Some thoughts, occasioned by this.

If you don’t feel like clicking through right now, the upshot is that people tend to rent cathartic experiences, but own addictive ones. The examples the author uses are movies vs. music. The primary form of movie consumption, he argues, is the rental, but people tend to purchase music (these days, generally individual songs).

One-off freakazoid exceptions like “a new Star Wars movie on opening night” aside, nobody watches movies back to back. Even if you loved it,  you generally wait at least a year or so before you watch it again. It’s the narrative structure that does this, he argues. A movie takes you through the whole arc; it’s a big jolt of catharsis when it’s over, and you need time to recharge your emotional batteries. Honestly, how often do you re-watch the movies in your collection (if you even have one)? For most people, me included, it’s really more of a collection — I have a nice DVD box set of the Godfather films, but that’s because I was, at one point, the kind of guy who liked to think of himself as the kind of guy who owned a nice DVD box set of the Godfather films. I still like the movies, but I haven’t watched them in years. If I’m in the mood for a gangster flick, I’m much likelier to rent one I haven’t seen yet off Amazon than re-watch the ones I already own.

Songs, on the other hand, get replayed a lot. For instance, I know I’m getting a good workout in when the songs on my lifting playlist start repeating. It would be simple to have a constant stream of new music; Spotify etc. have “stations” devoted entirely to exercise, narrowed down by type of workout (stationary bike, weightlifting, etc.). But I’ve never heard of anyone actually using them for that purpose. Everyone I know has their playlist, and though they might tinker with it at the edges, it’s always the same songs, over and over. It’s like a whole series of little dopamine hits. If I get to “Ride the Lighting” the third time, I know I’m killing it… and hearing the song helps get me through that last set.

It’s an interesting theory that makes a lot of intuitive sense. I think it applies to other stuff as well, and is testable against the current unpleasantness.

The Establishment Left, I argue, sees street violence like a movie, in two different senses. The first, less important one is via narcissism. They’re narcissists, which means they see life as movie in which they’re the main character. Street violence, then, is just an action scene against which the hero — them — does heroic things. It’s the second, much more prosaic, sense that’s important here:

The Establishment Left seem to equate “participating in a riot” with “renting a movie.” You and your friends get together, pop some popcorn, drink some brews, topple some statues, hurl some bricks, wow, that was fun… and then back to Redbox it goes, to sit unremarked until it’s swapped out for something else. Rioting is cathartic for the orcs, lets ’em blow off a little steam every few years. It’s useful for cowing the Normals, and it’ll never get anywhere near my house, so why not rent one whenever the mood strikes? Lately they’ve grown tired of renting cut-rate “political thrillers” — Russiagate was just All the President’s Men with an all-retard cast — so why not rent Harold and Kumar Burn Down White Castle for a change of pace?

For the actual participants, though, rioting is getting to be a lot like listening to your favorite tunes when you’re working out — not only do you not get tired of it, the replays actually start to jazz you up after a while. It’s not catharsis, it’s addiction — and you own the addiction. The orcs, having gotten so many dopamine hits from being the center of attention, have to keep upping the ante. It’s not Social Justice: The Movie, it’s Social Justice Warrior: The Identity. Big difference, yuuuuuge.

Note that this is true no matter who wins this November. In a way, it’ll actually be worse for the Left if Biden wins. As we’ve remarked, the Establishment is desperate to stay in charge, to remain the star of the movie. If Biden wins, the orcs will be out for blood for real. The Left has to get them back on the leash… and they won’t have the Bad Orange Fascist to do it for them, or to take the blame. It’ll be interesting, to say the least.

Sportsball being the opiate of the masses, it illustrates their mindset quite well. An instructive incident happened today:

Cam Newton, once a very productive quarterback for Carolina, has been a free agent for most of the offseason. He’s on the wrong side of thirty, is known as a scramble-first, throw-last kind of player, and has spent the better part of the last several seasons on the bench with catastrophic leg injuries. He just signed an incentive-laden deal with New England for the league minimum.

This has led, naturally, to a chimpout.

Newton being Black, the usual suspects are comparing his deal to those of every doofy White backup they can find. Those guys have larger guaranteed contracts, whereas Newton, who has been to the Super Bowl and was once league MVP (or at least a strong candidate for it, I forget the details), is guaranteed far less. So… you know, raaaaacism (always five a’s in raaaaacism).

A logical person, of course, would see things like “wrong side of thirty;” “a scrambler;” “catastrophic leg injuries;” and “hasn’t taken a meaningful snap in two seasons” and think “yeah, a league-minimum deal with lots of incentives makes a lot of sense under those conditions.” A reasonable person would also conclude that Newton himself agrees, since he signed the deal — free agency being what it is, and free markets being what they are, he was perfectly free to walk away, to pursue other opportunities in line with what he believes to be his true worth. He didn’t; ergo, he values himself at the same figure New England does (including, obviously, a large bet on himself that he’ll stay healthy and hit all his incentives).

It’s that last part that’s the most interesting. The chimpout centers around the phrase “given less.” Not “offered less,” and certainly not “accepted less.” Given less. The assumption seems to be that the Patriots screwed him, and that Newton himself had no choice in the matter: “You’re getting $X, bwahahahaha!!”

It presumes, in other words — and there’s really no other possible interpretation — that Mr. Newton had no personal agency whatsover. Negotiating for more wasn’t an option. Refusing to sign wasn’t an option. Nope. That’s what they gave him, so that’s what he had to take.

See what I mean about the Left killing themselves with this stuff? The longer all of this goes on, the more Chad and Stacy Normie are exposed to the weird, whining, colossally-entitled conspirazoid world of Blacks. I’ve deliberately left aside anything about Newton’s character — though he’s well known to be a prima-donna headcase — and just focused on the financial aspects, because that’s the most strikingly odd thing about it. Blacks presume… collusion, I guess, as if all the other NFL owners got together to force the playoff-contender Patriots to sign a guy that they’re certain is still a championship-caliber quarterback who is guaranteed to lead them to another trophy, but for the league minimum, because…. reasons? A guy that none of the cellar-dweller teams showed any interest in, again because… reasons?

WTF? doesn’t even begin to cover it, but that’s where we are, y’all. That’s Black America for you. They’re dogmatically certain that Newton is getting screwed, that the Patriots held a gun to his — and the rest of the league’s — head, to force him to play for the minimum (plus a shitload of incentives that, if he’s really that good, he’ll be sure to reach, but hey, why complicate things?).

It’s bizarre, but that’s Blacks for you. And all this before the league forces someone to sign Kaepernick… then start Kaepernick… then somehow win every game with Kaepernick, because anything else is, sigh, raaaacism.

This is an epic fuck-up, y’all. The Left let their dogs off the leash, and the dogs are jogging, just like they always do. And now everyone sees it, more and more, day after day.

This has been your regularly-scheduled whitepill.

or, your occasional white pill for the dark times.

I’m increasingly convinced that the Left have screwed the pooch. bigtime.

First, consider the argument, detailed below, that the “Left” is far from a monolith. To us outsiders, it looks like one big, shiny black obelisk of bugfuck lunacy, but it’s actually more like an avalanche — a whole bunch of little pebbles of bugfuck lunacy flowing willy-nilly in the same general direction. The general direction in which they’re flowing is, of course, “the destruction of Western society,” and that’s step two of my argument: The pebbles at the front of the avalanche believe they’re somehow controlling the avalanche… but meanwhile, the big boulders in the back know better. For them, this is endgame.

As Z Man keeps pointing out, lots of what we’re seeing in the Imperial Crapital is a palace coup. There’s open civil war on the Left. I, too, have been beating this drum for years. The orcs and their True Believer enablers in the Media are fed up with triangulation and half-measures. As radical as Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff et al seem to us, the orcs and their propagandists see nothing but geriatric White milquetoasts. They hate Boomers for the same reasons we do, but double, because while we hate them for not riding gracefully into the sunset like every previous generation, the orcs, being natural conspirazoids, see The Man keeping them down again.

We look at Pelosi and see our parents and grandparents, who missed out on the Summer of Love and never got over it. We see them as fundamentally narcissists, and while that doesn’t excuse them in the slightest, it means that their actions have no grand plan, no deep design. Narcissism, you’ll recall, is the bone-deep conviction that life is a movie, and you’re the star. It doesn’t matter to a movie star if the movie he’s in bombs at the box office. To him, the important thing — the only thing — is that he’s the star. Pelosi et al are doing whatever it takes to keep themselves strutting and fretting on stage for another brief hour, that’s all.

They look at Pelosi et al and see The Man. White people are no strangers to paranoia, of course, but our out-and-out conspirazoids, the real tinfoil hat-wearers, are, for us, the fringe of the fringe. As anyone who has been around POCs can confirm (and you can see for yourself if you dare venture into the fever swamps of social media), they’re pretty much all tinfoil-hatted crackpots. Blacks, especially, believe any paranoid nonsense they stumble across, so long as Whitey is the villain (and he always is), but the rest of them aren’t much better….

…and now they’re taking action. See, for instance, the ouster of Elliot Engel in New York. He was the Establishment candidate par excellence. He’s been in Congress since 1989. He got all the big endorsements from the Establishment names. Even “conservative” PACs were sending him money, because (((reasons))). His underdog, under-funded opponent, Jamaal Bowman, crushed him in the polls. His campaign was race-baiting demagoguery — his name is Jamaal, for fuck’s sake, with two a’s — and the district is majority-minority. When a New York Jew is getting turfed out by angry Negroes, you know the end is nigh. AOC, of course, was right there leading the charge.

That’s the fundamental disconnect here. The Left is so used to riling up the orcs whenever they need to show some flex, they think they can do it indefinitely. They think the genie’s going to go back into the bottle, that the dogs will go back on the leash. They always have before. But… will they?

Then throw in the Kung Flu. I think it’s safe to say that everyone is tired of that shit by now. Everyone’s tense and edgy. You’ve got a lot of real people who are really hurting — they’ve lost their jobs, their savings, soon enough their cars and homes, all because Karen insists that leaving the house is instant death. And yet, Jamaal and he homeboys be out wrecking shit, day after day, night after night, with zero repercussions. And the Media is right there cheering them on…

…worse, the Media, being catastrophically stupid, is trumpeting to the world their conviction that COVID-19 knows how you vote.  Only Trump rallies, mom-and-pop businesses, church services, and White people who don’t wear masks to Target spread COVID. They really believe this, y’all. They announce it every day, on every channel, it’s practically 24/7. I’ve heard more than a few people I once considered incorrigible Normies say something to the effect of “I’m gonna carry a brick while I’m running my errands, so if the cops stop me I’ll say I’m going to a protest and they’ll have to let me go.”

Meanwhile, on top of all that, the orcs out in the streets are making it abundantly clear what the endpoint is. They want to pull down all the statues. They want to put Negroes on all the currency. They want to rename everything. And even that won’t be enough, of course, because it can’t be. “White devil” isn’t a metaphor. They mean it. They will never, ever stop on their own.*

All of this, I’m increasingly coming to believe, sets up an epic Blue-on-Blue confrontation. The Establishment Left needs to get their attack dogs back on the leash. Not because it’s going to cost them the 2020 election — it might, of course, but they’ve got lots of tricks in the bag for stealing elections. Rather, if they want to stay in charge, and have anything left to be in charge of, they’ve got to get things under control fast. This whole thing is shaping up to be a huge narcissistic injury for the Powers That Be — and as we know, the one and only response to a narcissistic injury is murderous rage at the one who injured you.

So how do they do that? How do they get the attack dogs back on the leash? Forget Minneapolis for a sec. Think about Seattle. What are they going to do with CHOP, or CHAZ, or whatever the hell they’re calling it now? Mayor Jenny has three choices, all of them bad (from her perspective).

First, she can order the SPD to clear it. Which they can, but… will they? If I were a big wheel in the policeman’s union, I’d make her crawl over broken glass before I put my guys back in harm’s way. If I were a rank-and-file cop, meanwhile, I’d seriously consider taking a powder. Some Black heads are going to get cracked in the retaking, it’s inevitable, and the Black head-cracking is going to be all over the nightly news, all over the world, 24/7. Who in his right mind would sign up for that? But let’s assume they do. Now you’ve got Mayor Jenny — the same one who called the protests “a block party” and a replay of the Summer of Love — ordering her SWAT goons to go bust up the block party with extreme prejudice. There’s no way this is on anyone but her, personally. No politician is going to bite that bullet if she can help it.

So she could back off and punt, putting the onus on Governor Jay Inslee. But he’s even more of a Leftist swamp creature than she is. What’s he going to do, call out the National Guard? See above, re: all the problems of ordering the cops to do it, plus the sight of tanks on the streets of a major American city. And again, this is Washington State. A Republican couldn’t get elected dogcatcher up there. It’s all on the lily-white asses of Inslee and Mayor Jenny.

Which leaves federalizing it. Trump has actually done a pretty good job of handling St. George of the Holy Chokehold. Not great — he should’ve kept his mouth entirely shut — but since he’s psychologically incapable of doing that, he did the next best thing, which is to leave state governors and city mayors to stew in their own filth. The only way they can get off the hook for cracking a lot of Black heads is by calling out the Army to do it… but even that won’t save them, because they’re going to have to beg the Great Orange Fascist to come stomp the very same “Anti-fascists” they spent all summer egging on.

The longer this goes on, the clearer it becomes that it’s a Left civil war. The longer the dogs are off the leash, the less the chances they’ll ever go back on without a major ass-whooping… which they themselves, the ostentatiously #Woke, will have to beg the Fascist-in-Chief to provide.

The Establishment Left is desperate. They’ve been desperate for a long time. Everything they’ve tried has failed — Russia, impeachment, Russia again, COVID, Russians a third time, hell, they’re even out there trying to claim that Trump is involved in the Epstein thing (SJWs always project, remember)? They didn’t plan on St. George getting his career criminal ass killed; they just saw another chance to roll the dice, and they took it, because they’re desperate.

I think they’ve fucked themselves, good and hard.

*Especially if they cancel the NBA season, like they’re talking about again. Cheap shot, I know, but fuck ’em.

or, when your choices are between “bad,” “worse,” and “almost inconceivably horrible,” pick “bad.”

This isn’t a new thought for the Regular Readers — we were up to, what, Twenty at one point? — but in case anyone new has stopped by recently, I’ve been banging on this drum a lot over the years. I think I can prove it to you. Moreover, I argue that the proof-of-concept won’t be long in coming, if the current mess goes a certain way.

First, the proof. Y’all know I think Vox Day is mostly hat and very few cattle, but the guy deserves every penny his writing ever made just for codifying the Three Laws of SJW. If you don’t recall them off the top of your head:

1. SJWs always lie.
2. SJWs always project.
3. SJWs always double down.

You can niggle (yeah yeah, I denounce myself) around the edges of this, of course, and since there are a lot of spergs in Our Thing, let me add the stipulation up front: In any matter important to xzhyrm, SJWs always etc. Will an SJW give you accurate directions to the nearest post office? Sure… probably… if you’re not wearing a MAGA hat or anything… the point is, SJWs aren’t fundamentally opposed to telling the truth per se. It’s only when they speak ex cathedra about things central to their identities as SJWs that they always lie, project, and double down. Since “the location of the nearest post office” is unlikely to be of great socio-political import, they’ll give you accurate directions.

But consider something like race. This, I think we’ll all agree, is central to the SJW’s sense of xzhyrmself as an SJW. Specifically, considering xzhyrmself an anti-racist is central. Filter that through the Three Laws of SJW and you get….?

Proof is easy to find, as they let the mask slip surprisingly often, and never more than when and where they feel themselves strongest. You all remember Central Park Karen, of course, the impeccably Liberal White girl who threatened to — and did!!! — make a false police report on a Black guy while he was recording it on video, because she didn’t like the way he’d asked her to leash up her dog. Or consider the “safe space” Seattle’s Cosplay Communards have set up for “racial healing.” Do click on the link, please. You’ll see a video of White people herding Black people into a segregated area, for their own good.

Blacks know it, too:

The thing about [SJWs like the Central Park Karen] is, she is a liberal, she is an artistic director, she is a Tony winner, she is a producer, she teaches at Harvard, she is charismatic, she is an excellent public speaker and fundraiser, she puts on pretty dresses and speaks eloquently about how much she cares about diversity and inclusion. She has made her entire career about that. She works with black people. She believes she loves black people. She buys their work. And then, behind closed doors, she steals it.

That can’t end well.

Which brings us to the Third Law of SJW, the only one that is ever broken: SJWs always double down.

There is a point past which doubling down is impossible. Usually when that point is reached, the SJW just stops mentioning it and starts ostentatiously freaking out about some other outrage du jour (usually followed by massive stealth-edits of xzhyr social media timelines). I’m sure everyone in Our Thing remembers the lovely Mx. Amanda Marcotte, who really did seem ready to go down with the rape-ship about the Duke Lacrosse thing, but it’s common as dirt over there. I hope Bubba Wallace enjoys the remaining 32 seconds of his 15 minutes of fame…

… but that’s just the thing: Blacks themselves never forget. I took the Liberals’ advice and checked out “Black Twitter,” to better educate my honky ass. Yes, it’s a real thing, and yes, it’s exactly what you think it is. It’s always 1867 over there, and the night riders are just around the bend, noose in one hand, burning cross in the other.

There is no amount of gibs that will buy you one second’s grace from them. There’s no upper limit to the number of statues you must pull down, or the feet you must wash. A liberal-as-they-come Wisconsin state senator got his dumb ass seriously beaten after schlepping down to the riot to show racial solidarity. Here are his outstanding political accomplishments, straight off his own website:

• “Russ Feingold Award for Service” by the Coalition of Wisconsin Aging Groups, “in recognition of a strong commitment to meeting the needs of seniors in Wisconsin” in 2007
•  Named “Champion of Public Health” by the Wisconsin Public Health Association for 2007-08
• Named “Conservation Champion” by the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters for 2007-08
• 98% lifetime “votes right” record with Labor
• Named “Legislator of the Year” by Milwaukee’s Shepard Express in 2003 and 2008
• Named “Legislator of the Year” by the Wisconsin Professional Fire Fighters in 2002
• Several “Clean 16” environmental awards
• Recognition for pro-environment voting record from the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club and Clean Wisconsin Action Fund

You don’t get more obnoxiously Goodwhite than that… and he still got, in his own words,

Punched/kicked in the head, neck, ribs. Maybe concussion, socked [sic] in left eye is little blurry, sore neck & ribs. 8-10 people attacked me.

There’s no more doubling down to do after that. He’s done.

The other thing that SJWs who reach the point of no-more-doubling-down do, of course, is kill themselves. I’m dead (no pun intended) serious. Transgenders are the ultimate SJWs, the embodiment of the Three Laws — there is no lie, no projection that could possibly be bigger than pretending you’re really the opposite sex. They keep doubling down, and doubling down, and doubling down, until they can’t anymore… at which point they check out, at a truly horrifying rate:

transgender adults have a prevalence of past-year suicide ideation that is nearly twelve times higher, and a prevalence of past-year suicide attempts that is about eighteen times higher, than the U.S. general population. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS), which is the largest survey of transgender people in the U.S. to date, found that 81.7 percent of respondents reported ever seriously thinking about suicide in their lifetimes, while 48.3 percent had done so in the past year. In regard to suicide attempts, 40.4 percent reported attempting suicide at some point in their lifetimes, and 7.3 percent reported attempting suicide in the past year.

Emphasis added, in case you needed it.

What happens, then, when SJWs start realizing that they can’t foot-wash their way to grace? Their standard ego-defense maneuver — running away and pretending it never happened — won’t work, because Blacks won’t let it. Do they start offing themselves in record numbers? I wouldn’t rule it out…

… but as ironclad as the Three Laws of SJW seem to be, the Three Laws of Thermodynamics are absolutely inviolate. The First one is relevant here:

total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed.

In other words, pendulums always swing back. Today’s SJW is tomorrow’s Obergruppenführer.

For me, the most amusing feature of Clown World is that our Postmodern Marxists — the ones who can’t even spell “proletariat” — have proven that Karl Marx was 100% right. It’s a weird, antimatter kind of Marxism, but it’s the world we live in. Consider:

Marx argued that capitalism ends up making everything into a commodity (this is called “reification;” use it at least four times in six paragraphs if you want to ace your Soash 202 final). And by “everything,” he meant everything — art, love, beauty, friendship, all of it “is brought to the market, to be assessed at its truest value.” And he was right! The only thing is, “its truest value” turns out to be zero.

You can put the Mona Lisa on t-shirts, on posters… it should be a snap, with scanners and 3D printers, to turn out a plastic version indistinguishable from the real thing, right down to the smudges of Leonardo’s fingerprints (I hope I didn’t give just any aspiring art forgers an idea). So much for beauty, and as for friendship, well, who really keeps up with old friends anymore? Email killed letters, Facebook killed email, and we all know how Facebook works. “Gosh, Johnny was a great guy back in the days, but oh look, he posted a meme that is less than 100% condemnatory of Donald Trump. Unfriend!!!” Take it out as far as you please — if it isn’t totally in line with what you’re feeling right now, this second, then it’s useless, and into the trash bin it goes, because why not? It’s all just bytes and pixels.

See also: The current chimpout over statues, any statues, of anyone, anywhere. If it doesn’t make sense to you, read the above paragraph again. What could possibly be the point of a statue, any statue? It’s just some person who did something, as Ilhan Omar would say. There’s no point to having it up, and pulling it down feels good, so pull it down! The urge to destroy is also a creative urge, Bakunin said, and he too was right — since the Postmodern Marxist’s “life” is nothing but a constant act of self-fashioning, pulling down a statue is a small price to pay for a temporary virtue hit. Or — see above — it’s actually no price at all, because you could have a new statue up tomorrow, exactly like the original, for nothing.

Marx also said that capitalism reduces people to nothing but their labor. Again, he was 100% right, antimatter-style. Most of us have long suspected that lots of “jobs” out there are make-work. We even sensed it as kids. What could Mom and Dad possibly be doing all day, while we’re sitting in daycare or vegging out in front of MTV, that’s so all-fired important? I can’t for the life of me figure out what lawyers and CPAs do to keep themselves busy all day, to say nothing of the world’s customer service representatives. Hell, I was a customer service representative, back when high school and college kids could get boiler-room type jobs for summer work. The only real-world skill I learned was how to look busy for seven hours, given that I’d finished all my actual, productive tasks by 9 am.

That was thirty years ago. Thanks to the Kung Flu, it’s clear that “lots of jobs are make-work” really means something like “90% of jobs, at least, are make-work.” During the lockdown, I changed my insurance, got a routine physical, picked up some prescriptions, made some investments and liquidated some others, helped my sister’s kids with their homework, got a new pair of glasses, and, oh yeah, continued to work a full schedule at my bill-paying job… all remotely, without coming into physical contact with another living soul. So what earthly good are my insurance agent, my doctor, my pharmacists, my broker and banker, any teachers, my optometrist, let alone any of their support staff — receptionists, bookkeepers, back-office drones of all types?

Take it out a step further: What good am I, myself, under those circumstances, if I could still do my job 100% remotely? Surely I’m no exception to the attitude — already common before the Kung Flu, now nearly universal — that asks, “why can’t this be a smartphone app?” Answer: I’m not. I, too, could easily be a smartphone app.

If that ain’t alienation, so pure that Karl Marx must be getting a stiffie down in Hell, then buddy, nothing could be.

Draw what lessons from that you will. If you’ve actually read Marx, you know what his answer would be….

Despite my speculations yesterday, the “NASCAR Noose” incident wasn’t a hoax. No no — it was far, far dumber than that. It turns out that someone, it’s not yet clear who, decided that an ordinary garage pull rope “resembled” a noose. Here it is:

Note the White guy wearing a suspiciously red hat.

Far be it from me to suggest that Mr. Wallace, who evidently isn’t very good at racing*, reported the “noose” himself as a cheap publicity stunt. If anything, my money would be on NASCAR itself reporting it. They’ve gotten some bad publicity of late, and what better way to jump ahead of the Ostentatious Twitter Virtue Parade than calling the FBI on themselves?

(Actually, I really do kinda hope they did this. You’ve evidently decided that “people who hate the kind of people who would actually watch NASCAR” are your real audience — as opposed to, say, folks who actually enjoy watching car racing — and nothing gets their thighs moist faster than a good racial hoax. Slick marketing, guys. But I digress…)

Rather, the interesting thing here is the information, presented as a throwaway in one of the “news” stories, that the FBI team investigating the fake noose had fifteen guys. Fifteen!!!

Now, part of that was marketing on the Feeb’s part, of course — they take incandescently obvious bullshit racial hoaxes very very seriously down Quantico way. But, like NASCAR phoning the “noose” complaint in themselves (if, in fact, they actually did), this is the kind of marketing that kills you in the long run.

Elliott Ness had like three guys with him to take down Al Capone’s entire Mafia empire. The slick ultramodern FBI needs fifteen to determine that nope, an ordinary garage pull rope — $4.95 at any AutoZone in the land — isn’t actually a tiny noose for African-American pygmies.

Regimes can survive crises of legitimacy. What they can’t survive is crises of competence.

A thoroughly illegitimate regime legitimizes itself by delivering the goods. Pick any usurper, anywhere, at any point in history — if he lives long enough to bring a modicum of peace and stability, by the end of his reign he’s God’s anointed. Then compare and contrast with the situation that got the old king usurped in the first place. Regimes can, and usually do, survive mad kings, bad kings, absentee kings. You can go down in history, in fact, as some kind of mythical super-leader despite fucking up pretty much every single one of your endeavors, so long as you project the proper air of confidence and competence.

What they never survive, almost without exception, are ostentatiously incompetent kings.

“Making the trains run on time” is one of the hackneyed joke phrases in Our Thing, but there’s a real meaning behind it, and we ought to reflect on what it is. America could survive a Donald Trump, even a Joe Biden, if the rest of the Federal apparatus were minimally competent — even, say, 1990 level competent (though they were no great shakes even back then). The longer this stuff drags on, the more obviously the government apparatus is revealed as a black joke.

It won’t end well.

*From what I’ve heard. I’d rather have a tooth pulled without anesthetic than watch NASCAR. Affirmative Action being what it is, though…

Watching the USA go pedal to the metal turning itself into the USSR these last few years has been a real kick. I mean it. I haven’t had this much fun since the end of the Cold War, when I got to listen to all those folks assure me that, though the leadership has made some regrettable mistakes, the Russian people really love Socialism and are 100% behind the construction of the glorious Soviet future…. oh, wait, never mind, but look at all the great things Castro is doing in Cuba!*

It can’t have escaped the regular readers that we now live in one of the most ideological societies on earth. We Americans — our “leaders,” anyway — have always been self-righteous pricks, strutting and fretting our hour upon the world stage, but since it was mostly our “leaders” doing it, we could convince ourselves that it wasn’t us being North Koreanized (it’s a word). It was always some wogs somewhere who needed to “embrace democracy,” not us. Fast forward a few years and well, here we are, the new and improved North Korea — everything not forbidden is compulsory, just like in Kim-topia, but at least there’s Netflix and ESPN.

For proof, just look at the Media. Yeah, all of it, even Fox. Make that, “especially Fox” — as the Ace of Spades crowd keep pointing out, they’re all but indistinguishable from MSNBC these days, and when you’ve lost the feeble milquetoasts at AoS, buddy, it’s game over. You want an example? Sure. Word comes that the only Black NASCAR driver found a noose hanging in his locker. You, and I, and everyone not too stupid to breathe knows it’s 100 to 1 that this is a publicity stunt — the driver hung it there himself, or his agent did, or his publicist, or someone at Fox Sports, and when it’s exposed we’ll be told that it’s just a “conversation starter” for “troubling questions about race in America,” and it will be promptly memory-holed.

That’s an easy one, but y’all, they’re all like that. See also: COVID, Trump’s rallies, Joe Biden’s very obvious dementia, the race riots, and the rest of it. They’re all lies — egregious, shameless lies, visible-from-space lies. So what’s the truth? Here’s where old Kremlinologists really get that zippy Viagra glow…

… but they really, really shouldn’t, because they missed it — “it” being “the collapse of the Soviet Union,” which very few thought was even a remote possibility, much less right around the corner. The reason they missed it was simple: After a lifetime in the system, even very minor Soviet functionaries got very good at presenting the illusion of control — as the Chinese say, “riding the tiger.”** All you can do is hang on for dear life, because you’re the one who will get devoured first.

See e.g. Nancy Pelosi and that retarded kneeling stunt they pulled a week or two back. It was so tin-eared, even the vast majority of angry Blacks thought it was a stupid, token gesture. If Trump had any brains — yeah yeah, I know — he’d splash that all over his campaign ads, ideally superimposed over pics of the 101st Airborne executing looters in job lots. Hello, 50 state sweep. The point is, Pelosi, Schumer, even arch-devil Soros have no real idea what’s going on out there, much less any kind of endgame in mind. They at least see the tiger — which is far better than anyone in the GOP has managed — but they’ve got that fucker by the ears… and their grip is slipping.

Pretty soon they’re going to run out of statues. And since the worst of this stuff is happening in all-Blue jurisdictions — I’m talking the kinds of places a Republican couldn’t get elected dogcatcher — they might well move on to somebody important’s house. Graffiti up the gates of Nancy’s zillion-dollar San Francisco mansion, and she’ll roll in the tanks. And then it gets really fun…

UPDATE: Right on cue. Jesus this shit is predictable as sunrise. Not that it matters a bit to the larger point, but it has only been, what, two hours since I wrote this? Next up: “Still, this raises troubling questions about race in America.” Then down the memory hole, starting in three… two… one….

*If you haven’t already, you should skim Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims. He’s not the most exciting writer, but he lays it all out in almost excruciating detail. Did you know that there were American Leftist gadflies who claimed to believe Albania was humanity’s glorious future? There are few unlikelier messiahs, in all of human history, than Enver Hoxha, but the irritated butterflies of the American Left are like Mulder and Scully: They want to believe, baby.

** I assume it’s the Chinese, anyway. That sounds like the inscrutable wisdom of the Orient. Nobody is better at making banalities seem profound than ancient Kung Flu masters. “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” Ah so, Grasshoppah. In other words, have a fucking plan. Brilliant!!

See what I mean with this stuff? (Warning: about a zillion auto-play videos, because Fox. Also warning: Fox News. Be current on your blood pressure meds).

Sabotaging Trump’s rally — by showing all the empty seat, then walking away — would’ve been a slick bit of dirty pool. I mean it. Nice move, “Zoomers” (whoever the hell y’all are); I wish I would’ve thought of it myself. You even blackpilled Z Man about it (not that that’s a particularly high bar). I salute you….

But then y’all have to go ruin it by bragging about it. You’ve turned what should’ve been a very effective piece of propaganda into a win for the other side. Even the Ace of Spades dorks get it:

THE NEW RULESBased on AOC’s bragging about using TikTok teenagers and K-Pop fans to reduce the headcount at Trump’s rally in Tulsa, some new rules are evidently in effect:

1. Any rally with a headcount < 6200 is a miserable failure.

2. Foreign interference in an election is now totes OK.

3. Voter suppression is also totes OK.

4. Abusing the ticketing system to intentionally deny people the ability to hear the politician of their choice is “a form of protest” and is thus totes OK.

5. A candidate being 10 points ahead in some poll 5 months out from the election is absolutely dispositive.

6. Millions of online viewers count for nothing.

7. Stacey Abrahms is the rightful governor of Georgia (this is always true).

In case any Democrats wander by here, let me point out three very, very obvious things:

1. It’s going to take Joe Biden a month’s worth of rallies to draw 6300 people, what with all the truly obnoxious Branch Covidians in his fan bae; and
2. You could hold a Trump rally in a phone booth now, and he’ll claim it would’ve been the best-attended thing since Woodstock, if not for those meddling kids; and
3. Any time he draws more than 6300 people — which he will, this being election season — he’s going to claim this is his real level of support. All he has to do is put out pictures of a stadium packed to the rafters and say “compare and contrast.”

You just own-goaled yourselves. Again. And I know y’all won’t get it — narcissists, by definition, don’t know they’re narcissists — but for everyone else just getting up to speed on the New Kremlinology (that is, trying to figure out what’s really going on in the Imperial Crapital by reading the tea leaves), this is highly instructive. So…. thanks?

We humans are pattern-finding creatures. Even the most primitive tribes — the kind that wear coconut codpieces and eat grubs — understand, and embrace, the notion of cause and effect. The phrase “cargo cult” is brutally overused in Our Thing, but it’s worth remembering what “cargo cults” actually are:

Back in WWII, the primitive tribes of the South Pacific saw Americans arrive by ship on nearby islands. The first thing these strange seaborne pale-faces did was build an airstrip, after which planes started landing with all kinds of goodies. From this, the tribesmen concluded that building an “airstrip” would bring the planes.

Folks in Our Thing use this as a nice metaphor for the superstitions of our modern techno-savages. Those idiots up in Seattle, for instance, have no idea  how any of the stuff they’ve “liberated” actually works, so they tore up some pavement and tossed random seeds in the dirt — to them, that’s “farming.” If the idiot SJWs on the city council hadn’t kept the utilities running, they’d be resorting to cannibalism by now….

…but I digress. The point is, the original cargo cultists made a perfectly valid inference, based on the information they had. Hell, it’s even a scientific proposition (in Karl Popper’s sense) because it’s “falsifiable.” What makes it a cargo cult is the fact that repeated falsifications didn’t cause them to abandon the hypothesis. Instead, they started telling themselves stories to explain the theory’s failure. In other words, not being wrong was far more important, to the cultists, than being right.

As I say, that’s a human universal. Part of the reason “science” was so carefully circumscribed back in the days was to maintain exactly that sense of detachment. If the gunk that comes out the back end of the Bunsen burner isn’t the gunk I expected to find, then my hypothesis is false, and it’s back to the drawing board. The minute I get emotionally invested in the gunk that’s actually there, I’m no longer doing science. Which is why there’s no such thing as social or, god help us, political “science.” since these fields start with an emotional investment in the gunk that’s already there…

…but again, I digress. The point is, we can’t avoid this in ourselves. The best we can do is be aware of the tendency. And this, I add, is what folks in Our Thing are increasingly unlikely to do.

Almost all analyses of the recent, ummm, “unpleasantness,” for instance, proceed as if there’s some master plan behind it all. Whether or not you want to name Soros or, sigh, (((others))) as your devil, the very fact that you’ve nominated a devil means you’ve already fallen victim to cargo cult thinking. We all anthropomorphize “the Left” — myself most certainly included. But unless we constantly remind ourselves that “the Left” is just shorthand for a tendency, we end up like the cargo cultists telling themselves stories to explain away the planes’ failure to arrive. There is no “Left,” of course, outside of the individuals who tend to behave in a certain way.

[The same is true of “the Right,” obviously. I suppose you’ll have to trust me on this, but folks in the ivory tower think of us exactly, and I do mean exactly, like we think of them — brainless, brainwashed sheeple who take our orders direct from our sacred Leader. Sure, sure, we might make a few noises about being a bit different, but when the chips are down we’ll do exactly what our “God-Emperor” tells us to. Meanwhile, they themselves are, in their own minds, a group of fractious freethinkers who just can’t agree on anything. It’s all just SJW bullshit to us, but to them, there’s real, deep, and longstanding beef between Maoist Feminist Lesbians and Feminist Lesbian Maoists, to say nothing of Lesbian Maoist Feminists…]

Which is why Captain Whitepill has been riding to the rescue lately. As much as I’m playing the part, and as pessimistic as I can be in real life 95% of the time, there are some serious reasons for hope in all this.

All ideologies fracture under stress. We’re all familiar with the just-so assertion that “real Communism has never been tried.” As much as that’s usually just cargo cultism, there’s actually a case to be made there, just like there’s a case in every one of those “Lenin / Stalin / whomever wasn’t a real Communist” books that folks who still read The Nation have sitting unread on their display shelves. Lenin and especially Stalin faced the stark choice between “remaining in power” and “being true to the spirit, and quite often the letter, of Marxism.” Not surprisingly, they picked the former (which is why Trotsky got whacked, even after he was no conceivable threat — he never let Stalin forget his choice). In the weird Castle Wolfenstein world where the Germans won the war, I promise you, there are university library bookshelves groaning under volumes arguing that Hitler was never really a Nazi.

And that’s assuming ideology has much of anything to do with anything, which is a dubious proposition. You think the Cosplay Communards up in Seattle have ever actually read the “intersectional” gobbledygook they’re spouting? I taught college for a lot of  years, y’all, and I promise you: I could assign Harry fucking Potter and maybe one in four of them would read it. Two others would be too busy getting drunk and laid, and the fourth wouldn’t do it just on general principles. The idea that these goofballs can even spell “reification” is laughable. Like the New Left of which they are very pale reflections — pun most definitely intended — they’re only mouthing this stuff as their excuse to flip cars and break shit. I guarantee you, you could get them quoting Hitler himself at their rallies if you took his name off it. “Interest slavery,” anyone?

Nobody involved, White or Black, has any idea what they actually want. We’re told with a straight face, for instance, that “defund the police” doesn’t actually mean defund the police. Rather, it just means “take away all their equipment and forbid them from responding to calls.” When you’ve got the White mayor of overwhelmingly Black Oakland persecuting a Black guy for hanging exercise pulleys in a public park because some idiot thought they kinda sorta look like nooses, it’s clear that Clown World is far, far in the rearview mirror. It’s just nihilistic shit-flinging, by people who hate us almost as much as they hate themselves…

…and for every hour this goes on, the more painfully obvious that becomes.

What you’ve got, when it comes right down to it, is a whole bunch of utter narcissists who feel no need to even try to rein it in. Forget the DSM, since it’s written by a bunch of simpering SJWs. The Last Psychiatrist’s definition is the real one: the unshakable inner certainty that life is a movie, and you’re the star.

What you’re seeing in Seattle, in Minneapolis, in Atlanta, and everywhere else, is classic narcissistic injury. The one thing a narcissist can’t abide is the suggestion that he’s not the star of the Movie of Life. They don’t hate the guys on the statues they’re tearing down. They honestly have no fucking idea who any of those people were:

What they really hate is accomplishment. It’s the same psychology that motivated Milton’s Satan: non serviam. Being unable to create, he revels in destruction for its own sake. So it goes with the SJWs. Life isn’t actually a movie, and they’re not the stars, and deep down they know it. The same social pressures that force them to maintain a facade of normalcy, ironically, allow them to convince themselves that life is a movie, that Reality is bending to their will. Remove the social pressures, and the mask pops off… and, as any psychologist will tell you, the one and only reaction to narcissistic injury is bitter, hateful, murderous rage.

It’s one hell of a wake up call. Just as Chad and Stacy Normie are, thanks to the narcissistic fools in the Media, getting to see Blacks as they really are, so they’re also getting to see SJWs, in the Media and elsewhere, as they really are. Believe me, it’s absolutely clear who owns this mess, and it isn’t Donald Trump, much less “The Right” or even “the KKK” (all twelve of them, ten of which are undercover FBI agents). They’re doing everything in their considerable power to drag us into their movie….

…. and it’s a slasher film. And now everyone knows it.

UPDATE: The rumor going around social media is that Trump’s rather poor rally attendance tonight was due to “Zoomers” (whatever those are) “sabotaging” it by reserving tickets, then not showing up. Which actually would’ve been a pretty slick bit of dirty pool, IF they could’ve resisted bragging about it… but they can’t, because they’re narcissists.

Even worse would be if they didn’t do this, but claimed they did. Either way, though, the proper low blow would’ve been to artificially depress Trump’s rally numbers, point it out, and then walk away. “Ha ha ha, the Twitterer-in-Chief can’t even fill a stadium in Podunkville!! What a loser!!!!” That could’ve done some real damage. But now, Trump can easily flip the tables on them — “We had a sellout crowd, had to turn people away, and look, they have to resort to cheap tricks and childish tantrums.” It doesn’t matter now what the actual attendance numbers are — Trump could claim it would’ve been the best-attended political event since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and who can gainsay him?

See, they had to make it all about them. Another massive own goal, because they can’t resist feeding their narcissism. See what I mean about this whole thing trending towards being one of the all-time fuckups?

I know y’all don’t come here for the optimism, but I’m having fun playing Captain Whitepill for a bit, so:

The reason Karl Marx’s hare-brained theories made intuitive sense to Europeans is the same reason Adam Smith’s hare-brained theories* did: White folks, being accustomed, through birth and training, to seeing the world logically, assumed that all men are, at bottom, logical creatures. In other words, the great Enlightenment fallacy (Karl Marx, you’ll recall, was born in 1818). As “reductionism” seems to also be a universal human tendency, it was very easy for those sane, logical Europeans to make the mental leap from “men tend to act in their own economic self-interest” to “men are nothing but economic actors.”

Few theories in the history of Man have been more comprehensively refuted, but lots of us still cling to it anyway. Consider sportsball. The prevailing assumptions, even now, seem to fall into two camps:

The first says that the overwhelmingly Black players of the Negro Felon League will realize which side of their bread’s buttered and come to their senses. All this talk of collectively kneeling at every game, or even boycotting the season, is just that: Talk, by guys who have too much time on their hands before training camps open. The Commissioner will make some token gesture, this line of thought goes, and some idiot Karen of an owner will sign Colin fucking Kaepernick, and all of this will blow over.

The second is just like the first, but with the races flipped. This camp thinks that Whitey is so sportsball-addled that it doesn’t matter what the players do. After all, at least some of them kneeled at every game when the Kaepernick thing first happened, this line of reasoning goes, and though the NFL has seen attendance and revenue drop across the board for the last few years, they ain’t going broke any time this century on the current trajectory.** Moreover, this theory goes, look at what else Whitey will put up with for sportsball: Months where everything’s pink. Spanish announcers in the booth. Ugly sideline reporterettes. So long as the aforementioned Negro Felons are chasing a ball around, all that other stuff is incidental.

I dunno. The opium of the people is opiates, as any trip to trailer country will confirm, but sportsball is a close second… and now there really can’t be any doubt about how pozzed it is. They just invented a new holiday, “Juneteenth,” for everyone to get all ginned up about between Memorial Day and the Fourth. All the cop-kissing and flag-sucking at every summer sporting event will now bookend a week-long (undoubtedly soon to be month-long) celebration of Magic Negroes. And it just so happens to fall right in the middle of baseball season — that is, midseason of the second-Whitest sport in America — and at the tail end of the Stanley Cup playoffs, i.e. the most popular time for the Whitest sport in the world, ice hockey. There will soon be absolutely no place to go to get away from it… and should any substantial number of White fans defect to something like curling, they’ll Kwanzaa it up too in short order.

That doesn’t strike me as the self-confident action of a ruling power. That strikes me as a giant tactical mistake. They’re betting that Whites are too beaten-down and pozzed to make any protest when their last form of solace is taken away. As a purely tactical decision, it’s one hell of a roll of the dice…

… and if they really were winning, they wouldn’t need to roll the dice.

And that’s just Theory #2. It could be a lot worse with Theory #1. As we all know, the kind of guy who makes it in pro sports is, shall we say, “in the moment” a lot more than your average person. If Whitey isn’t a rational economic actor — and he’s obviously not, judging by how much money he keeps giving to organizations, like the NFL, that clearly hate him — why on earth should we suppose that Blacks are rational economic actors?

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they actually did it. Walked out on the season, that is, or whatever it eventually ends up being (and remember, there’s lots of summer left; “boycotting the season” is just their opening bid).

Again, that’s not the mopping-up action of a triumphant army. That’s a clear indication that the generals have lost control of their troops… indeed, maybe never had much control in the first place, which is why they’re so desperately rolling the dice, to rally everyone back in line.

As I say, this isn’t a prediction. I’m more playing the role of Captain Whitepill than anything else. But it’s at least plausible, you must admit.

*No slander intended on Adam Smith. He was, from all reports, a decent man who was trying his best to observe actual patterns out in the real world. He wasn’t an “economist,” a profession that didn’t exist back then. He was a moral philosopher, who made his rep on books like The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He was wrong, all in, but he wasn’t evil. Karl Marx was pure fucking evil.

**I assume at least some of them kneeled every game of every subsequent season, but I haven’t watched a snap in years. Feel free to correct me.