Coded language

Have you learned it?

Before there's flowers here and sour tears
I'm looking forward to knowing how power feels
Powerful, power is knowledge
They sum up my life with my four years of college
I know first-hand words is money
I learned they coded language, observed these dummies

~Heems, "Killing Time"

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad (sic) champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

Many have had much to say about the H-1B dustup that occurred on X where I’m told the school districts are improving and crime is actually down. While I think many of my thoughts could be shoehorned into or even summarized by

Curtis Yarvin

’s “Migration and the sovereign firm” (chiefly the idea that you will never take care of something more than when you own it), today I want to dedicate a few paragraphs to Vivek Ramaswamy, who I should state doesn’t inspire much emotion in me but who I am beginning to respect for his ability to piss off many of the people who he would rather have his back. As a slick and spiky guy, I can’t help but salute one of my own.

Migration and the sovereign firm

It was either this pose or the Michael Jordan dunk thing.

Vivek would be successful in most modern nations but one of the reasons he succeeds in America comes down to his ability to magnify his talents through a system that, to some extent, at least spiritually values the secular/vernacular conception of the Protestant work ethic while flattering the Boomer American identity, giving praise to the idea he’s successful because he lives in such a great nation that takes smart, industrious people and makes them rich.

If you are wealthy, whether deservingly or not, you like to think you earned it and, even if you can’t totally convince yourself of it, you like this prosperity gospel not because you’re a greedy supervillain but because, if you can pretend these historical tailwinds still exist, you don’t have to feel so bad that you have all the money, nor do you have to worry about impending spaghettinations at your back.

And, while I think Americans (and people at large) are losing their ability to grind in a way that doesn’t include Jocko Willink monologues and War Crimes Pre-Workout + Concerta, there are still plenty of people in this world, Gribbles included, who value hard work, overtime, elbow grease, and the dignity a workplace injury can bestow upon you (Workman’s Comp 3x champ, thank you).

While I understand Vivek did not earn his stripes working on an oil rig (a place with little room for anything other than merit), he is most certainly intelligent. While I think you can sense it listening to him speak, I also happen to know a sperg who went to high school with him and claims Vivek was easily and obviously the smartest person in the room despite not really liking Vivek. My point: Even if Vivek is just the lucky and lazy recipient of super-stellar intergalactic genetics that make him a turbo genius, that’s still an expression of merit and even Gribbles the world over can get their heads around accidents of talent and genetics.

No matter how hard you work, if someone is smarter or stronger than you, they’re still smarter or stronger than you whether you think they earned it or not. Anyone who has seen multiple children or animals grow up at once gets the idea that some got it and some don’t. Ditto for anyone in athletics or music. All of the people I’ve just described are more likely to be Gribbles than anyone who works in teaching, consulting, NGO’s, or optometry. Gribbles understand the world is unfair and accept that some inequities (white privilege, being Alec Baldwin) are not worth fighting.

Still an uneasiness persists among many in the MAGA camp who find themselves averse to maintaining such a robust H-1B visa program. Through several quirks of our contemporary economy, which is quite managed at this juncture in the 21st century, a massive gap has separated the traditional, low time-preference values of hard work and frugality from the behaviors we reward with social and economic capital. It’s the kind of gap that makes regular hardworking or even useless people question their betters. I believe Marx called this “estrangement” but I’ve never read him and don’t want to.

I’ve also never read Krasinski who got pretty buff for the Jack Ryan series.

(Next time you think about giving a woman shit for using a filter, remember this image.)

Forget the fact that the people with the most broken backs get paid the least in this country (who’s the Marxist now?). How is it the case that you might find yourself pitching hard work to the group of people most fucked by DEI? Even within white collar environments, many are systematically discriminated against through all-of-society civil rights hiring practices while being lectured for their inferiority, noticing the double-standards that bind them, or complaining about them in any way.

On a personal note, I should state that I’m sympathetic to those currently annoyed with Vivek because I’m from South Florida and have always disliked its culture of respecting money regardless of whether you made it by bettering the world or showing hole, while very few people seem to care about anything that regards your mind or soul outside of libido.

As Red Scare contributor Christopher Lasch writes in The Culture of Narcissism:

In an age of diminishing expectations, the Protestant virtues no longer excite enthusiasm. Inflation erodes investments and savings. Advertising undermines the horror of indebtedness, exhorting the consumer to buy now and pay later. As the future becomes menacing and uncertain, only fools put off until tomorrow the fun they can have today. (…) In a lawless, violent, and unpredictable society, in which the normal conditions of everyday life come to resemble those formerly confined to the underworld, men live by their wits. They hope not so much to prosper as simply to survive, although survival increasingly demands a large income.

The problem is that Vivek is selling the bootstrap mentality to a group of people who voted for Trump and his DOGE crew largely because they feel they have qualities that have been valued for most of human history or that they are at least willing to cultivate them, but that these same qualities are left undermined by our modern email economy and the beneficiaries who bite their tongues when people suggest punctuality is a weapon of white supremacy.

We’ve kept the moralizing and shame of Protestantism but lost the emphasis on doing good works. It’s why useless people are always going on about emotional labor when they are the hardest people to be around in the first place. NGO staffers, medical billers, baristas, and compliance officers, the primary beneficiaries of our planned economy always complaining it has not been planned enough.

This is why I always find a homeless guy and give him a single to start mine.

I agree that the H-1B thing would probably be a lot less significant if we treated our citizens like investments rather than liabilities. A necessary precondition of this type of investment would require establishing stability through law and order. But as long as we allow the future to be “menacing,” as long as we live in a “lawless, violent, and unpredictable society,” people will question your motives and honesty when you tell them you just want people who more perfectly fit the ideals of the correct work ethic. Perhaps you should focus your words, if not your attention, on making this a less third-world country in which the law is evenly applied, in which our cities are less violent, and in which there are fewer acts of terror. We have Americans who want to do that job and Americans who want that service but no politicians who can make it happen. But what do I know about politics? I’m just another wealthy minority in America. A slick and spiky guy.