A month or so ago in Democrats Face a Pandora Dilemma I described the wiretapping situation as being one where the left had to decide whether to condemn the actions that took place under Obama or to normalize them at a time when Trump holds the same powers. As predicted, they've opted to accept the activities that occurred under Obama and to even attack Trump for daring to criticize them. Let's look at today's article from Business Insider, Congress is poking holes in a key Trump talking point about Obama-era surveillance. Note the tactics they employ in the headline, because they know in the facebook era most people will 'Like' articles based on the headline alone, and assume that the article supports the headline, and thus the headline can be taken as fact. They're trying to make it look like it's an article about what Congress is saying, and not just a propaganda piece. And yet the sources are, as usual, anonymous US officials. From the first sentence:
Obama administration officials did not act inappropriately in trying to unmask officials on President Donald Trump's transition team whose conversations with foreign officials were incidentally collected during routine intelligence-gathering operations.
When I said they're normalizing it I meant that in the literal sense. The first sentence comes right out and says Trump was monitored in routine intelligence-gathering operations. Totally normal.
Let's look at some more language from the article.
Trump's accusation, for which he offered no evidence...
Well duh, the evidence is classified. We assume that if the case can be made it will be eventually made to the American public. No one expects a secretive kangaroo court like, I dunno, the FISA Court that was used to spy on Trump in the first place.
Nunes reiterated in multiple press conferences that there was still no evidence to suggest that Trump or his team had ever been surveilled illegally.
Yes but the surveillance may have been done in way that obeyed the letter but not the spirit of the law. Just because they got a FISA warrant doesn't mean they should have. And the bigger question here anyway is about the unmasking.. Improper unmasking and dissemination is spying whether or not the initial collection was incidental, and especially if it was "incidental."
that investigation was ultimately fruitless
Are they saying the investigation is over? Then what are they even talking about?
Rice's requests to unmask US persons were neither unusual nor against the law.
So long, Pandora's lid.
Rice requests were neither unusual nor against the law. That means that Trump's people can do the exact same thing to their political opponents. Not just can, but should. In fact my biggest worry about Trump is not that he'll turn into a neocon (and that's a big concern) but that'll he'll refuse to use his enemies' own tools against them. He should use the foreign intelligence apparatus to spy on political opponents. He should circumvent rules of government transparency in the ways the left excused Hillary Clinton for. He should use the IRS to target opposing political organizations. He should funnel government money to friendly NGOs.
He should do all those things. Because that's what his predecessors did, and no one was ever punished. If he doesn't do those things, then he's just leaving them for the next Democrat to pick up and run with. The worst thing Trump could do would be to worry about being called a hypocrite. They'll make up things to call him a hypocrite anyway, so it doesn't matter. Let me put forth what I shall dub the Law of Canceling Hypocrisy.
Tenet: hypocrisy is not a valid argument against hypocrisy. Perceived hypocrisy is immaterial if the accuser must engage in hypocrisy to make the case.
If Trump set up a secret, private email server the left would scream it was the biggest hypocrisy they had ever encountered. But they must be hypocritical to make the case because they've already excused Clinton's behavior, and she faced no legal repercussions. Because they've declared those actions to be acceptable they cannot reasonably condemn Trump for engaging in what they allowed to become precedented behavior, even if he was previously opposed to it.
Remember, When They Go Low, We Go Low. When the opponent engages in "cheating" behavior, they must be punished and, if they are not punished, the behavior must then be used against them. If your opponent fights with knives, you must fight with knives. And if he brings a gun, well we all know the sage wisdom about not bringing a knife to a gun fight. It is not hypocritical to bring a gun to a gunfight, no matter how much you might have railed against gunfights in the past.
Paul Ryan fucked up. Again. The leading Republican Congressman doesn't seem to comprehend a rule that any creature capable of basic pattern matching should understand by now: there is no benefit to appeasing the left. What good has ever come of it? What do so-called conservatives expect? Do they think the left will say, "oh look, they're acting in good faith....let's do the same" or "well we've gotten reasonable concessions, no need to demand more." Has that ever happened? Can someone provide any recent example?
Likewise, a conservative has never benefited for admitting wrongdoing. After a successful witchhunt do liberals ever say, "Well he's admitted to the transgression and apologized, that's the important thing." No, they always double down. Apologies are merely admissions of guilt. Once they get your confession, they go for your job. They hate that Trump (almost) never apologizes. And of course they do! He's depriving them of one of their most potent weapons. That's why he's in the White House, and lefty appeasers like McCain and Ryan handed Obama an easy re-election win.
Ryan catered to the left, giving them everything they could have hoped for in the Omnibus Bill. All of Obama's leftist agenda was well-funded. Ryan couldn't have appeased them more if he tried. The result? Well, the media left him alone, even praised him, for a while. That was great for his career...he was Washington's golden boy! But where is he now? He's pushing for a healthcare "reform" bill that keeps the major tenets of Obamacare in place. The left should love this bill. No, it's not ideal; they'd rather have liberals in office pushing for socialist state-run health care. But considering that both houses are Republican, the states are supermajority Republican, the Supreme Court will soon be fairly conservative again, and the President is a Republican who ran on the promise of repealing Obamacare, this is the best they could ever reasonably hope for. And yet they are shitting all over it and shitting all over him. It doesn't matter to them one little bit that he has twice now worked to get Democrats the best possible deal they could ask for.
Ryan and Trump are both screwing this up. Frankly, I'm surprised at Trump. His core business strategy is to always have leverage. You start with the conservative plan and negotiate from there. And you force all the RINOs in congress to take the stance of rejecting the conservative plan for all to see. Instead, they've started with the liberal plan. What do they hope to achieve? The conservatives hate it because it's the liberal plan, and the liberals hate it because they don't care what the plan is, they're not going to support any Republican-sponsored healthcare plan no matter what it is. We can understand Ryan's decision to push the healthcare plan. He appeases the left. That's what he does. I'm not saying he's an idiot, a wimp, or a traitor, but anonymous insider sources tell me that he is. Why does Trump support the plan? He knows the plan is a shit sandwich and fails his basic tenets of negotiation strategy. Why such warm support for it? Is he that desperate to score a legislative win? Many of his supporters believe he is playing the long con: that he is letting Ryan's plan die on its own. By appearing to openly support the proposal no establishment Republicans will be able to blame him for the bill's failure. The left will attack him for losing a legislative fight of course, but who cares, they'll attack him no matter what! That's the beauty of not appeasing the left: you don't have to worry about what they're going to think. Politically the best course for Trump is if the subpar legislation dies, nothing happens this year, and Obamacare continues to fail under its own weight until even liberals are begging him to do something. But he is adamant to get healthcare done first. His dedication to fix the worst things first is admirable, but he needs to play the political game right to extract the best long-term results.
The left has obsessed over Trump's tax returns for a year now, reaching fever pitch during the election when they seemed to categorize his decision to withhold them as a criminal act. Never mind that the whole thing is an idiotic tradition; they just wanted anything they might use to attack him. Trump's decision to withhold was a thing of beauty. Could anything be more affirming that he is the right guy? If he had released his taxes, they would have found something to promote as scandalous. And if he didn't, they'd attack him for that. So why appease them at all? What's the benefit?
Trump didn't appease. He chose not to give up his leverage in return for no benefit. It may have seemed peculiar at the time. "Why wouldn't he just give them the returns to shut them up?" says the RINO who only understands the strategy of appeasement. "And besides, what leverage could those returns possibly give him after the election?" Those people don't understand the power of leverage, whatever it is, and the stupidity of appeasement, whatever it is. Trump operated on those fundamental principles, and he just scored an enormous political windfall out of it. Instead of using his weapons in futile self-defense, he held on to them and used them to bait his enemies into an epic defeat.
Appeasement: don't do it
Leverage: if you don't have some, get some
Immigration
Finally, let's look at immigration. Trump originally crafted an immigration order in strict compliance with legal precedents and statutes. He didn't really have to; the president has authority in those areas. But it doesn't matter. The left found a judge to rule in their favor who didn't even bother to mention the relevant legal codes. Why should he? They don't care what the law says.
So Trump backed off, withdrew the order, and wrote another softer order. This all smells like appeasement. It has now been overturned by a federal judge in Hawaii. The reality seems to be that the president can't do anything so long as even one federal judge disagrees with him. How does Trump fight back against those judges without getting himself into legal trouble himself? That is the question. But there are tactics at his disposal. First, he needs to throw out red herrings to distract them. Attention getting orders that will occupy the left while the real orders pass through quietly. Sure the left will eat him up for scripting illegal orders. They're going to anyway. He'll just have to be careful that legally minded conservatives don't get too annoyed.
He'll have to pick up the dirty habits of his predecessors. Cite national security wherever possible so that orders can be classified. Establish clandestine backchannels. He always has the nuclear option of a temporary ban on all immigration, citing security concerns. Remember, When They Go Low, We Go Low. Yeah he'll get a little swampy in the process, but it's that or have his presidency completely steam-rolled by the 9th Short-Circuit Court. And finally he needs to be appointing judges with one primary criterion: that they will return the favor of judicial obstructionism when the next Democratic president is in power. (God forbid). We'll have to assume that Trump, who maintains leverage and recoils from appeasement, is working diligently to outmaneuver the tyrannical judiciary.
There are a couple ways the Democrats might respond to the recent wiretapping allegations. They might assess the situation based on a sober analysis of the facts and evidence available to them compliant with the standards of journalistic integrity. I jest, of course. They might also respond by doing everything in their powers to rebuke and ridicule the claims, effectively working to protect Obama from a serious public inquiry into the matter. If their standard pattern of behavior and initial reactions are any hint, they will pursue the route of legitimizing Obama's actions. But is that the wisest strategy for them?
Why Wiretap?
Note that these days the term wiretap is typically meant in the sense of a general interception of communications. Obviously a wireless phone is not literally wiretapped.
All politicians say they want honest and accurate journalism. But if some hypothetical entity was engaged in widespread unethical and illegal behaviors, they might become very concerned, even somewhat paranoid about journalists venturing too close to revealing their misdeeds. (Remember this is completely hypothetical). It is the priority of any shady politician to keep tabs on journalists and be forewarned of any impending scandals.
Competitive advantage
Intel always gives the recipient unfair competitive advantage. There are indications that information gleaned from surveillance made its way to the Clinton campaign. Such actions, if proven, would constitute a massive blow to the notion of a free election, and corroborate Trump's claim that it was rigged.
Political weaponry
Surveillance gives enormous leverage over the subject of interest. If the dubious observer just so happens to find evidence of criminal or embarrassing behavior, they can use that information to either blackmail or destroy their opponent.
Why Russia?
It seems that surveillance permission was granted to the Obama administration after their second application to the FISA courts. They did not make an attempt to get a surveillance order from a standard court. It would be nearly ludicrous to do so. To go on the record to ask for a warrant against the opposition party's candidate would be quite a scandal. But FISA warrants are issued in secret. That is the warrant you want if you're a shady politician trying to use surveillance as a weapon against an opponent. But the warrant is also very restricted in scope. Because it is effectively a violation of the 4th Amendment, the warrants are limited to foreign intelligence surveillance (the FIS in FISA) information necessary to protect the United States against "grave" "hostile" attack, war-like sabotage, or international terror. It's not enough for Obama to merely allege that Trump is generally a threat to the nation. There must be a concrete plot, either real or suspected, and of a foreign nature.
This is why we have the alleged Russian connection. If you've been baffled over their insistence on pushing this farsical inquisition, be baffled no longer. The Russian connection satisfied the need for the surveillance to be of a foreign nature. With that in place, surveillance was put on the Trump campaign in complete secrecy. This explains not only the pushing of the Russia conspiracy theory during the election, but why they are pressing hard on it still to this day. Once Trump was elected it became obvious that the surveillance would be exposed. They are desperate to keep the idea of Russian collusion planted in the minds of the public to have plausible deniability for using the state security apparatus against the political opposition, which is approximately the definition of tyranny.
The Dilemma
The situation facing the left is this. If they admit that the surveillance was improper then they pave the way for high-ranking former officials, and perhaps Obama himself, to be sent to prison. They almost certainly won't do this. They'll find every reason to deny or justify the surveillance. Obama probably won't go to jail. But then they've justified tyrannical behavior, and now Trump is president. The precedent will be made that to put surveillance on the political opposition, all one has to do is make vague accusations of collusion with a foreign entity and get a secret court order. So which is the better option for the left: Do they let their hero's legacy go down in flames? Or do they open the Pandora's box of legitimizing state tyranny under an administration they are quite certain is tyrannical?
A video going around on facebook shows Steve Bannon asserting that the clash between the West and Islam is going to be the 4th great crisis or "turning point" in American history. This is intended by liberals to show Bannon is irrational or a war monger or Islamophobic or whatever insults they can conjure up. Their reactions remind me of the description given by another blogger that SJWs don't read or listen for the point of accumulating information, but they merely scan for something to be enraged by. In this case the video went viral because it feels like some form of hate speech to them, although conceptually there's plenty there for rational adults to analyze.
The question in general is does Islam pose an existential threat to Western society? and if so, is it the greatest threat? I'm taking this a step further than Bannon, who invokes Judeo-Christian values or western society, but his examples pertain particularly to the US. The American revolution and civil war didn't pose some existential threat to the entirety of Western civilization.
I agree with Bannon that Islam is a threat to the West. Despite what liberals would have us believe Islam is not a race, and I would argue that it is not a religion. It is, but it is also a culture, and even more importantly, a political ideology, much being incompatible with the Western tradition. This is not to say of course that individual Muslims can't prosper in the West or contribute to it, but they cannot in large numbers without changing what the West fundamentally is. We could not replace the native population of America with Muslims and expect it to look, behave, or function anything like the West.
Islam is a threat in the way that pneumonia is a threat. Yes, if enough pneumonia gets into the body it will kill the host. But that doesn't typically happen. Pneumonia only gets an advantage when the body is weakened. So which is the true cause of death: the pathogen, or the underlying weakness? If someone battling AIDS finally succumbs to pneumonia, we generally say they died of AIDS.
I propose that the greatest threats to the West boil down to a single concept: expansionism, which I will describe in the following sections. Now I don't pretend this is the only threat to the West. There are others, greed, hysteria, a lack of rational discourse being high on the list. I suspect though we might be able to provide a context where those vices are downstream from the expansionism.
Territorial Expansionism
Anyone who has read history or played a good strategy game like Civilization or Risk knows that, even in games where expansion is the goal, over-expansion leaves one vulnerable to counter-attack. Let's explore some scenarios where over-expansion has led to problems for the West and ethnically European people.
Rome
In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies Joseph Tainter lays out the cycle of empirical expansion and collapse, with Rome serving as the canonical example. In those days the primary energy source was grain. A country's energy input was roughly equivalent to the grain they produced or purchased. However an expanding nation could plunder the accumulated wealth of the conquered. As long as plunder was inbound, the nation enjoyed an artificially high level of wealth / energy. The downside was that with each conquest they accumulated responsibility for administering the new lands and putting down insurrections. As the size of administered lands grew, and the plunder shrank, the balance sheets became untenable.
The Romans were not able to adapt to their new reality. In fact their policies tended to drive farmers off the land; in the late empire a surprising amount of arable land went to seed. Clearly the Romans did not grasp the long-term costs of expansion, nor how to maintain power without large inflows of wealth. Ultimately the Romans were put to the mercy of the invading Goths.
Nazi Germany
Probably the quintessential example of the perils of manic militant expansionism. Not content to dominate north central Europe, Hitler pushing his Wehrmacht halfway to Asia, choosing to fight nearly everyone at once, and ending in the total destruction of the German state. While we are reminded frequently of the Jewish dead, usually stated at 6 million although the real number may be under 3 million, what is rarely mentioned is the number of dead Germans. Roughly, four and a half million killed in the military. Another half million killed by bombing and other affects of war, and then another half million or so killed after the war, bringing the total to something like 6 million.
Even if you were a dyed-in-the-wool Aryan supremacist, the excessive expansionism was disastrous. If you were just a normal German caught up in the mess it was even more disastrous, or if you were one of the millions that lied in the path of Wehrmacht, or who died helping to fight it. The end result was grief for nearly everyone.
United States
The United States as we know it was born out of Manifest Destiny, or expansionism sanctioned by God. The 13 English colonies became 50 spread from one side of the continent to the other, with two halfway to Asia. Such an aggressive land grab might have made sense in the context of early America. Western European populations were surging as a result of the technological advances of the industrial revolution. There was also limited competition for the land. The stone-age native inhabitants were scant in number, with estimates at just over a million over the whole land that would become the United States (and just 20 million spread over the 2 continents of America). There was little competition from the advanced powers as well, with the French and Spanish being checked and ultimately ejected from the western hemisphere.
From 1607, the founding of Jamestown, to 1965, a span of 358 years, the population surged from a million or so Indians to almost 200 million total, with about 90% European, yielding an average growth rate of a little over half a million a year. By modern standards 200 million people over an area the size of the US was still a fairly low-density country, but at this point the expansion policy seemed to be successful with good long-term prospects. [Note, for the analysis I'm using white population as something of a proxy for western society. We're talking about large-scale ethnic and cultural trends here. I understand that trends don't apply to every individual, and yet current attitudes make these sorts of disclaimers a necessity when discussing demographics.]
Around 1965 two events greatly altered the demographic trajectory of the US.
Slowed growth rate. Over the course of the 1960s the birth rate dropped by over a third.
Non-white immigration. Until 1965 immigration primarily came from Europe. However in that year the Democrat-run Congress passed a law the shifted immigration priorities towards non-white and non-western sources.
The effects have been immense; it doesn't seem most Americans truly understand the demographic swing undergone in a generation or two. In 1965 the population was nearly 200 million souls and 90% were white. In 2010 the white population was a bit under 200 million. That's very small growth, just a few million in about 50 years, a far drop from half a million a year.
However the overall population soared to 310 million officially, with the real number probably closer to 330 million. In the same era that white population grow maybe 5 or 6 percent, non-white growth was [...does math, takes 130 million divided by 20 million.....] 650%, with an expansion rate of over 2 million per year. Since 1965 the growth rate of non-whites has been 100 times that of whites!! In 50 years the founding race's population percentage has dropped nearly a third. I would challenge you to find any example of such a demographic scenario in all history that was not caused by armed invasion, natural disaster, or the willful emigration of the founding tribe to a more desirable locale. This seems to be historically unprecedented.
Now the normal rebuttal you'll hear to all this is that none of these demographics matter because America was founded on an idea. [Well really that assumes you're opponent is rational. The more likely rebuttal I hear from liberals is I'm just upset because I'm white with insinuations that white people aren't allowed to have certain opinions. But remember, they aren't racist, right?] But is America really founded on an idea or is that more like American mythology? Certainly the founding fathers themselves didn't think America was an idea where all concerns for demographics could be brushed aside as petty xenophobia. Benjamin Franklin questioned the practicality of permitting even Germans from settling in Pennsylvania, as they would tend to isolate into their own cultural bubbles. And in fact he was correct, with many such enclaves persisting until our wars with Germany made such cultural affiliations a social liability.
The question isn't so much deciding what is right or wrong, but what will happen regardless of our beliefs. It might be morally superior to allow entry too all those who wish to partake in our welfare state (it's not, but let's just go with that). Regardless of opinion, the result is likely to be both a degradation of the cultural values that made America great to begin with and, more concretely, the fracturing of the country along ethnic and cultural boundaries. It's already happening. The four states with white population percentage less than 50% are California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas. What do those states have in common? Not a lot, but they all have active secessionist movements. They aren't the only such movements, as they are also seen in Alaska, Cascadia, and New Hampshire/Vermont, but there is an undeniable correlation between the demographic situation and separatist desires.
If you investigate the separatist movements, you'll find mostly the countering arguments are economic. You'll find much less allusions to the American "idea" as cause to stay united. New Mexico's movement stays small because ultimately they receive more from the federal government than they receive. And this should be generally true, on average, since the federal government is running enormous deficits. They're able to spend more than they're collecting from the states' citizens. But that can't last forever. What happens when the economy tanks and the government piggy bank is emptied out?
Whether you support multiculturalism or not, there is simply no precedent for a stable multi-cultural society. Even the Old Testament warned against such ventures. I predict that as multiculturalism progresses in the country we will see increasing segmentation in the country, leading to outright schisms once the economy falters.
Israel
Even tiny Israel pays the price for expansionism. In 1971 the Arabs offered peace to Israel, in exchange for ceding back the lands it had gained in the 1967 war, particularly the Sinai lands it annexed from Egypt. Israel chose to hold out for more, and since that time has engaged in widescale expansion of Israel settlements into the West Bank and the Golan Heights. The cost has been intense hostility with the Arab world and almost universal condemnation of Israel from the UN. Even the US abandoned Israel, a parting f-you from the outgoing Obama administration. Because of their expansionist desires, the long-term tenability of the world's only Jewish state remain uncertain.
Economic Expansion
Nations these days tend not to compete militarily as much as economically. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War because it could not keep up economically. Much as military expansion drove the empires of yore, economic expansion drives the US hegemony today. But even in the economic realm expansion is prone to the same side effects and risk of collapse. The American empire is a realm of aggressive global capitalism and mercantilism. The fiercest wars are waged for access to markets, to resources, to cheap labor, and ultimately to higher profits.
But these venture come at a cost to the nation. The free flow of capital to outside investment means less investment domestically. The free flow of capital drives the free flow of people, and the drive to undercut wages causes the mass import of foreigners and the instability that comes with a multi-ethnic state.
The destructive forces of unrestrained capitalism were laid out two centuries ago by Marx and Engels. While the prescription (communism) was bunk, the diagnosis was illuminating. Liberals today tend to blame all social ills on capitalism. Conservatives in turn blame it all on the liberal agenda. The reactionary should be careful to understand that unrestrained capitalism and liberalism are both wrought with destructive potential, and we should take the time to tease out which societal ills are being caused the two orthodoxies and their associated expansionist tendencies.
State Expansion
While the state is just one portion of the nation, it too is subject to the same tendency to over-expand and collapse. A massive and monolithic governing apparatus is stifling to a country for reasons too numerous to get into here without reciting half of the conservative doctine. But let's look at an example that allows us to witness some concrete aspects of state expansionism.
Europe does not suffer from territorial over-expansion. Her empires have long since collapsed. However the state sector has expanded enormously, so that the bulk of western European countries are welfare states. And not just welfare states, but they are something of a Ponzi scheme, where the state requires a forever growing productive population base to fund the social liabilities. This need provides the major rationale for letting immigrants pour in: the social programs need warm bodies. So they permit a massive demographics shift with all the risks I mentioned earlier. The great irony in this is that the immigrants are generally not very productive and cause an even greater strain on the very social programs they are fighting desperately to maintain.
Adversarial Expansion
Most readily apparent as a threat to a civilization is the expansion of a competing neighbor. Even a perfectly balanced society is at risk of being overrun. Let's look at a couple threats that the US has faced on the global scale.
Communism
People today don't have the perspective to realize just what a threat global communism was following World War II. The Soviet Union was a collosus and had the intention of imposing global communism. It had gobbled up Eastern Europe and posed an immediate threat to western Europe. Communism also took hold in China, and Korea was only saved (halfway) through direct US intervention. Similarly Southeast Asia became an orgy of communist and anti-communist bloodshed. Latin American countries were also falling to communist yearnings, many averted only through covert and typically brutal intervention by the US military and CIA.
Even more alarming was the level to which the US was infiltrated by communists, considered to be the most heavily infiltrated modern government ever. I highly recommend everyone to take the 3.5 hours (don't need to all at once) to watch Stefan Molyneux's breakdown of the communist threat that drove Joseph McCarthy to make his infamous purges of communists from the government and media.
While history always seems like a foregone conclusion, just imagine where we'd be if communism had completed it's sweep of Europe and Asia. Clearly communism did at one point pose a very direct threat to the Western way of life.
Islam
Islam is inherently expansionist. Upon it's introduction in backwards Arabia it's adherents sprung immediately into prominence, quickly occupying great swathes of the Middle East, north Africa, and southern Europe, and the growth and spread of Islam has continued to this day. In fact Islam is projected to become the world's largest religion by 2070, despite Christianity having a 800-year headstart and being spread by the great colonial powers (including Rome itself).
Islam is designed for expansion. Of interest to western nations should be the concept of Taqqiya, which allows Muslims to downplay and even outright deny their religion if there is social pressure to do so. However as the percentage of Islam grows so do their religious demands on the society, as has been outlined by Peter Hammond.
Note this graphic is out of date as France is at 10% now, and faces frequent riots and restlessness. The official numbers put Sweden and Germany at 5%, but those were from before the great Merkel open-door's policy. No doubt they are close to 10%, and the Netherlands as well. They fool themselves into believing the Muslim immigrants will happily adopt to the superior Western ideals. They would do well to open a history book. The expansion of Islam will either have to be repelled, or those countries will turn increasingly Islamic, eroding the western tradition. What do people really think will happen once Muslims have 51% of the electorate in a western democracy?
Conclusion
Here I have shown 3 ways in which a nation's own over-expansion can lead it to ruin: territorial, economic, and political. Over-expansion implies many things. Lack of patience. Lack of planning. Lack of sobriety. Lack of proportion. Lack of humility. Generally a lack of balance and a lack of virtue. When pondering some social ill, ask yourself in what domain could expansionism have been the cause. To do so immediately drives one to consider the big picture of the issue within the context of the continuous power cycles that occur between and within nations.
As he did last month at an event in Washington, D.C., the mayor expanded on what he believes is the road map back to power for his party — putting moderate candidates such as veterans, football players, sheriffs and business people up in Republican districts, picking battles with Republicans, exploiting wedges within the GOP and fighting attempts to redistrict Congress on partisan grounds. But this time he didn’t hold back on his frustration with some of his fellow Democrats. “Winning’s everything,” he said… Instead, he said, Democrats should focus on the GOP. “Wherever there’s a disagreement among Republicans, I’m for one of those disagreements,” he said. “I’m all for it. The president’s with Russia? I’m with John McCain and Lindsey Graham, I’m for NATO! Why? (It’s a) wedge. Wedges have to be schisms, schisms have to be divides.”
From AC's commentary:
All of politics is r vs K. It is a battle of reproductive strategies. r-strategists want to destroy K-strategists. There are no morals, no ideals, no greater goals, no compassion, no decency – nothing else. This is about destroying what the left views as a hostile species they do not like. This is a war, every bit as real as the Allies vs the Axis, or radical Islam against the unbelievers.
His viewpoint is that politics is downstream not just of culture, but of deeply rooted psychologies, dubbed r and K from biological reproductive strategies. This isn't a battle of ideologies. The sides are drawn up at a deeper level, and the politics follows after. The left does this better (in a sense of the word better) than we do. I noticed this in one of my earliest blog posts. The left is unprincipled. Surely they'd say the same about us, but I counter they are objectively more so. In a political war that is an insult, but in a war of psychologies that is the strategy of fluidity. They don't care about principles, they care about damaging the other side, and making gains for their side.
Here Rahm says it openly. Winning is everything. Principles be damned. Ideology be damned. Logical consistency be damned. Whether or not we choose to be principled or consistent is our own choice, but know this: it won't matter to them. They won't be impressed with our logic and they won't respect our principled approaches. It is a war being fought with sides drawn based on subconscious psychological drives.
Remember, when they go low, we go low. To them nothing matters besides winning. Nothing matters besides political power. And there is a lot of reason to be very afraid of what will happen when/if they regain political power. They've already determined violence is okay if they call us a fascist first. What will be next? These people must be kept in check with whatever means is available. Not for any principles, but because we are their enemy, and they have no principles.
Taking the high road may often by the best strategy, but refusing anything but the high road is a fool's errand and will lead to assured defeat. Let's take a look at why we should always be willing to "sink to their level".
You must defend the fronts on which you are attacked.
Not fighting is just a highly efficient method of losing. It is tempting to say, "We won't be drawn in to such a petty fight." Abstaining by virtue of a moral high-road is practically indistinguishable from surrender. Allowing the adversary to push on a front without response is the same as retreat. Retreat can be a powerful strategic tool, but it can't be the only strategic tool.
Liberals understand this. They always fight, even when it doesn't make sense to. Conservatives don't, because they are afraid of the liberal media. If doing the right thing was easy everyone would do it, but since it is such a rare trait, doing the right thing must in fact be dangerous and difficult.
In no domain is this more apparent than in education and the media. Conservatives have given all control of the the most important propaganda assets to their opponents. The only conservatives that seem to have dug in are the religious right, who demand that Creationism and other religious topics be taught in the schools. The more reasonable conservatives don't have the same conviction. And they've allowed the education sector to be totally dominated by the left, to the point where some pursuits, such as social sciences, have no conservative faction at all. See where being reasonable gets us?
The left pushes back on instinct. In fact, as I described in an earlier post, it is their defining quality. If the right stands against Roe V. Wade out of legal reasoning they push back with women's rights. Doesn't make sense does it? Nope, not at all. They're not even having the same discussion we are. Being reasonable is less important than having a casus belli. The left has had great success even though objectively their arguments suck.
The left fights back even when they contradict themselves. After years of calling the lack of federally mandated maternal leave another example of oppression against women, they actually attacked Trump when he made the proposal in his campaign. Insane? Yes. Effective? Considering their grip on the vital institutions like education and the media, yes, they are doing something right. Perhaps they are modern day Berserkers, but so what?
The right must adopt this mentality. They must instinctively defend any front unless there is some good reason not to. Who cares if they call us hypocrites? They call us hypocrites anyway. Who cares if they employ their SJW weaponery against us, calling us racist, sexist, etc? They do those things anyway. They will attack you whether or not you choose to defend yourself. The issue here is not one if intellectual or moral superiority, but a simple lack of courage and conviction.
You must employ the tactics that are used against you.
If your opponent deploys a previously shunned tactic that gives them an advantage, you must respond in kind. At the least, you must consider that the tactic is a viable weapon in your arsenal. If you're in a fist fight, you will like keep some level of civility to it. But if they go below the belt, you absolutely must return the tactic. If they are allowed to kick you where it counts but you don't allow yourself to use the same tactic, you will be at a marked disadvantage. And if your opponent knows they can fight dirty and you won't respond in kind, then you only encourage them to disregard all decorum.
Right now the left is winning the dirty deeds fights. The DNC has funded and organized highly illegal activities intended to damage the other side. And they've faced no legal repercussions for doing so. It would be foolish at this point for the right not to respond in kind. Why should they not have paid protesters show up to liberal events? Why should they not work to shut down rallies of their opponents? Because we're better than that?
This shouldn't imply that we blindly react. Of course restraint is its own virtue. Donald Trump could have responded to Hillary's insults of his base by insulting her base, but he "looked past the sale" and chose not to do so. Maybe he should have, but he came out on top of things. Today they are doing everything they can to provoke us into violence, but using violence against us. We are wisest to resist, because we know how they are using the media to in their favor. (Note if they didn't control the media then this would not be to their advantage. That's what we get for giving up that battlespace to begin with.) At this time it behooves us not to respond in kind, but we have specific reasons to disobey the general rule: always respond in kind.
Wars are never battles of ideas.
Ideas may fuel wars. Belligerents use ideas to underpin moral justifications. But ideas are just one front of the war. You can quite easily win the battle of ideas and lose the war. I see a lot of people complaining about meme warfare. It's low-brow and childish. Yes and it's highly effective. Trump may be the first man deliberately memed in to office. Memes are most effective when you have your logical arguments in place, which can guide the memer to make pithy laconic statements that efficiently convey powerful statements. But they don't have to be. The left's most viral meme right now is just ridicule of Kellyanne Conway. Memes don't have to convert; they can simply serve to boost morale for the embattled soldiers.
To win the battle of ideas but lose the fronts of emotion, self-interest, information, logistics, strategy & tactics, organization, communication, etc is to be utterly crushed in the war. When they go low, that is outside the realm of ideas or civil discourse, we must be able to defeat them in that domain as well. In fact the only thing ultimately to keep an opponent from "going low" is the fear they will suffer greatly for doing so. In face of defeat they will always resort to "low" tactics. This is perfectly natural and we should never be surprised at them.
Conclusion
Political wars will tend to spiral towards the bottom if no mutual or societal pressures exist to prevent it. We have a society built on rule of law meant to prevent this. But the inhibiting effect is only as strong as the enforcement. And if the rewards of violating convention exceed the punishment, then someone will violate. We can't control society, we can only operate within it. And if society is willing to permit uncouth behavior, we must use it so the other side cannot gain an unfair advantage over us, while at the same time working to build a society the effectively clamps down on the same behavior. It is not hypocritical to do so, and in fact is the only reasonable approach to these things.
Update
These ideas may be somewhat more mainstream than I though. They are largely influenced by Vox Day. He has a fairly large following, but that doesn't make him mainstream. I was surprised that when I caught the Mark Levin on my commute after writing this, the guest host Dan Bongino spent the beginning part of the show on this (2/6/17 podcast). He points out that the left reflexively fight on every issue, and the right doesn't. Very similar to what I wrote on the same day. Maybe he reads the blog? (traffic stats indicate not likely)
Another thing I didn't mention though is the the left is heavily Marxist these days, and in Marxism everything is politics. Art, literature, education, science, you name it: it is all just a front in oppression politics. So naturally they fight us everywhere, and we're slow to respond because they don't seem like political battles. They are.
