Meanwhile the main story goes unaddressed, as usual: The Trump administration is a materialist horror show without a soul, whose god is money, which treats our allies as freeloaders

Everything is reduced to a mere transaction.

It is libertarianism writ large.

 

 

Tucker Carlson is another one who thinks America will be to blame for a Russian invasion of Ukraine, omitting certain uncomfortable truths

 https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/12/08/tucker_carlson_ukrainian_lobbyists_have_all_of_washington_heading_for_war.html

Tucker omits that Russia lost the Sevastopol naval base to Ukraine from 1991-2014 after the fall of the USSR, after which Putin took it back by force in the annexation of Crimea, an act of aggression unanswered by Obama. But Russia had paid rent to Ukraine for use of the base during that intervening period. It's not like they were or are entitled to it, Tucker.

George W. Bush set the precedent for all that in the first place by not answering Russia's aggression in South Ossetia in 2008.

Tucker also omits that Germany is hostage to Russian natural gas by choice, having embraced the madness of green ideology and abandoning their own sources of energy.

This spirit and habit of appeasement shouldn't be continued or encouraged, especially one in the service of a banal, libertarian, materialistic understanding of "American interests".

Joel Kotkin has come around, now calls it what it is: Global fascism

In 2018, Kotkin was still tip-toeing around the obvious, but not anymore:

Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world . . .

Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.

Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. ...

fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. ...

China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. ...

But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.

Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”

Kotkin recognizes at least that American right-wing libertarianism is part of the problem, not part of the solution:

the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.

Regrettably, however, Kotkin still does not connect this failure of the old liberal order in the West with the failure of the old moral order which gave it birth and on which it depended. This is because Kotkin still sees things in primarily materialistic terms.

Kotkin is oddly politically correct when he denounces possible recourse to nativism, which blinds him to the nativism which is at the heart of Chinese state capitalism and gives it much of its appeal and strength. He calls for "a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority" in the West, not realizing that it was Protestantism which made that even possible in the first place.

The problem of the West is spiritual, and Catholicism will never be able to rise to the occasion of refounding it as long as globo-homo defines Rome. The whole idea is inimical to the notion of founding a nation "for our posterity".

Different faces, same materialist evil

Announces "stay at home" Mar 16, "cure worse than the disease" by Mar 22

Closes Hubei Prov. Jan 23, "actions taken to contain the virus are harming the economy" Feb 3

OF COURSE Rod Dreher would agree with Peggy Noonan: He's a globe trotting connoisseur of fine hotels, food and drink, grifting off Christians who buy his snake oil for a religion now as materialistic as he is

The logic of thorough-going materialism: Since humans are nothing but animals, we might as well eat each other

Now that all objections to organ transplantation as a form of cannibalism have been effectively silenced, we're going all the way.

As Ann Coulter likes to say, Our new country's going to be great! 

CANNIBALISM IS FOUND THROUGHOUT THE ANIMAL KINGDOM—SO WHY IS IT THE ULTIMATE TABOO FOR HUMANS? | OPINION

Richard Spencer is a materialist, doesn't get that the facts which matter are meta

To Kevin Williamson and National Review conservatism is materialism, and you damn families and your schools in Kentucky and Oklahoma are the problem

It's Kevin Williamson with the mulish refusal to consider and deal with the world as we actually find it. You can spend decades trying to beat the nesting instinct out of mothers but all you'll have to show for it in the end is a different set of mothers to replace them, and a different country. Conservatives would prefer to stick with the one we've got. Libertarians should move . . . out.

Job Security Is Not Coming Back:

[I]t is better that we are not governed by poets. Our policymakers must deal with the world as it is, and our schools and families should prepare children for the world as it is, not as we might wish it were. Imagination and creativity are ... a mulish refusal to consider and deal with the world as we actually find it.

Dummy up, idiot, they're importing voters not workers

Libertarians were the Trojan Horse sacking the GOP, third world immigrants are the republic's. A purely materialistic, consumption-based country simply needs more consumers.

It was a nice country while it lasted.

National Review's Kevin Williamson goes all-in for thorough-going materialism

The Division of Labor Is the Meaning of Life:

By any meaningful standard of measurement, these are, materially speaking, the best years the human race has ever experienced—and the best years the American people have ever experienced, too. Health, wealth, safety, freedom, opportunity—never better.

Unless you were one of the approximately 1.5 billion aborted in the world since 1990.

Must see video: Tucker Carlson says socialism is exactly what we're going to get unless we stop worshipping at the altar of (capitalist) materialism

Pretty smart coming from a guy who eschews intellectualism.

For example, I wish he had said that you can't have limited government without individuals composing it who first limit themselves. He says that, and more, just not in a lapidary way. Tucker is revolting against the reductionism of Conservatism Inc. to mere materialism. He is revolting against ideology, and it's amazing. 

Here.

Bons mots:

Republicans see it as their duty to make the world safe for banking.

Questioning markets feels like apostasy to social conservatives.

Economics and culture are not separable one from the other.

Rural America now looks like Detroit.

Putting corporations first is bondage.

We tax capital at half the rate we tax labor.

Divided countries are easier to rule.

Market capitalism is not a religion. It's a tool.

Libertarians tell a lie when they say any deviation from market fundamentalism is socialism.

The damage done to conservatism by Conservatism Inc. is Orwellian

The very essence of conservatism used to be all these things, American culture, history, nation, heritage, family and faith, spokes on the wheel of its organic whole. But the libertarians have co-opted all that away and replaced it with an ideology of materialism which has erased the memory of it to the extent that the two, conservatism and libertarianism, are now indistinguishable in the popular imagination.

Like just about everyone else on the left, Joel Kotkin continues to twist himself in pretzels to avoid calling our system what it already is

State capitalism.

It is the socialism of the right, despite what names people may give it. The fascist model in which business and government cooperate now more, now less was not defeated in World War II. The superior American version simply defeated the German one, and eventually also the left's inherently weaker version in Russia.

It has triumphed globally, brought to the fore in America by the libertarian resurgence under Ronald Reagan, imitated by the jealous Euro project, and notably exported to China, where it was eagerly embraced as no threat to Marxism. To the genuine Marxist, remember, free-trade is welcome because it hastens the global revolution. Belt and Road participants, take note.

The experiential groundwork for global state capitalism was laid long ago by the King and Bank of England in their joint enterprise known as the Thirteen Colonies. Everyone imitates this now in principle if not always in particulars. But everywhere it flourishes it is facilitated by the same thing, the central banking systems which coordinate their activities through rules administered under Basel III. The contemporary exemplars of state capitalism fancy that they are substantively a world away from Hitler's Germany, because, well, the Jews. We don't kill Jews, insist these experts at mass abortion and Uyghur mass re-education. 

It's the historical resonances which bother the left in using the phrase, but the underlying facts aren't different in substance. Materialism today means not having to say you're sorry for treating people like depreciated or unappreciated assets. Older workers in the West are routinely tossed aside for being too costly. Potential younger competitors are hamstrung by a culture of costly credentialing prerequisites. When such people become worthless enough, it isn't unlikely that in some places they could stop being considered people altogether (typically where atheism reigns) so that they could be slaughtered wholesale with the same relative efficiency already applied to the unborn. The tech already exists to do this. The only question is when will the people exist who are possessed of enough nerve.   

Here's Kotkin on this so-called "new, innovative approach" which looks like nothing so much as the old Soviet Union, with its hostility centered on the middle class, its dreary blocks of drab apartment buildings, the dim pall of surveillance and conformity lurking everywhere, complete with its own privileged new class in service to the party .01 percent:

Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing concentration of wealth and power in a few hands — notably tech and financial moguls — while seeking ways to ameliorate the reality of growing poverty, slowing social mobility and indebtedness. This will be achieved not by breaking up or targeting the oligarchs, which they would fight to the bitter end, but through the massive increase in state taxpayer support. ... [T]he tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on Wall Street — have [sic] a far less egalitarian vision. ... [T]hey see government spending as a means of keeping the populist pitchforks away. ... Handouts, including housing subsidies, could guarantee for the next generation a future not of owned houses, but rented small, modest apartments. ...  They appeal to progressives by advocating politically correct views . . .. Faced with limited future prospects, more millennials already prefer socialism to capitalism and generally renounce constitutionally sanctioned free speech . . .. [I]ncreased income guarantees, nationalized health care, housing subsidies, rent control and free education could also help firms maintain a gig-oriented [slave] economy since these employers do not provide the basic benefits often offered by more traditional “evil” corporations . . ..  [T]he oligarchy, representing basically the top .01 percent of the population, are primarily interested not in lower taxes but in protecting their market shares and capital. ... The losers here will be our once-protean middle class. Unlike the owners of corporations in the past, oligarchs have no interest in their workers become homeowners or moving up the class ladder. Their agenda instead is forever-denser, super-expensive rental housing for their primarily young, and often short-term, employees. ... The tech moguls get to remain wealthy beyond the most extreme dreams of avarice, while their allies in progressive circles and the media, which they increasingly own, continue to hector everyone else about giving up their own aspirations. All the middle and upwardly mobile working class gets is the right to pay ever more taxes, while they watch many of their children devolve into serfs, dependent on alms and subsidies for their survival.

Baylor University lecturer imagines materialism isn't an ideology

And, by cracky, what we need is ideology, here:

Abraham Lincoln watched [democracy] dissolve in the early years of his presidency, but he understood that the real foundation of the U.S. was an ideological enterprise, not a material nuts-and-bolts one. For him, the Declaration of Independence was a more important founding document than the Constitution, even though that's what the inconclusive political fights leading up to the Civil War had all been about.

To these people just as to Lincoln, the Constitution is the problem.

Reminds me of no one so much as Obama. Definitely a Yankee that guy is.

Mommas don't let your babies grow up to go to Baylor.

When terrorism gives you lemons, make lemonade

It's not exactly affection shown for the terrorists, but hey, what do you expect from thorough-going materialism?

In all seriousness, Republican elimination of personal exemptions is just sleight of hand to raise your taxes

In 2017, the personal exemption is $4,050.

If your little tribe is six, mommy, daddy, and four kids, your personal exemptions add up to $24,300.

Add in the standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly of $12,700 and you are up to $37,000 shielded from taxation. (Itemize deductions instead and you might shield even more, but Republicans are proposing new limits on those, too).

The new Republican tax reform, however, eliminates the personal exemptions and caps all this at the new higher standard deduction of $24,000, thus exposing $13,000 to taxation that wouldn't have been exposed before. And you'll pay at a higher rate in the lowest bracket, too, which has been raised from 10% to 12%.

That's what's really going on here. The only way this benefits families is if those families are small. And, of course, small families implies something else: more immigration.

It's anti-American and anti-family, and in fact, it's inhumane. Taxes were always meant to be personal, and by eliminating personal exemptions for the first time in history the libertarians who wrote this bill are showing their purely materialistic hand.

You aren't a human being to them. You're merely capital.

Don't let them get away with this.

A materialist imagines that for the first time in history we are free

Wow, while I wasn't looking utopia suddenly arrived. Reminds me of nothing so much as Millerism.

It never occurs to this guy that "the end of the working class" can mean only one thing. The middle class replaces the old working class and becomes the new working class. And that won't be good for your bank account.

Here:

We can hope for something better because, for the first time in history, we are free to choose something better. The low productivity of traditional agriculture meant that mass oppression was unavoidable; the social surplus was so meager that the fruits of civilization were available only to a tiny elite, and the specter of Malthusian catastrophe was never far from view. Once the possibilities of a productivity revolution through energy-intensive mass production were glimpsed, the creation of urban proletariats in one country after another was likewise driven by historical necessity. The economic incentives for industrializing were obvious and powerful, but the political incentives were truly decisive. When military might hinged on industrial success, geopolitical competition ensured that mass mobilizations of working classes would ensue.

Publius Decius Mus eviscerates libertarian James Pethokoukis as a mere leftist materialist, calls him a traitor

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Here are some excerpts, but read the whole thing:

'In the leftist-Hegelian hive mind of which Pethokoukis is but one drone, the benefits of mass immigration and open trade are true simply; therefore popular objections are illegitimate. ... Pethokoukis ... has absorbed the core premises of the Left. “That’s racist!” This points to one of the deepest problems with “conservative intellectualism.” It accepts, out of conviction or fear or both, every restriction the Left places on it. The left rules out-of-bounds any discussion of the cultural or political effects of immigration as “racist,” and the conservatives go along. Hence they can only talk about immigration in economic terms, as if human beings were widgets.

'In fact, this particular intellectual rot defines almost all of “conservatism.” It’s allowed the Left to bully the Right out of talking or thinking about so many subjects that all conservatives can rouse themselves to address any more is the economy. They rationalize such a narrow focus by insisting economics trumps all. But the root is fear. Or was. Fear may have caused the initial retreat, but younger “conservatives” raised in the faith actually believe every line of the Leftist creed. Except the parts about redistribution, because Hayek. Also, the donors don’t like it. ,,,

'Like all self-castrated “conservatives,” Pethokoukis goes right along. Whether out of fear or conviction doesn’t even matter anymore.

'Either way, he—and all the others like him—are obstacles to the near- and long-term project of saving what’s left of American and Western civilization. To climb out of the hole we’re in, we don’t need liberals, we don’t need cowards, and we don’t need traitors.'

Rush is reading from this right now on air: It must be the OxyContin part that finally ticked Rush off

Materialist Kevin Williamson for National Review, here:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale [Trump] communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

To Tim Carney, the soul of the Republican Party in 2015 and beyond boils down to (mere) materialism

Here, without the mere:

"More broadly, the rising tide against Ex-Im exemplified a nascent Republican move away from corporate welfare. Marco Rubio led the fight to block an insurer bailout through Obamacare. Ted Cruz is leading in Iowa polls while unambiguously pledging to kill the ethanol mandate. Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and most of the rest of the field also feel compelled to inveigh against corporate welfare, even if they don't oppose it in every specific instance. There's a long way for the party to go, but they're at least marching in the right direction, because they're no longer always marching to K Street's tune. ... Dole, Lott, subsidized exporters and ethanol executives will have all the material blessings they need at Christmas. But conservatives will have a much stronger hold on the soul of the Republican Party than they did just 10 years ago, and that's something they can be happy about."

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"Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them 'I offer you struggle, danger and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet." -- George Orwell, 1940