He may be a bad thinker but he sure does know how to make fun of the Cloud People and their nonsense. It certainly gave me a much-needed chuckle.
Tag: ZMan
The ZMan Sounds Optimistic Too.
I guess it’s not just me. Spring is busting out everywhere and even the dissidents are ebullient. Well sorta.
The Z-Man Thinks Our Government System is Obsolete
The Z-Man has a very clever analogy between government and software systems.
He compares government reform to software revision. but he makes the case that at a certain point the program needs to be replaced with something new. This corresponds to revolution. My hope is he’s wrong about what needs to be done.
ZMan Reacts to Christopher Caldwell’s “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties”
Caldwell rights about the deleterious effects caused by the affirmative action legislation in the 1960’s.
Surprisingly, the ZMan seems to think some of the views of the Dissident Right are leaking through to mainstream society. I’ll have to read Caldwell’s book to see what I think.
The ZMan Addresses the New Serfdom
A very interesting article by the ZMan on the result of only having one retailer, one bank, one local college, one local law firm. Even the rich folks have nowhere to send some of their children to work. He is right about this, I’ve seen it affecting even the cloud people. Now that the working class has been liquidated, they’re coming for the rest of us. Oh well, at least we’ll get bread and circuses for a while.
A Convincing Critique of Free Market Capitalism
Another Friday, another podcast by the Voice of Saruman. This week the ZMan’s talk was a condemnation of Free Market Capitalism or as he characterized it “Marketism.” Now, I’m far from an adherent to all of the ZMan’s opinions but I think it would benefit even the most strident libertarian to listen to this argument.
In my youth I was a pretty strong adherent to the idea that whatever I built was my own business and the government had no right to tell me how I could run it. But after witnessing the stalinist policies of Silicon Valley and their cronies in the rest of big business I’m perfectly willing to see the Department of Justice crush them if for no other reason than to pay them back for the damage they’ve done to regular people that ran afoul of their twitter mobs and sjw finks.
But I digress. Forget the ZMan’s other dissident right beliefs. Listen to his arguments and examples. He makes a whole lot of sense. Capitalism is not a religion it’s a tool. If it doesn’t serve the needs of the people then it’s a bad tool and needs to be fixed.
The ZMan ExplainsWhy We Lost the Culture Wars
The ZMan is a self-avowed bad thinker but no one can accuse him of not providing a cogent explanation for how mainstream conservatism ceded the culture to the Left. This is a clear and convincing explanation for how we got to the sorry state we are in today.
Crushing the Coup is Not Optional
Last Monday I put up a post about Matt Taibbi’s article on the “permanent coup” going on inside the Deep State against President Trump. On Friday I was listening to the Voice of Saruman (aka the ZMan) on his weekly podcast and at minute 35 he had a segment on The Permanent Coup! It was his thoughts on Taibbi’s article. The ZMan read a good chunk of the article aloud and then gave his take on it. I think he said just about what I said agreeing with Taibbi. Apparently great minds think alike. Well, on some things anyway. Basically, the premise is if the security state gets to decide who can be president then we’re already in a post-democratic country and it’s only a matter of time before the peasants grab their torches and pitchforks. The ZMan took things a little farther than I did and said he thinks the chances of reforming the security agencies is very slim. Come to think of it, I think Taibbi came to a similar conclusion and sort of predicted that a reaction in the form of a dictatorial move could be imminent.
So, listening to the podcast got me thinking about all this again. I used to think that enduring the “Resistance” was just the price we had to pay to get on with the job of changing the Republican Party. But now I see the Deep State as a parasite that has hijacked the government and subverted the lawful working of our democracy. And the more I thought about it the more convinced I became that firing, prosecuting and imprisoning the conspirators was just as important as the other priorities of the Trump administration. All the way back to J. Edgar Hoover the FBI has been blackmailing American presidents and calling the shots behind the scenes. After the Patriot Act, they’ve been given surveillance weapons that in concert with Democrat allies in the Courts, Media and Congress can disrupt every action of an Administration that they don’t like.
And it gets worse. The Democrats and probably some of the imbecilic Republicans are willing to go down this road. They used the Mueller investigation to hound out of office and even imprison men that had done nothing wrong. They are trying to delegitimize a presidency and criminalize the normal workings of the executive branch. Really, the only way forward in this situation is to have Barr start firing the upper echelons of all the intelligence agencies until they run out of cabalists. And not just the first couple of rungs. He’ll have to decimate the upper management level in order to demoralize the middle management layer enough to start getting the cooperation needed. What is needed is a whistleblower. And the only way to get one is to remove the senior cabalists and thus remove the fear they inspire in their subordinates.
But will Barr do it? He worked with all of these guys for years and probably belongs to the same clubs and social organizations they do. He probably understands their point of view and the elitist attitude that informs it. And he probably realizes how deadly serious are the consequences of crossing these people.
But here is where I differ from those on the dissident right. I think it will happen. I think that we have reached a point where our side knows it’s no longer possible to kowtow to the Deep State. I think it will happen. Maybe heads won’t actually roll but there will be criminal indictments and convictions and powerful men will go to prison. I think it will happen and I know it has to if we are going to remain a free nation and not an Orwellian nightmare state.
Barr has been pursuing the origins of the Russiagate scam and it appears he has managed to unravel a loose end. If he indicts some of the middle rankers like Peter Strzok or even reaches up to McCabe that should go a long way to getting one of these rats to sing. So, I remain hopeful.
But as I said at the beginning, nailing one of these rats is almost useless. The whole rotten structure of the intelligence agencies has to demolished and rebuilt on a basis that recognizes the primacy of the President’s authority over it. Without that we’ll be back where we are now sooner or later. So right up there with “build that wall” should “drain that swamp.”
Reclaiming the Family – Part 1 – Bring Back the Dowry
One of my guilty pleasures every week is listening to the Voice of Saruman on his Friday morning podcast. I refer of course to the mellifluous musings of the ZMan on his on his Z Blog’s Power Hour. As with others on the Far Right, I find it easier to agree with his analysis of the modern world’s dysfunction than with his solutions to these problems. So back on Friday I listened as he regaled us with the tragicomic details of the War of the Sexes or, as he called it, “Wammin’s World”. And after enjoying the mockery of the absurd antics of the feminists I reflected on the takeaway message that the speaker was making;
“The thing about the war of the sexes is that it is really a war on normal women. When you examine the arguments from the Left and from feminists, not a lot of it is aimed at changing male behavior that is beneficial to women. Mostly it is aimed at eliminating the protections a healthy society has for its women. The resulting social breakdown creates more unhappy women, who can then be recruited into the coven of feminism.”
With that analysis I agree wholeheartedly. But the ZMan doesn’t specify how this lunacy can be ended. Being the pragmatic fellow that I am I tried to think what practical changes could be made that might move us in the right direction.
And the first thing that came to mind was something else that the ZMan touches on often; that the way that our civilization cannibalizes its less affluent members is by setting up institutions that monetize the social capital of the family in ways that end up destroying the family. So, for example, parents bankrupt themselves to send their daughters to expensive colleges and this ensures that the daughters will attempt to recoup that investment by entering the economy as corporate drones. And during their time in both college and the corporate world it will be drummed into them that their real value and their happiness is as drones, busily making up power point slides and decorating their cubicles with colorful diversity slogans. And so, between working in the corporate environment and drinking the Kool-Aid of female empowerment they either never get around to marriage and children or they raise their one or two children by proxy with nannies and daycare. And the next generation doesn’t even know what a normal family life even is. This is social capital (families trying to do the right thing) being monetized by the colleges and corporations. The schools and the corporations that use these women profit immensely from the process. But the families that underwrite the whole thing are basically cutting their own throats by doing it. And flooding the labor force with women depresses the value of labor for the men trying to find a place in the world too. This along with the rampant female affirmative action makes it more than likely that a man will find his wife making more money than him. This further degrades the likelihood of a normal happy family relationship for all involved. Society might as well just turn us into Soylent Green and save the time.
So, the practical changes should be a way to avoid this whole family destroying cycle. And the first change would be, Don’t send your daughters to college. I could expand it to don’t send any of your kids to college but let’s start small. As the father of daughters who went to expensive colleges, I can tell you that not doing this would first of all restore solvency to many an American family and also allow families to provide much needed help to their daughters when they want to get married. In other words, reinstitute the dowry. This might sound almost medieval but can you imagine if the money that a father spends on his daughter’s college education could be diverted to a down payment on a house? That could be enough to allow his son-in-law to support his new family with just his own salary. In other words, letting a woman stay home to raise her kids. Additionally, if parents don’t have to bankrupt themselves to turn their daughters into childless drones then those parents will have the wherewithal to help the young married couples when the pitfalls of life intrude on their world; illness, unemployment and Acts of God.
And a non-financial benefit of this arrangement would be the restoration of the normal relationships within the extended family. Parents would be respected and appreciated for the financial and familial leadership they would represent when decisions like home purchasing occurred. Husbands as the primary bread winners would be appreciated by their wives and this would give the men the psychological reinforcement to value their roles that they currently lack. But most importantly, it would allow young women to fulfill their most valuable roles in our world. They would be the mothers that every child needs and deserves. Modern society has denigrated and devalued the role stay at home mothers play in producing happy and sane children. Anyone who has seen how children are raised today knows that it is a miracle that any of them avoid becoming psychopaths. This alone would justify any productivity to our economy associated with women withdrawing from the workplace during their childbearing and childrearing years. But another facet that people rarely discuss is the satisfaction that a woman gains from being a mom. Now granted there are some women who are unsuited for motherhood. I wish there were a blood test that could identify these poor things and redirect them to something where they’ll do less harm like loan sharking. But for the majority of healthy well-adjusted women motherhood is fulfilling as well as extremely valuable to society.
Reclaiming the Family – Part 2 – The Family Business
The ZMan has an Article About How the Dissident Right Differs from the Paleocons
His point is that those purged from institutions by the triumphant Left have either to abandon the legitimacy of those institutions and exchange them for the outsider dissident society or forever survive on the margins of those institutions, a pariah and a somewhat willing accomplice of its outrages. Pretty interesting. I guess it precludes the idea of reclaiming those institution.