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[From "Deus Vult"]

Trump cannot get stuff done, because he is merely president, and the permanent government is full of people that hate him.

But it is not just the permanent government. His political appointees are in bed with his enemies, and are subverting his agenda. Two years after Hitler was elected, Hitler had a Nazi running ever boy scout troop and every trade union chapter. Trump cannot even get a Trumpist running border security.

The one area where Trump has been successful is putting his people in the judiciary. Trumpist judges, though still massively outnumbered, are coming in at every level. Trump has been effective in appointing judges, because he has a big bench he can draw upon, which bench knows who whom, which bench is self policing, which bench can be relied upon to carry out his program without him needing to be on their back. Personnel is policy, and the Federalist society has a supply.

Reflect on the Federalist society: They have their article of faith – original intent. And they have a network to identify their fellow faithful. Just as Constantine adopted Christianity that provided him with a cohesive group to staff his government, in a Roman Empire disintegrating from elite incohesion.

To govern, you need a synthetic tribe, which Hitler had, which Constantine adopted, and which Trump lacks, except for the federalist society which is narrowly focused on judicial process.

The Federalist article of faith (Original Intent) that provides unity and cohesion is also an effective antibody against enemy outgroups. It is something no leftist can admit is even thinkable – to them, just words with no meaning that they dare conceive of. So when leftist entryists attempt to infiltrate the Federalists, they use their shibboleths incorrectly, like a Marxist purporting to be channeling Adam Smith, and wind up babbling random nonsensical meaningless scripted formulaic NPC gibberish.

We, on the other hand, agree with the leftists, that original intent is not really going to fly, while we agree with the Federalists that judges exercising executive, legislative, budgetary authority is intolerable. One emperor is a stationary bandit. A thousand little emperors is mobile banditry and anarcho tyranny. We, however, propose a solution far more radical than that of the federalists – that the final court of appeal should be the Sovereign, should be Moses, the King, or the President, and he should be able to intervene in any case, and fire any judge. We also propose William the Conqueror’s “forms of action”, meaning that judges should be reduced to data entry clerks filling out forms that result in remote procedure calls to a system of central databases, similar to the system used by Australia’s border control force for dealing with “Illegal persons”. (Australian Border Force is Judge Dredd with more typing required than Judge Dredd had to do, but the same refreshing speed, efficiency, and absence of lawyers and priestly robes as with Judge Dredd.) William the Conqueror’s “Forms of action” kept judges in line for seven hundred years, and modern databases and remote procedure calls make William the Conqueror’s solution lightning fast, so that it can be applied by a cop on the beat, after the fashion of Judge Dredd and the Australian Border Force.

We have our mailing lists and forums, like the federalist society. What we don’t have is some articles of faith, a canon, a creed, a catechism. Constantine’s Christians had a creed. Trump’s federalist society has one. By getting agreement on certain principles, we can identify our fellow faithful, we can provide a tribe capable of governing. Our basic plan is that someone grabs power, needs a tribe to actually govern. Ideally, a warrior grabs power at gunpoint, swiftly discovers that guns do not suffice, realizes he needs a priesthood, looks around for a priesthood, finds us, as Constantine found Christendom, and Trump found the Federalist Society. When Trump appoints someone in charge of border security, he does not necessarily get someone who favors border security. When Trump appoints a Federalist Society judge, he reliably gets a Federalist, as Constantine reliably got a Christian, and Hitler reliably got a Nazi.

The political appointees that Trump appoints are frequently disloyal to Trump and hostile to his agenda. The Federalist Judges he appoints are loyal to federalism, thus reasonably loyal to Trump and supportive of his agenda. Indeed the left regularly complains that federalist judges are more supportive of Trump and his agenda than they are to federalism, which is not true, but has a substantial grain of truth in that federalist judges appointed on the basis of their federalism are more supportive of Trump and his agenda than are political appointees appointed on the basis of loyalty to Trump and his agenda. The Federalist society polices itself. Trump is not having much success policing Trump political appointees.

[...]

So: here are the articles of the Canon:

Throne
Altar
Freehold
Family
Property

Throne

Division of powers, divided sovereignty does not work, more rulers means mobile banditry and anarcho tyranny. A stationary bandit has better incentives than a mobile bandit.

Altar

You cannot separate state and church. The church will undermine the state and take state power for itself, or the state subvert the church, or both at once. Harvard is our high holy Cathedral. A holiness spiral ensues as the priestly classes, the professoriat, the judiciary, and the media, pursue power by each being holier than the other. Obviously we have a state religion a state religion that every day becomes crazier, more dogmatic, and more intrusive, and that state religion needs to be formalized and made official so that the high priest and grand inquisitor can stop holiness spirals.

[...]

Freehold

Freehold necessarily involves and requires rejection of the principle of equality before the law, and property rejection of equality of outcomes. Not all men were created equal, nor are women equal to men, nor is one group or category of men equal to another. Stereotypes are stereotypical, because the stereotype is usually true for most individual members of the group or category.

We have never had equality before the law, and are having it less every day. Cops have a special right to use violence, blacks have a special right to use violence and to not be insulted, similar to that of the traditional aristocracy, Hispanics and illegal immigrants in California have a special right to use violence and to not be insulted.

State building is coalition building to rule. We need a coalition of the smart, the cooperative, and the productive, ruling the stupid, the disruptive, and the destructive. The doctrine of equality means you cannot reward the elite with status? What! Of course the ruling elite is going to be rewarded with status, and that is exactly what is happening.

The ruling elite always gets rewarded, the ruling coalition always gets rewarded. Members of the ruling coalition always get a superior right to use violence, and a superior right to not be insulted. That is the way it is, and that is what we saw when white people were ethnically cleansed out of Detroit. The doctrine of equality before the law was always a lie intended to destroy the coalition of the smart, the cooperative, and the productive, to guilt the best people into surrender, so that they could be destroyed by a coalition of the worst.

Freehold means that we acknowledge that some state power is in fact private property, and the sovereign lets his loyal vassals enjoy their privilege, because if he tries to meddle, he will be overwhelmed by detail and complexity, so best to formalize that privilege and make it official. If we don’t have the aristocracy that so offended the founding fathers, we find ourselves with blacks exercising aristocratic privilege over whites. Equality before the law is an unworkable ideal, hypocritically betrayed in actual practice. Some people are going to be unjustly privileged. Let us try to make it the best people rather than the worst people, and try to make it the people that the state draws is wealth and coercive power from, rather than the people who sponge off the state.

Family

The immense biological and reproductive differences between men and women means that they can only cooperate for family formation on asymmetric, unequal terms. The wife has a duty to honor and obey, the husband to love and cherish. To ensure cooperation between men and women, the state, the family, society, and religion have to force men and women who sleep together to stick together, to force them to perform their marital duties, to force the man to cherish and the woman to obey, otherwise you get defect/defect, and reproduction and family become difficult for both men and woman.

For hypergamy to be eugenic rather than dysgenic, taxpayers and warriors need to have a special right to use violence and to not be insulted. For marriage to work, pimps, sluts, and whores need to have a substantially less protection against violence, insult, and rape. For marriage to be incentive compatible for women it has to be simply legal for a respectable man to chain a slut up in his basement, and if she does not want to risk that outcome, she needs to sign up in a nunnery or submit to husband. A right to protection should require chastity and/or submission to the authority of a husband or father. Sluts shall have legal authority equal to chaste women? What! This inevitably results in sluts being given legal status higher than that of chaste woman, and that is exactly what is happening. Wives, like whites, are very much second class low status citizens. We have an aristocracy, and black whores are at the top.

Women always wind up heading off the protection of the most alpha male around. If that is the protection of uncle Sam, you get what we have got.

You will notice that the doctrine that all women shall be equal required and led to the doctrine that all women are naturally chaste, enshrined in our current law on rape and sexual harassment, which presupposes that the primary person who is harmed by rape and sexual harassment is the woman, and the primary person who is going to object to it and be distressed by it is the woman, rather than the father, her biological kinfolk, and the husband. The transparent falsity and absurdity of this doctrine leads to the transparent falsity and absurdity of all rape and sexual harassment charges and convictions, as near to all of them as makes no difference. Legal equality necessitates and results in a denial of biological inequality.

Rape and sexual harassment laws that give women equal status to males are a problem, because in practice their resistance to rape and sexual harassment is a fitness test – they are pissed at you if you fail the test, not pissed by being successfully raped. So rape and sexual harassment charges based on the legal theory that these are crimes against the women herself, rather than her husband or family, always originate from failed shit tests – and the overwhelming majority of these failures do not involve rape and sexual harassment. What happens in the vast majority of cases, for all practical purposes all of them, is that a woman is sexually attracted to a man, hits him with a brutal and hard to pass shit test out of the blue, he fails, she feels creeped out, and comes to believe that something must have happened that legally justifies her feeling of being creeped out. In the rare and unusual occasions when they are based on an actual attempt at rape or sexual harassment, they are based not on the rape or the sexual harassment, but on the man failing her fitness test by retreating from her hostile response. They originate from male behavior that is not all that bad – just weak, the male trying something, but then retreating in the face of determined opposition.

We cannot give women the same legal right to protection against violence and insult as men, because they fail to cooperate in that protection. The best we can do is grant state backing for nunneries, husbands, and fathers protecting their wives and daughters, because husbands and fathers are are going to cooperate in that protection, and the male priests supervising the nunnery will cooperate in that protection. Violence and insult against women has to be handled as an offense against the male authority that cares for them, because if handled as an offense against the women themselves, the women are unhelpful, untruthful, deluded, and uncooperative, failing to report the kind of offenses that we want to suppress, and delusively reporting non offenses.

Men and women want families. Men and women want to cooperate to have families. But prisoners dilemma gets in the way. To fix the prisoner dilemma problem, need to hit women with a stick.

Property

Anti discrimination law violates people’s property rights. Google hates us, but the problem is not primarily too much capitalism, but too little. In the James Damore affair, Google’s Human Resources Department (the Human Resources department being a tentacle of the state inserted into every corporation) threatened the board and the management of Google with a lawsuit for not hating us enough, issuing an official opinion that thinking forbidden thoughts constituted a “hostile environment for women”. Because stereotypes are usually true, private individuals and corporations should be free to make use of the information expressed by stereotyping. The trouble with libertarians and libertarianism is that they support every socialist intervention that is destroying our lives and our economy.

Family law and anti discrimination law violates the fourth amendment and the seventh, eighth, and final commandments

[...]

Technological advance and industrialization comes from Ayn Rand’s heroic engineer CEO, mobilizing other people’s capital and other people’s labor. We first see this archetype appear immediately after the restoration, when Charles the Second made it OK to use the corporate form to get rich. Unfortunately, Ayn Rand’s hero is not heroically on our side, contrary to what Ayn Rand promised. He unheroically endorses the official religion, knowing his property could be attacked if he does not. But we should keep in mind that this makes him merely the instrument of power, not power. When we are in charge he will support our official religion and scarcely notice the change in the slogans posted in the rec room, which formerly endorsed coveting what belonged to others and females adopting male clothing and roles, but will then condemn coveting and endorse males performing male roles and females performing female roles.

Rand’s superman is not on our side. But he is not on the progs side. He is his own side, and this makes him largely irrelevant for political power, which requires cohesion.

The state can facilitate science by being a customer and buying high tech stuff. Indeed, a great deal of advance has come from the state seeking means to hurt people and break their toys, but when the state tries to itself advance technology, it usually turns out badly: Nasa could not build rockets. Kidnapped Wernher von Braun. Asked him how to build rockets. Still could not build rockets.

Nasa puts Wernher von Braun in charge. Now it can build rockets. Puts a man on the moon.

Wernher von Braun retires. New types of rockets don’t work. Old types of rockets gradually stop working no matter how much government money is poured down the toilet.

Where did Nasa find Wernher von Braun?

Nazis kidnapped him from the German rocket club which they shut down.

Seems obvious that we would have wound up with a whole lot better rocket technology if the rocket club became, or spawned, a bunch of startups, one of them led by Wernher von Braun, and governments outsourced rockets. Which is what gave us the reusable booster that lands as a rocket should land.

Before Wernher von Braun, american government rockets did not work. After Wernher von Braun, government rockets gradually stopped working. And the rocket club, not the Nazis, and not NASA, found Wernher von Braun.

Radar and wartime electronics present a similar story. Harvard created a huge radar and counter radar program during the war – which led nowhere, as NASA’s rockets went nowhere after Wernher von Braun retired.

The Victorian theory that women were angels, therefore no coercion was needed against naturally saintly women, only against demonic males who make saintly women do bad things, led to an intolerable flood of bastards and women giving birth in the rain in dark alleys, which in turn led to “Oliver Twist” and “Les Miserables”, which brought us the welfare state, and the replacement of the nuclear family with child support. As people in the eighteenth century were aware, people need marriage in order to reproduce, and marriage needs coercion to make it stick, and the primary victims of this coercion need to be women, otherwise they will have sex with one man, then sex with another, making it difficult and unpleasant to father children.

Similarly, “White Man’s Burden”, and “la haute mission civilisatrice” was the death of colonialism.

It led the British general who was invading Afghanistan to believe he was doing Afghans a favor, and if he was sufficiently nice to them they would throw flowers at his troops. So he forbade his troops to take necessary measures for self defense, and, as a result, he and his troops died.

The white man’s burden was profoundly counterproductive to social cohesion, because it led to them sacrificing near (British officers and troops) for far (afghan officers and troops)

If it is a burden, then you proceed to conspicuously display your holiness by burden carrying – which is apt to mean making your troops carry burdens.

Before the British intervened in Afghanistan, the most recent news that most people had of it was records of Alexander’s army passing through two millenia ago.

The empire of the East India company was expanding, and the empire of the Russias was expanding, and it was inevitable that the two would meet. And so it came to pass that the Kings of Afghanistan encountered both, and played each against the other.

When the British became aware of Afghanistan, they interpreted its inhabitants as predominantly white or whitish – as descendants of Alexander’s troops and camp followers and/or descendants of Jews converted to Islam at swordpoint.

Afghanistan was, and arguably still is, a elective monarchy, and the fractious electors tended to fight each other and elect weak kings who could scarcely control their followers, and so it has been ever since Alexander’s troops lost Alexander.

Mister Mountstuart Elphinstone, in his account of is mission to Kabul in 1809, says he once urged upon a very intelligent old man of the tribe of Meankheile, the superiority of a quiet life under a powerful monarch, over the state of chaotic anarchy that so frequently prevailed.

The reply was “We are content with alarms, we are content with discord, we are content with blood, but we will never be content with a master!”

As Machiavelli observed, such places are easy to conquer, but hard to hold, and so it proved.

To conquer and hold such places, one must massacre, castrate, or enslave all of the ruling elite that seems fractious, which is pretty much all of them, and replace them with your own people, speaking your own language, and practicing your own customs, as the Normans did in England, and the French did in Algeria, starting 1830. The British of 1840, however, had no stomach for French methods, and were already starting to fall short of the population growth necessary for such methods.

So what the British could have done is paid the occasional visit to kill any king that they found obnoxious, kill his friends, family, his children, and leading supporters, install a replacement king, and leave. The replacement king would have found his throne shaky, because Afghan Kings have usually found their thrones shaky, but the British did not need to view that as their problem, knowing the solution to that problem to be drastic and extreme. If the throne has been shaky for two thousand years, it is apt to be difficult to stop it from rocking.

After a long period of disorderly violence, where brother savagely tortured brother to death, and all sorts of utterly horrifying crimes were committed, King Dost Mahomed Khan took power in Kabul in 1826, and proceeded to rule well, creating order, peace, and prosperity, and receiving near universal support from the fractious and quarreling clans of Afghanistan.

The only tax under his rule was a tariff of one fortieth on goods entering and leaving the country. This and the Jizya poll tax are the only taxes allowed by the Koran, at least as Islamic law is interpreted in this rebellious country which has historically been disinclined to pay taxes, and because this tax was actually paid, it brought him unprecedented revenues. On paying this tax “the merchant may travel without guard or protection from one border to the other, an unheard of circumstance”

However he did not rule Herat, which was controlled by one of his enemies, who been King before and had ambitions to be King again. He therefore offered Herat to the Shah of Persia in return for the Shah’s support against another of his enemies, Runjeet Singh. He was probably scarcely aware that Runjeet Singh was allied to the British, and the Shah was allied to the Tsar of all the Russias.

Notice that this deal was remarkably tight fisted, as was infamously typical of deals made by Dost Mahomed Khan. He would give the Persians that which he did not possess, in return for them taking care of one of his enemies and helping him against another.

The British East India Company, however, saw this as Afghanistan moving into Russian empire, though I am pretty sure that neither the Shah of Persia nor the King of Aghanistan thought they were part of anyone’s empire.

So Russia and the East India Company sent ambassadors to the King of Afghanistan, who held a bidding contest asking which of them could best protect him against Runjeet Singh. He then duplicitously accepted both bids from both empires, which was a little too clever by half, though absolutely typical of the deals he made with his neighbors.

Dost Mahomed Khan was a very clever king, but double crossing the East India Company was never very clever at all. No one ever got ahead double crossing the East India Company. It is like borrowing money from the Mafia and forgetting to pay them back.

Russia and England then agreed to not get overly agitated over the doings of unreliable and duplicitous proxies that they could scarcely control – which agreement the East India Company took as permission to hold a gun to the head of the Shah of Persia. The East India company seized control of the Persian Gulf, an implicit threat to invade if the Shah intervened in Afghanistan to protect Dost Mahomed Khan. It then let Runjeet Singh off the leash, and promised to support his invasion of Afghanistan.

So far, so sane. Someone double crosses you, then you make an horrible example of him, and no one will do it again. Then get out, and whoever rules in Afghanistan, if anyone does manage to rule, will refrain from pissing you off a second time.

The British decided to give a large part of Afghanistan to Runjeet Singh, and install Shah Shoudjah-ool-Moolk, a Kinglet with somewhat plausible pretensions to the Afghan throne, in place of Dost Mahomet Khan.

Up to this point everything the East India Company is doing is sane, honorable, competent, just, and wonderfully eighteenth century.

Unfortunately, it is the nineteenth century. And the nineteenth century is when the rot set in.

His Majesty Shah Shoudjah-ool-Moolk will enter Afghanistan, surrounded by his own troops, and will be supported against foreign interference, and factious opposition, by the British Army. The Governor-general confidently hopes, that the Shah will be speedily replaced on his throne by his own subjects and adherents, and that the independence and integrity of Afghanistan established, the British army will be withdrawn. The Governor-general has been led to these acts by the duty which is imposed upon him, of providing for the security of the possessions of the British crown, but he rejoices, that, in the discharge of this duty, he will be enabled to assist in restoring the union and prosperity of the Afghan people.

So: The English tell themselves and each other: We not smacking Afghans against a wall to teach them not to play games with the East India Company. On the contrary, we are doing them a favor. A really big favor. Because we love everyone. We even love total strangers in far away places very different from ourselves. We are defending the independence of Afghanistan by removing the strongest King it has had in centuries and installing our puppet, and defending its integrity by arranging for invasion, conquest, rape and pillage by its ancient enemies the Sikhs, in particular Runjeet Singh. Because we love far away strangers who speak a language different from our own and live in places we cannot find on the map. We just love them to pieces. And when we invade, we will doubtless be greeted by people throwing flowers at us.

You might ask who would believe such guff? Obviously not the Afghans, who are being smacked against the wall. Obviously not the Russians. Obviously not the Persians. Obviously not the British troops who are apt to notice they are not being pelted with flowers.

The answer is, the commanding officer believed this guff. And not long thereafter, he and his troops died of it, the first great defeat of British colonialism. And, of course, the same causes are today leading to our current defeat in Afghanistan.

The commanding officer of the British expedition made a long series of horrifyingly evil and stupid decisions, which decisions only made sense if he was doing the Afghans a big favor, if the Afghans were likely to appreciate the big favor he was doing them, and his troops were being pelted with flowers, or Afghans were likely to start pelting them with flowers real soon now. The East India company was no stranger to evil acts, being in the business of piracy, brigandry, conquest, and extortion, but people tend to forgive evil acts that lead to success, prosperity, good roads, safe roads, and strong government. These evil acts, the evil acts committed by the British expedition to Afghanistan, are long remembered because they led to failure, defeat, lawlessness, disorder, and weak government.

As a result, he, his men, and their camp followers, were all killed.

Progressives tend to judge people by their good intentions, and the intentions of the British Empire in invading Afghanistan were absolutely wonderful, but the man who does evil because insane is a worse problem than the man who does evil because he expects to profit. The rational profit seeking evildoer, you can pay off, or deter. You can surrender on terms that will probaby not be too bad. The irrational evildoer just has to be killed. Before 1840, the East India Company was sometimes deterred, frequently paid off, and frequently accepted surrender on reasonable terms. In 1841, just had to be killed.

This illustrates the importance of the rectification of names, of formalism. If you lie to yourself, you are deceived. I have been reading the Clinton emails, and one of the most striking features is that Clinton and company are deluded and deceived by self flattering lies, that despite having vast spy networks in far flung places, are seriously out of contact with reality, as their circle tells each other what they want to hear.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. Hillary and her advisers, and therefore I suppose the entire state department, know neither the enemy nor themselves. They dream grandiose delusions, in which they are the terribly smart and virtuous people, rather than a drunken old sow surrounded by lying flatterers.

The East India Company did not realize that it was about to be recast, or was recasting itself, from being a for profit company, empowered to make war and engage in acts of piracy and extortion for private profit, to being the British government’s instrument of holy do gooding, benevolently carrying the white man’s burden for the benefit of a bunch of strangely ungrateful foreigners. In place of a ruthless mafia with uniformed soldiers, the East India Company was about to become an NGO with uniformed nursemaids.

Yet strangely, the greater the good intentions, the more they were to be resented. [Sarcasm tag removed because it broke the quote submission] The East India Company seems to have been more popular when they were pirates and bandits than when they were pious do gooders. No one seemed to appreciate the East India Company doing good to them at gunpoint. The ridiculous part of the white man’s burden was the striking ingratitude of the supposed beneficiaries, resembling the striking ingratitude of Middle Easterner’s towards meddling by presidents Bush and Obama in the Middle East. Those @!^&$ Middle Easterners just somehow do not know what is good for them, unlike far away strangers, who, being terribly clever, know exactly what is good for the Middle East without ever having lived there.

If an elite attempt to rule distant places, they will rule them very badly, unless some of the children of the elite move to those places, and stay there to rule them. Carpetbaggers who come and go tend to leave horror and devastation in their wake, as for example the looting of Haiti by do gooder ngos after the earthquake. If you are not going to stick around, the incentive is to take everything and smash everything, which is what happened to Haiti when the US State Department ngos got coercive quasi governmental power. Haitians wound up eating dirt, sleeping in the rain, and got cholera. So, not going to rule well, unless you have a fertile elite, which needs more governmental and quasi governmental jobs for its excessively numerous offspring. In which case good rule will naturally follow from the desire of that elite to make a nice place for themselves and their descendants. This is necessarily going to be rough on the existing local elite, but an ideology of doing good to far away strangers does not result in doing good to far away strangers, but at best to famine, destruction of property, and disease, as recently demonstrated in Haiti.