Opera Rocks

There is an important reason that the right never wins the culture war overall, despite the left being so poor at tactics that they often end up shooting their own feet. That is the reality that logistics are more important than tactics, and tactics only matter once you have sorted logistics out. The left has sorted logistics out by creating patronage networks, while the right refuses to do so because it's still controlled by a curious kind of boomer paleoliberal who thinks that "free market" means "everything should pay for itself". Thus, both the cultural and political struggles of the right must be waged by broke young men as a side project to their careers, while fighting for the left is a career. The young men fighting for the right are simply expected to purchase their own rifles, ammunition, uniforms and kit, provide their own transport to the front, then organize themselves into units to defeat the communists. If you understand this, then you will understand why the retards manage to win a lot despite being retards. The left is giving people 100K fellowships for writing lesbian novels, while the right is charging its own guys $200 to listen to some theoretical ramblings about the antichrist. No, that's not a metaphor. I wish I had made either of those two facts up as some sort of hyperbole. Only the left understands how to get and use political power. The left understands that power is a form of currency. So if you want it, you have to buy it, with some other form of currency. Such as money. The right thinks that political power is a side effect... something that you naturally accumulate while doing business. Possibly this is because most wealthy right-wing people are investors. They start a project, or put money into it, and they expect to get their money back and then some. That's what they are used to. That's how investment works. But that's not how power works. And if you have wealth, but no power, then the people with power will just take whatever you built. I don't know exactly what the tech right, the business right, the wealthy right, should be spending on political power. But what they are spending is clearly not enough and in the wrong places. Because George Soros sure as hell isn't selling people tickets to listen to him talk.

My father died in Japan in February and I could not get back. I told exactly one American, and only because he asked a direct question at a bad moment and I have never been able to lie fast enough. He did not say he was sorry. He said, "You busy Saturday?" I was not busy Saturday. I have not been busy on a Saturday since I arrived in this country. He wanted help moving a riding mower to the other side of his garage. The mower runs. He drove it out himself. I want to be accurate here, because I have thought about it a great deal since: the mower ended that day about two feet from where it started. We were in the garage five hours. There was a small refrigerator out there with beer in it and one orange drink belonging to his grandson, and neither of us touched the orange drink at any point. We discussed a shelf. We discussed a bolt for some time. Around one o'clock we spent close to forty minutes on the correct way to coil a hose, and he was wrong, and I told him he was wrong, and he told me to prove it, and I proved it, and he said "huh," and that was the end of it. He did not mention my father once. I had prepared for it. In my country a man in mourning is approached with fixed phrases that have been in service four hundred years, which is the entire purpose of them, and I had built mine in English over three nights. They were not good. They were ready. I never used them. I still have them written down. At six he said, "Same time next week?" We did that for five Saturdays. We moved a workbench. We rewired a light that already worked. One Saturday we sorted screws by length, which is not a job. That is somewhere to put a man. In April a neighbor three doors down lost his mother. I do not own a mower. I own a boat trailer that does not need to be moved. He came at eight. He is coming again this Saturday. I have not said one word to him about his mother and I am not going to. He knows what time.