AI Panickans will never lear

Here's an interesting article: https://aicentral.substack.com/p/verified-human

And here's another: https://sigmagame.substack.com/p/why-deltas-hate-ai

And here's one of my AI generated character portraits for Dominic Clevenger, using a Hero Forge model that I made as a reference. I'll make another post sometime later showing all of the variants. Clearly I'm not afraid of using AI. I have used it to generate images of ... OK quality for my campaign setting. I've used it to help generate first (poor) drafts of fiction text. I haven't even gotten around to really seeing if they're sufficiently decent to be used as a basis for editing it into something workable, or if I should just ignore what it generated and write it the old-fashioned way. I'm not one of those AI panickans who is terrified that AI will make me obsolete. My job is unlikely to be successfully rendered obsolete by AI, and while AI can be a shortcut to some of my hobby endeavors, it's not likely to be a suitable replacement for a person there either, except in limited manner, like I can get mediocre images to use on my blog posts and in my pdfs. I could possibly get a passable book cover from AI. With a lot of effort. The propaganda that AI is going to replace people's jobs really only applies if your job is a make-work busy work job that... honestly, probably doesn't need to be done at all. There's a lot of those. SWFs hardest hit. 

To get any good results out of AI, you still need a lot of human shepherding. Those who are capable in their fields will inevitably find that AI can be a useful shortcut and time-saver, but that it won't literally replace their need to manually intervene in the results. Those who are fearful of all of the propaganda about AI coming for their jobs will—mostly—discover that propaganda is just propaganda, I'd guess. They're either adapt what or how they work a bit, or the whole thing will fizzle anyway. 

Because I also read Ed Zitron. Here's one example: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/ The AI bubble is just like every other bubble; a lot of hype, a lot of shady claims by shady people, leading to a lot of transfer of money to said shady people, leading to an inevitable failure to be able to deliver on the shady promises. AI isn't completely a scam, of course. It can do a lot of pretty cool things. But I'm pretty skeptical about a lot of the narratives that we're being fed about it at the same time. 

Anyway, the main point of all of this is that I find the AI panickans at places like reddit and ENWorld extremely tiresome. Of course, people at those places are tiresome about almost everything that they say, do, believe, claim, and worry about. But their visceral reactions anytime the trigger word AI is posted in any context is becoming a particular pet peeve of mine. AI Slop, which usually accompanies AI, isn't any worse than human-created slop, of which there's way too much. I'd honestly rather read an AI slop replica of some old-fashioned pulp stories than human-created woke garbage. Hollywood in particular has been banging the "AI is scary" drum for a few years. But Hollywood produces tons of slop that people don't like, and their livelihood is directly threatened by AI democratizing the ability of normal people to get past their gatekeepers and produce content that competes directly with them. Average writers  of all kinds of slop, which sells as ebooks on Amazon are also worried... but that's because fundamentally their business model is to try and monetize slop, and AI slop is faster, more prolific, and unlikely to really be much worse than what they're producing, causing them to inevitably get lost in the crowd. 

I recently read the following passage, which I think sums up my perspective on AI. It's about AI being used to write fiction, but it really applies to almost any usage of AI:

Writing fiction isn't like riding a bicycle. You don't just figure it out once and coast forever. It's more like learning to play piano, where your first attempts produce noise instead of music, and only through deliberate practice do you develop the skills to create something worth hearing. This reality becomes even more important when you're working with AI. You can't edit what you don't understand. You can't guide AI toward quality output if you don't know what quality looks like. You can't maintain consistency across a novel if you don't grasp the fundamental elements that need to remain consistent. The writers producing AI slop aren't failing because they chose the wrong tool—they're failing because they never learned their craft. The writers succeeding with AI assistance aren't lucky—they're skilled enough to make informed creative decisions regardless of their tools.

Ripping off the mask

Not shocking. But this Breitbart article is still interesting. I'm copying and pasting most of the text.

Given their voluminous schedule of speaking engagements and media appearances, politicians often suffer slips of the tongue, though most are of little consequence.

But while ordinary gaffes are daily occurrences, witnessing a lawmaker commit an infamous Kinsley Gaffe is extraordinarily rare. The term, coined by political journalist Michael Kinsley, refers to when a politician accidentally tells the truth, specifically one they are not supposed to say publicly. Unlike a simple slip of the tongue, it’s an inadvertent and major reveal of a politician’s genuine thoughts, or an admission of their party’s undisclosed positions or motivations.

Such was the case in 2024 when Democrat Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut appeared on MSNBC and committed a classic Kinsley Gaffe while responding to a question about the status of his party’s longstanding push for illegal alien amnesty. “Well, I mean, Chris, that’s been a failed play for 20 years. So you are right that that has been the Democratic strategy for 30 years, maybe, and it has failed to deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country.”

Inasmuch as the senator attempted to euphemize “illegal aliens” as “undocumented Americans,” the message was loud and clear; those are the people his party cares most about.

The clip resurfaced recently in the context of the ongoing debate over Department of Homeland Security funding, and while it justifiably sparked conservative outrage, Sen. Murphy’s disclosure shouldn’t be surprising given the Democrat’s decades-long advocacy on behalf of illegal aliens.

Their opposition to enforcement and support of illegal aliens is well documented and extensive. While hundreds of immigration-related bills have come and gone, a few highlight the Left’s consistent advocacy of illegal aliens over time. In 2005, the Sensenbrenner bill sought to criminalize unlawful presence as a felony. It was opposed by 82 percent of House Democrats, who argued it would “criminalize” millions and militarize the border without offering a legal path forward. In 2013-2014, Democrats opposed the Gang of 8 bill. Even though it included a path to citizenship, the party rejected House Republican efforts to add enforcement elements to it. And in 2023, Democrats opposed the Secure the Border Act, criticizing it for wasting billions on a border wall, ending certain parole programs, and limiting asylum grounds, calling it an “ineffective” strategy that ignored broader reform (amnesty).

At the state and local levels in mostly blue areas, Democrats have demonstrated their affinity for illegal aliens even more robustly over many years. Sanctuary policies now exist in 1,003 jurisdictions; 19 states and the District of Columbia issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens; and 20 states grant them in-state tuition subsidies. The net result is that 18.6 million illegal aliens now reside in the U.S., costing taxpayers $151 billion, clear evidence of the accuracy in Senator Murphy’s admission that his party elevates the interests of illegal aliens over Americans.

Senator Murphy unwittingly revealed who the Democrats prioritize, but he stopped short of revealing why. No matter; others have. In 2009, Eliseo Medina, Secretary-Treasurer of the far-left Service Employees International Union (and an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America) unabashedly stated, “We can create a governing coalition for the long term … if we can get immigrants on a path to citizenship, we can create a governing coalition for the long term that will allow us to win on all the issues that we care about.”

Medina was well connected to the Obama White House as a surrogate voice pushing “immigration reform” (amnesty) yet not a single Democrat at the time objected to his audacious statement, likely because most agreed with his comments suggesting that illegal immigration serves their electoral needs.

That is, of course, why Democrats have rallied in opposition to today’s SAVE Act (H.R.22) which imposes stronger identification requirements that would prevent illegal aliens from voting.

Based on the Left’s words and actions over many years, it’s clear that mass migration is their tactic to incubate future voters and solidify party dominance for all perpetuity. This explains why Senator Murphy wants to “deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country.”

To be fair though, others also corrupt immigration for their narrow self-interests. Industry favors mass immigration to replace American workers and suppress wages; Third World nations rely on porous borders as a safety valve to export citizens they cannot support or do not want; churches, charities, and NGOs depend on flows of migrants to fuel their virtue-signaling and fundraising initiatives; socialists, communists, and anarchists promote mass migration as means to achieve a disorderly, non-consensual make-over of the U.S.

In the end, Senator Murphy shouldn’t fret too much about having committed that Kinsley Gaffe. Sure, he spilled the beans by revealing that Democrats favor the interests of illegal aliens over Americans. And sure, he violated his party’s Sacred Veil of Secrecy that cloaks their true immigration motives, but it really was no big deal because here’s the thing:

Americans have known it all along.

Well...

What a terrible week. Not only has the work trip been quite frustrating, but it's not just work; I'm trying to refinance my house with the lower interest rates now in play, and there's been snags, and my assignment at church has had someone who's really anxious and pressing on something that she thinks is super urgent and needs immediate attention even though I'm out of town, and my dad's health has gone from bad to considerably worse over the last few months, accelerated even more in the last few weeks. I'll probably have to take some time to my folks house and help my mom out with him. And, who knows? At his age, these compounding health issues simply are not a great sign. His younger sister passed away a couple of years ago; it might be his time this year too, unless he can rebound shortly. 

So, my plans to have a semi-relaxing work trip didn't work out. When I wasn't frantically texting or calling people in my off time, I was pretty drained, and just kind of sat and vegged with my phone; either listening to music, blowing through YouTube videos that I was only semi-interested in, or otherwise doing things that required little to no brain power or emotional investment. I did not read anything other than a couple of chapters of Rise of the Seventh Moon. I'm still a little bit shy of halfway. Which is easy to tell, because I'm reading it on my Kindle app on my phone. 46% right now. Maybe I'll finish that with my additional personal travel that I'm doing tonight and this weekend in general. Sigh. I'll take my stuff if I go to my folks house too; I won't be busy literally the entire time, of course.

The image is ChatGPT generated, of course, but it's a reasonably accurate facsimile. Maybe he's a little better looking than me, and maybe just a little bit grayer. (Or maybe not.) But otherwise, that's pretty close. Other than that I don't wear dress shirts like that very often, especially when sitting in a hotel room by myself. 

Anyway, yeah—sometimes life sucks, and sometimes the suckage lingers for a while. Don't get me wrong; things could be worse. But I've mostly just been very busy, very stressed, and very frustrated by things, and haven't had an avenue to "come down" and decompress very well. I think that's part of the reason I've embraced SWTOR so much lately; it's a pretty brainless activity that accomplishes that. Without it, my more aggressive reading plans ended up not being the best—they required more mental horsepower than I had left at the end of the day. 

I do need to mark my completed book in my tracker, but with only one complete, that's not super urgent. I just don't want to forget it. Although maybe I don't need to worry so much about tracking my reading. I've only done that for the last four years, and I was reading just fine before that. I did find that tracking my reading ended up encouraging me to read more, but even that wasn't necessarily consistent. 2024 wasn't a good year for reading, for instance, even though it was a good year for tracking what relatively little I read. 

Anyway, it's nice to make plans, even for something as frivolous as how to spend my free time while out of town on a business trip, but making plans is no guarantee of keeping plans. I don't know if this is literally true, and Google's seach AI seems to suggest "sorta" but I'm feeling it today.

Do you laugh or does it make you angry?

Not sure. Both, I suppose.

All of these "right wing conspiracy theories", most of which were blatantly obvious to people who were paying attention at the time, turned out to be spoilers for the people who weren't. 

This one in particular made me laugh, because someone posted something deliberately false in an attempt to get community notes that is a major red pill.

In unrelated news, I finished Dweller in the Deep yesterday, and look to be on track to finish Monster Manual II in the next few days, before I go out of town. I'll finish Rise of the Seventh Moon on my Kindle app on my phone on the plane, I think, and I'll replace Monster Manual II with Fiend Folio in my backpack, but I won't actually start reading that until I read a few other things first. 

My trip next week is to Del Rio, Texas, although my real business is across the border in the dumpy little town of Ciudad Acuña. After I'm back, I have to turn around and leave town for a previously scheduled weekend "back at home" for my grandson's first birthday in less than 24 hours. I'll be gone all weekend. Then I'll have another week at home like normal, before probably having to do more work travel in the first week of March to Hermosillo. 

I don't really love traveling to Mexico. Mexico is a dumpy, corrupt, third world trash pile, and the more time I spend there, the more convinced I am of that. (Also the more I interact with Mexicans here, the more convinced I am that they all need to go home.) Luckily, when my business is in the border towns like Acuña or Juarez, I actually stay in a hotel in Texas, eat at a restaurant in Texas, and just go work in Mexico during the day.

Of course, more travel means more reading; it's really the only thing that I can easily do while traveling to entertain myself during my downtime. No TV (well, that's not really true, but watching TV on my phone isn't any fun), no computer, etc. So reading it is. I'm actually not too sad about that. 

I've already got The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane in my backpack, but by the time I get around to the second trip, I'll probably be carting one of the James Silke Horned Helmet novels. I have a well defined list of game books to read, well into the year and probably well into 2027 and even 2028. However, I'm not sure about novels and fiction; my plan is much more vague and much shorter. I've got Solomon Kane and King Kull still to read on Howard. I've got a (sorta newly) purchased Lovecraft collection; complete for stuff written under his own name. I've got the four Silke novels. I've got the three Zahn Star Wars novels. After that... I'm not sure what's next, or even what order I'll read those. Solomon Kane is the only one that I'm 100% on what I'll read, and I'll read it next. 

I've also got a John Carter omnibus; the first five novels in a nice hardback. And a Robert Ludlum omnibus. I read this same omnibus probably 25 or even 30 years ago; it includes The Holcroft Covenant, The Matarese Circle, and of course The Bourne Identity. These are not new books. They were published first in—respectively—1978, 1979 and 1980. But they're still great. I enjoyed reading them in the mid-90s, and I tracked down the same omnibus on purpose to read all three of those. So those will be on the list for this year too.

There's talk at work of sending me back to Juarez/ El Paso too soon, so that would be three trips in short succession. You can't travel to any of these places without spending at least a whole day traveling on both ends, so I've ironically found that traveling for work is less stressful in some ways than just working. Because I'm traveling, I'm not expected to be too reactive to stuff happening, and I'm generally not available. People talk about falling behind, but much of the stuff that comes up is resolved by the time I get to it, so it's not that bad.

Not saying that I want to actually take that third trip, but it might happen, and if it does, I'm not going to cry too much about it.

The lack of leaders in current generations

From a Sigma Game substack post. What explains the lack of leaders in Western civilization? Four reasons, annotated with comments by me.

Feminism and the rise of credentialism. The transformation of the university demographic has been astonishing. From negligible numbers in 1960s to nearly two-thirds majority in the 2020s, women have taken over higher education and eliminated its function. Being completely converged, it no longer serves its purpose of educating society’s future leaders and preparing them for their responsibilities, it’s now just a credential mill for midwits and worse to be provided make-work jobs and serve as a faux elite that will do whatever it is told.

To be fair, plenty of men have recognized the fake and gay nature of university educations over time, and skilled trades are growing again. But much damage was done in the meantime. And skilled tradesmen may be doing fine on their own, but they're not getting into leadership positions anytime soon.

Diversity and social atomism. The more diverse the society, the more people stay at home and avoid socializing. The black block party, the white suburban barbeque, the men’s club, the Junior League, all these ad hoc organizations are largely a thing of the past due to the demographic changes combined with the legal elevation of equality and the demise of the right to free association. A potential leader can’t lead a nonexistent organization to which he doesn’t belong. Even the organized churches are dying.

I don't know that there's anything more to say on that, or not. Even in my church, which is not dying and which does generate local leaders because of our lay volunteer clergy for all but the highest levels of the church, we're not doing all of the things that we used to when I was a kid, and many of those things I used to do were things that were done for generations. Of course, churches are more susceptible to the side effects of diversity. The Gospel is for everyone, regardless of their state, their race, their culture, or even their legal status. It's not the Church's place to turn people away, even if those people should be remigrated back to their homes where they can participate in Church meetings there instead of here. But that's the state's job. The Church's job is to bring the Gospel to them regardless. 

Of course, that doesn't mean that people in the church shouldn't remigrate if they don't belong here legally, or if they came under dubious auspices, or that people in the church can't work with ICE and whomever else to make sure that people who don't belong are sent back home. But I do understand why people are conflicted about the question, even if I am not, and I do understand that churches have to accept a higher level of diversity, perhaps, than other organizations do. Everywhere that I've lived, there's been at least one Spanish speaking congregation for every 10-12 regular English speaking ones. As long as the people are here, they need that kind of ministering. Whether or not they should be here isn't a question that relates to whether or not the church should minister to them while they are.

But, of course, the diversity contributes to lack of social cohesion and and increase in atomism. It just is what it is, as the post says.

The GATE/Epstein/gangstalker phenomenon. Young men of potential are identified early and then either sidetracked, controlled, or eliminated before they can rise along the probable trajectory of their lives. This probably goes too far into the conspiracy zone for most people, but it’s not a coincidence that the sort of self-righteous losers who attend Mock UN and student-leadership conferences are actually being put in charge of major corporations, resource-rich NGOs, and other organizations they manifestly have no business running. No wonder nothing works anymore.

It does go too far into the conspiracy zone for me. I don't disbelieve that at least some of this exists, but that people are literally running around "beaming" people just so that they have headaches and can't function well in regular normal roles is a bridge too far. I don't believe that's happening. Of course, that doesn't mean that there isn't some of this applied to people who do reach a certain level. It's no secret even to non-conspiracy-like people that Epstein and blackmail have been used to control many of our politicians, and there's even the slightly conspiracy zone idea, but one that's quite believable, that you can't even rise to a certain level very easily without allowing yourself to engage in blackmailable activities, because you're literally shut out of them until you do. 

It doesn't need to be quite the crazy Anonymous Conservative level of "American Stasi" and beaming and testing of smart little kids to still be effective at the top levels of corporations, NGOs, and politics at a much more low-key yet still substantial level of activity.

The technological distraction. Between video games, weed, and pornography, young men simply don’t have the burning desire to succeed that they once did. Mediocrity is much more pleasant now, and much more personally satisfying, than it ever used to be. Why bother working hard to buy a nice car when you can drive a better one for free in a racing game any time you want? Pleasure on-demand is inevitably demotivational and debilitating.

This is undeniable. And it needs not have anything said about it, I don't think. Especially when the most successful way to rise above that kind of mediocrity is not to achieve better, but to sell out to the powers that be.

Sigh. Trump's more or less (so far) success at draining the swamp could be a sea change, but it will take time, the swamp is weakened but not gone, and the damage of generations of this—starting with the Boomers on down—will take more generations to completely undo, I'm sure. 

NYC

What's his name, the communist Islamicist anti-American who won the mayoral race for NYC; how did it happen? Wring hands.

The answer is pretty obvious, although hardest hit will be virtue-signaling conservatives who applauded it happening until they suddenly realized what it meant. If they've even yet realized what caused the election result.

The big White Flight dip in the 70s is pretty notable too, of course. Same thing happened in most inner cities, perhaps most visibly in Detroit. Thanks, George Romney. You are ultimately responsible for this. You and everyone else who embraced your hateful, anti-American ideology that America wasn't for Americans and had to be stolen from them and given to any rough savage who came along and demanded access to it.

Vox Day said, about this same graph: 

The result of the mayoral election was not only inevitable, it was one of the primary objectives of the architects of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. This is exactly what those who hate America, hate Christianity, and hate Western Civilization have sought to accomplish since the turn of the 20th Century. Note the steep 25 percent decline in a decade after 1965.

This is the intended result of the so-called “Melting Pot”. It always was. And as New York City has gone, as Minneapolis has gone, so too will go the rest of the United States if Americans do not take control of their country back from the foreigners who have usurped their right to rule themselves.

And contra the New and Improved Nickles Fuentes, an American is not anyone who was born inside the geographic boundaries of the United States, or who was given a piece of paper by the federal government, but rather, the legitimate Posterity of the American revolutionaries for whom the Constitution was written.

Conservatives conserve nothing. They couldn’t conserve America. They couldn’t even conserve the definition of “American”. Which is why conservatism is not, and cannot be, part of the solution.

It's not rocket science. It's literally right there in the Preamble.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

There's been a lot of sophistry around who exactly are the Posterity of the Founding Fathers, but it's blatant and obvious sophistry, because the meaning of the words are quite clear, especially in context. The people who want it to mean something else clearly are afraid—and rightly so, in many cases—that they don't have a legitimate claim of being the Posterity of the Founding Fathers, therefore they engage in sophistry to blow smoke in the faces of the actual Posterity of the Founding Fathers and confuse them in an attempt to claim their legacy for themselves. 

Sorta like a certain stereotype of a certain tribe of lawyers and other corrupt rentiers who engage in stereotypical sophistry in an attempt to bamboozle populations all over Western Civilization since the time that they were a minor yet troublesome Middle eastern tribe in the Roman Empire. Hmm...

Israel

As an aside, I think the Gaza peace announced today is good news, of course. I don't, however, think it's an issue of overwhelming national or global interest; it's a regional story for the Middle Eastern region. It's telling to see how many news aggregators and commentators talk about it like it's the most substantial thing that's happened in the news for years. Now, its no mystery why Breitbart, for instance, is all about it. Breitbart is significantly more interested in Israel than in America. But it really raises the question. If antifa is being pursued specifically as a foreign interference in domestic affairs, then how can you ignore the Israeli elephant in the room?

And yet stupid Boomer conservatives do exactly that.

Also, check out this take. I have no idea if it's true or not, but it certainly seems reasonable to me.

https://charlesjohnson.substack.com/p/is-qatar-in-nato-now-qatar-and-turkiye?r=lp6h7

Don't listen to the fakes

Charlie Kirk seemed like, mostly, a decent guy. His schtick of going on campuses and having polite discourse with people was a cool idea, sure. But he was also a fake. I never understood why this guy who I had literally never heard of one day was suddenly propped up as a literal teenager as the next big thing in political commentary. It was clear from the beginning that he was manufactured. Watching some of the things that he promulgated change in front of my eyes was also instructive. Seeing him and Jack Posobiec and Matt Walsh, or whomever the other one was, post almost the exact same message, nearly word for word, one day was another.

Being a (probably) decent, nice guy doesn't mean that I trusted him or paid much attention to what he said, or thought that he was someone that I should have given much attention to. Vox Day found the following quotes. Along with some of his commentary: Selling Out is NOT Success

This is why one should never, ever, trust any “influencer” or “opinion leader” or “activist” who rapidly goes from nothing to hundreds of thousands of “followers”. It’s also why I pay no attention to the likes of Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and every other shill who sells opinions for donor cash.

CHARLIE KIRK: Just lost another huge Jewish donor. $2 million a year because we won’t cancel Tucker. I’m thinking of inviting Candace.

CHARLIE KIRK: Jewish donors play into all the stereotypes. I cannot and will not be bullied like this.

CHARLIE KIRK: Leaving me no choice but to leave the pro Israel cause.

Now, there are a lot of things that can be gleaned from these three texts written by Charlie Kirk. But first and foremost, mark that he was being propped up to the tune of $2 million per year from just one of his “donors”. It doesn’t matter by whom, it doesn’t matter for what, the salient point is that all of these guys are fake.

All of these characters are quite literally manufactured. Their opinions aren’t real, they are purchased and directed by their donors and investors.

If someone isn’t actually selling an actual product or service, then what he is selling, unbeknownst to most of those who listen to him, is his voice and his words.

Of course, this was shortly before he was assassinated in a kind of suspicious manner in a way that looks shockingly pro for a mincing weirdo who is unlikely to have been any good at being a professional hit man. And, as Ron Unz has pointed out repeatedly, who's most notorious for assassinating their critics?

The Browning of America

Ben Shapiro revealed something that he probably wishes that he could unsay a few years ago when he said, and I quote, "I don't give a damn about the browning of America." Well, sure you don't. Because you're a fake American. You certainly give a damn about the potential browning of Israel, don't you? But my, how fast the Overton Window can move! Conservative Inc. has gotten a new message, and rarely has it been so obviously coordinated, not grassroots or viral, and subject to a top-down strategic roll-out. Heck, the language is literally exactly the same from these so-called unrelated "influencers" of "Boomer Conservatism."

Sure, sure. Third World immigration. It's not not a problem. But what about repatriating the Jews? Nobody suggested that? And do Africans (via American slavery generations ago) count as Third Worlders? Questions begged and not answered. I'm not sure if they're really ready for this, but they also know that they can't hide behind their outdated civic nationalist pose anymore. 

UPDATE: Right on cue...

New economics

I'm not necessarily surprised, but I am disappointed by the vast expression of economic illiteracy and the belief in obviously false narratives that I see in the wake of the Trumpian trade policy. Here's a redacted quote of today's Z-man post.

Last week, Trump stunned the world by following through on what he has been promising since he came down the escalator in 2015. This set off the Great Trump Stock Market Crash, which promises to continue this week as the rest of the world responds to the new world order. The yesterday men and the crazies are sure this is the Great Depression, because their history of the world starts in the 1930s. It is a stylized history, such that every modern event can be jammed into the 1930s, the 1960s, or the 1980s. Since they are sure Trump is secretly Hitler, this must be the 1930s—even though we have witnessed many stock market corrections in the last thirty years. The COVID crash, the mortgage bubble, and the dot-com bubble are easy examples.

In reality, what we are seeing is the long-overdue return to normalcy, where American economic policy is aimed at benefiting the American people, rather than abstract concepts from economics departments. If Canada has tariffs on American goods, then the United States should have tariffs on Canadian goods—unless it can be shown that the American people benefit in some way from the imbalance. The same is true for every other country in the world.

Of course, the reality is that the market isn't the economy, and isn't the only indicator of its health. As many have pointed out, not only is this a correction to normalcy, but jobs have come back significantly more than expected and projected. Wall Street may be struggling, but that's only fair, because Main Street is finally rebounding after decades of being stifled to prop up Wall Street. 

One of the weird things about decades of American trade policy is that it has created the same sense of entitlement as government racial policy. Just as nonwhites think they are entitled to be near white people without conditions, the world thinks it has a right to access the American market without conditions. This is most obvious in Europe, which has taken this lopsided arrangement for granted. They have also assumed they are entitled to American defense, while doing nothing in return.

The logic behind this arrangement has always been nonsense—but people love to believe in nonsense, especially their own. We see this with the free trade crowd, who are claiming tariffs will only harm the American people. If that were true, then the rest of the world should have been miserable for the last thirty years. Further, if that were true, then the rest of the world now has a chance to usher in a golden age for their people by eliminating their tariffs instead of raising them.

As he says, and I'll not quote this part, the reduction in the scope of the government, and in the tax burden on the American people is integral to this process as well. Main Street, i.e., regular Americans, have been subsidizing Wall Street and the globalists for decades. This is the scope of the realignment. So yeah, Wall Street will take a hit. But the only people who should really fear that are people who make their money in unproductive, globalist investments. Mitt Romney's income is at risk. Mine isn't. 

More important are the changes in how we think and talk about the economy. For the longest time, the economy has been treated as a god. Americans were expected to tolerate anything to please it. If the economy demanded Haitian cannibals in your town, you had to accept it. If the economy demanded that the quality of your hand tools decline, you just lived with it. If the economy required you to work two jobs to make ends meet, then you did it. The economy was a remorseless god.

This sort of thinking makes sense to an alien overclass that sees the United States as an opportunity to be exploited. It does not make sense if the ruling elite feels a connection and obligation to the people. Shifting from the old transactional model of economics to a nationalistic model requires a new language. Simply pointing at a graph that trends upward is no longer enough. The political class will now have to possess some economic literacy.

Bingo!

In the end, Bessent is correct. America cannot continue to create credit in the financial system and borrow trillions to hire government workers. We either have an orderly transition back to a normal economy, or we have a disorderly transition. The name for that is collapse—and that is vastly worse than a stock market correction. This is the reason the economic elites are backing this move. They know that the people who suffer the most from failure are the elites.

And bingo again!

If Trump hadn't come along and eased the transition, the current trend would have simply led to a Soviet-style collapse and the anarchy that followed... at best. At worst, it would have been more like a Roman-style collapse where the Romans essentially ceased to exist entirely, their impoverished and decidedly smaller in numbers mixed descendants emerging many generations later as something else. Arguably, either of those could still happen. But the fact that Trump has shoved the Overton window wide open on these kinds of topics makes both of them less likely then they had been even a year or so ago.

UPDATE: And a brief quote from today's post (the next day) because it reads like an extension of the same topic.

The reason regular people feel so much economic angst, despite the appearance of material prosperity, is that we have reached the end of the line for this model, where costs are socialized but profits are privatized. If you look closely, you will see this dynamic everywhere. The offset to those cheap products at big-box stores is the collapse of American manufacturing, and the social capital that came with it. The offset to cheap labor via immigration has been stagnant wages and emergency rooms that resemble Tijuana bus stops. The offset to a rising stock market is endless financial insecurity. The hidden costs have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored.

The reason Trump is trying to usher in a new economic model is that the old one, the financialized economy, is running out of places to hide the costs of endless credit creation and the auctioning off of social capital. It is not just that we cannot borrow more money. It is that we cannot continue to socialize the costs of creating more credit money. Just as critically, we can no longer tolerate an oligarchy built on privatizing the profits of this system.

UPDATE 2: And another one, to add to it: Much of the politics of the right for the last 8+ years has been a continual battle against those who, when faced with a divergence between the model and observed reality, define "principle" as continuing to choose the model. Don't really need to add anything to that observation, do I?

A few things

I need to get back to blogging about gaming, and I will soon (or if not, I'll make another YouTube video about it, which I'm also behind on) but for today, here's some interesting data that I stumbled across by accident. First, a "perception of corruption by country" map that was presented to me in some work training, but which is distributed by some third party research group. I find it interesting, although not surprising, that it completely validates the Z-man's assertion that the war between Russia and the Ukraine is a war between the two most corrupt white nations... if you ignore Byelorussia, which is pedantically listed as a hair more corrupt than Ukraine (although I have my doubts. Besides, this is a list of perception of corruption, not necessarily actual corruption, which is certainly harder to measure.)

Mexico is also abysmally low and falling fast every time the data is refreshed. Because so many Americans do business with Mexico, our compliance training at work obviously focused heavily on dealing with Mexico. But it's also extremely relevant in our current political discussions about the Trump administration's grief with Mexico in general. It also of course is extremely relevant with regards to the expected behavior of large blocks of Mexicans living in the United States. As Vox Day has said for years, there's nothing magical about the dirt of America, where if foreigners set foot on it it magically turns them into Americans. They will continue to be Mexicans, or whatever it is that they were before they came. Therefore, patterns of behavior, genetics, and human capital by nation should be expected to continue to hold true (minus a mass admixture event, or something) regardless of geographic location. Mexicans are still Mexicans, even if they get American paperwork, and their behavior will continue to be Mexican, even in America, for the most part. Expecting anything other than that is wishful thinking, delusional, and ridiculous.

https://transparency.org/cpi is the link. The redder the color, the more corrupt the country is perceived to be. 

On another note, a lot of Canadians are bent out of shape by the tariffs, calling them unfair, and getting mad at America. Screw you, Canada! If you don't like tariffs, here's a sampling of tariffs that Canada has charged on American goods for decades (rounded to the nearest whole number):

Milk 270%

Cheese 245%

Butter 298%

Chicken 238%

Sausages 69%

Barley seed 58%

Beef 27%

Cars 25%

HVAC 45%

Vacuums 36^

Cable boxes 35%

TVs 45%

Steel 25%

Aluminum 45%

Copper 48%

I'm not impressed with their complaining, and much less impressed by their threats. The reality is that Canada's economy is extremely vulnerable, and they know it. Their tariffs are a blip on our economy. Our tariffs would be devastating to theirs. That's what happens when you have a gigantic trade surplus with much larger country that has a great many natural resources, and the capability to not need any of your imports at all. The US has funded a lot of Canada's nonsense; they have no real military to speak of, because they rely on ours. They engage in plenty of protectionism because it funds their economy at our expense, but they are a relatively small trading partner with us. On the other hand, we are a HUGE trading partner for them. 

Trudeau is, of course, a liar and an idiot, but even so-called conservative star Pierre Poilievre is sounding kinda whiny, calling Canada America's best friend because they sent a handful of soldiers to Afghanistan years ago or something like that. He says we stabbed them in the back (by reciprocating their own behavior?) and saying that we're already paying higher gas prices (my local gas price is down at least $0.25 in the last couple of days).

Canada isn't America's best friend. I've known too many Canadians to believe that, even regardless of the policies of their government. Canadians are smug and arrogant, and look at Americans with contempt, for the most part. Canada is the leftover New French, who resent the rest of Canada and the British Canadians, even as they rely on them financially, and the rest of Canada are Americans who do the same to America. They were afraid of freedom in 1776, were comfortable with living under tyranny, and continue to do so. But they have the same dynamic with America; they resent us and dislike us even as they are completely dependent on us financially. Their threats to sell their oil to China or India ring pretty hollow; they're pretty much allowed themselves to be invaded and purchased by China and India anyway.

Rather than being our best friend, Canada is our toxic, narcissistic ex-girlfriend, who still depends on us, but hates us in part because of that financial dependence. I have little sympathy for what could potentially happen to their economy if they continue to attempt to exploit and tweak us. You asked for it, sweet-cheeks. If you don't like it, you should have had a much better pattern of behavior in how you treated us. We're completely and utterly justified in putting the screws to you until you shape up, because you still haven't moved out of our basement and set yourself up as a legitimately independent country.

Scolds

Edited and shortened from: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=31806 

[T]he last half century of the internet demonstrates the reality of large societies, whether they are digital or analog. Once a society gets to a certain size factionalism is inevitable. The message board experience is the best example, as these platforms created lots of tools to allow people to exist on the same platform but ignore the people from factions they did not like. It never worked. The only solution was peaceful separation in the form of separate private platforms.

This makes perfect sense when you learn about the Dunbar number. This is the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. The generally agreed upon number is one-hundred-and-fifty. For many people, the number is much lower, so this means in any large group, the typical person will have a sense of belonging with a minority of the people. Consequently, they will be alienated from the rest and there is a short trip from alienation to hostility.

This explains the general sense of unhappiness in modern America. The mass media age has not brought people together as our politicians endless[ly] blather on about all the time, but rather increased the sense of alienation. The normal person is now bombarded with the presence of alien, perhaps hostile strangers. Every online experience comes with someone trying to scold you, lecture you, harass you or they are simply outside what you consider to be normal and acceptable.

Digital life is making analog life less tolerable. [...] [W]e see the horrors of the virtual world jumping into the analog world, as these people now do to our institutions what they did to the internet. For example, spiteful mutants have taken over the court system in New York. Just as we saw with social media, they are using their power to harass normal people. They have litigated VDare into closure simply because they can. This is not much different from what the scolds did to social media platforms with moderation.

New York is like Twitter before Musk. They have law-fared the NRA into bankruptcy, charged Trump with various invented crimes, levied a fine on Trump for denying he committed a crime that has never been demonstrated, litigated VDare out of existence despite never alleging any wrongdoing and sent a growing number of innocent white men to prison for the crime of being white men. Douglas Mackey is the most famous, but there are others like Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman.

There is another important lesson here, a scary one too. The internet has proven too big to control in this way. The scolds got the upper hand for a while, but the cost of endless policing exceeded the carrying capacity. People forget, but the reason Musk was able to buy Twitter is they were in serious financial trouble. He fired over two-thirds of the staff, the scolds, and harpies, because these people did nothing but immiserate the people who kept the site running.

This will apply even more to a continent sized country. New York can make itself hostile to normal people, but normal people can leave. After what New York has done to VDare, every reformer now knows they have to shop for safe jurisdictions to avoid this sort of problem. The same will be true for industries that know they are threatened by the kook squads. The gun makers are fleeing the Northeast because they know better than anyone that there is no reasoning with fanatics.

The point here is that we will see in the analog world what we have seen in the digital world for the last decades. A great disaggregation is unfolding in which normal people seek refuge from the areas now controlled by the fanatics. Further, the social media experience has shown that you cannot last long when you are overrun by fanatics, even when you are systematically robbing them. Even if peaceful separation is not possible, people will seek it anyway.

In the end, this is the reason to be optimistic. A society in which people like Fani Willis and Letitia James are doing anything more than pulling a cart is a society that will eventually destroy itself. For any human organization to survive it must be run for the interest of [the] normal by the sober minded and talented. This is true for a social media platform, and it is true for a country. Nature cannot long tolerate the unfit and human nature will be compelled to do the same eventually.

This is the only reason we had peace throughout the late 19th and 20th century. Following the scolds declaring war against the South, the men of the South mostly sought peace afterwards by migrating West to the empty frontier, to escape the predatory existence of the scolds. It's only been (relatively) recently that that is no longer possible; that the frontier, and separation by distance and local culture has failed to protect people from their toxic presence. I still remember in the 80s when I was young that different places had different culture, and everyone pretty much understood and accepted that, except for a handful of spiteful busybodies who felt it was their purpose in life to hall monitor the entire world. This has always been the Yankee burden, and the critical flaw in their national? regional? cultural? character. Not sure exactly what a Yankee is in this regard. Are they a nation unto themselves; separate and distinct from the Tidewater gentility or the backwoods borderers, like my own people? Or, to use David Hackett Fisher's term, maybe they're a "folkway", although I'd argue that few people understand what it meant by that word exactly.

The Z-man seems to be pointing towards separation, however, which indicates the eventual disaggregation of what was once "One Nation Under God" into more than one nation, and likely few of them having anything to do with God. Of course, what "nation" is the scold? Sure, they tend to congregate and have a high preponderance amongst the original Yankee population, which is why the Northeast is so toxic. But they have spread all over the country, intermarried and intermingled everywhere. The Left Coast is essentially a Yankee colony, and most large urban areas have their stink on them, even in Red States. Their admission of tens of millions of hostile and culturally incompatible aliens into our country was a deliberate design to weaken the ability of normal people everywhere to easily withstand or separate from them, because the hostile aliens tend to get favored treatment from the scolds. 

But he makes a good point. There's no living with these people, and eventually people will completely run out of options in trying to avoid them. What happens then?