the path of tribal conquest

and the road back out

conquering other tribes is the primary purpose of tribes. anyone who says otherwise is selling something, usually “trust me while i rob you blind.”

exceptions to this are very, very rare.

mostly, its a memetic necessity and a sort of emergent dominant strategy in a game theory sense.

it’s rooted in hard facts:

if you are few and they are many, they can kill you or take what’s yours.

the algorithm is simple:

when weak, seek accommodation.

when strong, grant none.

this is the might makes right law of the jungle and the way to win at war of all against all.

every hyena knows this. more than a few humans have forgotten.

here is an example from islam, a theocratic culture notorious for this strategy.

the very ideas are codified into the ethos.

you can easily find a dozen examples of this. it’s neither subtle nor hidden.

ask them. they’ll tell you.

never make peace when you are powerful.

always ask it of the powerful when you are weak.

keep your eyes on the prize and the goal ever in mind:

to take the land of the infidel, his wealth, his wives, and his children.

“we are the religion of peace” they tell you.

but what they say to one another is often very different.

this is seen as neither wrong nor shameful, it’s a simple expression of effective will to power. it persists because it works. it’s selected for. it’s a dominant meme and to the extent that the population you seek to dominate does not understand this, they become easy pickings. you scream about “rights” when you are a minority, then seek to take them away from everyone else once you are in power.

and they fall for it.

there has been a lot of focus on “immigrants” and “invaders” of late because it’s an obvious and easy distinction, but it’s also one you want to be careful of assuming to be the whole story.

the markers of religion or ethnicity are easy demarcations, but they are not, in and of themselves, the real distinction. it’s not even “culture” per se.

the reality is that it’s tribe.

tribal identity, tribal identifiers, tribal loyalty, and tribal ideology. this is the dominant strategy in gang warfare and so too is absolute, utter dishonesty.

when you say “tribe” people think about where you came from or what you look like, but it transcends that, especially in the age of the postmodern, post-truth, post-reality jihadi secular religion. this too is a tribe and they are every bit as dangerous as any other tribe from the low-trust world. and they too will use this same playbook:

demand rights and accommodation as a minority then grant none once in power.

you saw this with the “woke” and DEI tribes. they began asking for accommodation, for tolerance, for a place in companies and universities. then, they went “full soviet” once they had amassed sufficient power. disagreement meant you were racist, sexist, phobic and would be cast out in cancel culture expulsion or dragged into struggle sessions for “re-education.” all tolerance was gone.

i am the captain now.

same pattern, over and over.

in the minority: free speech.

in control: only we may speak.

they took over schools, companies, countries.

and their regimes were everything they once professed to hate: bigoted, exclusionary, preferential, autocratic, and vicious.

remember this?

here is your “pluralism and inclusion.”

“do you feel included!?!”

look at this crowd. it’s not about race or gender.

it’s just another tribe drunk on power.

and in this lavish and destructive application of force, they cow the other tribes into submission through overt threat and will to violence.

those who pled “tolerance” now have none for anyone else.

remember this?

these are the great leaders of a great nation kneeling in their capital in contrition to a tribe that is, at that very moment, burning and looting their cities.

any barbarian chieftain would know this for precisely what it was.

yes somehow, much of america said “oh, OK, this is fine.”

it was not.

how must such a tribe feel?

will not such a tribe double down and ask for more?

of course they will. they are in power now.

no accommodation for the weak.

“mostly peaceful” they will tell you.

but these are lies.

there is a whole tradition of this.

it’s the intersection of “big lie” goebbels, who tells you “always accuse the other side of that which you are guilty” and notions like islamic yaqiyya which states that “the believer” may hide his belief and his aims from the unbeliever if it renders him safe or helps to advance the cause.

many tribes adopt these tactics.

this works very well on the “rare exception” tribes who are golden rule based high trust societies. “we must trust them” as that is our way. we imagine that they will be like us, learn from us, see our high-function non-defection society and embrace it. but they don’t. they walk right in, dressed as wolves and tell you they are lambs.

and then you fall for it.

the standards are invariably double. the migrant rapes and goes free, the woman complains about it on the internet and is jailed.

you take a child to a strip club and you’re on rikers faster than you can say “champagne room” but hand your kid a wad of singles for “drag queen pole dance” down at the elementary school and you go on the gold star exemplary parents list.

the lie is so brazen that high trust people say “well, it must be so.” but it’s not. it’s glaringly obvious what “drag queen story hour” means and why the audience is always children and never “old folks” or “people in hospital.”

and then the facts come out.

another tribe lying about its aims and practices to gain power over others.

this can go hideously wrong when the morals of tribes diverge profoundly from those of society.

but what really brings the atrocities is when the tribes in power and regard begin to bend laws and structures to their ends or to be supported by a fearful state scared of them or desirous of using them as hobgoblins with which to menace a population to keep them from rounding upon the state.

in this system:

your speech is “hate and terrorism.”

their hate and terrorism is “speech.”

it’s not about whether there was a knife, it’s about who held it.

the laws are no longer to protect the people, they are to protect the lawgivers and their agents.

this is always the way.

and the tribes who are organized and ready to be violent win the game of werewolf.

the inversions of this sort of persecution and preferencing can get wild. immigrants get free housing. you get kicked out of yours.

this is all tribal and it’s all the same two tenets:

when weak, demand accommodation and rights.

once in power, accommodate nothing but yourselves.

and on come the gaslights.

we’re not crazy, you are.

and this really brings out the lunatics because this sort of abusive punch no punchbacks is just their game and the utter lack of accountability becomes a license to do the outrageous. my tribe uses every part of the pathology.

and the complicit media becomes a thing read in white space, not in print. if the media says “girl arrested for brandishing knives” you know there was an immigrant perp. failure to list race tells you the race. it’s always what they refuse to say that speaks loudest. that’s how you spot the capture.

power flows to those who take and keep it.

it’s about who is organized and who is committed. it’s very hard for peaceful people, especially alone, to hold ground against unpeaceful people who are always spoiling for a fight and ready to die on hills of tribal doctrine and dominance.

“trans” is an astonishing example of this.

this is a tiny tribe punching WAY above its weight because its members are wildly devoted in the way only the pathological can be.

much of what is going on with “trans” is not even about gender. this has become the scupper for the maladapted, the magic words that make them untouchable and powerful and possibly get them into college. actual gender seems increasingly incidental.

this is a VERY bad way to build a tribe.

its whole purpose bends to demanding tolerance of the intolerable.

here are some charming examples:

swap out the payload of these messages to “white” or “male” or “chinese” and the FBI would kick in your door.

but this gets called stunning and brave because this is the tribe that is allowed to have the knife.

the woman in the lower right is peggy flanagan, lieutenant governor of minnesota.

"hey, i wonder where these mentally ill kids are getting such violent ideas?"

drop in a pile of injected hormones and an SSRI and you're basically running MK-ultra.

last week in minneapolis, this 22-23 (reports vary) year old biological male DBA “robin” the trans-woman shot up a church full of schoolkids. his weapons were bedecked with trans and anti-trump regalia and he left behind a manifesto of wild claims and violent ideation as well as missives about wishing he had never been brainwashed into trans but feeling unable to renounce for fear of consequence and censure.

the mayor says “let’s not make this about trans.”

why? because fail to appease them and the group goes wild.

and the minneapolis and minnesota governments are always ready to bend the knee.

the media wants to focus on pronouns.

sigh.

what is one to do with a tribe like this?

what is one to do with tribes like any of these?

is reasonable coexistence even possible when so much of what is asked is just an endless reprise of this?

i fear that diversity, equity, and invasion is not an ideology with which free people may cohabit.

and we the trusting tribe of golden rules and golden ages who merely wish to be left alone in peace and to leave others in the same are at a difficult crossroads for while we may want to move past tribal warfare and domination, tribal warfare and domination does not want to move past us.

it wants to run us over and occupy our space.

and something will have to give.

and when something has to give, something will.

i say this not as threat but as prediction because this is how these pendulums swing and social forces once loosed cannot be constrained or stopped.

and they always, always go too far.

either these unassimilable incursionists from both home and abroad must stop or something altogether awful will happen. i think a lot of us are worried about what we feel building.

high-trust, high-agency societies are slow to rouse, but utterly implacable once set in motion. it would be massacre. and that benefits no one save the nihilist wreckers who hope to climb the ladder of such chaos or use it to excuse dictatorship.

if we’re going to get out of this, our tribe must realize that it is a tribe and stop playing at “everyone else gets rights except us.”

there is no future in that.

being clever or educated is not enough.

it always comes down to what people can do and what they will do.

the original el gato malo was a huge savannah cat. he loved ham to a truly irrational degree. one day i was eating a ham sandwich in my home office. he wanted some. i said “no.” so he walked over and knocked over my water bottle so it was pouring into my printer. “what the hell!?!” said i, jumping up to grab it to stop this calamity. he calmly took my sandwich and bounded out of the room.

he had a brain the size of a walnut.

this was not about being smart.

he was more focused than i was. he was willing to do what i would not and to take the game onto fields that advantaged him.

there’s a lesson in there.

we’d be wise to learn it.