Thursday, January 16, 2025

Another disaster week

This week is a bit of a disaster too. Not necessarily in the terrible way (honestly, last week, even getting stuck for three days at the DFW airport wasn't the worst, because I stayed in a hotel, so I slept OK, ate OK, etc.). I've had a terrible cold ever since I got home. A little before, actually. Sleeping well has been a real challenge. As soon as I lay down, drainage starts going crazy and I'm stuffed up and start coughing a LOT. When I'm awake and up, it's OK. Being vertical improves the drainage a lot. But, of course, I can't sleep standing or sitting up very well. So I'm kinda miserable and tired all of the time. Also, there's a lot of craziness at work, and we're pretty short-handed; two people are off on medical and one quit and hasn't been replaced yet (although I think he was reluctant; but he was commuting the better part of an hour and a half one-way. It wasn't really sustainable.) So, I'm not exactly relaxing and getting hobby stuff done this week, let's just say. I'm exhausted both physically and in many ways mentally at the end of the work day, and I'm lucky if I can veg in front of the TV and play some overlanding youtube videos or something.

Yesterday was also my birthday. While of course everyone likes a birthday, it means that I'm on the phone most of the evening with family, I go out to eat, and in my case, I got to make my wife watch something that I'd been wanting to watch with her to see if she'd like, and she couldn't complain. (First two episodes of Longmire is what I picked. I was kinda under the gun to think of something, and that's what first came to mind.) Dinner was, unfortunately, mediocre. I went to place that I used to like, but I haven't been in a long time, and I haven't been here in our new location, and the experience was less than I hoped for. I don't know if this is unfortunate or not, but I've enough rewards on my wife's rewards program for a $10 off, so we'll probably go back again relatively soon, but I'm not going to suggest it for a while.

I also went out to lunch to a BBQ place that I like, and I didn't find that as good as I remember either. Although that may in part be driven by the fact that I was back in Texas last week and had some pretty dang good burnt end brisket while I was there, of course, so my Texas style BBQ here on the southern east coast (sorta) was not as good. 

I've also had to chase around a lot of personal issues. I spent several hours on Monday at the DMV, for instance. I have to go pick up a car today. I have to take my wife to the airport and then drive out of town myself tomorrow evening. I admit to feeling a bit exhausted. Next week, I'll be back in my house up north with my son and daughter-in-law and their three little kids. That should be mostly fun and relaxing. I know my son will want to play Dominion all the time. I like that game, but I doubt I really want to play it more than two or three times all week tops.  My daughter and son-in-law also live there in town. Maybe I can even get another D&D session in with them? They're the ones that I tried to start Shadows Over Garenport with, but it didn't really come together in more than one session before I moved. And if I get tired and remain sickish, I'll probably want to lay around, sleep and read.

Sigh. Real life, y'all. My blogging and vlogging goals are not happening quite the way I want them to. In any case, here's a video to watch. In addition to what he says, I think part of the problem is people who try and make their hobbies into something that pays all their bills. Living off of your hobbies sounds fun, but I doubt that it really is, because it sounds too stressful to me. My own youtube forays are just for my own benefit, and whether anyone at all finds and enjoys my videos is immaterial to me. I don't do it for them, I don't do it to "grow my channel" or to even make some side hustle money. I make them because it's my hobby, and I like to talk about my hobby. There's too many people trying really hard to not work conventionally in the hobby youtube space, and it's not good for their content, honestly.

Monday, January 13, 2025

Ugh

Ugh. Last week was a bit of a disaster. I traveled for work to visit a supplier in Juarez (when you do that, you travel to and stay in El Paso and just pop across the border on a supplier shuttle during the day). Weather, however, made the trip back very annoying. Got delayed in DFW due to snow and lack of sufficient inventory of de-icing solution. For no less than three days. I was supposed to arrive home on a non-stop from DFW on Thursday afternoon, around 4:30 my time. I got home instead on Saturday at about 11 PM, after passing through Washington DC. I also got a pretty bad cold, so I was stuffed up, sneezing, coughing and pretty miserable. Luckily, since it was a work trip, I could call my work travel agent and they'd book me a hotel in Dallas when it became clear that I wasn't going to get a flight out, so at least I got to go sleep in a hotel. And although food selections were limited, I ate fine. In fact, the blackened shrimp and catfish on a bed of dirty rice from Pappadeux was excellent, although it'd probably have been better (and cheaper) outside of the airport.

It also wasn't all that bad because I had my phone with me, my music, and several books. I finished, on the trip, three books in fact, The Bones of Haven by Simon R. Green, Sandstorm from the 3e era, an environmental source book, and Dance of the Damned by Alan Bligh, an Arkham Horror tie-in novel. 

As soon as I got back, I turned to my The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard collection, picked up the d20 Call of Cthulhu book, and will read the next two novels of the Lord of Nightmares "trilogy" that follows Dance of the Damned. Not a bad start at all to the year in terms of reading. 

Next week, I'll be going back to my old house in the northern Midwest, which we still own and which my son and his family are living in right now. My wife will be with me for the weekend, but she has to leave on Monday to get back to work; I can work remotely. Of course, I'll spend a lot of time with my son, my daughter, my grandkids, etc. and maybe even some old friends, but I should have plenty of time to read on that trip too, so I want to make sure that I bring sufficient material to keep me busy. Sadly, a lot of what I really want to read I still haven't found which box in my garage those books are in. So I have three of the old Lovecraft trade paperback collections, I can't find the other three (I think there were six in all. Maybe I'm wrong and there's only five? I can't remember now.) I do have the complete works on an old mobi file, but I prefer to read actual books. I wonder if I should just read the ones that I have, and then go through the Kindle reading the ones I missed? Or I just read the ones that I have, then wait until I find the others eventually to read them? Or just read it on my Kindle all around? Or just read something else? It's not like I haven't read Lovecraft before. But for some reason, I'm jonesing to re-read him again right now. Then again, sometimes a little Lovecraft is enough; three collections of trade paperbacks may not have all of the classics in them, but it's probably more than enough for me to decide that I can turn towards something else after reading that much. After all, I'm also reading a Cthulhu game book and I have five more Arkham Horror tie-in novels to read sitting on my shelf.

Although I really like that mode of fiction, I might be in the mood to mix it up after that, and do something a little more heroic and cheerful. Maybe I'll re-read Raymond Feist's four Riftwar books after that. After losing three of them in a neighbor's move (I ended up with a few of his things too; it worked out OK, I guess) I rebought the original edited versions that I had originally had of all of those books, which I like better than the "director's cut" versions that have been in print for the last few decades. Thanks, Thriftbooks, for making them available! I have a few more books that are "out" as in not boxed up, and I have relatively easy access to most of the boxes that have most of my books. And I've got a ton of Kindle content to read.

That's the biggest gripe I have about our current living situation; we're in a temporary house that we're renting, but it's smaller than our last house, and we just don't know what to do with all of our stuff. I need to turn a room into a permanent office/library eventually, but that is unlikely to happen until we buy a new house here.

In any case, on the docket for gaming books, I think maybe I'll read my two Privateer Press Monsternomicon's next. I do have a pdf of the 3.5 update of the first one, but given that I don't care that much about the specific stats, the original 3e hardback is fine. Those are among my favorite gamebooks that I own too.

Monday, January 06, 2025

This week

First real week of 2025. First week back at work. I'm at work today, that is; tomorrow, I'm traveling all day for work, Wednesday I'll be at my destination in El Paso and Juarez, and then Thursday I'm traveling all day again. But both of my travel days will have me at my destination before 5 PM. Not only will I have plenty of time to read and listen to music on the flight, but after getting a nice dinner on Uncle My Employer, I have all evening—both Tuesday and Wednesday—to sit in the hotel and do whatever the flip I want to do. Here's my plans for the week.

  • I just finished the second (of three) novels in the second (of two) Hawk & Fisher Omnibus collections, and read the first long chapter of the third novel. I intend to finish this novel before I'm home. I've got about 150 or so pages to read. Bones of Haven is the book I'm on. Although this is the second time I've read my omnibus collections, I've never read the prequel and sequel books. I probably should. In fact, I just put them on my Thriftbooks wishlist. I'll order them sometime this year.
  • I intend to record audio for my Shadows Over Garenport First column Youtube Video, slap it into a slide-show/presentation style format and upload that as a new Youtube video on one of the two nights that I'm in the hotel in El Paso.
  • I intend to eat BBQ at Rudy's. Maybe twice, if I can't find another nearby restaurant that looks as good. Of course, I don't live in the northern midwest anymore; I now live back in the south, so getting good BBQ isn't nearly as hard as it used to. That said, Carolina styles of BBQ aren't the same as Texas, and Texas is the best. And not just because I grew up there. But Texas style seems to have spread and I can get it pretty good here too. But still. If I can get it and work can pay for it, and I'm in Texas while I'm doing it; of course I'm going to. Now, if only there were a Pappadeaux's or a Double Dave's in El Paso, I'd really be good to go. Sigh. I can probably get lunch at Pappadeux during my layover in the DFW airport on the way home, at least.
  • I intend to finally finish Sandstorm, the 3.5 era book that I've been reading for months now. I knew that that was going to be tougher to get through than I hoped, but it was even worse than I thought. It's just painfully tedious to read those environmental books nowadays. I just don't have much interest in the super rulesy approach of 3.x, and most of the ideas that it has really aren't all that interesting. My review of it now, were I to write another one to replace the one I wrote years ago, would be even less positive than my already desultory earlier effort.
  • Just in case I have time, I'll also bring the first of the first of the Lord of Nightmares Arkham Horrors trilogy. It took me forever to track down the third book, which I foolishly didn't buy when it was still in print. Now that I have it, I have hardly any memory of the first two so I need to reread them. Sigh. Hopefully I'll be reading that on the flight back home.

Saturday, January 04, 2025

Updates to DFX, Appendix and Character Sheet

All three documents have had some minor changes. Some of it is merely cosmetic; this is the only change to the character sheet, for instance. But both the rules and the appendix got another editing pass, and some errors were corrected, and a few other things were reworded to be more clear.

And just so this isn't just links to an ephemeral version of the game (not that I have any intention of making any more modifications anymore; and I haven't for a long time. This is probably pretty stable now), here's a picture or two just for fun, from my AI DFX collection.

Dark Fantasy X Rules

Dark Fantasy X Appendix

Dark Fantasy X Character Sheet

An alternative to the cover art

Alpon von Lechfeld, in his study (above) and his lab (below)


Friday, January 03, 2025

Pulp Hero X

Back in this post on my modular modules, I didn't actually have a pulp hero module identified. Part of this is because I never actually did anything with the modules. Then again, there isn't really all that much that needs to be done. If by Pulp Hero X I mean something along the lines of Brendan Frasier's The Mummy or Harrison Ford's Raiders of the Lost Ark or possibly Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing, except also with the possibility of completely non-supernatural games, then what really needs to be done for Pulp Hero X that isn't already there in Horror & Macabre X, License to Kill X or Weird West X anyway? Pulp Hero X becomes more of just a setting than a full module, utilizing nothing new or original that can't be pulled out of the already identified modules. In fact, if Horror & Macabre X's default is a kind of Lovecraftian 20s or 30s, a la default Call of Cthulhu (which it probably would be) then Pulp Hero X is literally the same module, just played with a different tone.

Honestly, what does either of them need that Dark Fantasy X doesn't already provide? Eliminate the fantastic non-human races of Dark Fantasy X, redo the equipment section to focus less on Medieval-like items and instead include some "modern" stuff like guns and cars to replace all the swords and wagons, and you're pretty much good to go. You've got your Lovecraftian magic... if you want to use it. You've got lots of monsters... if you want to use them... and you've got everything you need to build a character. I noticed this when I made a Western appendix area in my Fantasy Hack X game, back when I was still more overtly Microlite derived. I replaced the black powder piratey and musketeer-like firearms rules that Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, the then current version of what is now DFX was, with six shooters and rifles that, honestly, would still be perfectly fine rules for most modern firearms today. Then I had more definition and detail around horses and horseplay, which seemed very genre appropriate.

For something like License to Kill X, I could do the same thing except instead of more with horses, do something about vehicle chases, including car chases, and have more detail and definition around guns because those seem genre appropriate. 

The modules under this paradigm can be as simple as a one pager detailing what elements of the DFX game not to use, and then some expanded stuff that's a little hyper-focused (to the degree these rules-lite rules are hyper-focused at all) on something that seems genre appropriate because the genre itself focuses on that aspect of play.

What brings this to mind right now is, as I've noted in a semi-recent post, is that I'm revisiting my Ruritanian alternate history timeline of a frontier Republic of Texas, except still existing in a Ruritanian section of the US way into the 20s, 30s or 40s, roughly, model railroad plan. As I've started to make more and more specific plans of more and more specific pseudo-dioramas on the layout, it's developing a kind of weird tales, pulp vibe. No doubt, that will make my layout even more anathema to the spergy crowd to disparagingly refer to anything unlike their boring layouts as "cartoonish", but I've long ago decided that I'm parting ways with the rivet-counters and operational spergs, and that my vision of the hobby is so different from theirs that it might almost be best considered another hobby altogether.

Of course, if I'm developing all of this Ruritanian Territory, as part of a fictional "pulp modern" Republic of Texas setting with all kinds of weird supernatural elements in it; archaeologists discovering "The Mound", Nosferatu out west, sasquatches, Dark Watchers, ghost stories, a kind of frontier analog to Arkham County, etc., then whatever I do with that setting for the model railroad plans certainly are appropriate for roleplaying usage too.

Saturday, December 28, 2024

Musk and Ramaswampy aren't our guys. They're Fake Americans.

During my ~11 years as a hiring manager [for one of the largest Silicon Valley tech giants], I talked to probably over a thousand candidates from tens of thousands of resumes. Looking back, my all-male team was quite “diverse” although everyone was probably INTJ, now that I think about it. I talked at many dozens of Indians, and quickly learned a few things that are invariant: they are helpfully accommodating to the point of obsequiousness, and this holds regardless of whether they have any clue what they’re talking about. This is crucial to understand.

When you are speaking with an Indian, you are not communicating. You are engaging in a choreographed dance where they are exclusively tasked with mirroring your moves, and leaving you to walk away thinking that your needs will be satisfied. And that is all that has happened. If you don’t know which follow-up questions to ask, you’ll have no idea that you’ve just been handled by an entity that understands how to “close,” but not how to deliver anything promised. The idea of the latter is never even part of the equation. Utterly alien minds to us.

One of Britain’s greatest crimes was teaching them to speak with that hackneyed, goobledygook accent, because it simply fries the brains of most Americans. It is scamouflage for the fact that they will lie, lie, lie as easily as you or I draw breath. It’s indescribable. Thankfully, I became good enough at technical interviewing that a couple simple questions would break their lies wide open, & I could simply nope out in good conscience. After a while, a glance at such resumes told me how the conversations would go, optimizing away the rest.

During this time, in other parts of SWE & IS&T, I watched as a couple Indian hires within 18 months turned into an almost wholesale replacement of any other race in the blighted departments. The degree of their apparently illegal hiring practices cannot be overstated. But of course, who is going to complain, and to whom? One of my last cross-functional meetings at the company, myself & one or two other guys from our org met with one of the terraformed orgs. There were 25 of them packed into a room for a meeting that required 5 people tops.

Regardless of context, every American needs to understand that they will lie under any circumstances for any reason or no apparent reason whatsoever. It is “cultural,” so get over your Christendom-centric notions of morality; those exist nowhere else on Earth.

We don't need more Indians. We don't need any Indians. Their culture is not superior to ours. That's why India itself is one of the worst places on the planet and most Indians are desperate to escape it. 

Musk and Ramaswampy are not "our guys". They're members of the Establishment who are gatekeeping on the right wing end to try and keep nationalism, anti-globalism, anti-corporatism and Christianity from re-establishing themselves as key components of Americanism. Just because you agree with and like some of the things that they say and do, don't get fooled. Fake Right Fake Americans have been running this routine for decades, but reliably their loyalty is not to America or Americans and they will throw us under the bus for their real agenda without hesitation. 

This is a little new, though. Mostly in the past this routine has been done by Jews and their Yankee neocon orbiters, partners and groupies. But regardless of who's doing it, it's the same song and dance. Once you learn to recognize it, you can't miss it. 

UPDATE: Spotted on X

I am not an American and I have never crossed the Atlantic – but, as a general point, any line of reasoning that assumes:

  • First, that a country with a population the size and quality of America (or Russia, France, Germany, etc) cannot produce its own highly-skilled IT, research, engineering, etc. professionals;
  • second, that it is normal and acceptable to brain drain the entire world using economic incentives and globalist ideological propaganda;
  • and third, that it is normal and acceptable to deprive your own population of socioeconomic opportunities to save a few bucks by claiming the former and engaging in the latter;

...is not only morally reprehensible and psychotic, but also the sort of self-serving, hypocritical lie that incites homicidal rage in the people who are being damaged by it, and permanently erodes the social fabric on every level.

Indeed, not that I condone or approve, but I do think it's inevitable; this is how "elites" find themselves Luigi'ed in the street someday. As much as we've romanticized the French Revolution; for normal people fascinated by it's horror and for Marxists for its supposed revolutionary fervor, we sure seem determined not to understand it or spot the same types of trends playing out in our own society. And it's hardly like the French Revolution stands alone as the only example of that kind of thing.

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Next steps; blogging and vlogging

OK, time to take a step back. I haven't done any of my plans for the last month or so with regards to blogging or vlogging, so let's reiterate the next things that I want to do and see if there's a time that I'll get them done in the next week or two or not. I have family showing up at the end of the week, so I'm unlikely to sequester myself somewhere in the house to record a video or type up a blog post while they're here, but maybe during the work day, if work slows down, I can do so, for at least some of it.

But here's what I wanted to do. In vague terms.

1. Cult of Undeath Fronts 2-5. I've done the work for the first front, mostly, but I have only a very vague handwavey outline for the other fronts. They need for me to spend some time to make sure that they're fleshed out.

2. Shadows Over Garenport Front #1 Video. This was supposed to be the next video I made, and I haven't made one in at least a month.

3. Supervillains of Dark Fantasy X Video. I had a pretty brief blog post about this, but I'd like to flesh it out slightly and redo it as a video. Another one that I announced some time ago and haven't worked on.

4. Development of Nizrekh, Porhomok and the Corsair Coast. I've also made some brief rumblings about these "new" areas, but there's not much there yet. Although it's not urgent, at least one of the two new areas, maybe two of them, will also feature as an expansion "travel" region for Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes, which was originally scheduled to follow Cult of Undeath. 

5. Sort out exactly what I'm doing for future campaigns. But I've also talked about adding at least one if not more campaigns, as well as some shorter "mini-campaigns". I need to at least decide what the high level plan is.

Here's a picture so this post isn't a complete waste. A village on a river into Porhomok inland from the Corsair Coast most likely. 



Thursday, December 12, 2024

DEI and the New Right

I still haven't blogged about almost any of the topics that I promised to blog about before the year ended. Sigh. And even now, I'm punting and simply annotating another Z-man post. 

It's important to not oversell what is happening. He makes this point with the collapse of DEI, while pointing out that nothing really substantial is changing; it's just going a bit underground and more quiet. People really don't want conflict. They want people to agree to be sensible and fair without having to tear down the artifacts of society that have been corrupted to prop up the nonsense and unfairness, but it isn't very likely to actually happen, and it very, very rarely has ever happened historically. When a ruling caste has become so hostile to the people that it rules that every aspect of the system that props them up is rooted in that hostility, the only solution is to destroy that system and rebuild a new one.

People sometimes call Trump a wrecking ball rather than a "regular" political figure, and in some ways that's true. But in most substantial ways, it's not. He's really not all that radical, and he wants to reform the system while somehow still preserving it. I think it's a bit more shrewd and has had his eyes opened, or has been red-pilled, to some extent, since his first term, but in reality, he's just a warm-up to what must inevitably come, unless he's shockingly and astronomically improbably successful in reforming the system. What must come is either a hard reboot of the American system back to it's install version in the late 1700s, or more likely just a complete collapse of the American system and the building of something else to replace it. We should hope that Trump will be successful, because the alternative is either a Napoleon or Pinochet to clean up the mess, or just a bigger mess; a complete collapse into anarchy and a destruction of the current system entirely.

A lot of people think that the collapse is a prelude to the Second Coming and therefore we don't need to solve our problems. I think that may be somewhat hubristic. Maybe the American Empire is important enough that its collapse corresponds to the End Times prophecies, but clearly that's been thought many, many times before in Christendom, obviously in vain. There have been many large societal collapses before, and what usually happens is that it's followed by a Dark Age before someone else rebuilds a new system. The Bronze Age collapse of an interlinked "global" system turning into centuries of Dark Ages until the Classical Greeks, Celts, and Iron Age Fertile Crescent societies rebuilt a completely new system in their place is a good example. 

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=33193

One of the things that got the “new right” buzzing in the closing months of the election was the sudden pullback by corporations on the DEI front. A bunch of large companies announced they were terminating these programs. This led to the online wing of the “new right” to confidently say “we are winning!” It was part of a wave of pro-Trump confidence that kicked in during the final six weeks of the election. After the election, the same forces sense they can clear the field of DEI.

That is the subtext to this post by Christopher Rufo, who has made a lucrative career out of opposing the DEI machine. It is a letter to the Trump transition team urging them to reverse the various executive orders creating the DEI bureaucracy within the federal bureaucracy and replacing it with a “colorblind” evaluation system. By acting quickly, Rufo thinks, the new administration can deal a death blow to the DEI movement, while momentum is on their side.

Rufo is smart to point out that public sentiment has shifted strongly against DEI, so Trump would not be battling with a hornet’s nest if he does this. Rufo frames his approach as low hanging fruit that would make Trump’s voters happy without spending too much political capital. On the other hand, the closest thing to eternal life is a government program, regardless of origin. Every president has dreamed of killing at least one government program. None have succeeded.

To his credit, Rufo seems to get this reality. Merely rescinding these executive orders would change nothing, as these race operations are now enshrined in the budgets of the main government agencies. More important, the workforce inside these agencies are committed to defending them because of the iron law of bureaucracy. The people actually running these agencies are solely committed to defending every paperclip that exists inside their agency.

There is something else missing and that is any thought as to why private corporations have made a big deal out of killing these programs. The main reason is they have proven to be bad public relations. It is not the existence that is bad public relations, but the over-the-top embrace of these race programs. Execs were sold on these being a great way to built favor with the diverse public. It turned out that they had no impact on sale, despite claims to the contrary.

In other words, the marketing campaign in favor of these programs became a pointless hassle for the companies doing it. Anyone who has spent time in a corporation understands that management is always ready to eliminate a pointless hassle, especially one that has no revenue stream. Like the company that puts up a sign that reads, “Under New Management”, these companies are hoping to turn a bad marketing scheme into a second chance with their customers.

The programs themselves, however, have not changed much as all. Again, anyone familiar with corporate life knows that “diversity” has been a part of the system for decades, long before Mr. Rufo noticed them. The DEI department will simply be renamed and folded back into human resources. The reason for that is these are a necessary defense against lawsuits. Diversity programs are a defense against lawfare, which is as permanent as a government program.

No matter what the public might think about any of this, the lawfare will continue, which means diversity pogroms will continue. The reason the lawfare will continue is, in part, to keep the diversity rackets going. There has always been a lot of coordination between the diversity pogroms and the lawfare. The main reason, however, is the law requires the diversity lawfare to continue. The civil rights revolution created a legal framework to impose what cannot happen naturally.

The point of the Brown case was not simply to overturn the Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, but to lay the foundation for a new moral order within the law that future cases and future legislation could build upon. This is exactly what happened over the following decades. Katzenbach v. McClung, for example, gave Congress a broad, extra-Constitutional mandate to address discrimination. In that case, they found a way to ban discrimination, despite having no jurisdiction.

This is what the “new right” fails to grasp about their calls for “colorblind” policies and the dismantling of DEI. What they want is not just impractical, but legally impossible, as a result generations of jurisprudence. The courts have repeatedly affirmed the two truths of our current legal framework. Discrimination is always bad and therefore always assumed to be illegal. Inclusion is always good and therefore should be the outcome of constitutionally defendable policies.

That means a “colorblind admission policy” at Harvard would be discriminatory if the result is a tiny number of black undergrads. It sounds insane, but by the logic of the law, it is perfectly reasonable. Our legal framework is not just eliminating observable discrimination, but also fostering inclusion. This is why the DEI people say it is not enough to be not racist. You must be anti-racist, by which they mean creating an inclusive racial environment everywhere.

This is why the war against DEI is nothing more than hacking at the leaves. The roots of the problem go back much further than the current racial fads and they have sunk deep into the psyche of the managerial class. It is why the word “inclusion” and variations on it salt the language of the ruling class. They are all about openness, because openness is the highest moral good according to the civil right ideology. This is not a front brain thing for them. It is a part of their internal logic.

It is not all bad news, however. The “new right” campaign against DEI has had the unintended side effect of delegitimizing the civil rights ideology. People have grown used to mocking this stuff, which is a small step from rejecting the primary goal of civil rights ideology, which is the open society. This was the motivation behind the censorship campaigns. The ideologues understand that if you can mock any part of the regime, you can mock all of it.

In this regard, Christopher Rufo and the “color blind new right” are a rearguard action, defending what they can of a regime that is losing legitimacy. It is an attempt to meet the public halfway. They get rid of the more odious parts of the regime but keep the parts that make the regime possible. That is the play of a loser, so the rise and prominence of the “color blind new right” is a positive. The generations old racial regime is in retreat in the face of an increasingly skeptical populace.

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

The CEO Assassination

My first thought was that people don't really care that much about the CEO assassination, because of a general sense that even if it was a murder, the guy probably deserved it at some level. Our sense of outrage at a social order motivated crime like this against a person who probably has contributed in general to our lives being worse just can't be raised. Even though the guy was a big figure in a quiet way on the national scene, it was really just a local murder story, no more worthy of being the target of national news that any other random murder story. The Z-man had a similar take, but took the analysis of what it might mean further. His thoughts on the matter are kind of interesting, as is often true.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=33176

An interesting bit of subtext to the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO is how the reactions to it reflects the shifting politics in America. Twenty years ago, the general reaction online would have been what you see in television police dramas. The vast majority of the public would have been cheering on the police as they searched for the killer, while his family was paraded in front of the cameras. The dead guy would have been the unquestionable victim of a terrible crime.

On top of that, the people we call conservatives would have been waddling about in their comfort fit chinos, beating their chests about crime and the demonization of capitalism by the people we call the left. As soon as it was clear that the perpetrator was a white male, the people we call the left would have been tub-thumping about the need for gun control and maybe white male violence. Both sides would have done their act in front of predictably adoring audience.

Both sides have tried their normal act, but the world has changed and that means the audience is not as interested in the old shows. The people we call the left got this right away and stuck to giggling about the victim being the head of one of those evil health insurance companies they have been demonizing for decades. They were sure the killer was one of their own, due to his wearing a dark hoodie. In fact, a lot of people in the dissident camp assumed [he] was Antifa too.

Based on the news reports, we can eliminate Antifa from the story. The guy they arrested has “pepe” in his social media profiles and is a fan of Uncle Ted, the avuncular character knowns as the Unabomber. While it is unlikely that he is “our guy”, he is clearly a young man who escaped the old political paradigm. He does not fit the left’s version of a hero or the right’s version of a villain. He has become a bit of a folk hero for many of the people who voted for Trump.

That last bit is what is vexing to the right-wing influencers. Their script does not have a section for this sort of character. The main job of conservatives is to celebrate and defend corporate power, but the bulk of their audience has long ago become fed-up by the abuses of corporate America. It was not the government banning them from the internet or cancelling their bank accounts. It is not the government race-swapping cultural content or running ads in favor of buggery.

There you see the big change in attitudes that is vexing legacy politics. For the last decade or so, it is the people we call the left who have been cheering on corporate America as they made war against our rights. The people we call conservatives sat silently as this went on. The CEO of United Healthcare could have been an anarcho-capitalist for anyone knows, but for the general public, he is the faceless symbol of corporate greed and avarice. People have had enough of it.

This case also reveals that the old American love of the outlaw is still there, buried under the piles of corporate slop. As the great Southern bard observed, outlaws touch the ladies somewhere deep down in their soul. America is a woman, so she has always had a love for the outlaw. The reason for that is the old frontier sensibility tells us that sometimes, you need the outlaw, because sometimes, a man needs killing and you cannot do that within the law.

That ties in neatly with the whiff of revolution in the air. The election of Donald Trump and the apparent acceptance of it by the political class has people thinking about more than just “owning the libs” in an election. To a lot of people, the bad guys look scared right now and this event feels like a nice reminder to them that there are worse things than losing an election. If the 2016 election was a warning to the ruling class, then the 2024 election is the final warning.

There is another angle here. The people we call the left have been demonizing health insurance companies for a long time. In typical bougie fashion, the rhetoric has gone well beyond factual criticism. Since Hillary Clinton waddled onto the stage, the left has been calling healthcare companies parasites that must be destroyed. Logically, it means the people running them are evil parasites who must be destroyed. Inside the real halls of power, people are making the obvious connection.

What the 2024 election revealed is there has been a shift in the economic elite. Some members have figured out that there is real danger for them, and they backed Donald Trump and continue to back him as he prepares to take power. Elon Musk is not bunkmates with Trump by accident. This will not be a repeat of the first administration. Some members of the economic elite want reform because they do not want to be on the wrong end of the next viral assassination video.

In other words, it is not just the change in public attitudes that has the chattering classes vexed, but also the change in the economic elite. The killing of that CEO kicked over more than just the rock of public opinion. It revealed the growing angst of the economic elite in response to changing public opinion. Even though it was just one young man on a mission, it is a reminder that history has often pivoted on one man or one event, setting off a chain of events.

When the desires of the economic elite align with the desires of the populace, things can start happening in a hurry. That is the conclusion of this big study on how policy is formed in America. A decade ago, researchers discovered what has been obviously true since the dawn of time. Every society has an elite and they generally get what they want, despite public attitudes, but they always get what they want when they are on the side of the people.

This is why the chattering classes are struggling with this story. It is why they will put the whole thing on ignore now that the killer has been caught. They have been selected and trained to play particular roles in an old show, but now the curtain is falling on that show, so they must scramble for parts in the next show. The reason for that is the audience has changed and now the producers are changing along with them. Luigi Mangione put a bullet in all the old acts.

Monday, December 09, 2024

Southern Utah

I've spent most of the last two weeks out of town, although I am now back, back at work chugging through all of the missed emails (and finding out that I'll likely go back to El Paso/Juarez for a quick work trip next week; right before Christmas. Sigh.)

That said, I love the American West, and I'm not averse to spending some time when the weather's relatively nice in El Paso. I spent most of last week in Southern Utah. I saw a number of sites, and the pictures below are only a small sampling of the places I visited, including:

  • Little Wild Horse slot canyon
  • Valley of the Goblins
  • Canyonlands Island in the Sky Unit
  • Factory Butte
  • the "Long Dong Silver" geologic feature
  • Swing City
  • Moonscape Overlook
  • Arches National Park
  • Natural Bridges National Monument
  • Bears Ears National Monument
I'll make a more detailed set of posts on my hiking blog later. For now, this'll have to do.

Looking at a pass out of the moonscape region

Hiking towards the absolutely barren "Long Dong Silver" feature, also called the Dark Spire. But not by anyone online.

One of the views from the Moonscape Overlook

Another Moonscape Overlook picture

From behind the Dark Spire. It's not really a spire; from the side angle it looks more like a shark fin

The cliffs of Moonscape Overlook with Factory Butte looming in the background

"Presidential" natural bridge, the largest of the three. I hiked to the bottom of all three and stood underneath them

On the trail down to Sipapu Bridge

The Bear's Ears themselves

I didn't realize I had another view of the same bridge. I do have more pictures of the others, but they'll have to wait for another post.

A kiva on the way down to Sipapu bridge

Petroglyphs near Wolfe Ranch in Arches National Park

Me standing under Delicate Arch, the most iconic scenic formation in the entire state

Some Anasazi ruins in Bear's Ears. Yes, I know they don't like to say Anasazi anymore. I don't care

The whole place was crawling with ravens. I got this close up of one of them