Don’t Fence Me In
Empires are normally associated with great cities, monumental buildings and vast tramping armies. Less well known, but perhaps as important is the phenomenon of the nomadic empire: the largest of all. By many measures the Mongol Empire utterly dwarfed Rome.
It is the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world. It emerged from the unification of Mongol and Turkic tribes in modern day Mongolia, and grew through invasions, after Genghis Khan had been proclaimed ruler of all Mongols in 1206. At its greatest extent it stretched from the Danube to the Sea of Japan(or East Sea) and from Arctic to Camboja, covering over 33,000,000 km2 (12,741,000 sq mi), 22% of the Earth’s total land area, and held sway over a population of over 100 million people.
Only the British Empire in its heyday, covering 13 million square miles and governing 458 million subjects, was larger. Even the Xiongnu were so powerful that the Chinese – representatives of that other types of civilization — built the Great Wall to bar them. Nomadic empires combined two seemingly contradictory qualities. They were fluid — moving across vast areas of the world with apparently no fixed abode — yet possessed a structure; they had enforceable rules and a system of governance. Interestingly the nomadic empires may have evolved the rules as a consequence of their mobility. It was the need to create order out of a dynamic system that drove — at least in part — the rise of these empires.
The story of this ancient empires acquires a renewed interest today because many of the conditions present in the vast, unsettled steppe superficially resemble the uncharted borders of the online world. In the 21st century just as in the 13th century, powerful ideological and economic forces move effortlessly across settled boundaries in ways that no single nation-state can easily control. It is interesting to speculate whether some deeply buried, subconscious memory of the peril of Xiongnu led the current Chinese government to establish the modern Golden Shield, otherwise known as the Great Firewall of China. It would be ironic if the most ancient continuous civilization on earth alone among all the rest truly understood the contemporary world.
The fundamental requirement of nomadic governance was to manage problems asynchronously. To do that, the nomads created a kind of federal structure that every American would instantly recognize. Susan Alock, in her book Empires: perspectives from archaeology and history, argues that the need to manage tribal collisions, disputes over livestock and manage relationships with the settled empires, the nomads created a three tier system. At the top of the pyramid was an imperial leadership, which arbitrated tribal disputes and handled common strategy and foreign affairs; one level down were the governorships, which performed the same tribal management and strategic function at regional levels. Lastly, there were the tribes themselves: maintained with the traditional leadership and customs intact. Intuitively recognizing the principle of subsidiarity the nomads had assigned to central authority only those functions which could not be performed locally. In some ways the nomadic empires operated under the aegis of a “distributed program” in which autonomous nodes interact with each other to pursue a common goal.
The psychological conflict between a modern socialist and the knuckle-dragging traditional American barbarian revolves precisely around the question of whether society should run under a “distributed program” or an imperative one. Whereas one side believes that government should be limited to tasks that the individual or local government cannot perform and that relationships between the parts are regulated by a distributed program expressed in the Constitution and Judaeo-Christian tradition, the other side believes that “government should be there for you”. It should be there for you in the bedroom, in the playground and recycle bin. It should be there when you are eating transfats or farting. It should even be your sexual mentor, where possible in school. Like every good imperative program, it should leave no room for anything but itself.
The endless proliferation of treaties, laws and regulations were the imperative rules; and their embodiment in a never-ending expanse of organs of governance from local governments to the UN — with NGOs and activist groups filling every conceivable gap — was the instrument by which the ungoverned were going to be fenced in. Even private life was brought under cultivation by slow degrees and a code of Political Correctness suffused every aspect of life. In time it would become impossible to even think a subversive thought; the language would be incapable of expressing it. The vast increase in government over the last sixty years brought the settlement of the world — some might call it the End of History — almost within reach. And then the Internet happened.
The Internet reinvented the steppe on a virtual scale.
The “climate change” debate is almost a perfect example of intellectual combat between the two sides. It is a modernized re-enactment of a struggle between one side operating under distributed programming and another using a top-down paradigm. The construction of the “climate change” meme followed the traditional socialist pattern. The idea was built up with articles written about it in the press. Advocacy groups formed around it; authority from some academic source found to bolster it; celebrities were engaged to tout it. The UN was persuaded to give the whole its imprimatur. It had always worked before. Post after post was driven into the ground anchored around Kyoto, the UN and the EU. Strand after strand of wire was fastened to the timbers. And then, just as the gate was going to be closed, the nomads of the Internet charged the wire.
They have almost broken through. Led by individuals like Plimer, McIntyre and Lomborg and followed by a motely, a growing tide of discussion on the Internet has pushed in the wire so hard that it might actually collapse. The nomads looked at the data, the computer models. Someone may have hacked the CRU documents or leaked them. And once the data was out they knew where to look. The site Watts Up With That is a perfect example of the demolition of a staid University Department meme under the cut and thrust of the terrors of the intellectual steppes. Watts Up With That goes through one instance of the CRUs data fiddling in step-by-step detail and by the end it you have gone along for the ride. You have followed the process and find it impossible to simply say that “the CRU may have been naughty but the data is good”. The data itself may be bad or intentionally corrupted.
It is a fascinating spectacle. What the nomads have on their sides is reality. What the sown has on its part is manner and method. And the struggle between the two sides is one whose outcome, even in general, is still unknown. The settled empires are not without their resources. The Hill reports that two pollsters for Hillary Clinton have received nearly $6 million in stimulus money. The forces of the establishment may not be particularly quick, but they do have the big battalions. Perhaps in the end the nomads will be subdued by a fence which in the memorable phrase of Buddy Larsen, “will outlast the Solar System”. But not yet. Not yet.
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Well, but do we want to compare the duration of the Mongols empire to the duration of the Roman or Chinese or even British?
The West is slowly developing its own system of fortification and fences, ala nationalism and the Tea Parties, Swiss Minaret vote, the rise of the BNP, and of the far-right in France against Muslims. All across the West, the imperial model of Rome is failing because of lack of money. There’s money for Mark Penn, but most people across the West face decades of miserable, sudden declines in income and wealth, spaced across a year, with bread, electricity, water, fuel, and so on costing 4X or 5X as much as it did a few years ago, and wages and income declining with taxes increasing.
This has nothing to do with the internet, this has to do with the anger of a vast, distributed people.
The NGO-istan plus elite government “UN Plan” to run the Western World was bound to fail as the Catholic Church’s attempt to create a single Christendom in the counter-Reformation was bound to fail for the simple reason that there are too many people, around the world, hostile to being ruled by a new priesthood. Not even the Hapsburg monarchs were willing to submit to being ruled by the Popes.
And its the same here. A group of “new priests” want to create a “new Church” that rules everything without soldiers. A vision of a post-Christian world with the form but not substance of Medieval Europe under a new Pope (Al Gore).
The Mongol Empire fell apart because it was too vast, and the Mongol armies faced local challenges at the same time, without the advantage of surprise. In Egypt they were overwhelmed and simply outlasted. In Central Europe, their bows fell apart in the rain and the mud and rivers made dashing, flanking movements impossible. Among their Muslim conquests, they faced eventually Islamic capture and Islamization, to the point where they ceased being Mongol and became Muslims, with local and Islamic concerns. That Federal system depended on a solid muster of overwhelming cavalry for which their opponents had no answer. A temporary advantage soon wasted by internal fights.
What we are seeing now is the return of the “ethnostate” where the logic of “Multiculturalism” is taken to it’s conclusion — that European nations are their own “natives” and outsiders (non-ethnic Gauls in France, non-Swiss in Switzerland) are most decidedly not welcome and have no place. This was always the result of multiculturalism and the welfare state once the money stopped rolling in.
Here goes Wretchard opening up a can of Hope.
The real stuff, not that fascist-ersatz gummint brand, but the entrepreneurial, high proof, brewed at home, you-may-think-you’re-smart-’cause-you-went-to-Stanford,-but-I-went-to-Tech kind my grandaddy used.
Wow. I really like the comparison of the internet as the nomadic hordes. While I am in no way an expert on the Mongols, I understand from my readings they invented very little but were masters of taking the inventions of others and using them in novel and effective ways. That is a good description of what happened to the hacked servers. Also an apt description of how bloggers have almost completely usurped the “professional journalists.” (hard to use that term without snickering anymore)
Hey, where can I get me some o’ them Buddy Larsen apothegms?
Jamie Irons
Lost, but yet traces remain.
http://op-for.com/2009/12/they_deploy_by_the_horde.html
Heyyoukids
Part of the way America whipped the Germans in WWII was that we thought from the bottom up. We have Strategic Corporals. A thousand Strategic Corporals will outthink a dozen brilliant Pattons or Rommels. The internets will prove the death of fascism. The ChiComs may have a currently operating Golden shield but there are what 10 million(?) people working on the joints and edges of it. Who’s gonna win?
Hi Jamie. Buy you a 420?
Wretchard– a very interesting post (as usual). As you hint, American society evolved in a fashion that was nomadic (in a sense). You don’t like where you live? Move west–the frontier is there. But now the American frontier is no more.
What has caught my interest is how and why these nomadic empires fell, and what conclusions we can draw from that to modern times.
Golden Shield Gooks – I wouldn’t hang out at the reference wiki too long; or, they’ll put the nasty on your computer if you’re low-tech. it would appear they’re doing more than just internal observation…
Here’s another post that takes the issues raised by Willis Eschenbach in Watts Up With That even further: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1459.
Never thought the temperature in Darwin, Australia, would turn out to be so important to those of us in the “horde”. Could we now call ourselves “hordees”?
Brilliant Richard
re: golden sheild operators – you would think that there might be a few independent thinkers amongst the scads in their employ. between them and the rooskie hacks, it’s a tossup as to who most drinks the most nationalistic tea; or, in the rooskies case, perhaps white nationalistic tea (which their EU brethren will soon be drinking as well)…it gives one hope to hear their exchange visitors to our military academies incredulousness at the lack of indoctrination classes necessary on this side of the ocean
SE/4–don’t know that they invented it but the Mongols had the compound bow: light, easy to handle, and intensely powerful. Their mounted archers devastated their enemies.
I have been musing about “internal secession” for a couple of years now. That’s a variant on the theme of this post. Like the illegal immigrants who ‘hide in plain site,’ ordinary Americans may have to construct a new ‘virtual nation,’ building on what’s already in place: an underground economy, and a larger number of independently-employed people than the powers-that-be are able to account for or even acknowledge.
Each side faces distinct dangers. The main threat to the fence builders is that they eventually run out of stuff to subdivide intelligently and wind up creating little matchbox sized partitions. It’s the endgame for Labor in the UK. They have finally reached the stage of ridculousness and are offering certain categories of income earners “free school meals” to vote for them. It’s down to a hamburger. Eventually it will be the same even the US. Everybody has got to be a Czar, every little thing has to have someone in charge of it, whether its to tell 14 year old kids what sexual practices they should have or fine you for opening a bottle of sodie pop or make sure you aren’t accidentally eating transfats, whenever the fence builders see a network they want to put a video camera at the other end of it.
A nomad wants to range over the Internet, the fence builder wants to monitor you over it. And while a given frontier eventually closes, new ones are discovered. Columbus found you cross an ocean. Eventually someone will cross interplanetary space. Every system that is declared closed discovers it has a boundary. And the nomads cut loose again.
At the risk of overusing the metaphor, the struggle between the centrifugal and centripetal tendencies probably drive a lot of the crisis we are seeing today. Maybe climate change was the Bridge Too Far. When they started wanting to regulate breathing and farting it all become too implausible to simply accept without close examination.
It’s a game that’s long been played. I guess it’s our fate to play the 21st century version and to know, positively know, that whoever wins, there’ll be a rematch.
Perhaps, when you get right down to it, micro-management is the root of all evil.
While they were not a democracy, the Mongol Hordes did offer the ability of the lowliest soldier the right to petition individual grievances, right up to the Kahn himself.
If they enact Seize and Trade Away, will any one American have the right to petition that to Obama? No. Do we have the right to petition on any issue, from taxes to health care? No, not according to the Left. We have Group Rights, not individual ones. Otherwise, get a lawyer, but even then you have no right to petition The One.
So the comparison between “Us” and “Them” is apt in another way.
#9 Tcobb: But now the American frontier is no more.
I submit that the American frontier still exists physically, but only in Alaska. It’s the last refuge for those who formerly picked up stakes and moved West. So now it’s NorthWest, way northwest. But, many still do, including my sister-in-law, who went there for a high-paying temporary nurse’s gig in the tundra and has now migrated to Anchorage. And who else embodies the frontier spirit politically more than Sarah Palin?
Psychologically, I would also submit that most of the posters here are frontier people, which explains their deep frustration with the lack of any warm/less climatically hostile frontier options. It would also be easier to just move than to argue and confront the inherently dishonest, deceptive and deceitful people that comprise the American left It is very telling that liberalism and honor/integrity are so rarely met in the same person; Pat Moynihan and Joe Lieberman being about the only two public figures that would fit the bill. Alas, given that it will be awhile before we can board a rocket ship for the “new world”, fight the bastards we must.
If AGW experiences a Tiger Woods moment it will largely be due to its own excesses. They simply didn’t know when to stop and in that process money can hurt as much as help you. So Hillary sent $6 M to her pollsters? Is that going to help her the next time she says ‘mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?’ She’ll hear what she wants, but they may or may not tell her the truth. And then she has a $6 M mirror that tells her nothing of reality.
While the nomads played some part in picking the AGW meme apart, its main problems came from hubris. Borrow trillions! The continents are sinking! Fines on those who don’t use recycling bins! Walk barefoot! Shut down the powerplants! Leave nothing on at home but the refrigerator. And it wasn’t going to stop because they had lost their sense limits; lost it to a feedback loop that was paid millions of dollars to tell them nothing.
The Greeks defined tragedy as something bad which you know was going to happen and which, in spite of yourself, you went and did anyway. Kinda of like a drunk who walks into a bar to take ‘just one drink’. He’s walking into a whole new world and he knows it. But he does it anyway.
This kind of addiction, the need for a fix, is probably operating at a very basic level in the spoils-driven political culture. It’s when the gravy runs out that people jam their arms into the pot. They fight for the last gravy stain on the bottom, fight for it because like sharks they have become conditioned to bite all before them, whether it makes sense or not. Just because.
The role the Internet played was probably to let the kibitzers exchange notes as they watched this process. “Gee, that looks gross!” It sure did.
Apropos of nomads versus fence builders, the Roy Rogers clip reminds me of another metaphor that’s been given a cowboy-Western setting, namely herding cats:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE
Interesting that the basic theme of the commercial is “gathering information, ideas, and technologies–and making them go where you [presumably the individual entrepreneur] want.”
Interesting, too, that the commercial has some basic respect for the wild and nomadic quality of both cats and ideas.
Move west–the frontier is there. But now the American frontier is no more.
Not only is the (physical) frontier no more, but the Commissars of PC are doing their best to curtail the idea of moving where things are better. That’s the underlying fascism of ‘smart growth’ and the demonization of ‘urban sprawl’.
PC mandates that there are certain subjects that are simply beyond discussion. One of them is that since the 1920s, the US population has steadily moved off its farms and into cities – a vast un-sprawl by the millions that makes a joke of the complaints about city limits growing, since the population density in the great majority of the country has steadily declined by one or two orders of magnitude over the last eighty years.
But no, those entrants into cities are now forced by their social betters to ‘densify’, to grow upwards into little multistory boxes made of ticky-tacky instead of the single-family homes that they’d prefer. Nice neat regimented barracks, with easy access to community organizers, bacilli and the ‘security’ of Obama’s street army when necessary.
All we lack are the internal passports of the Stalin area, which assign each citizen a nice municipal box in which they must live.
Maybe tribal life out on the wide open spaces has something to offer still.
In the settling of the American West (and the Western movie, its entertainment metaphor), it was the struggle to turn the wilderness into the Garden of Eden, or at least a garden of sorts where “decent people” could live and raise a family in peace.
Even though the frontier pretty much closed at the end of the 19th century, there were still plenty of adventures and places someone could strike out and make it on their own.
Now the country is much more homogenized. There are unique aspects of geography and local beauty (and ugliness), but radio, then television and then the rest of Mass Media, and finally the Internet, have homogenized the people. The same restaurants, movies, malls, architecture everywhere. The homogenization of the culture has become the expected. Our aesthetics have become numbed. Oprah tells many what books to read. Or Glen Reynolds. Or somebody like that. We want to be told, because we really don’t have the time to sit and figure it our for ourselves. Tea Partiers, Obamabots, Warmists, Deniers, Truthers, Birthers, Democrats, Republicans; we really aren’t as different as we think we are.
I find a dull sameness when looking at the comment threads of a lot of blogs, because you can almost always see where the comments degrade and become insulting attacks on the “other”, whoever disagrees with the premise of the posting. The Belmont Club is pretty different in that there are some commenters here who are really insightful (and especially our host), and there are few trolls to seed the comments with idiotic remarks to distract the readers and commenters.
But the White Noise of Mass Media has turned individual thought and values into a featureless pureed mass of gook. It is really double-plus ungood to think as an individual, let alone actually act as an individual. You have to hide; hence the comment about “new networks” to connect the individuals. How really aware is the vast populace of what really was revealed in the leaked e-mails and documents of the CRU in East Anglia, UK?
We’ve really lost, because of the tasteless vanilla drek we’ve allowed ourselves to become.
I don’t think that a violent outbreak of resistance is the answer, because that gives the Statists in power the excuse to further the power of the status quo to protect the sheeple, although I am plenty angry about what has happened lately. But to break the monotony, something more dramatic than the honest but routine assemblages of “Taxed Enough Already” will have to occur. A brush fire is indeed growing, but can it really overcome the lethargy of of the wet and tepid masses of homogenized humanity that we have mostly become?
Can the wet, tepid masses be ignited to move against the dull and dulling message of the status quo, the boring drone of Al Gore, Barack Obama, CNN and the rest of the chorus of mediocrities?
Would the majority (or even a militant minority) actually be willing to risk all that they have (future, home, family, friends, maybe even your life?) to speak up and struggle against the cloying oppresion that is becoming the hall mark of our culture????
The Mongols had no concept of world domination: merely expansion to meet extant needs.
Back in the 70′s historians posited that the initial move by the Mongols out of their homeland was not connected to dreams of a contiguous global Mongol empire but rather stimulated by climate change–it got colder, truncating the growing season and motivating a search for resources.
Just mentioning it in the interests of unifying theories etc etc
Well, it seems small compensation to me for the destruction of our nation, this “horde of patriots”, eking out some sort of existence in an underground sub-culture on the margins while throwing the odd brick into the gearworks of a grim totalitarian machine. This is the 21st century. I should think that we have a higher vantage than this.
I think you have your metaphors reversed. Wretchard, you have got it just backward.
It is the Left that are the barbarians, it is they that build nothing permanant. They raid and loot and accupy the institutions of our culuture much like the Mongol (and others like them) did the cities of the Roman Empire. They cannot but pervert and destroy these institutions; they can build nothing out of them. They did not create these institutions. Baboons swinging through museums and cathedrals Orangutans picking their teeth with oboes, they are. Yes they have taken academia, but in a generation they have compromised and ruined science itself. They have destroyed the very concept of education. Only the most uncivilized of beasts would do such a thing. They build not a thing, they destroy and plunder.
What we really must do is to take the nation back, and send these barbarians packing. Send them beyond the frontiers.
Not some metaphor: Take it back. We have to cast this plague out.
It is not top down vs. bottom up. It is great poetry, but it is really a a misstatement of the problem. This is not really what is happening at all. It is question of treason and betrayal, even betrayals to foreign powers, even betrayal of God himself. We are engaged in an insane self-immolation. We have to disengage from it, and very, very soon. We have created our own barbarians.
It is the “nomads”, it is what you call the “judeo-christian barbarians” in your metaphor, that have created the great, settled world-historical civilization. It is they that are heir to the most subtle, profound, power and creative force for light in the history of mankind. You have got backwards.
And Mongol empire, while something to be feared, is hardly something to be admired, nor was it a coequal of our civilization. In an most precious sense, it was not a civilization all. No Euclid, not Mozart, no Jefferson, no Gregory, no Aquinas, no Bohr. No Christ. Little Light at all, just the grim cycle of violence and crude appetites that mark the common place of fallen Man. The empire of looters and bandits and thugs that broke into several smaller hordes (read gangs) within a generation or two. A mafia. Their mark on history is one of absense and interruption, not one of illumination and advance. The Mongols were a force for darkness in history, not a force for light.
Nor can you compare our barbarians with institutions such as the Holy See or movements such as the Reformation. It is true that our modern socialist propound a bizarre secular form of a Christian heresy, but they are hardly on the level of the great forces, institutions and actors of Christendom. Not at all.
They are pygmies. And what of us? We are lower than they if we allow them to destroy this great legacy. Odds are it will not come again.
We must finaly cast them out.
No they didn’t know when to stop and the money avalanche attracted the hucksters like honey attracts flies. The European Police Agency (EUROPOL) says carbon traders have been scammed of 5 billion Euros and up to 90% of trades in some countries are dirty.
Why is the moral hazard so great? In part, because the whole thing is a trade in numbers and imaginary ones at that. I can take possession of a pork belly. What are carbon credits? How much more real are they than some of the credit default swaps that are now less than they were valued for?
When you are being sold Hope or some pie in the sky thing the potential for fraud is enormous. Everybody knows this. At least everybody who has had some contact with the street. The best place to run this pet rock industry is in academia or in places where people have never seen a rock for real. Then the sky’s the limit.
I would make a somewhat different analogy.
All of the nomadic cultures, Including the one that established Islam, were built via conquest and died of inertia when their conquests lost momentum. They were ultimately parasitic in nature – they didn’t produce anything – and when the booty was sufficiently looted their leaders just went back home or went native, assimilating into whatever local culture they found themselves and sometimes affecting it.
The modern left seeks to conquer as well and is, likewise, parasitic in nature. They campaign (conquer) most effectively and by whatever means, but sustaining an empire is beyond them.
We must not let them succeed in completing the destruction of our once productive culture.
Eureka!
I’ve been going back and forth with a young grad student on the local rag’s forum. He simply can’t get over the fact that Steve McIntyre argues from a website, not the peer reviewed literature. I began to imagine him in mandarin uniform … The warmists are become brittle in their reliance on the “proper authorites.”
Meanwhile, I’m convinced that the EPA announcement is an elegant head fake. The CO2 rules in the works are restricted to new car emissions in the 2012 model year. The “anonymous official” that Fox is quoting it deliberately using the provocative words “command and control” vs the nice free market Cap and Trade to incite an over reaction domestically while placating the unhappiness in Copenhagen with the United States for its unwillingness to sign on to binding agreements and to substantial subsidies for developing countries. It might be caprice, or it might be that Obama is finally figuring out the information war.
I’m not sure what happened to my last comment. It just disappeared.
Let’s try this again…
Richard, I would make a different analogy. All nomadic cultures were products of conquest and were parasitic in nature. In every case, the conqest lasted only as long as it could sustain momentum and live off the fruits of the conquered (think Sherman in GA). Each conquest stalled when all the booty of vanquished populations had been sufficiently looted.
Likewise, today’s left is a parasitic phenomenon. Adherants are effective campaigners (conquerers) employing any means to their end. But, like the nomadic Khan’s of the Asian steppe, once they destroy their host, their golden egg laying goose, they are finished.
Konyok: Golly, you are in a optimistic mood tonight, and a charitable one too–attributing such subtleties to an governmetal official.
I rather doubt it.
They mean business, or rather, just the opposite.
Have you been on a campus lately?
I fear that some here really do not understand just how unyoked this folks are from reality.
Mongoose wrote:
“What we really must do is to take the nation back, and send these barbarians packing. Send them beyond the frontiers.”
This theme, hit upon by Whiskey, yourself, and others on this blog, is the key to saving whatever is good about Western Civilization.
It is vitally important that the next non-Dem who is elected is not some simpering “new tone” CINO but someone who delights in a no-prisoners approach to retribution, and in defunding the postmodern left, to beyond – or beneath – the frontiers.
The question then becomes, is this something that must (or even can) be done overtly from the start? Or will we, in an internet age, have to do a stealth, Gramscianesque stalking of the seat of power before unleashing the full intent and force of taking back? One way must be chosen over the other, it seems.
What say you all?
I’m not optimistic about a turnabout. Three affluent generations in the west: one with vivid memories of the price paid in ending the global tyranny of the ’30′s & 40′s; a second with those same lessons understood, but not seared into their character like the first, and a third with only experience of good times and rock & roll.
The last described, now into adulthood, think their world could never change & that the good times will always roll.
The second, it appears, are aware to some degree of the danger we face – of slipping back into global chaos, but don’t know what to do to stop gravity.
We’re losing the first, who can only watch the ship sink.
26- wretchard:
LMAO, Fraud is a national sport by us ; at least our bureaucrats will have some work on the table
I read that a swiss bank cleric gave the list of french frauders, but he has to run away from his country and he is hiding in Nice aeras
bump
E. Nigma… Seems like the Tea Party movement is the beginning of the uprising…its scares the bejezzesus out of the Left and the Obamatrons that ordinary “folk” are pissed off enough to go out and protest against socialism and crony capitalism. Its a fast paced world and news cycle. While the mass media has learned to use the story of the day (Tiger Woods) to try and deflect attention away form the commie power grab in DC, the internet hoards are laying in bed with their laptops reading Drudge, Belmont Club and Power Line with the TV off and the newspaper subscription canceled. The “progressives” stayed home in Virgina and New Jersey just as they will next year because they have no solid frame of reference other than the “hopey changey” crap from Obama, while we have the Constitution and the words of the founders to give us strength…and leaders like Sarah Palin who nicely articulates the values and hopes of Main Street and a truly hopeful message of the uniqueness of the American spirit and dream.
The fencers now must watch their steppe
As hordes of geeks and nerds
Full of vim and full of pep
Drive their pony herds
At full speed toward the EU types
Who yearn to fence us in
By using frauds and scams and hypes
To quell the rising din
The horsetail banner rides again
We’ve taken up the sword
The Internet has raised up men
A newborn Golden Horde
And we have our Subotai right here! And outing the CRU emails was not petty larceny, but Buddy Larseny.
Another interesting read, W. Likewise with the comments above…food for thought.
While mulling over the similarities of the Mongols and the American frontier west and the internet as a frontier, it occurred to me that space is probably going to end up being the next step.
I have no idea how else a new frontier could be opened up, and I’ve been watching with interest the developments in commercial space flight. I like Kim Robinson’s Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars trilogy, and I think something like that will be the broad outlines of what happens. Man will develop space elevators (or some other massively cheaper way) to break out of Earth’s gravity well, and we’ll go out to the other planets, moons and asteroids. With the number of bodies in the solar system capable of pulling Man’s feet to the ground, there’s a LOT of territory to cover. Think if you could buy passage to the planet or moon of your choice for about $10,000.
Meanwhile, somebody will figure out a workable way to do interstellar travel, and then we’ll start on the rest of the galaxy.
I envision these as the places where the horde will flee. If any of it happens in my time, I’d be one of them. I’d sign up for a one-way mission to Mars tonight, if there was a signup form somewhere on the web. I’d only need my wife and daughter and dog to come with me. There are many like me, I think.
Sigh. Until then, though, I guess I’ll be watching to see if I need to become a guerrilla patriot in my own country.
John W. Campbell, way back when, talked about “Neobarbs” – neo barbarians. He wasn’t talking about libertarians or conservatives like himself, he was talking about the other guys.
(P.S. Google vectors to two Chet Richards. Col. Chester W. Richards is the expert on John Boyd and OODA loops. I’m the other guy.)
What the nomads have on their sides is reality.
I suggest the reality/unreality is more important than the nomad/enterprise … er, nomad/settlement difference.
It’s a fascinating thesis, this nomad business, but it’s decoration on a controversy explained in simpler terms – fraud, a common occurrence in science.
Politically, the tribal versus centralized issue has been seen in the west for a couple of thousand years as well. The Romans used the centralized model, the Germanic tribes a decentralized one – and one not integrated at a higher level as with the Mongols. Oddly enough the Germanic model migrated to England, and thence to America (land of the new frontier), while the Germans themselves succumbed to the centralized model and gave us modern socialism instead, both via Bismarck and Karl Marx.
And today in the USA we have the old battle as seldom before in our history – seldom, but not never, Wilson and FDR were both centralizers, and socialist ideas have been very popular here through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Socialism here lost a lot of panache due to the excesses of Hitler and Stalin and our fear of communism, but as those are forgotten (!) it’s not shocking, historically, to see the old level of support for socialism return to previous levels.
Sort of like global warming returning to the range of the medieval warming period.
Or like the return of Sauron after the rediscovery of the ring. Other evils there are that will come, but it is ours only to worry about those in the time we are here.
Bing & the Andrews Sister Sing Don’t Fence Me In While Jimmy Cagney does shoot em up while philosophizing.
AP #37…the advance party of “hoards” from the US and Canada have already found a place to flee….right next door-Mexico…over a million US expats and the numbers are growing fast …low cost of living without sacrificing life style, affordable health care, laws that focus on self-responsibility and family with an open society of god fearing people in a democratic Republic with a sense of frontier and its own manifest destiny. Shame that the US is putting up a border fence as it may be used like the old Berlin wall to keep all of you potential “fleers” locked in ( somebody got’s to pay dem Obama taxes!)
just when i get a mention from the wretchard of Oz and a Walt zing (Matilda!), Ajax the Editor fires my name (while swallowing up a half dozen desperately unserious posts from the the last two threads) and re-reduces me to the aforesigned half-anagram. if this doesn’t work, i think i WILL use ‘anna graham’.
NAT KING COLE ROUTE 66 There are bunch of versions of this. the ones that showed the pictures were all nostalgic. Cole gets something of old 66 –though the camera is all about him.
Mongoose #25: what you said was right on the money.
Wretchard, what a brilliant metaphor!
The Left has managed to capture various anachronistic establishments, but the value of those establishments individuals empowered by the new technologies have totally outmaneuvered them.
It delights me to think that the claimed scientific credibility of “climate science” may well have been shattered by some university dropout hacker, and the public was informed by guys in their basement in pajamas.
I would make one other point: Saul Alinsky recommended that radicals attack institutions by “making them live up to their own standards”, because he claimed that in most cases they could not.
In the case of academia, real academics and real scientist can live up to their professed academic standards, but the Ward Churchills, Michael Bellesiles and CRUs cannot.
Wretchard, what a brilliant metaphor!
I would make one other point. Saul Alinsky advised radicals to attack institutions by holding them to their own self-professed standards, because in many cases they could not live up to those standards.
In the case of academia, real academics and real scientists can live up to their own standards, but the Ward Churchills, Michael Bellesiles and CRUs cannot.
Walt has scored again:
“And we have our Subotai right here! And outing the CRU emails was not petty larceny, but Buddy Larseny.”
#17 Tcobb . . .
“Micromanagement is the root of all evil.”
Great line, and so very true! I can think of many examples, and in my own personal life, I have “Gone Galt” to avoid quite a few annoyances. I hate to be pushed around.
My hairdresser today was bemoaning all the irritating things she had to do to open her new shop. The local government had gone way over the edge.
She also cut her prices 20%, which tells me that she is hurting. All the local stores have big sales and specials. We are definitely in a depression in my area. I think my hairdresser will Go Galt soon, and the various taxing bodies–local, state, and federal–will lose a lot of tax money.
Mongoose @30
Well, they’ve got the Republicans fencing with shadows with this EPA announcement. They’re talking about power plants and large facilities, but the EPA rules being promulgated now refer to emission standards for new cars – identical standards that the Euros aleady are enacting and the Japanese are right behind us. EPA’s rule making process takes years – it is actually more responsible than Congress which can pass a 2000 page porkulus in days because EPA must allow a 3 month public comment period. Imagine millions of angry Americans flooding their mailroom with outraged comments. If the EPA were to expedite the process to regulate industrial CO2 it wouldn’t come to fruition, and public notice, until the height of next year’s congressional elections. Ain’t gonna happen.
So, the White House tough guy talk about passing “market friendly” C&T now or suffering the consequences of EPA “command and control” is BS.
Of course, it might just be so incompetent that it looks subtle.
Of course, with tonight’s news that the Norwegians are po’d that Obama refuses to meet king Harald, incompetence does look like a good bet.
I think i have the title for the movie about this administration (in honor of Clint Eastwood, who, asked just recently how he felt on his birthday, said “Hey, eighty is the new twenty!”): “A Fistful of Dollars”
Mongoose: Yes [the Left] have taken academia, but in a generation they have compromised and ruined science itself.
I remember the beginnings of that science erosion. At the University of Washington in the early 70s it was a program overtly called the “Social Management of Technology”.
In which the learned deans and dons decided to impose adult supervision over those unwashed students of the sciences, in essence imposing the sort of Correct Final Goals on their researches that Willis Eschenbach at wattsupwiththat.com so clearly demonstrated today.
#25 Mongoose . . .
I like your take on things. WE are the cultured people. The Left are the barbarian-parasites. Regarding public education, I can tell you that if parents organized, it would not be that hard to take back decency and good educational values.
The powers-that-be are usually scared puppies who don’t want to be publicly humiliated. Some Alinsky-type tactics (believe me, this guy is useful for any dissatisfied group, not just the Left) would change things in a lot of public educational systems.
For example, do you think that various boards of education could stand up to parents who don’t want “fisting” and masturbation taught to their children? No they can’t. A little humiliation, embarrassment, and personal outreach will set the board members straight.
Trust me on this. Direct action works.
Wretchard and Tcobb #9,
Consider the migration patters of the Mongols and other Steppe nomads. They made their great population movements only when population or political pressere forced them to move. Ordinarily they followed a pattern of movement to the upper mountain grazing pastures at the start of Spring, and migrated to warmer southern lodgins for the winter. This pattern is replicated by all those Snowbirds who cycle between their paired homes in Florida and the Northeast. It is the classic pattern; they just do not have livestock.
And while the Western Frontier may have closed, save for Alaska, the real frontier has been internalized. I offer up Western South Dakota (home of the Sturgis, M/C rally) and parts of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, where the cowboy ethos lingers on. Also, how many of us live our lives in our ancestral home? Not many I think. Even those who may remain in the same city, are likely to move several times to different neighborhoods.
Of course, one reaction to this is the Leftist “war on the automobile”, which if successful, will rob us of our mobility and impose a virtual, if unofficial, enserfment.
Strip a Mongol of his bow and his shaggy pony and he was lost; strip us of car and gun and we become slaves. Insufficiently Sensitive #22 speaks to this same assault.
no mo @ 31:
If and only if we get Congress back next year. Then we will have some time to regenerate a real platform.
If next year (’10) maintains the Statists in power then yes, we will have to do this thing in a stealthy manner OR not. The not is the ugly part.
I have always responded to the story of the frontier man. Early on it was the adventures of E. R. Burroughs. The Mars stories were ….. inspiring. The pantheon of scIFi writers. The old ones not the current bunch – Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, Le Guin, McCaffrey, Ellison, Niven, Farmer, etc.
The current crop wants us … tamed. They do not want us to be frontier man. In their zero sum universe there can be only so many alphas and to their eyes it must be them. The denizens of the BC may or may not be wild. I hope you/we are.
I think that the way for the short term is going to be to disconnect. Work the barter economy. Move to the country. Resurrect the skills of the last century, canning, butchering, animal husbandry, gardening, marksmanship. Go John Galt in some small way. Why pay the masters for the privilege of being serfs? Until we can rid the nation of them or they die out, we cannot play their game. We should and must do as the Irish monks did, preserve the civilization until the barbarians are nativized.
“I aim to misbehave.”
One final remark for tonight . . .
Don’t you all think it’s funny that nobody on the Left seems to be happy that we aren’t all going to die from Global Warming? To me, the inability of Leftists to admit that AGW is one giant fraud and that there is no danger tells me that the whole point of the exercise is to create fear, not to problem solve.
Sadly, for me, most of my family and social circle are unreconstructed Liberals who will never change their silly utopian beliefs. So I won’t rub their noses in the AGW fraud.
But I will definitely do so to any believer I don’t care about who doesn’t tell me that he or she is SO GLAD there is no AGW. I plan to give them the full business.
E. Nigma, @23:
Now the country is much more homogenized. There are unique aspects of geography and local beauty (and ugliness), but radio, then television and then the rest of Mass Media, and finally the Internet, have homogenized the people. The same restaurants, movies, malls, architecture everywhere. The homogenization of the culture has become the expected.
In part that may be blamed on the mass media, but even more, IMO, it is attributed to the Eisenhower Interstate Highway Sistem. This brought us national chains of HoJos, Big Macs, Motel 6s, and all the rest. Back in the early 1950s there was none of that, and everywhere in the country there were distinct regional cultures and cuisines. Growing up I knew both chop suey and pizza as exotic ethnic foods. By the 1960s that was beginning to change.
George Man @ 24,
Sorry, but you are wrong. The defining thing about the Mongols was that Temujin, aka Chinggis Khan succeeded in uniting a disparate group of related mongoloid tribes under his rulership. He claimed authority from the sky god Tengri Nor to rule over all peoples where ever Mongol ponies trod and men lived in yurts; i.e. as far as they could conquer. When invading a new domain, their first order of business was to inform the unsuspecting inhabitants that they were “rebels” and call on them to submit or be punished.
Back in the 1970s historians loved to try to rationalise history using scientific facts not yet discovered – such as germ warfare against the Plains Indians before the discovery of germ theory.
Hah/Lol, “Nomadic empire” is also a real fine metafor for the transnational non-state NGO of islamofacist terror. The Mongol 3 tier thingee is the best shot explanation of the Brotherhood I have yet seen. Your linking the Top-down crush and take AGW corrupt croud and their obvious trade ripoff with the nomadic model is brilliant and correct. You might also do one, I think, on the Brotherhood War.
Rurik @ 56
So, both you and E Nigma (@23) are condemning the “homogenization of the culture,” by which I take it you mean the American culture?
The regional culture(s) that you mentioned were mainly ethnic enclaves, I think. You somehow think the ability of the middle-class to not only migrate, but even travel for leisure, all across the country, is responsible for lowering the culture to its lowest common denominator, or “…national chains of HoJos, Big Macs, Motel 6s, and all the rest.” Why not throw in Wal-Mart and REALLY start demonizing?
The fact is, those “national chains” gave Americans what they wanted; no one FORCED anyone to stop staying at the local motel/bungalows, instead of the Motel 6; or to stop traveling route 66/route 50/route 1, instead of the interstates; or to eat at “Mickey D’s”, instead of the local diner.
In my own experience, it is much easier these days to find “exotic” cuisines in many more locations; look at any edition of the local “yellow pages” and count the number of non-chain, exotic restaurants (Thai, Vietnamese, various Chinese, etc.) as well as many other “chains” that specialize only in good food, at an INEXPENSIVE price.
Why did Wal-Mart gain the client share it did? By supplying a vast inventory of low-price goods that people want/need at an affordable price. So, it’s not good to give people more choices at lower prices?
Then they can always move their business into the realm of the internet…shopping on Amazon for the holidays, anyone?
It’s late here for an old man, but comments above brought to mind the biblical story of the Tower of Babel or the Greek story of Icarus. Over-reaching appears to be a continuing saga of mankind. Wretchard, is “subsidiarity” a foreign word in western conversation?
Ned
Rurik @ 56
The sameness found in most of the country is one thing via the Interstate Highway system (the leveling of the popular culture), but the real tragedy is the leveling of thought, the regression to the mean. The action follows thought.
Cas@ 59
I am not trying to be elitist or demean the common tastes in the sense that I know what is right, but rather the sameness found too often is a symptom of a larger problem of thought and aesthetics. The regression to the mean with respect to orginality and thought. Americans used to be more energetic and inventive; there are still those among us who are. But more people are cautious and reactionary, which has nothing to do with the politics of right or left.
It’s just plain old intellectual slowness. We are becoming a dull, rude people; or rather, that attitude is more culturally acceptable. There is less of a spark of thought, ingenuity or cleverness found in our popular culture; it is not admired, but to be hidden lest it be denounced. It’s the same intellectual malignancy that has already brought down Great Britain. It is becoming a nation of yobs, as they say over there, and we are infected with the same cultural sickness.
When someone like Jon Stewart is held up as a brilliant satirist, I mean really? The guy’s humor is that of a clever teen-ager. My 12 year old laughs at him, so that tells you something.
Barbarian literally means “gate crasher”, I believe. Well, no need for that. The barbarians are already inside the gate, and at the mall shopping.
cas @ 59
I am not “condemning” it but “regretting” it. Wht you so snidely dismiss as “ethnic enclaves”, were ormerly great facets of what gave America its character. I remember when once there were significant differences between New England, the South, the Midwest, Texas, different parts of the Pacific Coast, and more. When people borrowed a sense of personal identification from their communities – some ethnic and some geographic, and not from the artificiialities of their pro sports teams which seem to resemble each other except in the colors of their uniforms.
Some of those chain stores I patronize but not all. Many people patronize them, not necessarily because they chose so, but because they now know nothing else or have no choice available. In some case because they prefer a guarnateed medium instead of the alternative chances of excellent or substandard. I bemoan the passing of the traditional. I also understand there are things of value in the new order, but also losses. Win something lose something. You may think you are championing capitalist enterprise, but I fear you are preparing yourself for state-directed uniformity of product and behavior.
E. Nigma, cas is right about one thing, we are in agreement.
Rurik @62 (and E. Nigma)
so snidely dismiss as “ethnic enclaves”
There was nothing “snide,” nor dismissive, in my reference to ethnic enclaves; I grew up in one, but in my case, it was filled with people from many different cultures, e.g., Italian, Polish, German, Irish, Hungarian, Hispanic, Jamaican; hey, it was an American city!
And no, they didn’t all get along, but their children usually did. They did share their ethnic cultures and cuisines; some I enjoyed, some I didn’t (still can’t handle hot peppers!)
Also, increasing mobility, whether by choice, or to find employment, or something else, means that fewer people continue to live where they spent their childhood. I know, because my children felt this first hand; they’re military brats, and have lived in Europe, Florida, Utah, and Texas. And yes, they do feel their “lack of roots” sometimes
In some case because they prefer a guaranteed medium instead of the alternative chances of excellent or substandard.
Yes, many people, (myself included) especially when traveling long distances, would rather have a guarantee of a clean cheap room and bed (maybe with a pool for the kids) as well as some inexpensive food, so that maybe they can visit a few more sites along the way, instead of cutting their trip short, or running up too much debt.
Many traditions have been changed, I believe, in the process of becoming “American”, instead of being part of some other group that came from the same country as your parents/ grandparents/ great-grandparents. I agree that the passing of some traditions leave us all poorer. But how would you change that trend? I ask because I have given this problem of “blandness” some thought, but I don’t have any solutions that wouldn’t be worse then the problem…
Great and thought provoking article. I agree with both Wretcherd and Mongoose, I just think they’re looking at it from a different perspective.
31 no mo uro – “The question then becomes, is this something that must (or even can) be done overtly from the start? Or will we, in an internet age, have to do a stealth, Gramscianesque stalking of the seat of power before unleashing the full intent and force of taking back? One way must be chosen over the other, it seems.”
I think that barring a collapse of the current system (very possible) it will be done incrementally, if at all. The GOP, if it regains power, will probably rescind a few of the highest profile outrages, and then get back to their real business of gaming the system from their end. Will the outrage of the Tea Partiers survive the return of “normalcy”? I hope so, but I doubt it. Once people think things are somewhat under control I fear this will die out.
The struggle will be won by those who hold control of the culture. This latest climate thing is a perfect example. What could a movie studio do with this story if it wanted to? We could have a blockbuster that would debunk the left for a generation, if they wanted to make it. But they don’t.
All the philisophical meanderings we see on this and other sites, even when they’re valid and thought provoking, will have less effect than a single episode of a popular TV series. If there’s ever a movie made it will focus on how the bad old Corporate energy companies attacked truth-seeking scientists to destroy the world and promote their greed.
Maybe Bollywood will do the blockbuster, it’s just that everyone will be dancing in their version.
I think with regards to the arguments of Wretch and Mongoose, it may be possible to postulate a two-by-two table which is so popular in the social sciences.
The two axis are: distributed vs imperative, and parasitic vs productive.
We can have parasitic distributed systems. Almost certainly, the Mongol empire and the current Islamic fundie networks are examples.
Then we have productive distributed systems. The federal system and the scientific method might qualify.
Then of course, we have parasitic imperative systems.
The final quadrant, that of the productive imperative system, begs the question of even whether such systems exist. My country of Singapore is almost surely in this quadrant, but can it be extrapolated to larger scales?
What are the factors that change the nature of parasitic systems to productive ones?
TWG: Yes, that is a reasonable characterization grid.
I quite agree. Systems are not civilizations though.
There is a profound difference between the productive and parasitic in your abstraction here.
There may be parasitic cultures; there are not, by definition, parasitic Civilizations.
31 – no more uro,
Stealthy or forthrite? It’s about arming the relacements. I too have been instigating for defining the “Planks” upfront, and stating the anticipated outcomes repeatedly, all during the campaigns of every replacement (C) in 2010 and 2012. It’s not party-specific and it’s got to be the “same speil” for all of them, a very focused message, so we can aggregate and optimize.
Death to the Left may seem too strident; but that’s what we’re talking about, no? Smaller gov’t with a vengence.
Unless we adopt a “stake in the heart” approach, we’ll end up with at best a McCain and at worst, it won’t have been worth the effort. The Mandate must be crystal clear, so those elected by our side cannot backslide on the primary objectives.
As to W’s invasion analogy, I keep coming back to a “designer virus” – a worm that captures anyone/node that’s easily tempted, apt to be greedy and lazy; ie, hedonists. That’s gotten to be very large part of the infrastructure/populace, spread by the compassionate Left and moderates as carriers. Always weakening the tempering processes of the body politic. Insideous.
The downfall of the West started with the removal of merit from the evaluation process, on compassionate grounds. Fairness, AA and PC are human constructs; nature doesn’t give a sh*t. See academes and half of US high school grads.
So because some small fraction of the students didn’t do as well with the memorization pedagogy, the Left persuaded US to abandon that and switch to a methodology that doesn’t employ any “rote learning.” Now we graduate 50%+ who are by 1960-1980 definitions innumerate and illererate, ahistorical and misinformed bout most things. What standards?
The Planks developed for (C)s ought to address some very basic remedies, no? Like what we’ll do first thing. How does something like this resonate with US? “The EPA will be down-sized, using proven science to determine the mission of what remains.” Add NASA, IRS (flat tax Plank) et al to the priority list. Open borders invite infectees.
A very aggressive “green” mutation of the virus has infested many US agencies and departments including the military and a significant portion of the population. Infected citizens (some of whom will literally lay down their lives) are aligned to stop forestry, mining, drilling, powerplant construction, and war-fighting, everywhere). What must the disinfecting/dismantling/vaccination look like, when permitting any trace to remain spells doom for future US generations?
Note: this “designer worm” is increasingly able to takeover/shutdown nearly anything, anytime, in its self-defense.
“right up to the Kahn himself”
Um, you mean that apart from anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, there was a time when Jews ruled the world?
I believe that the Mongol rulers called themselves Khans as in Noor Inayat Khan, the French patriot who fought the Nazis, or in Khan Noonien, the fictitious pirate-with-the-pecs from Star Trek. In contrast, Kahn is a variant of the Jewish family name Cohen or Kahane for the priestly tribe.
Tom Clancy has a franchise in which one of the forces is an internal secession of cyber folks. Called “cybernation”, they try to get autonomy, sovereignty, relief from US taxes.
After that, it’s the usual action. But he does a bit of devil’s advocate in it. Good or bad, your pick, it does provide some thoughtful discussion of what this would actually look like.
David Byrne does a great version of “Don’t Fence Me In,” with Brazillian style percussion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14l75vz-R9w
And so does Louis Armstrong.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3ebEEe8VEw
American cowboys are the horse nomads of America, as the Mongols were the most successful horse nomads of Eurasia; see William H. McNeil’s “The Rise of the West” on this, and for a surprisingly positive view of the Mongols, see “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” by Jack Weatherford.
America’s cowboys are mostly Scots-Irish, or those who have assimilated to Scots-Irish culture, and the Scots-Irish are descended from the Celts who also came from the Eurasian steppes, bringing their culture with them.
The Mongols invaded Europe and knocked on the doors of Vienna because Siberia became liveable during the Mideval Warming period. The Mongol empire collapsed when Siberia froze up and became unliveable during the Mini-Ice Age.
If you have travelled the area you realize that there is no viable alternate southern route.