Gattaca was a fun little sci-fi film from 1997.  The premise is that our understanding of genetics has advanced so rapidly that the Powers That Be can predict a child’s life outcomes with near-perfect accuracy.  So Our Hero, Ethan Hawke, is denied his dream of being an astronaut for the Gattaca Corporation because he’s unfit — “89% likelihood of a heart attack by age 35” or something.  These were The Clinton Years, remember, so the genetic testing is just the hook on which to hang some very Clinton-ish spiels on how good old fashioned Liberal pluck can overcome the Eeeeeevil Corporation in the end.

Have I mentioned that one of the defining characteristics of bad art is that it sends the opposite message from what’s intended?

Twenty years on, most Americans would love it if steely-eyed biotech could exclude someone, anyone, from anything,  Our Hero, Ethan, gets around Gattaca Corp’s genetic testing by hiring genetically-perfect-but-accidentally-paralyzed Jude Law as a DNA doppelganger — he carries Jude’s blood around in hidden vials on lab day, he wears recordings of Jude’s perfect heartbeat on fitness testing days, he even scatters Jude’s loose hairs and skin around his workspace to fool random sweeps.  In The Clinton Years, that was “the triumph of the human spirit.”  Nowadays, it’s practically paradise — corporations may be eeeeevil, but at least somebody acknowledges that basic Mendelian inheritance applies to humans…  a 2018 Gattaca remake would have both Ethan and Jude turn themselves in for promoting “privilege,” as the space shuttle triumphantly blasts off with a disabled, pansexual, transgendered Crew of Color.

The movie also offers some interesting slices of life in a future where, as the Heartiste types put it, “biomechanics is god.”  Ethan takes his new main squeeze, genetically perfect Aryan goddess Uma Thurman, to a piano recital.  At the curtain, the pianist throws his gloves into the crowd.  Ethan catches one; it has six fingers.  Uma casually remarks, “That piece can only be played with six fingers on each hand.”  Thus are the genetically suboptimal reconciled to their fate.

Reconciling the genetically suboptimal to their fate would have to be the #1 priority of any government that took human biodiversity (HBD) seriously.  The movie implies that genetic testing is only available to the middle classes and up — you know, the kind of parents who’d want their boys to go work for Gattaca — but twenty years on, it’s a mail-order business.  For every potential Gattaca astronaut or six-fingered pianist in our gene pool, there are fifty Deltas, and one hundred Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons.  They must be managed.  I propose a thought experiment:

Section break!

Let’s stipulate that our Gattaca State has solved its legitimacy problem by amending the social contract, from “physical security” to “material security” — it’s legit, Commie-style, because it provides every citizen with a minimum level of sustenance.  Let us further stipulate that — resources being finite — when we held the big referendum to go Gattaca, our State decreed that henceforth only those people actually within the nation’s physical borders at D day H hour are citizens, thus legitimizing our Gattaca regime as a “nation.”

If that sounds like “national socialism,” small n, small s, to you… well, congrats, you’ve passed the midterm.   It’s the only way I can think of to legitimize a Postmodern State that doesn’t entail genocide.  And since “genocide, caste system, or both” are the only plausible ways to organize Post-Industrial human society, let’s go with the one with the smaller body count for our thought experiment.

Let’s take it up the genetic ladder.  You probably don’t have to worry too much about the Epsilons and Deltas; bread, circuses, and Soma should take care of them, combined (naturally!) with a China-style two-child policy.  (Put the birth control pills in the Soma to make sure).  The Gammas and Betas, though, have enough IQ on the ball to be dangerous.  In military terms, they’re the NCOs and junior officers to the Alphas’ generals.  Oh, hey, speaking of national socialism….

…well, no, that agitates people too much.  Let’s use the word kokutai.  Everyone loves Japan!  Anyway, the kokutai.  In a Post-Industrial world where the material basics are all provided for, you still need something for people to do.  Again, your lower ranks aren’t too much of a problem.  You can push them into “service” jobs, 3rd World style — buying something at the market in a place like India entails going through seven different layers of flunkies, because the store owner has to provide make-work jobs for his layabout relatives from the sticks.  Just be sure to properly indoctrinate them to be the best damn gardener or bellhop they can be.  Soma and sportsball will take care of the rest.

The higher-IQ types, though, will need a grand quest.  I’m thinking of something like a new and improved White Man’s Burden.  We could probably call it “Yellow Man’s Burden,” since the Chinese Commies love them some genetic engineering, but let’s go with Mission Civilisatrice 2.0.  There are whole areas of the globe overrun with Epsilons.  What better use of our Gammas and Betas than to go there, to turn the place productive in ways that the “natives” never could?  Think Japan in Manchukuo (kokutai, remember?)  It didn’t work out the first time, but that’s a bug not a feature.  The constant war footing that makes a kokutai a kokutai helps preserve the necessary hardness in what would otherwise be society’s vast muddled middle.  And, of course, any Alpha with bleeding-heart type ideas could always be “sent down to the countryside,” Mao-style, to “reconnect with the laboring masses.”

What’s not to like?

In the spirit of the season…

I’m thankful for having a forum on which to express my badthoughts, for however long those are still tolerated.

I’m thankful that someone actually reads those badthoughts, even if it’s only about fifteen someones.  In fact, I’m grateful that it is only about fifteen someones.  Our Thing trends toward megalomania — with the noble exception of the Z Man, everyone who writes on Our kind of topics seems to go the Col. Kurtz route the minute he gets more than a few dozen readers.

I’m grateful to the co-bloggers.  When we started this thing a few years ago, I thought Morgan, Philmon, and CylarZ were the best e-migos a guy could have…. my opinion of them has only gotten better with time.

At the risk of sounding like the Pharisee, whose thanks God that he is not like other men, I’m grateful that I have some limited ability to sit still and shut up.  Yes, extremely limited — I’m writing this, after all, and I spent a lot of years in one of those professions where “loving the sound of your own voice” is a job requirement — but still, it’s there.  If History has taught us anything, it’s that the inability to sit quietly is responsible for 75% of all the disasters that have ever befallen humanity (and the rest were bad luck).  I may be the only guy not actually in religious orders who reads the Desert Fathers as a how-to manual.  Even they struggled with sitting quietly, and they’d withdrawn from the world specifically to do just that.

Finally, I’m grateful for the commenters.  We’re a saturnine bunch; lots of us are playing the back nine of our lives; I’m pretty sure most if not all of us drink a bit too much for our own good… but we’re doing what we can to keep Western Civ’s rickety ship afloat a few more years.  I’m not sure any of us would be the life of the party out in the world, but I am sure we’re going to have some high old times together in the reeducation camp.*

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.

*PS I’ve added a “contact” link at the lower right.  It’s mostly just to see if I get any “Greetings, fellow teen!”-type emails from the Feds or Soros-bots (if there’s even a meaningful difference anymore), but if you want to drop me a line with questions, comments, or concerns, go for it.

Modern political theory rests on the Social Contract.  We all got this in grade school, so there’s no need to belabor it, but it’s important to remember the underlying assumptions:

• Social Contract theory is designed to legitimize a Modern State; that is, a State that can only defend its people with firearms.  The main driver is technology.  The Premodern State was legitimized by God (the “divine right of kings” or some such), and that worked fine when wars were small, seasonal, and fought mainly by a warrior caste… but Modern wars are large, year-round, and fought mainly by militia.
• A militia system requires some kind of representative government — call it “democracy” for convenience — in order to function effectively.  This in turn requires ideology.  See the Putney Debates for details.  (A militia system without ideology is Roman-style warlordism — each individual commander negotiating the payoff with his troops; what civil government there is, is always subsumed by the need to keep the army happy).  Here again, the English Civil War is the model — Parliament’s troops were ideologically sound, which explains both their military effectiveness and their legendary brutality, especially in Ireland.
• This entails that, as the citizen’s primary duty is to help defend the realm, therefore only those capable of defending the realm are citizens.  Specific legal doctrines evolved to support this — couverture for women, minority for children.  (Old men who couldn’t physically fight paid taxes to support those who could).

All of these flow logically.  But Social Contract theory made one more assumption, all the more powerful for being unstated:

• Social contracts are only valid between close kin.  No one would argue that wars between States are unjust because they break the social contract, even if we are all “kin” in some sense (all brothers in Christ, for example), and even though the State’s security is put at (at least theoretical) risk during wartime.  Borders were remarkably porous in the Early Modern period — if, say, an Englishman wanted to go live in the Netherlands, he just went there, bought a house, and went about his day.  No red tape, no paperwork, no official sign-off from anybody.  But that didn’t make him Dutch, so when England and the Netherlands had one of their frequent little wars, his life and goods were at considerable risk.  Put simply but not unfairly, that Englishman could never be Dutch, even if he lived there, spoke the language, and was utterly opposed to the policies of his “native” country.  He might think of himself as basically Dutch, but he wasn’t — he was covered by the English social contract, not the Dutch one, his own opinions and even actions notwithstanding.

The problem is, we no longer live in a Modern State.  We live in a Postmodern one.

Again, the main driver is technology.  We don’t operate under a militia system, because we can’t, as we learned at great cost in the Civil War.  Even 19th century armies were too technologically complex for weekend warriors to handle.  This is why conscription in the World Wars was “for the duration” — “nine-week wonders” can be thrown into combat knowing the basics, but they’ll take appalling losses… after which the survivors become the hardened professionals with which modern wars are won.

And, of course, we’re well past mass conscription in any case.  A main-force clash between, say, the US and China would end with the loser shooting off tactical nukes as it retreats, which would either end the war right there, or escalate it into a full-on ICBM exchange….

… either that, or any attempt at mass conscription would reveal what we all instinctively know to be true — we can’t draft a functional army, because our draft pool is made up of noodle-armed soybois, grunting savages, lardass neckbeards, and girls.  What if they held a war and nobody came?  Try drafting Millennials and you’ll find out, Moonbeam.

Which brings us around full circle.  What is a State for, then, if it’s not to provide for its citizens’ physical security?  We all know that “democracy” fails in practice — had The People been consulted at any point in the last 75 years, the United States would still be a White, Christian nation, safe behind our seas, far from whatever barbarities they were practicing in Europe and Asia.  Instead, we’re ruled by Hawaiian Judges.  But given the changes in technology, it would seem that the Social Contract itself no longer applies, even in theory — in a world with nuclear weapons, in a country that’s so rich even our “poor” people die of heart disease, what can we, the governed, possibly be consenting to?

I propose that the answer to “what is the State for?” is: Cultural security.

It’s quite clear that the combination of technology and democracy are lethal to human culture.  Left to our own devices, minus the evolutionary pressures that got us here in the first place, humans will choose lotus-eating.  We have over 100 years’ evidence for this.  The hot new artists of 1911, all classically trained, with the full panoply of human cultural achievement from which to draw, gave us Modern Art — futurism, brutalism, stream-of-consciousness, and the rest.  Google up Der Blaue Reiter — that’s the best Modern Art can do.  Max Nordau was right — our evolutionary success has thrown evolution into reverse.  What will the culture of Ingsoc be like?  Imagine Miley Cyrus twerking on a human face, forever.  Unless we stop it.

Will this entail a loss of some freedoms?  Of course.  But we’ve seen what people do with freedom.  It’s not the proles’ freedom we have to worry about, since they give that up without a second thought.  So long as they have their Soma, they’re fine.  It’s the freedom of the just-smart-enough-to-be-dangerous that we have to curtail.  They want to burn down the world because they’re bored, just like Modern “artists” did.  Getting “sent down to the countryside,” Mao-style, would do Soros, Bill Kristol, et al a powerful world of good.  Technology and democracy got us here; only technology and authoritarianism will get us out.

Back in my teaching days, “relevance” was one of the things I hated most.

Part of it was the inevitable politicization — “making X relevant to students’ lives” never means anything other than “using X as an excuse to preach tedious Leftist politics at a captive audience.”  But the other part was: Knowledge is supposed to be irrelevant.  You’re the student; it’s your job to make it relevant to your life.  That’s what “learning” means.

Let’s suppose I assign the Meditations.   “Relevance,” in the Ed Biz sense, is pretty much nil.  The only thing Marcus Aurelius and a modern college kid have in common is their shared humanity.  That’s their only point of comparison.  But… that’s enough, because that’s where the learning happens.

Is Marcus a good man?  A hypocrite?  A stuffed shirt?  Is he a manly man, or a whiny emo kid?  Whatever you choose, ask yourself why you see him that way… then ask yourself, How did Marcus see himself?  Marcus’s isn’t the easiest head to get into, but it’s far from the toughest.  If nothing else, you’ve learned a little bit of empathy from the exercise.

Then consider his doctrine.  Would you want to be a Stoic?  Can you be a Stoic, in the post-Freudian world?  Now you’ve learned a bit about the assumptions underpinning Marcus’s world, and your own, and the differences between the two.

Let’s say it’s not possible to be a full-blown Stoic anymore (that whole “unconscious” thing).  Does any of Marcus’s advice still apply?  How much of it is culture-bound?  Can we re-write even his most Stoical maxims into something applicable today?

Then go back to the beginning.  What was your opinion of Marcus before, and what is it now?  If it changed, why?

I’ve spelled it out this way — at the risk of insulting the reader — to illustrate that this process used to be automatic.  I didn’t have to teach college kids how to do this, because they’d gotten it in high school, in junior high, from their parents.  Nowadays, of course, I can’t teach it to them — it’s not relevant, because they already know everything worth knowing; my job is just to put the A in the grade book, for record-keeping purposes.

Yeah, we’re pretty much screwed.

When I think about the possibility — these days, the near certainty — of widespread political violence coming soon to a theater near you, I think about my teaching days.  Culture matters, y’all.

Anyone who takes even a passing glance at 20th century military history immediately notices collectivists’ tolerance for casualties.  The Soviets admitted to something like 25 million against the Nazis; the reality was probably far higher.  The Nazis themselves were no stranger to suicidal tactics; Luftwaffe pilots were at one point ordered to ram enemy bombers when their fighters ran out of ammunition, and some of them actually did it.  The Chinese in Korea took the heaviest losses in modern warfare; Giap’s North Vietnamese Army was infamous for its “human wave” attacks.  Wherever you find socialists, you find an appalling indifference to human life.

Modern American college kids are far closer to New Soviet Men than you think.  Far, far closer.

If you’re over 40 and have a social media presence, think of your behavior there.  Do you unfriend people?  How often?  Is it easy?  If you’re anything like me, you don’t exactly agonize over it, but you do take some time to think it over.  Even if it’s just Joe Schmoe, some guy you swapped lies with on a business trip, you still think of him as a human being.  You wonder if he’ll wonder what happened if you’re no longer on his friends list.  It’s not a hard decision, let’s not overdramatize, but there’s always at least a small pang of something very much like guilt….

The younger generation doesn’t feel any of that.  They’re so used to lives lived online — 400 contacts in the smartphone, 5000 friends on Facebook — that unfriending someone is nothing more than deleting spam.  The Millennials’ emotional model is Tinder — if it doesn’t appeal to you in every way, right away, just left-swipe it and it’s gone from your life forever.   I often wonder how much of anything they actually feel.

Those are your enemies.  Those are the frontline troops, the NCOs and platoon commanders.  I’d like to think that I could bring myself to give the order to fire if I were absolutely convinced of my cause’s rightness, and the no-possible-alternatives necessity of pulling the trigger.  These kids, it wouldn’t shock me at all to hear them call in an airstrike if someone used real milk instead of soy in their half-caff, triple-foam venti frappucino.

Culture matters, and ours is selfish, simpleminded, superficial, and brutal.  Given half the chance, that’s how they’ll act.

I’ve written a lot about political generations here.  It’s hardly original to me — Peter Turchin and his “cliodynamics” disciples are all about the generational politics (this site is a good example of a disciple).  I think it’s overblown — anything that claims History is a science is overblown; look no further than Marx himself — but useful in moderation.

One point I can’t emphasize enough is that the real fanatics, the whatever-it-takes crazies, almost always come from the generation that was old enough to be fully aware of, but not participate in, some social cataclysm.  World War One is an obvious example, and as you might expect, the fanciest of the Cat Fanciers were all juuuuust a bit too young (or, in the Dwarf’s case, too clubfooted) to participate.  When a generation like that (average DOB of, say, 1905) starts staring middle age in the face, things are going to get very bad, very fast.

A more benign example is George Orwell.  Born in 1903, he had this to say about life before the Great War:

When [H.G.] Wells was young, the antithesis between science and reaction was not false. Society was ruled by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory business men, dull squires, bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity, snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side…Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells.There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers exhorting you to ‘get on or get out,’ your parents systematically warping your sexual life, and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags…the generally accepted opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given us wings.

Wells was born in 1866, when Victoria’s reign still had almost another 40 years to run.  Orwell was born two years into Edward’s, and the world could hardly have been more different, yet Orwell seamlessly equates H.G. Wells’s youth with his own.  For comparison, this is like someone of my generation (born roughly 1970) taking some Jazz Age relic as our guru.  It’s stuff like this that makes Orwell so hard to take seriously sometimes.

But he had a point for all that.  When you’re a teenager, everything your parents believe is wrong, because they’re your parents.  Teenagers in 1918, though, had a huge, obvious wrong to point at — if it were even possible for your parents to be right about something, they were certainly wrong about that, the War, the industrial meat grinder of the Western Front.  The pedants, clergymen and golfers of 1903 could’ve seen it coming — they didn’t.  They could’ve stopped it any time — they refused.  They still thought dying for King and Country dulce et decorum est, the old, fat bastards, safe across the water, even after an entire generation was wiped out fighting for…. whatever it was they were fighting for.

Orwell’s German equivalents were saying the same thing, for the same reasons.

And so were his American equivalents, when our cataclysm came.  It was the Second World War for us, not the First, but the social result was the same.  It even had the same root cause.  Here’s Orwell again:

There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers exhorting you to ‘get on or get out,’ your parents systematically warping your sexual life…

We forget this now — we’ve been well trained to forget it — but not least among Socialism’s many attractions was the sexual utopia that was to come when the workers seized the means of production.  “Common property” always seems to entail “common wives” — sorry, ladies, but it’s true.  The first thing any chiliastic socialist movement did was preach “free love,” going all the way back to Antiquity.  Every heresy from the birth of Christianity was accused of it; every sect in Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium did it; the so-called “Utopian Socialists” did it (e.g. Brook Farm); even the so-called “Scientific Socialists” did it, such that Marx and Engels were often asked to their faces if they meant all the means of production would be held in common.  It was even more open in the 20th century — it’s no accident, as Marxists frequently said, that contraception was the Socialists’ #1 public health issue.  Monogamy is counterrevolutionary, comrade.

Orwell used the language of science — “science” and “scientific,” “reason” and “reasonable” are plastered all over his essay on Wells, and indeed all over his writings.  (You’ll recall, for instance, that he contrasted Hitler’s worldview in Mein Kampf with “comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense.”)  But for as much as all Leftists everywhere and everywhen talk about how much they Fucking Love Science (TM), we don’t even pretend to bother with it in The Current Year (which is one of the reason lots of people, even in Our Thing, regard Orwell as some kind of conservative).  These days, we’re all about our pwecious widdle feelings…

….which is why it’s no accident that the gospel of our just-missed-the-war generation, the so-called Silent Generation that were responsible for the worst excesses of “The Sixties,” was Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.  Here again, we’ve forgotten — because we’ve been very well trained to forget — that until very, very recently, the Nazis’ besetting sin wasn’t “racism” (or, God help us, “prejudice”), or even “hate” — it was repression.  The Nazis were how they were because they were uptight about sex.

No, stop laughing, I’m serious.  My teaching days are over, I hate assigning homework, but y’all really need to go read this: “Apt Pupil,” by Stephen King.  It’s in a collection, and far be it from me to suggest that you should find a way to not give that greasy commie King a payday (like his idol Barack Obama says, at some point you’ve made enough money), but I’m sure you can find a way to get it.  I’m 100% serious here —  That’s how the Nazis were viewed by most Americans, well into the 1980s.  It’s sex, sex, sex.  King has (quite rightly) always been criticized for going to the gutter the way Democrats vote — early and often — and it’s never been more clearly displayed than here.  Hell, “getting overpowered by a Nazi” was a standard bedroom-fantasy joke well into my college years; “anal-retentive” was such a common bit of psychobabble that it was a standard joke on the late night yak shows.

Thus, the Sixties.  Just as “pedants, clergymen and golfers…systematically warping your sexual life” was to blame, in the minds of our intellectual vanguard, for the horrors of World War 1, so Auschwitz and all the rest could be laid at the feet of Adolf Eichmann’s Daddy spanking him too much, or not enough, while he was potty training.  Don’t take it from me, take it from Marcuse… or Dr. Spock.

From which follows the idea, foisted on my generation by parents who just know they would’ve ended the Vietnam War if they hadn’t been in junior high at the time (the Vietnam draft ended in 1973), that the answer to all society’s ills is more freedom, more permissiveness, more promiscuity, more “self-esteem.”  The Baby Boomers weren’t responsible for “The Sixties;” they were responsible for “The Seventies,” and look how that turned out.  The “Stonewall Riots” were in 1969, but the celebration of all things gay didn’t really get rolling until the mid-1970s, and Angels in America, the apotheosis of AIDS victims as the New Messiah, debuted in 1991 (Tony Kushner was born in 1956).  Obergefell was merely a valediction to a moment long past.

Which brings us to now, and — at long last — to the point.  The upcoming generation has nothing left to permit.  We’ve got “educators” preaching transgenderism to preschoolers.  Whatever promiscuity, deviance, and transgression can achieve, they have already achieved.  The constant stream of pro-miscegentation ads that assault us everywhere are one last, futile attempt to conjure up a new Final Frontier to be crossed, but it won’t work, because it can’t.  Ditto the attempted normalization of pedophilia, polygamy, and (soon enough) bestiality.  These barely rate a sigh on the outrage-o-meter.

Everyone knows it, too, in the same way everyone knows Communism doesn’t work.  There are still some true believers hanging on in Liberal Arts faculties, just as there are some true believers hanging on in the North Korean politburo, but all of them, the so-called Commies most certainly included, know in their hearts that “Communism” can’t work — it becomes, at best, a kind of virulent National Socialism, as no less a figure than Joe “socialism in one country” Stalin, or Mao “socialism with Chinese characteristics” Zedong acknowledged.  It took 100 years, but here we are, and even the American Left admits it — talking about improving the material lives of the US proletariat these days makes you a “rightwing extremist,” where it would’ve made you a hardcore Liberal just a generation ago.

By my calculations, then, this “more perversion solves everything” hypothesis has about a decade left to run, after which… well, I dunno, but I’ve often said “today’s SJW is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer,” and this is part of the reason why.  You may also have noticed — as Our Betters, the Liberals, ostentatiously haven’t — that the Brown People they’re so furiously importing are ludicrously misogynistic, patriarchal, and homophobic.  Tony Kushner — just to stick with a theme — had better hope American gays really can fly; as he’s Jewish, too, he’ll be among the first our new overlords throw off the nearest 10 story roof.

If we make it that long, it’ll be interesting, to say the least.  Schadenfreude is an ugly emotion, my friends, but it might well end up being the only entertainment we have in the reeducation camps….

The reason I’ve pretty much given up hope is: If there were serious resistance to the Left, there are certain things it would be doing.  These things are so plain, so slap-you-in-the-face obvious, that the fact no one is doing them can only mean the “resistance” has already surrendered.  Things like:

The MAGA Defense Fund.  Right-wing guys get doxxed and disemployed.  Their guys get $300K/year sinecures at “nonprofit” websites nobody reads.  That’s just the way it is.  But look, y’all, $300K is chump change.  It’s a lot to an individual, yes, but crowdsourced from 10 million people?  It’s pennies.  Let me describe to you what drug organizations do; make of this information what you will.

They set up a “nonprofit” like the Left does.  The Red Cross, as is well known, only disburses a tiny fraction of its donations to people in need.  So they set up a “Shave the Whales” 503(c) to study the impact of blah blah blah in one of those Caribbean countries that has loose banking laws and no extradition treaty with the US.  Shave the Whales hires some local subcontractors — minority subcontractors, natch — to build the Fakey Q. Fakenstein public health clinic down there.  If the clinic never does manage to get much past putting an “under construction” sign on a weedy abandoned lot somewhere, well, you know how contractors are.  Meanwhile, the funds go into the Caymans bank, and come out as paychecks to guys who need them.

Of course, drug organizations deal in cash.  They’d love to use PayPal, Kickstarter, etc., but the good law-abiding SJWs at those organizations refuse — quite rightly!! — to aid and abet such a disreputable enterprise.  So the cartels use Western Union, just like their footsoldiers hardworking undocumented pre-Americans who just want to make a better lives for their families do.  And if that doesn’t work, they put a guy with a briefcase full of cash on a charter flight and send him down there, where he hands it off to another guy who takes deliveries of such briefcases when he’s not sipping margaritas on the beach.  It’s a tough life, obviously, and that’s why you shouldn’t sell drugs.

Awareness-Raising.  It would be great, obviously, if one of us could get some face time with Mr. Soros, and calmly, politely, rationally explain our perspective to him.  Similarly, it would be nice if our guys could calmly, politely, rationally walk up to, say, Rachel Maddow’s door — NOT to kick it in and threaten her family like the Left did to Tucker Carlson — but to calmly, politely, rationally explain our views of her and her coverage.  Alas, neither of those are possible.  Nor is it possible to get a meeting with the execs at, say, NBC and calmly, politely, rationally explain to them why we think they shouldn’t be putting anti-white propaganda on the air in the guise of TV shows.  Nor with the Madison Avenue ad boys, to calmly, politely, rationally explain ditto.  After all, those high and mighty folks — though they’re surely reasonable folks who have all Americans’ best interests at heart — don’t take meetings with just anyone, so they’ll never hear our calm, polite, rational views….

The local people, on the other hand…. them we can reach.  Local tv anchors shop at the same stores you do.  The marketing director of the local rag is right there in the phone book.  It would be pretty simple to walk up to the people who air the shows, buy the ads, etc., and calmly, politely, rationally explain to them why we’d prefer it if they didn’t do that anymore.  Bezos can buy the Washington Post; can he bail out every local Times-Picayune in the nation?  NBC has deep pockets, but they’re not bottomless….  Polite, rational, calm face-to-face talks.

Targeted Boycotts.  Hell, it probably doesn’t require a face-to-face meeting.  It probably doesn’t even require total cord-cutting.  In the days of streaming TV and the internet, local propaganda media outlets work on razor-thin margins.  They also rely on survey metrics, Nielsen and whatnot.  I’d bet a local targeted boycott, NOT of the advertiser, but of the station / newspaper that runs the ad, would do wonders.  What would happen, do you think, if half the households in a smallish city simply turned off their TVs in primetime, even just for a night?  It’d seriously fuck with their metrics, if nothing else.  Get them chasing their own tails.  Can [pick your miscegenation-promoting company] afford to throw money at region after region, trying to figure out what’s going on with its ad buys?  The NFL got threatened with lawsuits from big companies when its viewership dropped slightly after the Kaepernick thing.  We can’t bankrupt the NFL, or the Washington Post, or NBC, but we CAN bankrupt their local affiliates.

A rolling TV blackout, once a week, switched up every few weeks to keep them guessing.  Again, you’re not hitting, say, Levi’s jeans – they have much deeper pockets than we do.  You’re hitting the outlets that show Levi’s commercials.  Make all the pozzed ads you want, boys; it don’t mean a think if there’s no place to put them.  Then, just to be sure the message is clear, hold a “turn ON your TV” night.  Stick-and-carrot, see?  The programs on which the poz propaganda appears gets boycotted; the programs that show plain old ads get watched.  If Leave it to Beaver reruns on the local public access station are suddenly the most popular show in prime time in a smallish urban market, that’s really going to explode some heads.  The metrics get messed up, the poz-pushing companies sink their ad buy dollars in the wrong place, and the local stations show what we want them to show…

A real resistance would, I suppose, think about doing such a thing.

Guerrilla Marketing.  If the resistance were serious — and I preemptively denounce them, and all of this — they’d start going Sabo-style on smaller communities..  The point here is to get inside the Left’s heads.  If a few more people get redpilled from the guerrilla ads, that’s great, but secondary.  The primary objective is the get the Left freaking out, and to publicize the freakout.  The message to them is: We know where you live, and there are lots of us — way more than you think.  Which will cause them to send a message in return: We can’t tolerate dissent, any dissent, even if it’s just a billboard or a flyer on a lamppost.

Sabo works in Shitlibopolises like LA and NY.  That’s cool, but it won’t have nearly the impact.  A resistance would, I think, work the college towns.  Young White males are angry, and confused, but apathetic.  Give them a demonstration.  Show them how little it takes to achieve a dramatic effect — the Left will go nuclear; they can’t help themselves.  Paper every coffee shop in a college town with “It’s Ok to be White” flyers.  Draw little “OK” hand symbols on the corners of Leftist political flyers.  Hang out in the library stacks — check for security cameras! — and scribble “it’s ok to be White” on the flyleaves of every book… or, at least, I’d think that’s what a resistance would do.  It’s illegal, obviously — it’s vandalism, which is wrong wrong WRONG (unless the Left does it, of course) — but I suppose a real resistance would be willing to risk it.  Hypothetically.

See what I mean?  Nobody’s even thinking about doing these kinds of things, or else they’d be doing them.  Serious preparations for serious action are impossible to hide.  Read any history — even the big “surprises” like Pearl Harbor, Operation Barbarossa, etc. were telegraphed way in advance; a whole bunch of people, way high up, knew something was coming.  This is why countries always announce their annual war games well in advance.  If anyone were serious about resisting the Left, they’d be doing something along these lines.   But they aren’t — which is good, of course, because I denounce all this — but it also means that they won’t, because they can’t.

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Ace of Spades, on the “anti-fa” attack on Tucker Carlson:

Do these people think that their leftwing politics and favorable coverage from Chris Cuomo, Don Lemon, and Brooke Baldwin protects them at their homes or when walking down the street alone?

Yes, obviously — because it does.  Even making a Leftist uncomfortable is a federal pound-me-in-the-ass-prison offense now.  Any person caught doing anything like what was done to Carlson to, say, Don Lemon would be hatecrimed into GenPop in the nastiest prison in the land, with a life expectancy of hours (see also: Robinson, Tommy).

Do you honestly believe that the edgier elements of the evil rightwinger coalition will permit you to retain your feeling of physical safety?

Again, yes, and again, obviously — see above.  There’s no “evil rightwinger coalition,” because the minute such an organization filed its paperwork, it would be infiltrated and doxxed, as would all its members.

The Z Man, on modern media:

The approved media does not just want to shut down your ability to speak and hear alternatives. They want to stop you from eating. When Trump says the media is the enemy of the people, this is exactly what he means. That’s why the Wall Street Journal hired Yoree Koh to try and deprive dissidents of a way to make a living.

As I mentioned over there, these are precisely the kinds of situations the Kitten Patrol was supposed to prevent.  One didn’t threaten the Cat Fanciers’ people without the Cat Fanciers’ people responding in kind.  Not only that, but the various branches of the Cat Fancy party would put guys on the payroll who — thanks to their political activism — couldn’t make a living any other way.  Got doxxed and disemployed?  The Party’s got your back… certainly including helping you get some revenge.

But see Ace’s bit above, right?  Well…  let’s do another little thought experiment.  There’s a type of organization that exists in America that does what it wants.  It operates on the same kind of principles, and it’s got law enforcement all over it 24/7.  And yet it still does what it does.  I’m speaking, of course, about drug cartels.  How do they do it?

They have membership rosters.  They don’t get messed with, without massive retaliation.  They take care of their own.  They move gazillions of dollars.  They communicate easily with each other.  How do they do it?

I dunno, not being a drug kingpin or a DEA agent, but I suspect that moving money out, at least, is as simple as sending a good old fashioned Western Union wire transfer to one of those countries they use, the Caymans or whatnot.  Getting it back into the country is as simple as setting up a “nonprofit,” a midnight basketball program or whatnot, and putting some down-and-out comrades on the payroll.  They file their taxes, etc., everything nice and aboveboard and legal.  As for communication, well… if the folks setting this up don’t have some way to get around that (“burner” cell phones, ham radio, good old fashioned 1950s spycraft), then they deserve to get caught.  Hell, a Protonmail VPN probably gets it done – invite only, with cutouts and pseudonyms only….

However it’s done — and again, a) I have no idea how to do it, and b) this is all hypothetical anyway, I denounce it all — it’s about the only way to make the madness stop.

If it can be stopped, but that’s a rant for another day.  But I know this: If Tucker et al had an organization behind him, this shit would not be happening, nobody would be getting shut down on YouTube, and the Left would be leery of unleashing the Twitter mob.

1856, not 1860.  The Democrats won tenuous control of the House last night, so I suppose the civil war will be delayed a few years.  As I said yesterday, it’s not a question of IF the Left starts shooting, only when.  They now have sufficient ability to be pains-in-the-ass enough that they don’t feel forced to go to the gun… yet.  But the lunacy will come fast and furious now.  The day is not far off, kameraden, when we’ll look back on 2016 as a sane, peaceful golden age.

As the Z Man pointed out yesterday, a Democrat-controlled House pretty much guarantees Trump’s re-election in 2020.  He’s at his absolute best playing rope-a-dope with lunatics, and the larger, dumber, browner, even-more-hormonal cat ladies of the new-look Democratic Party are the dopiest dopes to ever chase a rope.  All “investigations” of Trump to date have revealed far more dirt about the Democrats than the President, and since it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that none of 2016’s shenanigans could’ve happened without the active collusion of Barack Obama, he has a much better hand than his opponents.  I’d say that the Dems are about to learn the cardinal rule of poker — if you can’t spot the sucker in your first 15 minutes at the table, then you’re the sucker — but that implies the Dems are capable of learning anything.  If you enjoy the spectacle of all-out human folly, as I do, these are heady times indeed…

Wilmot Proviso.  ….or not.  I love a good train wreck as much as the next gleeful sadist, but the neverending march of feckless stupidity just grinds me down.  Barbara Tuchman had her flaws as a pop historian, but a way with a title wasn’t one of them.  The March of Folly is the greatest title for a history book ever penned, because it pretty much describes History entire.  You can’t study the history of anything for too long before you conclude that the real driver of man’s fate isn’t God, or the forces of production, or class conflict, or the clash of ideologies — it’s vapid, hubristic Dunning-Kruger cases getting bored.

Take the Mexican War.  It was obvious to everyone, certainly including the Mexicans, that the United States was going to attack Mexico.  James K. Polk practically ran on it in 1844, and by 1846 everything was ready.  The fact that this was naked aggression, and that the supposed casus belli — the strip of Texas between the Brazos and the Rio Grande — is obvious bullshit to anyone who’s ever been there, didn’t even register.  Everyone wanted to throw some weight around, and Mexico — just then getting over one of its periodic revolutions — was convenient.

Until David Wilmot added his famous Proviso.  He tacked it onto an appropriations bill, the sneaky bastard, so that in order to get their splendid little war, everyone had to put their cards on the table.  The Mexican War was a war for slavery; the vote on the Proviso made it obvious to even the dimmest-witted.  After all, the vote was taken just three months into the war — American troops were barely arriving in the theater, much less actually winning on the battlefield.  The fact that nobody cared — that Congress got out of the Proviso with procedural shenanigans — showed just how badly inertia had already set in.  Events were going to take their course.

Last night’s election strikes me as a Wilmot Proviso type scenario.  Over the next two years, everyone will have to put their cards on the table for everyone to see.  It should be momentous… but it’ll pass unremarked.  Congress will do what it does with procedural shenanigans; Trump will do what he does by executive order, and nothing will get done.  We voted for things to continue as they are… and they will, God help us.  The political theater will be train-wreckily entertaining, but nothing of consequence will happen in the legislature.

John Brown moments.  Which it never does, you know?  If you look at the run-up to the Civil War — the first one, I mean — you see Congress, the President, the whole political class, desperately doing nothing.  Stephen Douglas was the best politician of the era, but even he could only kick the can down the road for a few more years.  The People had other plans, as it always does, and eventually some lunatic decided to take matters into his own hands, as they always do.  At least your John Brown moments are fairly easy to recognize.  At some point, the lunatics are going to let one of their own take the stand after committing some atrocity, and then it gets really fun.

The Hardest Truth.  I’ve written about this before, but I’m starting to think it’s the only truth about humans worth stating in these latter days:  People can’t handle ease.  Human culture reached its apex in London in 1911.  Adolf Hitler and Virginia Woolf both said that the Modern world began in that year, and since that’s the only thing those two could possibly agree on, it must be right.  We lived at the glorious apex of the human race for three years… then our civilization committed suicide, because we were bored.  But it was Arkansas-style suicide — having shot ourselves in the heart in 1914, we shot ourselves in the head, just to make sure, in 1992.  The long twilight struggle with the Soviet Union was over, so to celebrate, we elected a slavering poonhound and his harridan gangster wife to guarantee we never got anything out of the victory.  Better an end with horror than a horror without end, amirite?

The Postmodern State.  If you follow Hobbes, like I do, you believe the State’s sole purpose is to provide physical security to its citizens.  But I’m starting to think that’s wrong.  Hobbes, like all Modern thinkers, faced the problem of legitimacy — a Modern state requires modern arms to defend it, which requires more buy-in from the citizenry than Divine Right Monarchy can get.  But we don’t have modern arms anymore; we have postmodern arms.  There will never be another mass-conscription, saturation-bombing, ships-lost-with-all-hands kind of war — the West lacks the political will, and though the East has the political will, they can’t defend against nuclear weapons.  If they attacked, the West would lose… but long before acknowledging the loss, they’d push The Button, and that would be that.

Either way, the West’s physical security isn’t militarily threatened.  No Red Army boot will ever step on American soil.  It’ll either be localized, distant, low-intensity conflicts, or the end of the world.  We could easily keep on losing all the wars we’re currently losing, plus a few more, with a military half the size of our current one.  Eventually we’re going to figure that out, taxes being what they are.  And then what?

There are alternatives to classical political theory, ones that grant legitimacy to the ruling power sufficient to keep the State running, but they’re not in English.  One is Volksgemeinschaft.  Another is kokutai.  The downside: They entail a police state, pretty much by definition.  The upside: We’re in a police state already; most of us just don’t acknowledge it yet.  If there’s an alternative that doesn’t boil down to straight-up African-style Big Man gangsterism, I surely don’t know what it is.  Guess we should start looking into that, eh?

In Evan Maloney’s fun little campus-bashing documentary Indoctrinate U, there’s a psychology prof who’s been outed as a conservative (and, of course, harassed out of employment and blackballed from academia, because Liberals are all about the dissenting viewpoints and how dare you suggest otherwise!!!).  Maloney then interviews several of her former students:

“Oh yeah,” they say, “we all knew.”  He asks them just how they knew, and they all reply with a version of “because she was the only professor we had who didn’t go off on political rants all the time in class.”

Which is how all but the deepest-cover shitlords get blown.  Unhinged political rants are so common in academia, in every class from the loopiest Angry Studies seminar to the hardest of STEM labs, that simply not acting like an SJW lunatic during class time is unusual enough to get you noticed.  It’s like being the first guy to stop clapping for Dear Leader at a North Korean politburo meeting.*

If I were still teaching, I’d be the only guy not all but physically dragging my students to the polling station today.  Thus, I’d be outed.  I thought my time had come on November 9, 2016, when I was the only guy on campus over the age of 22 who didn’t look like I wanted to slit my wrists, but somehow nobody dimed me to the Thought Police.  I’d like to say that’s because I was one of those inspiring Dead Poets’ Society-type motherfuckers, but in reality, it was probably just shell shock — the NPCs’ wires were still too fried to even notice that I wasn’t wearing sackcloth and ashes.

After two years of Trump, there’s no way that’s happening today.  If I were teaching now, I’d be reported.  However today’s vote turns out, thank you  Jesus for early retirement.

*It’s a mark of Orwell’s genius that he even thought this through.  I always wondered why the put a time limit on the Two Minutes’ Hate…. until I realized that, Stalinists being Stalinists, no work would get done otherwise; they’d keep ranting until they dropped from exhaustion (and the first guy to pass out would probably still get shot).