Jim's Blog

Every US intervention against Islam backfires.

Progressives believe that all religions, rightly understood, are Progressivism.

Viewed as a cynical lie, it is working pretty well. They actually are reasonably successful at remaking Islam into progressivism.

Unfortunately, it is not entirely a cynical lie. It is also sincerely held insanity. It is quite difficult for the Cathedral to do entirely cynical lies. Their stock in trade is not lies, but delusions.

Meanwhile, Muslims have been figuring out what is up, and are counterinfiltrating. As well as progressives lying that they are Muslims, we have Muslims lying that they are progressives. The former tend wake up with their throats cut by the latter.

Hence Major Hasan, Rotherdam, and Benghazi Embassy. The story of Arab Spring is a story of the counterinfiltration.

When Obama told the mercenaries to stand down, to not retake the embassy, it was not so that he could fool the American people by denying that Al Qaeda troops were operating freely in Libya. It was so that he could fool himself by denying that Al Qaeda troops were operating in Libya.

I don’t think progressives are going to succeed at remaking Islam into progressivism, and if they do succeed, I don’t think it would be a good thing.

A better solution would be to convert Muslims to the peace of Westphalia and monarchism.

If an Islamic country is ruled by a King, and he decides for war, he demonstrates superior holiness, but will very likely get killed. So he decides for peace.

If an Islamic country is a democracy, and a voter votes for war, he demonstrates superior holiness, but, being one vote of many, his vote makes little difference to his prospects of being killed. So he votes for war.

The problem with Islamic State is that the Caliph is elected for life by the consensus of the most holy. Which pretty much guarantees that soon your Caliph is going to be holier than Mohammed. Indeed he already is.

The Caliph should be elected for life by Sunni monarchs, and should be unable to declare holy war except in consultation with them. If anyone else declares holy war, this is infidelity to Caliph, and the holy warrior loses his head for irreligion and apostacy.

Bored now, which is why I have not mentioned it in a while.

Democracy produced the wrong result in Ukraine, so the Cathedral staged a coup.  The instrument of the coup was the Maidan movement, which is supposedly an indigenous Ukrainian movement, but its web page is in English in the distinctive dialect of the American ruling elite.  Intercepted phone conversation revealed that State Department regarded the nominal leaders of the Ukraine as menial functionaries which they got to appoint and dismiss.

Russia counterproposed regional autonomy, so that there would be some Ukrainian independence from the Cathedral.  The USG was not having any.

So, war.  This looks like straight USG imperialism.  If, as seems likely, the final outcome is that the Ukraine gets partitioned between Russia and the USG, as Poland was partitioned between Hitler and Stalin, that will not be Putin’s fault.  He made several attempts at compromise that would have preserved Ukrainian independence.

The interesting implication is that if the Ukraine is run by low level menials of the state department, by people a long way down in the State Department hierarchy, then most or all of Europe is run by low level menials of the state department, as Mencius Moldbug depicted it long before these events.

Lately Putin seems to be moving to a straight imperial position, in which Ukraine will be partitioned, but really,  don’t much care.  What is interesting about the Ukraine is what it tells us about the rest of the world.    If a menial in the state department treats the nominal leaders of the Ukraine as considerably lesser menials, what of other leaders of supposedly independent nations?

As you know, the entire west, in suspicious unison, simultaneously decided to allow itself to be overrun by third world hordes.

When Australia broke ranks, this was deemed illegal under international law, though oddly, until very recently international law did not require countries to allow themselves to be overrun by third world hordes.  The UN took a break from condemning Israel to condemn Australia.  Every international human rights organization now believes that economic refugees from anywhere in the world have a human right to settle in Australia.

This pattern of sporadic minor resistance suggests that the USG empire is ruled through soft power, and soft power is, in fact soft.  It is not that when the prime minister of Australia disobeys he gets shot.  Rather it is that the television stations, radio stations, and universities supposedly owned by the government of Australia announce that the prime minister is violating human rights.  Except when, as in the Ukraine, it turns hard and they start shelling schools and apartment buildings, which is terrible when Israel does it, but no big problem when the “government” of the Ukraine does it.

While every human rights organization everywhere condemns Australian violation of human rights in intercepting boats on the high seas full of illegal immigrants, they don’t seem to notice any violation of human rights when the Ukrainian government shells civilian targets.  That is soft power.  On the other hand, when the Ukrainian government shells civilian targets, that is hard power.

Soft power is a bunch of supposedly independent, supposedly non government organizations, speaking in one voice, their master’s voice. One day everyone spontaneously and suddenly agrees it is a human right to move to formerly white majority countries, just as it is a human right for a man to be a woman – but freedom of speech and freedom of association are no longer human rights.

Egypt proposes a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in which everyone ceases to fire.

The (Jewish) US Secretary for state proposes a ceasefire in which Hamas gets a new route to import rockets, now that Egypt is trying to stop them from being smuggled through Egypt, and a big pile of money with which to import them.

There are a lot of things wrong with Jews, but being sneakily cohesive is not one of them.

One of the things that the fans of the theory of Democratic Peace, the theory that democracies tend to be at peace with each other, tend to forget is that Gaza and Israel are both democracies.

If you are a Muslim, you demonstrate superior holiness by voting in favor of wars with infidels that may well result in your death, just as if you are white, you demonstrate superior holiness by voting for your country to become non white.

If Gaza was ruled by a King, then if that King was to decide for war, that decision would make him holier, but might well get him killed.

But if a voter in Gaza votes for war, his vote makes him holier, but makes absolutely no difference to his chance of being killed, since it is only one vote of millions. From the point of view of the voter, the ideal outcome is that he votes for war, but is, alas, outvoted, by all those inferior people less holy than himself, much as from the point of view of a white voter, the ideal outcome is that he votes for his country to become brown, but gets outvoted by all those ignorant racist hateful stupid whites.

Thus we get Californication, as Californian whites flee California to whiter and more conservative places, and then vote for those places to become progressive and nonwhite.

To stop a democratic Gaza from making war, need to kill a large proportion of the population. Very possibly all of them.

If you get competition for superior holiness, the holy people get ever holier until eventually the most holy position becomes suicidal. And in a democracy, the holiest position, despite being suicidal, will win the election.

Government is an illusion, a pretense in which everyone pretends to believe, for fear of what would be revealed should the pretense be seriously doubted. The US spent an immense amount of blood and treasure setting up a Iraqi government in its own image, and one morning that government softly and silently vanished away like the dream it always was. It seems to have been replaced by alarmingly numerous tribal, clan, and religious militias, of which ISIS is merely one of far too many.

Government is not a being like an elephant, nor a physical object like a tall building, but rather, a thought, an idea, ideas about how force shall be used. And ideas can change at the speed of thought. Ideas can change without anyone quite noticing for a time.

The patriarchal clan and tribe is the natural form of government, and any government on a larger scale has big problems for which we don’t really have any good solution, even though we have been working on this problem for thousands of years. We make synthetic clans, the church or the party. The result is apt to be a party state, one synthetic clan ruling many. It is oppressive. If the ruling clan loses cohesion, members of the ruling clan act more like mobile bandits, for example Jon Corzine, and it gets more oppressive. The rich are on the revolving door between regulators and regulated, for example Bush the second and Jon Corzine. Those capitalists that make their initial money legitimately, for example Elon Musk, then buy their way into the revolving door, becoming political activists, investing in politics with the intent that political authority will make them richer. Musk’s business plan is that car makers will be forced to buy his stuff in proportion to how many cars that they sell, which means that ultimately the ordinary car buyer will be forced to pay for Musk’s stuff regardless of whether he is using it or not, regardless of whether it is useful to anyone or not, which business plan pretty much guarantees that Musk’s stuff will not be useful to anyone. It is hard to make useful stuff. If your attention is focused elsewhere, and it really does not matter much whether the stuff you make is useful or not, it is not going to be useful.

The Iraqi government vanished when it came under attack by a few thousand competent well trained well armed men employing only personal weapons striking in areas far away from the centers of government power. Word of shots fired far away on the periphery caused government to disappear at the center without a shot fired anywhere near the centers of power. It is interesting to reflect on how much chaos Christopher Dorner caused when he launched his one man war on the Los Angeles Police Department, using hit and run tactics rather similar to those employed by ISIS in Iraq. If one competent man did that, what could half a dozen have done?

The revolving door spins scary fast. Jon Corzine, the man of many hats, regulator and regulated, the most regulated man in the world, took over MF Global, presumably on the basis that he would protect them from regulation if in charge, harm them with regulation if not in charge.

Twelve years ago, this sort of behavior would have been unthinkable. People would have screamed “conflict of interest”. There has been a quite sudden change in the political and economic culture, from typical first world to typical third world.

MF Global managed other people’s money, which Jon Corzine promptly stole. He expended the money of MF Global’s clients largely on buying political influence.

This is classic mobile bandit behavior. Instead of shearing the sheep, he skinned them. He would have made a lot more money steadily milking them over a lengthy period. His real asset was political and regulatory power. I conjecture it was slipping away, and he had to do something in a hurry.

It is difficult to see how to fix this problem. A Tsar is not a solution, due to the agent/principle problem. One needs a ruling elite with asabiyah, a harder and more subtle problem. Asabiyah is easily undermined by small amount of diversity, and I rather think that this is what happened twelve years ago – that the election of Obama is a symptom of the third worldization of our ruling elite, after the fashion of Detroit, and now Chicago. Can’t have a Tsar without an aristocracy, and Alexander the Liberator destroyed his aristocracy, replacing it with left wing bureaucrats who found that the more leftism, the more underlings the bureaucracy acquired.

Government needs to be one, which is hard, and the more government does, the harder it is to be one, and the less asabiyah it has, the harder it is to be one. Jon Corzine’s career tells us that our government is not one. Whereupon government suffers from the problems it purports to solve, prisoners dilemma, and tragedy of the commons, public funds and regulation being a commons.

The problem is not that they are abducting women and selling them as wives, but that they are abducting Christian girls and selling them to Muslim men.  This is not bad for Christian girls.  It is bad for Christian men.

The Cathedral, oddly, seems far more frightened of Christian Holy War than Muslim Jihad (observe their disturbing response to ethnic cleansing by Christians in the Central Africa Republic), so is reluctant to mention who is being abducted.

When group A abducts girls from group B, if it makes the girls available for general public use by group A members, this is extremely bad for the girls, since no one man has an incentive to take care of them.  But if it assigns them to particular individual men of group A, then not only does that individual have an incentive to take care of the girl and her children, but the apparatus of violence and coercion that made the transfer likely means that he has greater paternal security, and greater reason to expect the girl to stick around, and thus greater incentive to care for the girl and her children than occurs in the Cathedral approved free love/leking outcome.  Boko Haram believes that western education for girls is bad, because it indoctrinates them with immoral and self destructive ideas, and that girls should be married off at an early age.  Seems to me that they are obviously right about this.  The success in Christian societies of the Cathedral program of undermining marriage means that Christian men lack incentive to defend their women from Muslim men, as we see not only in Africa, but in Sweden and England.

The Ukraine, like most of the former communist lands, experienced a five finger conversion to capitalism. State assets mysteriously wound up in the hands of some individuals. Gennady Kernes was prominent among those individuals. In the Ukraine the new plutocrats have proven less competent at utilizing assets than stealing them. Ukraine lacks law, tradition, and custom for the orderly exchange of capital assets, so, in the absence of Gennady Kernes, his fortune is probably sliding into other people’s hands. He was probably shot by some random militiaman who was worried he was next in line to be arrested, but his assassination must be making some Ukrainians wealthy and a lot of Ukrainians think that they could get very wealthy by the suitable application of violence.

What Ukraine needs is an environment where productive assets have clear owners, and are capable of being exchanged, sold, and mortgaged. That Gennady Kernes title was “Mayor”, not “CEO”, that he was arresting people, and himself threatened with arrest and execution by the authorities that the Cathedral recognizes as legitimate suggests that it lacks that environment and lacked it even before the coup. (more…)

Government is a shared pretense. We imagine governments into existence. Blatant puppetry can puncture the illusion.

The NY Times tells us

One of the armored columns stopped when a crowd of people, many of whom were drinking or yelling taunts, gathered on the road before them. Later in the day its commander agreed to hand over the soldiers’ assault rifles to the very separatists they were sent to fight.

Another column from the same unit, the 25th Dnipropetrovsk paratrooper brigade, surrendered not only its weapons but also the tracked and armored vehicles it had arrived in, letting militants park them as trophies, under a Russian flag, in a central square.

A pro-Russian militant climbed into the driver’s seat of one of the vehicles and spun it around on its tracks, screeching and roaring, to please the watching crowd.

The events on Wednesday underscored the weakness of the new Ukrainian government as it begins critical talks about the country’s future with the United States, Russia and the European Union in Geneva on Thursday. Officials unable to exercise authority over their own military seem increasingly powerless to contain a growing rebellion by pro-Russian militants.

The core function of government is to enable the army and the police to act as one. An army needs something outside itself to give it cohesion – the gods, the spirits of real or mythical common ancestors, the man born to rule, the mandate of heaven. Failing that, the will of the people. What has the Ukraine government got?