proles Are Inert

We have established that human societies everywhere settle into a stratified equilibrium.  Many other social species have hierarchy.  Amongst humans, there is the hierarchy of natural castes.

Societies thrive or collapse  in proportion that its class system reflects the reality on the ground.  A society fails when mediocre men become rulers and great men are made into poor peasants.
A society stagnates when the best outliers are made to live as exiles and the halls of
power belong to ordinary men.

In the modern west, we think of justice merely as fairness in meting out punishments, but it’s much more than that.  Justice is a person attaining whatever station and reward is justly theirs.
It is sad we mostly understand this in terms of petty criminals being punished.
Rarely, do we reflect that it is just those with prolish values and temperaments are proles, or that those of noble bearing and character ascend the heights.

All across the internet, one finds idealogues who expect enraged masses to rise up and have a revolution any day now to stop “big government.”  Their outrage always turns out to be nonsense of course.
The peasants have always had their champions—champions who nearly always fail and end up dead themselves.  The brothers Gracchi in the days of the Roman Republic are a classic example.  After the two brothers were murdered in succession trying to pass monopoly-busting land laws, further attempts at reform dwindled for some reason.  Despite their far greater numbers, the proles were unable to protect their champions or carry out an agenda themselves.  As usual, they missed opportunities their betters would have seized upon.  The proles have always been inert.

Like most Americans, I was taught the idea of a “common man” enshrined as some kind of God.  But within a few years of going out into the world to fend for myself, I had discovered that the common people are no God, they’re just the mob.

The first universal trait I noticed in their character was passivity.  Everywhere I’ve been, prolish folks endlessly complain about their lot and resent their superiors in life.  But it dawned on me one day—they never do anything about it, nor are they capable of action.
I looked back through history, since my own life is a narrow anecdotal slice, but the pattern of proles is timeless as the tides.
So long as their stomachs are full most of the time, even if they’re subsisting on junk, they grumble amongst themselves, mostly for stress relief, but utterly lack motivation for change until they are truly desperate.  They are constitutionally incapable of framing dissident thoughts of their own volition.  Actually, their defining quality is they lack volition and agency.  If they were not docile and gullible, societies of millions where just a few have all the wealth would  not be possible.  In a way, it is just.  Unable to defend themselves, they assume their proper place as preybeasts.
Across history and location poor peasants have always been proud supporters of the established order while the truly rebellious have always been educated young men who couldn’t quite make it into, or beyond the upper middle class.
Peasants have always had revolts,
Frustrated petit bourgeois, revolutions.

Proles are by nature obedient creatures that define themselves by working most of the time.  They love to brag about how busy they are, all the sacrifices they’ve made while working, the injuries they’ve gotten doing the dirty work of the affluent.  They are masochists eternally dying in mines and on battlefields for their masters.  They take comfort in repetition.  Proles always buy the same brands, drive the same route every day, work the same tedious work, and listen to the same 25 songs everyone else is listening to over and over again.
Proles take pride in collectivism and trust the herd.  In a prole bar one doesn’t try to to order craft beers or wine when everyone else has pitchers of coors light.  In Proleville, no man can be talked to if he can’t talk about sports—the fine art of watching the accomplishments of others rather than doing for oneself.  Eating different foods, learning another language, staying fit with exercise, anything everyone else isn’t doing is a quick ticket to being cast out.  Just as they would not let a dog or pig sit with them at the dinner table, they allow no one in their midst who they cannot identify as a fellow human.

Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, or Khmer Rouge Cambodia are fine examples of what happens when the common man becomes ruler.  Given far more power than befits his station, his natural loathing and envy of anyone different than himself manifests in hysterical witch hunts.  Men like Mao and Stalin understood the vastness of this ocean of envy for The Man and kept their populations appeased by allowing the peasants to terrorize the hated middle management—rich peasants, the landlords, the educated.  Given permission by the rulers themselves, their normally impotent rage at life poured forth to create some of history’s greatest disasters.

The majority of human beings are proles.  The family I come from were classic anxious upper proles desperately groveling for middle class acceptance.
Their neurotic habits led to the isolation that allowed me to grow up in a vacuum of sorts and eventually develop customs of my own.
I learned to understand the futility of their struggle and regard their subservient attitudes with contempt.
I am genetically a prole, more predisposed to an honest day’s labor than white collar “networking.”
But I have striven to become an active rather than passive individual, attempting to shape my own destiny rather than spending the rest of my life complaining during lunch break.  If I accept the universe is fundamentally just rather than unjust, then I must face the fact that I must be the change I wish to see.
I may have unfair obstacles in my path.  I can choose to suppose I got a bad lot in life.  It does not change my mission.

Some might call my sentiment here “elitist” but that is why proles stay proles.  They always stay steadfast that they are undeserving of the lot they’ve been given yet remain ignorant in an age of information and continue to squander their wealth on big trucks and houses they can’t afford, lotto tickets, slot machines, smokes, and red bull by the case.  Most importantly, though, they are eternally bereft of imagination and ideas—and that is why things are the way they are.

Smart Racial Realism

It seems in the modern day that European Americans are the only group that doesn’t stick together while every other ethnicity seems to help each other out.
In my experience as a wanderer, I discovered the harsh reality that ethnicity is one of my fundamental traits, one I carry with me everywhere whether I like it or not.
I’ve been denied a job before when they learned I wasn’t Mexican.  I’ve been all but forced out of a job by black co-workers.  I curse my ancestors for allowing these outsiders to take over.

Rather than feeling guilt, “whites” should thank their lucky stars that they were the ones with the power.  I’ve seen the solidarity among just about any other group in the real world.  Long-nosed Europeans would have been wiped off the map if they hadn’t been able to defend themselves.  Most East Asian cultures, for example, are very frank about regarding other peoples as monkeys.

But experience also taught me working among European American proles is no better.  Just like the blacks and Mexicans, they sense I’m not of their kind.  Proles are everywhere the same.  Only the proportion of prolishness of a race differs.

Over years I experienced the difficulties of race, but also was forced to accept that class is more important.

This is where retarded white nationalists go wrong.  They blame all their problems in life on race.

I see the American Civil War as a grand monument to this sort of idiocy.

I’ll never understand why a single non-rich white in the South cared to fight for slavery, a system that hurt them and only benefited the very rich.

Most people who opposed the spread of slavery didn’t care about the slaves.  It wasn’t their problem.  What concerned them was the disastrous effect on the job market when abundant free labor arrives!

To your average white guy, the spread of slavery back then was like the mass illegal immigration and automation we face now.
One of the reasons young Abraham Lincoln’s family was forced to leave Kentucky for Illinois—slavery moved in and the prospects for ordinary people plummeted.
This early experience undoubtedly played a role in shaping the future president’s views.  He was first a believer in the Whig program of spreading wealth through developing infrastructure and commerce.  Slavery, a system that concentrated wealth on a few plantations and strangled commerce was inimical to his aims.

The vast majority of white southerners would have done better to forge an alliance with black slaves to overthrow the parasitic plantation owners without anyone in the North ever having to say anything.

That hundreds of thousands of them lined up to get shot for a system that only benefited the rich shows what dupes they were.  Faithful dogs, mere tools in the hands of their rulers.

To everything there’s a golden mean.  On one hand failing to embrace race realism is willful self delusion.  On the other hand, being obsessed with race makes one an easily manipulated pawn in the plans of the powerful.
If proles are everywhere the same, so are elites.
A millionaire in Massachusetts has far more in common with his counterparts in China or Nigeria than he has with a powerless US prole with his light beer, smokes, and football games.

When you bring up race with people in America only two possibilities can be imagined.
-Outright race war.
-Deluded ideas of sameness and equality.

It’s such a charged subject that no one can actually seem to think about it.  Being treated as a taboo subject prevents the issue being genuinely discussed.

I care about race because I know that when other peoples take over, I’m an outsider to them who will always be last in line to receive the fruits of society.  When you’re obviously different from everyone else, you become an easy target.  Cherokee Indians who tried to integrate into white culture discovered this the hard way.  If you live in another people’s culture, you’re at their mercy.  If one day they decide to exterminate you or take your stuff, too bad.

There’s no mystical magic in a race, though.  If I determine my clan’s interests can be better served by working with other peoples, I will do so.  I would gladly ally with blacks who share my interests against some plutocratic parasite with my skin color.  If I went out and took a bullet in some billionaire’s war because x people are bad, I would deserve what I got.

Race reality in modern America isn’t about racial solidarity to the point of stupidity.  It’s about recognizing opportunities for arbitrage across racial lines.  If I can get a hotter black or latina woman than I can a white woman, then I will not hesitate.
I’ve found that jobs with lots of blacks tend to have lower expectations.  Most Blacks don’t work hard if they don’t have to, a virtue as far as I’m concerned.  So  when I can get along with my co-workers, it’s great, because I can get paid for standing around half the time.  Whites and Asians who aspergically slave away spoil things for everyone.

Smart race realism means:
-A people must guard its territory; there must be a place that is unequivocally its own, even if it’s just a few city blocks.  It must protect its own and not give stupid concessions.  A people that shows signs of weakness gets quickly wiped out by its neighbors.
-A people must also maintain relations with its neighbors, being always ready to make a good deal.
-A people’s internal parasites are as much a threat as any outside people and must be dealt with.

How Microsoft’s Human Resources Culture Drove Away Talent

“Microsoft’s implementation – “stack ranking”, a bell curve that pits employees and groups against one another like rats in a cage – plunged the company into internecine fights, horse trading, and backstabbing.

…every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor…For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings.

Employees quickly realised that it was more important to focus on organisation politics than actual performance:…”

LINK

One of the commenters on this article, a ‘mikesmith’ gives some real food for thought by challenging current conventional wisdom about the ascendancy of STEM.

“I was particularly struck by the very last line, quoting Jobs: ‘Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA.’ That is so insightful and so true, and says so much about why Apple is now the world’s biggest company. And it’s now fundamentally an arts company, nont a tech company. Sure it has to have great technology. But the purpose of the technology is to sell the arts products. It’s the products created by musicians, writers, filmmakers and others sold on iTunes that is financing Apple’s growth.

And it’s not just true about companies but about countries as well. Those that prosper in coming years will be those that promote the arts, the humanities, the liberal arts. Education in those areas should be a country’s number one priority, and those countries that do that will be the leaders and will have the most prosperous economies. People who study business and technology simply aren’t capable of coming up with the creative ideas. They are good at bean-counting, or finding ways of making the creative peoples’ ideas work better, but they shouldn’t be in charge and they certainly shouldn’t be receiving the bulk of the investment. It’s the artists and the creatives who matter, who now generate the ideas and the profits. Consider how much economic activity just two artists, Tolkien and Rowling, have generated in the past decade. Huge streams of billions, stemming from the work of just two artists! And they will continue for decades.

I’ve read numerous articles in this paper and others recently that young people are studying business and the sciences more than the arts and the humanities. That is just disastrous, both for the individuals and for their countries. And I feel so sorry for those young people who have been brainwashed into thinking that that’s the way to go. There’s no future for them. They should consider well Jobs’ insight, it’s quite brilliant.”

The Logic of North Korea

Assuming that North Korea is insane and illogical is a counter-productive approach. Once one has given in to such a sentiment, there can be no reasoning, no progress, and no predictions of what will happen next.

Famine conditions serve a purpose:
-The state concentrates its resources in and around the capital.
-The state keeps its most valuable and loyal citizens in the capital
-The less loyal and less valuable you are, the further away you have to live from the capital.
-The further away from the capital you are, the less state resources you receive, the poorer the farmland and farming equipment becomes.
-Thus the less loyal and valuable you are to the state, the less likely you or your progeny will survive.
-Thus the state all but breeds its citizens for obedience and productivity.

Insane or chillingly rational?”

*Kim Jong Il was alive when this article was written but the principles of the North Korean state are unchanged.*

Truly nothing is permanent, the site I posted this article was posted on was deleted by yahoo over a year ago. And perhaps all of wordpress is deleted 10 years from now or less?  I remember working in an archives once, their worship of paper documents that cannot be changed or deleted except by fire or decay:

Here’s the original text updated 11/28/2015:

Confused with the state of North Korea, many foreigners dismiss the country, its Dear leader, and everything in its borders as ‘insane.’

Assuming that North Korea is insane and illogical is a counter-productive approach. Once one has given in to such a sentiment, there can be no reasoning, no progress, and no predictions of what will happen next.
There is in fact a method to the ‘madness’ and assuming insanity constitutes a refusal to analyze or understand a potentially dangerous government and its policies.

* Firstly, the North Korean government very much has a purpose in mind when it menaces its neighbors with weapons tests and undertakes nuclear development.

The DPRK:

-Wishes to give the impression of erratic, frightening behavior so it can be more intimidating.

-Wishes to be more intimidating so it can get what it wants through threats.

-Wishes to make threats because:
It is a relatively easy way to increase the resources, income, and political clout of the regime.
Intimidation is a deterrent to invasion.
It Is a way for a nation perpetually on the brink of famine to feed itself.

* Even a state with a weak centrally planned economy is not implemented irrationally. Famine conditions serve a purpose:
-The state concentrates its resources in and around the capital.
-The state keeps its most valuable and loyal citizens in the capital
-The less loyal and less valuable you are, the further away you have to live from the capital.
-The further away from the capital you are, the less state resources you receive, the poorer the farmland and farming equipment becomes.
-Thus the less loyal and valuable you are to the state, the less likely you or your progeny will survive.
-Thus the state all but breeds its citizens for obedience and productivity.

Insane or chillingly rational?

* The cult surrounding Kim Jong Il and his family is not insanity, but rather a continuation of tradition.

-Extravagant stories of a ruler’s birth were common in historical East Asian monarchies.
-The Kim family is essentially a modern day Korean dynasty. Korea was traditionally the most Neo-Confucian state on earth. In this system, the common people owed obedience to their ruler just as a child did to its father. This relationship of ‘filial piety’ was regarded as the foundation of society. Exceptional obedience of the populace was not insanity but the proper order.
-‘The great Juche idea’ is in part a modern continuation of the philosophies behind traditional Korean monarchies.

* Much of the North Korean approach is determined from the perspective of Korean history:

-Korea was historically caught in between larger neighbors and periodically suffered devastating invasions. This fostered an attitude of fear towards the outside world. Korea, even more than other East Asian nations has been known as a ‘hermit kingdom.’ This tendency towards xenophobia and isolation continues in both modern day Koreas. It is only much more pronounced in the North.

-The twentieth century was incredibly traumatizing for Korea. Resistance groups under Kim Il Sung spent years fighting the Japanese in both Korea and in China. In the Korean war, conflict surged repeatedly up and down the peninsula. By the end Korean civilization, was in ruins. The North especially had been bombed back into the stone age by the Americans, mostly with lots and lots of napalm. Millions of civilians were killed during the war. The bitter resentment caused by this death and destruction endures to the present day.

— Korean pursuit of nuclear weapons is in part a reaction to precedent set by the Americans:
-Macarthur requested about thirty nukes with the intention of turning the entire border region of North Korea into a radioactive no man’s land through which no Chinese or Russian troops could possibly pass.
-Truman kept the possibility of nukes open even after he fired Macarthur.
-North Korea is loathe to stop its nuclear program when it has already come so close to being nuked.

* Playing the role of North Korea satisfies the needs of its most important client. There is market demand for a North Korea.
-The last thing China wants is to share a border with a staunch US ally that hosts a large garrison of US troops. North Korea is a friendly socialist government that serves as a buffer zone.
-The collapse of North Korea would result in millions of refugees flooding into China.
-The recalcitrance of North Korea serves as a distraction and ties down US troops.
-The ability of North Korea to brazenly stand up to US demands makes the US lose face. The US loses clout when it makes ultimatum after empty ultimatum.
-North Korea is a litmus test that allows the Chinese to see how far the Americans can be pushed. Brinksmanship is risky, it is grand to have someone who’s willing to do it for you.

So long as North Korea serves Chinese interests (it serves as a buffer zone just by existing), it will continue to receive plenty of energy and food aid from China. China might publicly scold the DPRK and even briefly place sanctions, but it will just be for show.

Why smart people defend bad ideas

We all know someone who’s intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen? Link