Youth participation in soccer continues to decline, despite the best efforts of the cultural elite to promote it.
Over the past three years, the percentage of 6- to 12-year-olds playing soccer regularly has dropped nearly 14 percent, to 2.3 million players, according to a study by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, which has analyzed youth athletic trends for 40 years. The number of children who touched a soccer ball even once during the year, in organized play or otherwise, also has fallen significantly.
In general, participation in youth sports nationwide has declined in the past decade, as children gravitate to electronic diversions and other distractions.
Yet in recent years, while soccer continued declining, baseball and basketball experienced upticks, buoyed by developmental programs begun by Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association.
This was always predictable, as soccer never had strong appeal. Youth soccer leagues were middle-class suburban creations, designed as safe spaces for white kids. No one says it that way, but that’s the reality of youth soccer in America. As a result, the soccer infrastructure is labor intensive. It requires lots of parents volunteering to make it work. It also requires a lot of cash. Maintaining a segregated anything in modern America is expensive, which is why real estate in a place like San Francisco is so pricey.
In fairness, all sports have seen a decline in youth participation. People like to blame video games and social media, but those are symptoms. Youth sports require a high degree of parental support and involvement. They also require infrastructure. That local ball field exists because the city, town or county makes it a priority. That happens when you have a society of strong families adhering to traditional roles. When those families are not there to volunteer and agitate for youth sports leagues, inevitably those leagues atrophy.
Most people struggle to understand long term trends, so it is not surprising that it is easy to peddle the idea that video games are the cause of this. Parents today see the decline and just assume it is a new thing. The fact is, kids vegetating in front of a video screen is just another symptom of the same main cause. When most kids grew up in normal homes, there was more organic structure to their lives, so they were less likely to indulge in whatever strikes the fancy of a child. There was a parent around to provide guidance.
It is the hidden cost of ripping women from their homes and putting them to work. Those mothers and grandmothers, staying home to raise their kids, provided a hidden infrastructure to American life. In stable, healthy societies, women maintain the social organizations and the social life of the community. When women are working ten hours a day at an office, that social work does not get done, so something fills the void. That has been the sewage of popular culture, along with state provided stand-ins for the parents.
Traditional sex roles also work as a bulwark against mischief. Fifty years ago, even public schools in poor areas could expect plenty of mothers volunteering to help with various school projects. They would also be the main labor pool at the church and other voluntary community organizations. It’s hard to corrupt these organization when mothers and grandmothers, people with skin in the game, are there to make sure those organizations serve their interests. Take away the mothers and the degenerates run wild.
The fact is, if you were looking to exterminate a people, by that I mean destroy their culture and identity, the first thing you would do is put the women to work. It’s not an accident that invaders who kill off the men and marry the women almost always adapt to the culture they conquered. That’s because the culture of a people is their women. Men have a role, but primarily as the guardians of the engine of their culture. Women are the ovens that bake the bread. Take away the oven and there can be no bread.
By ripping women out of their homes and putting them to work like field slaves, modernity has destroyed the natural framework of society. The state has tried to fill the void, which is why per capita, inflation adjusted government spending has quadrupled as women moved from the home to the workplace. All that government supervision of children and maintenance of synthetic community organizations comes with a direct cost, which shows up in paychecks and the cost of goods. It’s one reason the middle class is broke.
On a more esoteric note, what the modern age has been is an elaborate strip mining operation, where the hidden capital is monetized and carried away. Another example is what we see with Amazon destroying retail. The price of cheap stuff delivered to your office is the harvesting of the social value of local business. Instead of Johnny’s Appliance Warehouse sponsoring your kid’s baseball team, it is a government run program paid for by your property taxes. Without local business, there are no local sponsors.
Again, if the point is to kill a people, the first step is to put their women to work, turning them into economic units, like farm animals. From there,. it is easy to strip out the rest of their organic infrastructure that maintains their culture. Before long you have a collection of people with no identity of their own, wholly dependent upon their masters. That’s where we are headed as a society. It’s also why fertility rates are falling in the West. Why would anyone bring a child into the world when life is just pointless work and consumption?
“Put the women to ‘work’ ” – nah. Put them back in the home/bed – the Lord’s ‘work’ bringing other very unique and special “Others” in to this “world”. May even mitigate that “negative TFR problem”. Hoo-wah.
Been reading you Zman for almost 2 years now and I would arguably rate this post your most seminal work to date – this entry really gets to the root of Western Civilization’s cancerous degeneracy and concisely identifies the tumor’s location. You somehow manage to surgically dismantle the foundamental tenets of feminism and progressivism in one fell swoop – brilliant & bravo…cue the slow golf clap.
“sewage of popular culture”!! Great line!.
That was a hard hitting essay, and not thing in it I could argue against.
Z, you outdid yourself. Well done.
Just when I believe Z Man cannot possibly improve his game, he ups the ante yet again. Thanks to Z, I am beginning to experience some faith that correction for at least a segment of our society is actually possible.
All hail Z!
George and KAB ask if there is a solution. There is.
Women who realize that salvaging the culture requires a large percentage of women staying home and raising kids must support this verbally and not worry about feminist blow back. When I talk with young professional women who are married and pregnant, I express my hope that they can stay home for as long as possible. I mention how my mother stayed home with us and how wonderful it was that she was always there. It is hard to appreciate how thoroughly brain washed women have been – they just assume everyone expects them to be back at work in six weeks.
Women can break all of that by showing that OTHER WOMEN are encouraging them to stay home.
Another opportunity that I take advantage of: talking about how to live frugally. I talk up how easy it has been for my husband and I to drastically speed up paying of our house. I always mention how I love cooking for my husband and that we rarely go out to eat, which saves us thousands.
Men can help too but to break the back of the feminist monster, it will require women openly supporting the idea of staying home with the kids and educating them at home. It’s catching on: any day of the week there are atrocities happening to kids in day care and schools. Work them into conversations and mention how you completely understand families who decide to home school to protect their children.
People are noticing our frayed culture. They sense something is terribly wrong and something has to change. Maybe some just need a little help in seeing where that change can occur.
Worked at the VA for a few yrs following military retirement. You see the impact of women in the workforce clearly there. This is the other end of the argument advanced in numerous earlier comments — the terrible damage done to community and families when women walked away from their household role. Govt institutions like the VA are almost entirely matriarchies now … especially in the administrative support areas — the bureaucracy. Certainly, men from facilities branch do still scuttle down the halls with their repair equipment, and the emergency management crew is mostly guys. But the bulk of the offices that support the organization are packed to overflowing with females.
And those men / males who are there, aside from some of the Docs, some of whom do still sport a don’t-give-a-damn attitude, absolutely MUST conform to female interactive systems. And God help the man who says some thing offensive to female sensibilities. You are ostracized, counseled, and even worse. I jokingly stated that you could kill someone and not get fired, but you were gone most expeditiously if you were accused of uttering a forbidden word, or making a female feel uncomfortable — perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but not too far off the mark.
This has resulted in an organization that supports a largely male population being run by women … many of whom (especially in leadership) are not comfortable with, or openly hostile to, men or “manliness.” Witness last years sexual harrassment campaign system-wide — they’re there for medical care, medications, or to die. But for lectures on behavior by those who are supposedly there to help them ……? Repellant.
Now, certainly, there are many women there who are committed and caring, and who don’t intentionally buy into the ever-concentrating feminist agenda that permeates our government. But no matter what you do, when you reach a certain mass of females, and they are insinuated into leadership, they begin to work to change the organization. And from what I saw there at the VA, and in the military as well, they are succeeding.
But the way, I will say the institution in my experience has provided excellent medical care (from both males and female providers). It’s the maddening bureaucratic routines, requirements and incompetencies, along with systemic admin failures that keep the Vets shrieking.
If I had to choose a single issue that has contributed most to all of the problems we face in the West it is the collapse of the family (and all the consequences that necessarily stem from that) following women leaving the home.
I think though that there is a misconception that most women were eager to abandon the home and go to universities and work 10 hours a day. I grew up in the rural Midwest in the 70s and 80s. ALL of the girls I grew up were told the same thing: You will go to university and get a degree in case your husband gets sick or passes away. You need to be able to take care of your family.
That is what drove us to school and have careers, at least for a while. I don’t think any of us went because we aimed to compete with men in the workplace. No one I know was trying to break any glass ceiling.
I want us to go back to the way things were. I went to university for 18 years total. Loved learning. Working has always been satisfying for me. But nothing makes me happier than taking care of my husband and family. They appreciate it. They pay it back in so many ways that the job can never do.
You have to have business rooted in the nation first . The Chamber of Commerce /Country Club Republicans can’t abide by the idea that people would live in one area all their life, work at a job and raise a family there
These ^&$^^%^%* people are constantly trying to uproot people, lobby for subsidies so people can chase low wage jobs all to cut payroll costs . Those costs that in a regulated market they’ll get back anyway when people spend money
The CCCCR people are worse than Progressives who at least mean well.
Any nation that becomes mostly urban and rootless won’t thrive , it will die from low fertility and fractured families and it deserves too.
As an aside if you want the difference , Amish people who are rooted, employed, faithful have the same survival rates roughly and fertility from 5-9
Those rootless types 1.3 or so the difference being so profound that on a linear tracks (and yes it doesn’t work that way) from about the time of Lewis and Clark to now, everyone would be Amish, Evangelical (who have 3 or more usually) or LDS
Basically regulate or die.
“Another example is what we see with Amazon destroying retail.”
I’m curious why you are always on about Amazon and never mention Walmart. Walmart did it first and continues to do the same now.
Of course, one could then point at Sears as well.
Z’s got serious reading to do so he can supply us with oxygen tomorrow. And you’re asking him to bother with Amazon vs. Walmart vs Sears?
I remember about 12-15 years ago liberals HATED WalMart. Now nobody complains about them? Something change or liberals just find a new pinata?
Walmart increased wages so that they fall below the Welfare threshold and brought in a lot of organic and other healthy products that actually sell very well.
They moved from corporate parasite to big company at that point.
As someone who lives even farther out than those small communities with the local businesses supposedly being destroyed by Amazon/Walmart/Sears/Standard Oil/Whatever, I have a different perspective.
Internet online order, whether it’s Amazon, Etsy, valleyvetsupply.com or the online sections of Walmart, Tractor Supply Co. or Rural King — is a Godsend.
I have three grocery stores I can get to in less than a 20-minute drive. Only one has a decent selection. The Walmart is farther than that and I rarely go there unless I need something specific, because I’d rather get a half hour of my day back then drive to Walmart instead of Kroger for groceries.
It wasn’t Walmart or any other big retail that killed the little cities in my county, it was A) The slow death of coal-mining and B) the automobile. The little mining town near me used to have its own grocery, its own medical clinic, its own school … back when there were two mines operating there and before the state highway system when getting to the nearest sizable city was an all-day affair. That was back in the early part of the 20th century. Now it’s got a post office that’s open two hours a day and a little mom & pop Mini-Mart that doesn’t really make enough money to justify its own existence (can’t even sell beer — it’s a dry Township).
The county seat has a sprinkling of useful businesses there, but for a lot of stuff you half to drive a half hour or an hour. This was the case long before there was an internet. The nearest Walmart used to be nearly an hour away until they opened one “only” a half hour from me. Walmart didn’t kill anything out here, and the internet didn’t kill anything. I’ve seen a few businesses fail out here over the years — a grocery store/hardware store, and another little hardware store, but another hardware store opened up, and many other small businesses have opened since. Businesses fail all the time. We have more small businesses out here in my Appalachian backwater than we did 20 years ago before the “close” Walmart opened, and there are more businesses up near the Walmart, — it’s a magnet.
No local business is going to stock the special UV-blocking eyemask or protective boots I just ordered for one of my horses, or the special electric mesh I use for fencing my goats. Maybe they’d special order them for me, but it’s not going to be a big money-maker for them. I buy all my grain from local feed stores, and all my hay from local farmers. I go to a “local” John Deere dealer an hour away, or a little diesel/tractor repair shop in the county seat or a mechanic who runs a little shop at his family farm (JD used to be a half hour, then moved north a year or so after I bought my tractor, that sucked). I shop at a local supermarket, go to local auto parts and hardware stores. Amazon isn’t a threat to our way of life. It opens options to us that simply didn’t exist before.
Office politics. Compare wealth and brag about paper cuts.
You all can do better than this.
Show us the way.
Hallelujah!! Someone has the balls to call it like it is.
Z: “That’s because the culture of a people is their women.” I used to jokingly tell the guys at the office about all the potlucks and holiday decorations, “You know, if it weren’t for the women around here, we wouldn’t do SHIT. We wouldn’t even know it’s Halloween, much less that it’s freakin Frank’s birthday.” Seriously, in an office full of guys the get-togethers amount to talking a bit of sports in the breakroom. Granted, potlucks are an awkward pain in the ass. But yeah, the office would be pretty arid without the girls.
The only reason you need an office culture is that our upper classes can’t understand that almost everything that needs to be done outside of a few jobs could be done in 20 hours
We wouldn’t need an office culture if we were there a few hours a week, got things done in a timely and efficient manner and moved on
The idea that we produce so much stuff that a frugal family could probably get by on one , 20 hour worker seems insane or cartoonish like the Jetsons but production wise its pretty true.
That won’t change. It took basically the threat of civil war and Communist take over to get the work week down to 40 what it was in the Middle Ages. It would probably require that again
“The idea that we produce so much stuff that a frugal family could probably get by on one , 20 hour worker seems insane or cartoonish like the Jetsons but production wise its pretty true. ”
Spot on. IMS Z stated we live in a “post consumer” society. There is no need to work 60-70 hours a week. Of course if you want the latest car, McMansion tract home and live in a horribly expensive urban center and send your kids to a private school. You better be pulling close to $200k a year.
Hell, even making $150k in Silicon Valley puts you in the near homeless category. A apartment is $5K easy. Factor in food, car payment, etc. You’re barely making it. And the sad thing is most of the work can be done from home. In fact any job that is paper shuffling can be done from home and the only reason it’s not. It would put most managers out of a job. They’d be sitting in their offices doing nothing all day except BS’ing with other bosses. Then the big bosses would figure out they could do without them.
I don’t have kids, probably never will (middle aged, no prospects) but if I did my default response to any request for any civic participation in any place I’ve ever lived would be no.
There are a lot of reasons for this but on the whole this society has never done well by me and mine so I don’t owe it anything.
Its also ideologically and ethically no longer recognizable, the break created by President Trump not withstanding . Its not mine.
As far as schooling, if I had kids I would not let them near a public school any more than I’d hand them to a random guy in a van offering them candy.
@AB
That helps me see where your coming from and why you comment a certain way on different subjects…
Things get different when you have children and a wife that’s for sure.
I’m not past all hope on the family department and were that to change and were I to live in a place that wasn’t So Cal I could change my mind.
I’m prone to undo pessimism and cynicism at times anyway.
For comparison Where I live the only neighbor I know and can communicate with is an older black guy. I like him well enough but he and his are a very different tracks than I would even if I had kid
Even when I lived in more homogeneous areas (Colorado, Arizona at the time , Oregon, Washington) community was weak and as such , I’ve always had trouble seeing the benefits of civic participation American style
its been a bad idea for men since the Satanic Panics in any case
Get the hell out of the People’s Republic of California asap. Just gather up some essentials and drive east, dont look back. Forget those states you mention, they’ve already been Californicated. Go to unpretty places that dont appeal to Californians, and, in a word, are shitty, with harsh climates and aren’t in economic over drive – Louisiana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska for example. That’s where the friendliest people are, who still have a sense of community. Location isnt everything, but its a start.
Bravo, Zman. Just bravo.
This is a fantastic post!
But is there a solution?
Take your pick: World war. Famine. Epidemic.
Are the public schools in rural areas and red states pozzed? Genuinely curious.
Probably. It takes a confident hick to stick to her traditions when tempted with the chance to up her status through progressive airs.
Yes. All the teachers are churned out of universities and schools of education on the same template. All the curricula are very similar nationwide, generated by a handful of education publishing companies.
I think GU1 meant are they fully pozzed. There’s different levels. The textbooks may be Leftist, but that doesn’t mean a school is enthusiastically pushing that agenda. Personally, I don’t want to know the answer to his question, since when I hear inklings of small town America being infiltrated it gets me seriously down.
It doesn’t matter if they’re “enthusiastically pushing it” if the kids are getting graded every day on spitting out the right answers:
“Colonialism was awful.”
“American history in a nutshell: Slavery, slavery, slavery! KKK! Jim Crow! Japanese internment!”
“Johnny has two dads! And it’s awesome!”
“Jane has a penis! And it’s awesome!”
“We don’t talk about Jesus here.”
“This is how you put on a condom.”
“Practice safe anal sex!”
@GU1
Not as bad as the blue states but any school getting federal funds has a little bit of it…We still homeschool though because we love our kids…
Brilliant and disturbing.
“Why would anyone bring a child into the world when life is just pointless work and consumption?” This is why, for the longest time, I thought Leftism was a scam dreamed up by professors and race pests to glom a steady paycheck. Marxism’s obvious consequence is nihilism: What’s the *point* of all this, if all it does is temporarily alleviate the pain of some naked apes who will be forgotten as soon as they’re in the ground? It’s not just evil, it’s **stupid.** In a lot of ways I still can’t believe it. Learning you’re a naive dumbass — is that maturity, or disillusionment?
https://youtu.be/xJWrnA-KcEk
A Day in the Life of 9 yo in 1964
Love this guy’s channel.
As a boy growing up in the 1960s, the neighborhood kids and I would entertain ourselves outside, doing anything and everything to have fun which included our own makeshift sports. We could turn climbing a huge maple tree into a life or death game. Sometimes that meant somebody fell out of the tree and maybe broke something pr scraping all the skin off their legs or arms. But that’s why we had iodine and mecurochrome. Speaking of which, I just now realized that neither of my two (now adult) offspring have never climbed a tree. Can you imagine that? I also have to laugh at how we (as 12 to 14 year olds) used to play tackle football wearing nothing but normal clothes like a sweatshirt, tee shirt, jeans and sneakers. Yes, we got the tar knocked out of us and even better, got to knock the tar out of other kids. If someone saw boys doing this today, the authorities would be called, the boys placed in foster care and the parents arrested. God almighty, what have we come to?
And yes, all this “select” and travel team nonsense is a scam, perpetrated by the ones running things at the expense of naive parents.
Jesus, what a blackpill. Are there any solutions to these problems?
Time, time, hear the bells chime
Over the harbor and the city
Time, one more vodka and lime
To help speed that tiny tick, tick, tick
In a decade or two
Or three or four
A stirring on the wind
Can you hear the whistle blow?
Sounds like time the avenger
It’s interesting how this post dovetails exactly with a book recommended’on sailer’s blog, The Lost City, by Alan Ehrenhalt. It’s an examination of Chicago and environs in the 1950s, and how community and a sense’of belonging depended on authority in neighborhoods, schools, churches, families, government. Once you destroyed the authority, community disappeared. Question is, how to get back. I keep asking about concrete answers to our problems, when the solution may only become evident when culture swings, and people’s thinking changes. Blogs like sailer and this one are part of that. Tim
Long article on sociologist Wilson….tldr….the pill franged us up
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/two-nations-revisited
Excellent article, well worth reading. Thanks for posting.
It may be apocryphal, but was told once that “corruption” in the old Daley wards was very different from the kleptocracy you see today. If a guy did work for the machine and needed a job, he was given a job driving a bus or picking up garbage. If there weren’t jobs available they might add another bus line or put another truck on a route. But you did real work and supporting your family was considered a given. Compare that to the welfare wasteland today. And it applied to the black as well as white neighborhoods. People didn’t cross boundaries, but the same rules applied.
The soundtrack to civilizational suicide, as sung by two barren women:
https://youtu.be/YCKpJkplwoU
This deserves more than just two up votes.
Agreed. Though I could not watch the whole thing but I got the gist
It gets even worse at the end.
The phenomenon that you describe models as a cancer of society. It grows and gets worse over time, until the society ultimately dies and the cancer can die with it. Alternately, if the cancer has not progressed too far, it may be possible to eradicate it and restore some measure of health, but that means killing the cancer cells via strong medicine. When notified that they have cancer, most patients lapse into denial as the initial response. That is where we are now.
Z: “When most kids grew up in normal homes…” You know you’re on a conservative site when the writer refers to normal homes without scare quotes.
Off topic:
The tone-deaf nature of Conservatism Inc on full display here. Notice that you cannot find the word immigration mentioned at all. Nor any mention of the foreign capital inflating the real estate market.
https://thefederalist.com/2018/07/16/15-minimum-wage-hike-wreaking-havoc-new-york-citys-dining-sector/
If you really want to light up a feminist, try telling her that society is better off if women stay home and raise the kids.
Lol. Want to watch them go incandescent? Make a comment or two about the 19th Amendment. Sets their hair on fire, it does.
My husband of fifty years started ragging on me a couple of years ago re: Woman Suffrage: the worst legislative mistake of the 20th c., according to him; wants the immediate repeal of the 19th Amendment in time for its 100th anniversary in 2020, and so on). I can see his point, but men really screwed up in so many ways that it almost makes no difference at this point, as Hillary might opine.
I kinda wish women would cool it and not act on urges such as wanting to “integrate” the Union Club or bring coeducation to the few schools left that are “single” sex. Hah. Who would even admit to desiring such a situation today? Out-groups can call this B.S. and form their own business club or start their own condo or gated community that suits them. Screw so-called discrimination!!
I also wonder how long what used to be called Society will survive? The (non-working) upper middle class women, wives of professionals, or heiresses to private wealth, would organize whichever city they dwelt in with entities such as the Junior League, Garden Club, Art Museum docents that required an invitation to join. This selectivity went from the general (the country club, often pushed by the husband’s employer to place a partner at each club in town to cover potential clients) to the particular (dancing school and local debutante ball) requiring active committees sifting through the eager candidates’ admissions applications, sponsors’ letters and so on. A turn-down from one of these women-run groups would prove a social death knell for the unlucky family. The husband’s job would rarely be affected with this sort of situation (see how the men are “above it all”!) but the wife’s compatibility with the reigning female social structure would be the sticking point. A lot of very bitchy divorced women get ensconced in these groups and really put the screws to Door #2 or #3 (ex-husband’s newest wife and blended family), forcing their ex to pony up for his daughter by Door #1 to have the official presentation, but not allowing the new family to participate. Nice, isn’t it? This is what I call real POWER!! I have gratefully forgotten many stories from this time in my life;-)
It follows, I aver, that much of the hideous Deep State activity that we are watching with open-mouthed horror these days is due to just this sort of icky co-education of the workplace, with women doing what they do best — undercutting other women. The military must be an absolute zoo these days. I would not let my husband go on a six-month naval deployment like I did fifty years ago, during Vietnam. No way, Jose.
Great post.
And as much as I hate the feminism that made women want to abandon their families, let’s not forget how our hostile elites created the need for them to do so…
Skyrocketing home prices, created by whites fleeing imported diversity & legally prohibited from self-segregating by other means.
Imported cheap labor driving wages down for American workers.
Free-Trade-lunacy-caused deindustrialization destroying high paying manufacturing jobs.
Even the most fervent you-go-grrl careerist women hit a point after having a child when they realized that June Cleaver had it pretty good after all. But they usually discover that’s not an option for them if they want to lead a safe white middle class life now.
Feminist claptrap was not without its influence. But women of my cohort lapped it up. They wanted financial independence from men.
I will add one other thing about soccer. In SoCal, AYSO was really big for a long time. It still is, but it is totally dominated by the Latino population. A good way for the average white dad to end up as a Pinata is to question the Mexican ref’s call against his kid’s Anglo team. I saw this happening as far back as the early 1980’s. Flash for ya’ folks: They hate us like the Dindus hate us.
If you cannot move, then do what you can to protect your own tribe. Between they their takeover of the politics of all of the Blue Hives, and their “cultural enrichment” such as MS-13, Chagas, TB, drive-bys, etc., White culture and the ROL are being destroyed or morphed into something out of a dystopian End of Days film. This is why Kootenai County and Ada County are filling up fast here in the Gem State. Bleib ubrig.
Was so happy when the two of my kids that played soccer finally quit. Want to see a bunch of pencil armed beta males from Scarsdale transformed into rabid sideline Chihuahuas? Have their 10 year old play travel soccer. But my kids would not have come out the way they did (particularly the two with LD) had my wife not quit work and stayed home full time.
After 9-11 everyone was eager to hear what Bernard Lewis thought about anything. He was the premiere orientalist in the world. Wrote: What Went Wrong? about the collapse of Muslim culture.
In almost every interview he gave about the economic and cultural weakness of Muslim society he said that they were giving up close to 50% of their potential economic activity by not allowing women to work. I thought this a curious thing as most women of the west were not in the workforce during the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the slow slide downhill of Islam as a driver of culture. I did not have the awareness at the time that I have now. That he represents the prejudices of liberal Jewry and the academic set. He, of course merely stated his point as a categorical fact with nothing but contemporary statistics to back it up.
And of course we now have Britain and France as prime examples of how the hidden capital of the Muslim female is putting more than a little significant pressure on the west.
Lewis could never tell the truth without destroying his career. He could not come out and state “Islam is the problem” along with massive inbreeding that has resulted in places like Iraq and many others with people having a average IQ of 85.
Yeah he’s a Jew but even back then and speaking anything that was not PC/MC would be a career killer.
As if Conservative and Orthodox Judaism wish us well. Those terms don’t equate with the same things in Christianity or American politics, Ok? Know about the Talmud? And the Jews opened their city gate to the Turks in old Constaninople and fought with the Moors in the Muslim conquest of Spain.
Women socializing, yes! I remember in the 60s mothers chatting over the backyard fences while hanging laundry. Every mother knew every child and looked after them in an unvoiced agreement. If Mrs. P from two or three houses away caught you doing something you weren’t supposed to do and admonished you it felt exactly like your own mother had caught you.
Nowadays a mom from three houses away may get told to mind their own business, if not told to **** off.
“…you it felt exactly like your own mother had caught you.”
Even worse: you knew your mother was going to find out, and you’d catch it again. And then dad would come home…
Exactly my experience. Any adult present had absolute authority to correct bad behavior. “What would your mother say if she knew you were doing that?” I knew if I screwed up, some adult would call my home and Mom would be thanking her for calling right about the time I was walking in the door. The most screwed-up kids were the ones whose parents bitched back with “nobody disciplines my kid but me” crap. What that really meant was that they didn’t discipline their kids and they felt stupid when others felt the need to so.
That is really hard hitting and right on target. It’s something like a “Bowling Alone” for the dissident right. The generalizing from youth soccer to civilizational decline is more organic than such moves usually are. The strip mining metaphor is pure gold. If I were in a woman bashing mood this morning, it would be easy to say, “See, it’s all their fault!” But the piece makes it clear that they’re victims as much as perpetrators. This one needs wide circulation.
Superb
Let’s not forget, when a couple states that the woman has to work nowadays to make ends meet, what this really means is that the woman chooses to work so that the couple and their children can maintain a certain, elevated lifestyle. There are innumerable married couples with children in this country who are living a fruitful life with the mother staying home to care for the children. These couples just don’t have 2 new vehicles, or vacation every year in Disneyland, or eat out every Friday night, or buy the latest DVD’s for their children, etc. They pinch every penny until it squeaks, but it can be done. You just don’t hear about it in the media unless you search. I believe Dr. Laura Schlessinger used to highlight these couples on her syndicated radio program. If I’m not mistaken, Dave Ramsey still does likewise on his national radio show. Thank you for writing about this Z.
That’s not true at all for certain income levels. The dentist’s spouse may not have to work, but plenty of other wage-slaves’ spouses do.
I would bet you more dentist’s spouses work than a much lower status profession like mechanic or HVAC dude. It’s not about money. It’s about almost a pathological need for status. Women judge other women as dimwits and handmadiens if they aren’t out there working.
I think some of the younger women are waking up to the fact that the working life is not all it’s cracked up to be and where we were taught to make fun of housewives in the past, I think we’re coming into a more sensible time of women preferring to stay home and raise kids, that is, 1) if there’s a father in the picture who’d support his family and 2) if they can swing it financially. I hope one day soon the majority of women view stay-at-home wives/mothers with envy and admiration, a privileged and important status worthy of emulating. I’m encouraged by the traditional movements I see blossoming these days.
Also young people (HS) should be encouraged to consider jobs that pay well and allow flexible hours (nursing and dental hygienist come to mind as examples) so that parents don’t have to turn their kids over to the day-care establishment.
In many parts of the country, you need to make a certain income to avoid you and your children being exposed to vibrancy. Sad but true. And the retort “move to the sticks” ignores the fact that many of our friends and families live in Pozland, and they’re unwilling to move to a rural area.
My wife stays at home with the kids, btw
Yes, our fully monetized society is *not* family friendly. Especially with wages being as low as they are. Our standard of living has dropped a lot in the U.S. The young do not know what they’re missing. (Although they know how everything costs money they don’t have, and socialism is sounding better than living a life working low-paying jobs that barely supports one, nevermind a family. No savings, no retirement, just work for peanuts till you drop dead. The Latin American model.)
At a certain income level (certainly dentists) there’s the possibility for hiring “help” as well as flexible scheduling that allows both spouses time to pursue their careers. The clock-punchers don’t have that. Don’t get me wrong. If you can afford it staying home with tiny ones is best for them. I just don’t think pay-check-to-paycheck people should be demonized for not having the luxury of choices rich people enjoy.
Weirdest question ever.
In the medical profession we have reached some supposed nirvana where the number of female medical students exceeds the male. But many females end up not practicing medicine or take long segments of maternity leave. Society is investing a very limited number of medical school positions for less time as practicing physicians. This has led to the importation of potentially dangerous H1B visas and more recently during the late Obama admin, physicians who had completed neither medical school nor residency in the USA. Some were good, but there are terrible horror stories which I have directly experienced! Sort of like derbs bowl of m&ms, where if one laced with arsenic would you take a handful?
More worrisome, I look about and see many female physicians who are unwed. This is a huge trend. They go on and on about their dogs and how they care for their dogs like children. This is in part because they are busy with their careers but also I think because women in general will not respect a man who makes less than they do. When you raise the bar so high, the pool of potential mates shrinks to the guys who command supermodels by definition. Thus we are losing talented genes from our gene pool forever.
I know many women who make more than their husbands (medicine & engineering) and I’ve never heard a single one complain about their husband’s wages. Maybe I just know nice people 🙂
As for the third-world doctors (usually “hospitalists”)? Well my mother had been confined to a wheelchair since I was a kid and was susceptible to UTIs. One landed her in the hospital. The Pakistani actually asked me why we wanted her treated as if we had this great opportunity to let her go into sepsis and be rid of her. (She was handicapped, not senile or in pain.)
There are some succes stories. I wouldn’t mind either! No, surgeons, every level of sensitivity.
My parents had similar experiences with Muslim doctors. They are to be avoided at all costs IMO.
HMO doctors in general are a very mixed bag in terms of competence which can be life changing if you aren’t your own advocate and for those who can’t be.
Those women would be the exception.
Amen. Examples of policies that are anti-white male and just anti-white in general.
Yep. Why not instead fund our own medical schools? American need jobs don’t we?
The same thing has been going on for decades within the legal profession. More and more females are attending law school, practicing law with large prestigious law firms, but then dividing into two groups: those that have children and stop practicing for a number of years and those that stick with it but don’t have children and have “fur babies” instead. And guess what, many of those women in large firms chasing partnership then quit to become federal and state judges using their law profession and political contacts. I cannot exaggerate how HUGE a factor that is in the changing way our courts work. Bottom line: many judges, and the female ones are far more susceptible to this, have “judicial activist” tendencies. There are of course exceptions to this “rule” but for the most part the most activist judges are the females. All you have to do is read the opinions of Elana Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor if you want to see what I mean.
“Youth sports require a high degree of parental support and involvement. ”
Got asked to help coach grade school football again this year. Practice 3 times a week, walk-through on Saturday, games on Sunday. Some guys eat this shit up, but not me. I don’t want an part-time job (unpaid) where all the parents who won’t actually lift a finger still think they can gripe about how much playing time their kid is getting. BTW, their kid hates football, and just wants to be home playing video games.
Soccer for kids is a pretty good ROI vs. football (equipment and field upkeep) and better exercise overall if you get the sides down to 5v5 or 6v6. A mowed field, a ball, couple of pop-up nets and you’re good to go.
Basketball likewise for exercise but you need much more infrastructure. Other problems as already alluded to.
Traveling team bullshit is for morons, no matter the sport. You’re spending $30k+ a year for 6-8 years HOPING your kid might get a college scholarship? You’re a moron.
As for mothers at home, yep, can’t be overstated. Very few mothers worked in our neighborhood, especially important during the summers. Kids were outside all day, or playing in the basement or garage if it was raining; and the mothers knew how to handle kids. They were ADULTS that you had to obey. They didn’t fall to pieces if they ran out of all-organic, GMO-free juice boxes. They made you a sandwich; didn’t hand out fucking “lunchables” garbage. Kept their ears and eyes open, not staring into their phones all day.
Mothers working has probably done more to depress wages than automation and immigration combined.
Good example of how culture can be monetized, destroying the culture in the process.
Just because something is not paid for, does not mean that it cannot be monetized. However monetizing it will invariably destroy that very aspect.
Be it moms going to work or big chain stores, cannibalzing culture can be very “profitable”.
“On a more esoteric note, what the modern age has been is an elaborate strip mining operation, where the hidden capital is monetized and carried away.”
One of the key draws for baseball, basketball, and football has always been the idea that kids could grow up and be a pro ball player. Or, emulate their heroes from the sports world. MLS never acquired that cache in this country, and it most likely never will. Even Hispanics in this country are more likely to be household names if they play baseball.
But I think some of the issues in youth sports are tied to your statement above. It’s the professionalization of youth sports that is killing youth sports. I can’t tell you how many kids I know who have been playing sportsball X since they were 5 years old, and if you have a kid who wants to start playing at 10 or 11 years old, he’s competing against kids who have been playing since shortly after they were potty trained. That drives kids who want to pay just for the sake of playing out of sports. Coaches even at the elementary and middle school levels have practice regimes that run 5-6 days per week. If you’re not on some college recruiter’s radar, it can be tough to get on the local HS team. If your goal isn’t a state championship, but rather passing that geometry test on Friday, the coach wants nothing to do with you.
When I was a kid, I played baseball almost every day. But I did that by walking around the neighborhood digging up kids who wanted to go to the local park for a pick-up game. We’d have 8 players on 2 teams and ghost runners. My Little League games were a couple of days a week and a practice in-between. We could walk to all the home games in the local park. For away games, we could all pile in the back of a pickup truck for the 10 minute ride to the next town over.
By professionalizing it, monetizing it, society has turned sports parents into attention whores and the kids into commodities.
I didn’t play baseball as a kid because MLB invested money in getting kids to play baseball. I played baseball as a kid because it was fun to play, required little or no money once you had a bat, glove, and ball, and it was fun to watch on TV. We’d watch the old “This Week in Baseball” with Mel Allen on Saturday mornings, and then spend our afternoons trying to recreate the highlights at the park.
Youth sports are having trouble because we’ve taken all the fun out of it.
Pick-up games, in whatever sport, have an added benefit – teaching self-organization and mutual cooperation. My experience was similar to yours; you’d round up kids from around the town, of various quantity and age and ability, and if you really wanted to play, you had to cook up a host of ground rules fast to make the thing work, because it couldn’t unless everyone was having fun. Beat-up equipment, weird baselines and weirder bases (pieces of firewood, rings from a ‘jarts’ set, and the like); somehow you made it work – because you wanted to play, which we frequently did until we couldn’t see, even as players would peel off when they were summoned for dinner and rules had to be adjusted mid-game.
The relative joylessness of modern youth sports – designed by adults, for adults – is painful to contemplate; A good film about the dictatorship of adults over the spontaneous joy of kids at play is, oddly, a chess movie – Searching for Bobby Fisher.
This is EXACTLY my experience. There was always a game going on you could join, you played until it got too dark to see or you got called home for dinner. We never had enough players so we made good use of the Invisible Runner. We negotiated the rules, haggled and enforced them, all without adults or uniforms. We learned how to solve problems and disputes. Now kids wait for the adults to organize and adjudicate. No wonder these whiners get to college and can’t cope, they’ve never had to.
“Ghost runner on third!”
Right field is out.
If the ball goes down the storm drain it’s a forfeit.
Ball hit over the shed is an OUT.
re: “Ghost runner on third!” That’s the kind of thing that reminds me that we don’t live in the same country as the one we grew up in.
It couldn’t last, that old weird America. Regression to the mean was delayed by our sheer dynamism and the vastness of the empty spaces.
Feeling blue I re-read Thomas Wolfe’s ‘Of Time and the River’ a few months ago just to re-live the joy of being an American, a participant in a strange and empty land, but with a ‘library card’, if you see what I mean.
Well, the emptiness won’t last; our enemies plan to pack 2-3 billion in here. Of course ‘global warming’ will have been long dropped as a concern by ‘those who care.’ Their gated compounds or private islands will be well-guarded.
Who’s on First;)
In fairness to adults – some of my best friends are adults – they aren’t in league against the joy of childhood, they’re just over-pressured to replace normal affection with what our enemies designated years ago as “quality time”.
If a kid’s moods and energy don’t coincide with the ‘quality time’ allotment, then out come the ADHD drugs, the therapists, and counselors, with written evaluations to follow you the rest of your life.
From earliest antiquity to about 1995, it was understood that a normal 11-year-old boy is bored by schooling. Then it was revealed by the latest in science that well-positioned pharmaceutical companies had the answer. Not baseball or chasing butterflies or building birdhouses or helping Uncle Fritz build a boat or collecting rocks or making school more interesting; nope, drugs were the solution.
*
Not that he’s a ‘conservative’ or ‘race realist’ or any of that, but it would benefit any young person alive in this bizarre post-thought interregnum (for thought will re-assert itself, as it always has) to read Matthew Crawford’s 2015 ‘The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.” It’s a kind of elaboration on Voltaire’s old dictum – by way of his mouthpiece Candide – to tend to your garden, be it motorcycles or church organs or the acquisition of a language, or indeed working a tip-top garden.
“designed by adults, for adults” – exactly. Brilliant observation!
If little johnny gets injured at the local park nowadays there are 20 lawyers talking the parents into suing everyone. Hence youth sports must be in organized leagues to lessen liabilities. Lawyers ruin everything they touch.
Great point. The modern parent can’t just let Johnny (or should we say, Devon, etc.) go off and have fun with his friends; that would – should Johnny/Devon hurt his foot or get a lump on his head – mean criminal negligence on the part of his parents, and quite possibly their professional, financial and social ruin.
Z-man, a mystery man, has left footprints suggesting he’s a lawyer. Well, good for him – he makes more dough than many of us dirt people who hang out at his blog.
The real question is not whether we should line up lawyers in front of open pits and mow them down: Of course we should.
The question is, should we spare any of them, and if so, by what entreaties should we be moved to mercy, in view of the devastation the legal profession has induced on a peaceful and free people?
By what appeal to humanity can a lawyer save himself?
That’s the question.
One lawyer in village – poor man. Two lawyers in same village – both rich.
Friend of friend has an 11 year old daughter who is “on track” to become a world-class swimmer (or is told so).
Since the girl is considered small for her age, she has been placed on a Human Growth Hormone regimen to optimize her height. Somehow, I wonder just who got this ball got rolling…. Gives me the creeps.
We endured two seasons of listening to the parents of my daughter’s best friend remind everybody that their child was ranked “third in the state” in cross country. My wife used to joke, “Wait till she gets her period and puts on 30 lbs.”
My daughter and the other girl are no longer friends. We were at a track meet last spring. The girl, now three years older, had indeed gained 20-30 lbs and was visibly very slow. She tried to hand fight another runner trying to pass her. She lunged right trying to knock the other kid down, but wound up collapsed in a heap on the track like a Brazilian soccer player writhing in fake pain.
I was just reading all the replies and recollecting on growing up on a street in S.E. PA in the 60s with tons of kids from big families, like 10 or 12 kids, and all the self organized baseball, football and variations on cops and robbers or capture the flag games we played. Lots of times the ages ranged from 6 through 18, boys and girls together, and we negotiated specific rules to minimize injury or level the field a bit. We learned how to deal with, and fear, the teens, when we were little guys. Maybe this is why none of us were bullies when we grew into teens. We learned alot about getting along if the play was to be fun. I rode my bike to my little league and pop warner league practices and games. I think my dad came to one game. Most of the time he was working. We had so much freedom back then, we built and fell out of tree houses, constructed crazy rope swings, dammed creeks, had ongoing, day long dirt clod and crab apple wars with the upper half of the street, rebuilt our bikes, took apart anything mechanical not in use; the Huck Finn factor was high. Nowadays my old neighborhood streets are empty of children. The few that remain are indoors playing video games or Facebooking or something digital, while on break before the next adult organized activity. Their childhood has been scripted, stolen from them, and they dont even realize it. Nor do their parents. It’s a shame.
My kids still are able to do those things but I know that’s not the reality for a lot of kids and it is a shame…
A great piece. I have been saying this for years.
Women are designed by nature to look after the children, men and home. The Socialist loonies have deliberately destroyed the family unit to further their involvement in everyone’s lives.
My Mom stopped working when she had kids and my Dad’s career was just getting off the ground when I was born. That meant was my parents had to be disciplined and careful with their money. We rarely ate out, I was probably 7 or 8 before my mother had her own car. Vacations usually meant visiting family.
I don’t see many young people with that kind of frugality and patience any more.
It’s not so much the impact on children that is the problem. It is the impact on community. The women socializing during the day, while their kids are at school or out playing, creates the conditions for social organization. Husband X comes home to learn they are playing cards with Family Y, because his wife became friends with Wife Y. Now you have two families glued together because of the wives. That social glue has value that cannot be replaced with the state.
I remember this so well back in about ’69 when I was starting Kindergarten and before. That was before Mom had given into the temptation to go work, and most of the Moms didn’t. There were Bridge groups and neighborhood get-togethers. All the Moms knew each other so all the families did. It was something out of freaking Father Knows Best and it was better. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” — L. P. Hartley
This is something I try to explain to kids who have no historical perspective: I grew up in a different world, and it worked. Not only did it function just fine without computers and cellphones and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, it was in many ways better than today. The idea that the past could be better in any way at all blows their tiny unformed minds.
It is a common conceit of the historically uninformed that the present is always preferable and better in comparison to the past.
That social glue has value that cannot be replaced with the state.
Which is why they are working so hard to destroy it…They want a low trust society so there is no unity against their evil…They want it where you can’t trust your neighbor and everyone turns in everyone else to the state so they can get a pat on their head…
Had never thought of the problem that succinctly and in that way. Excellent imagery. I do think you hit on the heart of the matter with this notion of social glue and its development.
Great post Zman. My mom was a stay at home mom til I was four, then circumstances required her to return to work. Even as a child, before I was politically aware, I thought the decline of the one income family was a catastrophe.
I thank my Mother for being a stay at home mom when I was a kid. As she’s gotten older, she’s become a crazy liberal, so now she’s defensive about having been a stay at home mom and is uncomfortable when I thank her for it. I love her, but it’s a sick thing to behold.
Mass immigration has something to do with that. I often go by the house where my grandmother was born. A lovely Victorian that now has 12 electrical meters outside and where the yard has been converted to a parking lot. (These condos start at $300K.) America was a better place when normal people could afford nice homes in cohesive communities.
You’ve never had kids of your own, I take it?
Public schools are the number one source of leftist poz in the world today. The teachers are pooch screwing union slobs for the most part, many of whom are single women and elderly cat ladies. Years ago I made the mistake of going to a PTA meeting. I was the only guy there, the rest were women. The meeting was dominated by three cunned stunts that insisted that the school and public educators re-invent and reform themselves, from the ground up – solely for the benefit of their own children. They screeched at the teachers and principal, at each other, and at the audience. The rest of the women sat silent, lost in the chit house drama of it. The principal looked like he just wanted to go home. I went out for a smoke, thought better of it and left. I understood then why my daughter was failing and having behaviour issues in class. I took over her education at that point myself, and her grades skyrocketed and her behaviour problems disappeared.
I will bet you a dollar to a donut the same thing is happening to soccer. It’s mostly a girl’s sport around here and you can see it falling off. If you give modern, menstrual liberal women a say in any organization they will poz the crap out of it to the point it won’t work anymore. Women are socialists and fascists by nature and cannot function unless those tendencies are reigned in.
I have no problem with it, I think kids are better off playing on their own rather than organized leagues with the politics and pressures that go along with it. I had way more fun playing road hockey than putting on the pads and playing in the arena.
Homeschooling is about to become a much larger option but obviously sacrifices will have to be made buy parents for that to happen . We cannot keep sending our children to these day prisons and expect them to learn anything
Sacrifices indeed. The material sacrifices required to be a more resilient family and community member have never been so trivial. Work less, contribute more, rise in your community. The communal is the political and begins at the personal.
The problem you so clearly detailed – is why I want to take “conservatives” who loudly object to cutting back the tax dollars that flow up to local, state and Federal government – and kick them right in the balls – again and again and again.
I know multiple people who would self describe themselves as “conservative” who see no problem sending their kids off to the shit shows that are public schools – even though they recognize how bad they are, they insist that their kids won’t be affected. Then sometime in the child’s life – used to happen in college , now it’s happening in high school – the kid goes full retard SJW – and they (the parent) will start talking incessantly about how they “don’t know what happened to my child!”.
The free candy of public school is what happened. People can’t resist the free candy – even if they know they’re going to have to let somebody touch their peepee.
Your tax dollars fund your enemies. That’s the simple explanation. People who willingly keep going back for more of this – really need to have their heads examined. They also need to be attacked for their stance on this. It needs to stop being “acceptable” to argue for the continued funding of our societal enemies thru forcibly extracted tax dollars.
This is the same type of “conservative” that patronizes Disney and Starbucks. These people just want a liberalism that provides the cheap grace to their white guilt, but get “shocked, shocked” when leftists demand the tax hikes and their child is AA’d out of the state flagship. Suburbia is full of these people. Rural people have their own problems, as they love Wokemart.
@calsdad
It’s like beating your head against a brick wall though trying to get them to see the light… People these days have a hard time using their brain…
Public schools are child abuse. Period. End of story. Anyone sending kids to them clearly doesn’t care.
I recall, way back in the ’80s, there would be a news item every year about the economic value of a housewife. They’d break down laundry:$, child care: $$, housekeeping:$$, etc.
The point was always something like: “See how economically valuable the woman in the home is?” But now I see the whole thing as an outrage: imagine justifying the structure of the culture through accounting. Just one more step in the massive project of commoditizing absolutely every goddamn thing in our lives.
It’s the assumptions that get ya. They’re sneaky.
Exactly. The game our rulers play is to win the fight over the moral framing. Once the value of women was reduced to accounting, the game was over.
Old Cherokee saying: A people aren’t finish until their women’s hearts are on the ground.
In other words, we’re toast.
Those articles never mentioned the “economic value” of the husbands extraneous functions, yard work, auto maintenance and repair, financial planning, home maintenance, etc.
I keep giving my wife invoices for services rendered and all I get back is her inflated ones. I guess we will have to call it evern.
This goes all the way back to Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. It’s Feminism’s ur-text. Engels says that Private Property and the State can only exist thanks to the bourgeois family, which can only exist thanks to the exploitation of the wife’s unpaid labor. It was published in 1884.
The problem is that strip mining civil society for profit is just so goddamn efficient. Turning everyone into a wage slave produces more money than building a quality complementary life. Centralization makes it more efficient still. Capitalism encourages that efficiency above all else.
No one is going to vote for a candidate who says “yes, it will shrink the economy and force you to work for no pay, but you’ll like it, I swear.”
……… is that why women vote for communism?
Comments like this is how I know the comments section is chock full of those fallen away liberals I keep hearing so much about.
Centralization absolutely makes financial rape more efficient. Capitalism is not about centralization. You seem to be confusing communism/socialism – with capitalism.
Women vote for communism because they like the promise of societal support – because it dovetails nicely with their biological instincts to be part of “society”. The resulting centralization – makes it easy to financially strip mine “society” by promising everybody is going to be “equal”. What they don’t tell you is: equally screwed.
The people doing the TRUE screwing in our society – are socialists or communists – not capitalists.
As far as I am concerned the difference between capitalism and communism can be explained very simply at the PERSONAL level – which is something the commies always refuse to do. We are each born with our own human capital – something that gets talked about here constantly. White people have used that capital – to build highly advanced societies. Other cultures or races – made up of people with different types of capital – have not been able to do this. In the same way other races have no claim on the capital of the civilization the white man has built – other individuals have no moral claim to my own PERSONAL human capital. People in Christian / Western societies used to understand this – and that’s why the ‘underprivileged’ were served by CHARITY – and not forcibly extracted welfare dollars. As an individual you may have much more human capital than others within your community – but you were expected as a moral obligation to help others in need – *within reason*. The local drunkards and layabouts were owed nothing – and even the churches recognized this fact.
So – as far as I am concerned – capitalism starts right with the individual – and his own human capital – and extends right up to the top with whatever those people with human capital have created.
Communists and socialists think entirely differently. An individual is just a cog in “society” – and is not any more worthy than any other individual. Society is pre-eminent – and the individual is expendable. They have demonstrated this quite clearly over and over and over again with their death counts. Because they believe in society over individuals – they also inherently believe in big government – and (as we were warned by the people who started the United States) – government will ALWAYS go out of control and be used to enrich those in control of it. Centralization is a mark of communism and socialism – not capitalism.
One of the marks of leftists – is their incessant need to denounce capitalism, even if they don’t know what the hell capitalism is.
Just because socialism is bad doesn’t mean that capitalism is good. Just take a look at the much lauded supermarkets of capitalism that Reagan wanted to show off; they are filled to the brim with choices and most of them are poison. Capitalism has evolved into a system to most efficiently serve vice.
Capitalism was invented because feudalism began to collapse in England and a new system was needed. The centralized nation state and the absolute monarchy co-evolved with capitalism. Thus centralization is just as much endemic to capitalism as it is to socialism. Socialism just takes it further. Centralization, and thus standardization, is in a feedback loop with capitalism.
As industrialization kicked, capitalism demanded that workers cram themselves into cities. By 1850, industrialization was more profitable than agrarianism. The destruction of white society has happened as capitalism demanded more grist for the mill as the yeoman farmers had given all they could. So they found the labor in the third world. At the same time, the majority of women entered the workforce as well.
Socialism is capitalism for spergs. There’s a reason CEO’s want men in women’s bathrooms and are willing to risk money to do it.
Yes, Capitalism/Communism and their compromise, Socialism, are philosophies of Matter. Fascism/National Socialism are philosophies of Man. Thus they are in conflict and always will be. And if the latter should rise again, the former will unite against them as before. All against Trump is the same principle, though in a less radical form.
All organization starts at the bottom. This is one of the consistent failings of socialists and communists – they think organization starts at the top. They don’t even understand how nature is organized – so how the hell could they ever understand how human beings organize themselves?
I say capitalism starts at the bottom – because each human being has his or her own human capital. I have known people (men) in my past who would simply work like dogs – and were smart to boot. These people almost invariably become wealthy because they are PRODUCTIVE and smart about it. They also get their pick of women.
I have also known plenty of men who are useless pieces of shit. Full of laziness and excuses and failure.
The examples are easy. A person with a high amount of capital and the drive and energy to take advantage of that – will become wealthy in one form or another. That can be either monetary wealth or familial wealth as women will want to have babies with him.
In a properly functioning society – as in a state of pure nature – the lazy will fall away and society as a whole will advance as those high functioning and productive INDIVIDUALS lead the way.
The experiment has already been run on socialism at the bottom levels. It’s a FAILURE. The Jamestown colony failed – because they assumed they could appropriate the productiveness of the young men to the advantage of the older men and women. The experiment has also been run in much larger control groups – and the results are failure – every single time.
And those failures didn’t exactly lead to any sort of cultural benefit either – as failed communist/socialist societies inevitably led to the total destruction of the cultures and societies that embraced it.
If there is one thing that those large scale socialist/communist experiments in the past DID get right – is that they realized they could not tolerate free riders. So they killed them. This is one thing that that the current day socialist/communists in our midst can’t seem to get thru their thick heads.
The egalitarian premise behind communism and socialism are rooted in a complete non-understanding of the nature of man – and the organization of nature. It’s bound to failure.
Capitalism at least acknowledges the nature of man and tries to take advantage of it.
Words fail. Where does someone start with people like you? As if profit alone can run a society. As if Government made those Corporations take their jobs out of America. Or replace workers with robots like they are now. Just keep reading AYN RAND, a Jewess.
Again with the example of fallen away liberals I keep noticing in these pages.
As per usual: didn’t even address what I detailed as capitalism. Instantly goes for the usual “corporations” talking points, mentions the other leftist bugaboo – of “Fascism and National Socialism” and somehow equates Communism with Capitalism.
As far as I am concerned – all organization starts at the bottom – as it does in nature. So capitalism starts with each individual – and that individual’s human capital. As I already stated: those individuals built Western societies – and cultures. Which are largely based on the achievements of SPECIFIC INDIVIDUALS – that were then capitalized upon by the society at large.
Commies and socialists and all the other “ists” that basically exist to claim that “society” some how has pre-emenince over the individual – always seem to be in failure or pre-failure mode because of their utter refusal to recognize this simple fact. They therefore kill off the most productive individuals, because it make them look bad.
Leftists can’t seem to wash their defective programming out of their heads – so their responses constantly go back to leftist talking points and bugaboo buzzwords.
Profit!!
Corporations!!
Fascism!!
National Socialism!!
LOL.
I agree with your assessment on women & culture, and the degradation (collapse?) of culture as women are educated (or rather, conditioned) to choose workforce & materialism over family & community institutions. But we also have adult males (not men) who will not opt to work 2 to 3 jobs that would allow his wife to convert his house into a home or transition his children into well-adjusted adults. Most adult males I know are pleased that their woman is in the labor force … so they don’t have to work as hard. They’re also happy to outsource their children to public non-education and youth pastors.
I’m roughly your age (53), and my Dad’s generation all worked as many jobs as necessary to support the family. Today I know zero low-income men who work two jobs or even think to start up a sideline business. Again, I’m onboard with your assessment, but not sure how this culture can dig out of this … I’m rather persuaded, though, that the first step is for males to become men because women are now trapped in the workforce.
Didn’t take long for the “men are really to blame for how wahmen slouch off their role as mothers” post to appear. Men choosing to work 3 jobs is,’t going to fix the programming that women receive about keeping up with their social group in terms of Coach bags and Lexus SUV s, if anything, it will probably exacerbate the lifestyle many of them feel entitled to.
If the wife/mother is inclined to make things work within the means available, it can be done even on a relatively low income(as I know quite intimately, supporting a family,of four on my not very impressive science researcher salary). If the woman wants a champagne lifestyle no amount of income will satiate it, and the modern family court system will make sure she gets it even if she blows off her obligations to her husband/children.
I have seen both sides of the coin: women who live a champagne lifestyle while their husbands work themselves to death, and women who refuse to give up working – because they fear abandonment by their husbands – and the poverty that will follow because they never worked outside the home.
The women living a champagne lifestyle thing – I have seen blow up a couple of marriages. The husband got sick and tired of working like a dog to support a woman who literally couldn’t (or wouldn’t) even give him a hot meal at the end of the day. When times got tough and cutbacks were needed – and she refused – that was the end of that.
Part of the problem here is the “I’m a princess!!” bullshit that gets fed to women literally from birth. Little girls run around in fairy and princess costumes – and then when they get older they incessently watch shit like Sex in the City and Women’s Guide To Divorce – both of which incessantly preach the “you’re a princess” theme – and make it out like women are just entitled to be supported in the “lifestyle they’ve become accustomed to” – come hell or high water.
There’s a reason why the MGTOW “movement” is gaining followers – and it’s because men can’t see the payback on working themselves to the bone – for NOTHING.
Most of the men that I know – who insist we should all be living some sort of “traditional” lifestyle – with women staying home and men out in the working world working themselves to death – live in utter ignorance of what the LAW is. I’ve seen a few of them get into their mid-50’s – have their wives utterly screw them in a divorce – and then basically have their lives ruined FOREVER , because the combination of their age – combined with the fact that the working world doesn’t want to employ men who are 50+ in age – combine to screw them from ever having a good life again.
Seems like a lot of the younger men have clued into the screw job – you can thank the internet and the fathers and uncles for that. And that’s probably contributing significantly to the hesitation of younger men to stick their head under the guillotine.
You can talk about race and culture and all of that until you’re blue in the face – but when faced with the LAW and a direct financial screwing with the resulting life long consequences – most men I know who have a brain in their head will respond to the problem that is right in front of their face (the financial screwing) – and not the problem that esoteric in nature to most of them (race and culture).
That – in a nutshell – is the problem you’re faced with.
This goes both ways. I’m a 50-something woman, 8/9 on the attractiveness scale, Ivy educated with a PhD, stay-at-home for 20 years while teaching part-time in universities … and I just found out that my husband has been having a long-term affair with his shrink. He’s had the time to squirrel away all our assets into hidden places and … yes, I’m screwed.
At my age, a career is out of the question. I’m far too old for tenure. Books don’t make money. Honestly, I hear what you’re saying about how women undergird civil society … I share those beliefs. I was one of those women. I wiped little baby butts in Sunday School, home-schooled the kids, rehabbed the house, pinched the pennies, adopted his twelve-year-old niece when his brother went nuts, and, in spite of opportunities, was faithful. I can look back and think of things I would have done/said differently, but the ledger is heavily weighed on my side.
Please know, Mr. Carlsdad, that women get hurt in this social maelstrom, too. It’s not “innocent men” v. “grasping, materialistic women” — a tad simplistic, no? Sometimes it’s “innocent women” v. “conniving, adulterous men.”
Through tears, I wish you only the best.
Picture, please. Women who objectively are a 7 at age 50 are magical things.
I’d say that depends on how you weigh the scale.
If you’re going to compare a 50 year old woman to an 18 year old women – then you’re weighting the scale.
And the same effect works on men too, so I don’t feel like I’m being unfair here towards just women.
If however you restrict the population that is being rated to a similar age group – then I have seen women in their 50’s who are very attractive. In my opinion maybe even more so than some younger women – because of the rarity. Women in their 50’s who remain beautiful get that way because they actually work at it.
There’s an awful lot of women who are naturally beautiful at 18 – who are utter train wrecks by the time they are in their 30’s.
It works both ways? Yes, about 30% of the time. Women bring over 70% of the divorces. Don’t let your own situation blind you to the objective situation. Anecdotal thinking is a feminine weakness.
I have seen the situation that you’re describing too, but – being a man – I do look at things from the man’s perspective. All I can say to you is: get a good lawyer. Not sure what state you are in , but here in MA the court system is heavily weighted towards sympathy towards women. So if you can make a good case you will likely get something out of the deal – IF you have a good lawyer.
Also: do not think that a career is definitively out of the question. My best friend’s wife went back to school in her mid 40’s after raising three kids (and only have a high school education) – and now works as a teacher in her late 40’s and is working on establishing her own day care business. Day care can be an extremely profitable business to be in. One of my brother’s in law got out of the Navy in his early 50’s – and went into teaching. He got a PhD while in the service and has been taking advantage of it.
Up in my area they just opened a Primrose School. My understanding is that Primrose Schools are a national franchise chain – and while looking at their site just the other day I noticed that they listed the people who worked there – and made a rather large deal out of the educational attainments of the people working there.
I guess my point here is: Ivy League PhD + part time teaching + 20 years of raising children does not = nothing.
It might not = tenure in the academy, but if you’re reading this site you might find the academy intolerable lunacy anyway. I know my brother in law has endless stories about going head to head with some of the lunatics he works with – and he’s teaching at a place that should be as immune as it gets from stuff (The Citadel).
I do realize that there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here – in regards to who went nuts first – men or women?. But as ZMan has pointed out – and as the guy in this Youboob interview talks about :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=B2BPBOckFTo
Women are the guardians of culture, so if the culture has gone nuts and women support infidelity – then men are going to take advantage of that.
I went to high school with a guy who later went on to become a major league baseball pitcher. I don’t follow sportsball – but I believe he is in the Hall of Fame now. Something I heard from him many years ago has stuck with me all these decades. He said that when he was out on the road – if he came out of his hotel room in the middle of the night to say get some ice for a drink – women would be lined up in the halls sleeping on the floor – just to get a chance to get a crack at a major league ball player. As a young kid he found it a little bit disconcerting.
I bear this in mind when I think about claims from people like Gene Simmons and other famous men when they start talking about how many women they have slept with. If you REALLY sit down and think about it – could these men have slept with even 1/4 of the amount of women they claim – if the women weren’t just offering themselves up? I’m sorry but no man in the world has the time or energy to convince even dozens of women to sleep with him if the women aren’t very willing or even FORCING the issue.
This was a little piece of brutal truth that Donald Trump was referring to when he talked about the pussy grabbing thing.
This little piece of truth is also relevant to this gem that I saw popup in Twitter this morning:
https://twitter.com/HakonRotmwrt/status/1018802243418480640/photo/1
Apparently France is banning paternity testing – because 10% of children have been found to not be the children of their legal father.
I believe things like the examples above – start to make it clearer which came first – the chicken or the egg.
And that women are not blameless in this whole mess – and may in fact bear a heavier burden of the blame.
Men surely share some blame too – but in regards to your case – that shrink likely knew your husband was married, and did it anyway.
Well, as a man I’ve learned that if there’s a problem in my family to look for ever increasing concentric circles around ME. I’m just saying men need to grow a pair, and you chose to take it personally? So you’re saying the larger problem is women’s shopping habits, without mentioning 40-somethings addicted to porn & video games? Yep, I’ve raised a family of 8 on a meager income, primarily by giving my kids a homestead and meaningful work raising food, stacking firewood, and other life-giving work. My wife loves the nurturing role, and as a homeschool mom, is too damn busy to worry about brand-name consumerism. All that to say, you jumped to some seriously erroneous conclusions … is that what “science research” has taught you?
Get the biology right and culture will follow. Similarly, get the masculinity piece right and women will gladly (happily – joyfully) line up to marry a responsible protector/provider, someone who isn’t addicted to either soccer or any other boyish distractions.
You certainly got yourself worked up over someone pointing out the validity of Spengler’s Universal Law #11: At all times and in all places, the men and women of every culture deserve each other.
Nowhere in my post did I say anything in regards to men choosing to live a meaningless life of hedonism, and I’m certainly not going to defend it any more than I would defend women choosing a life of meaningless hedonism. I’m alsoglad that you’ve figured out that NAWALT, the completely useless anecdotal response to anyone pointing out the way the current family law system is set up to favor one gender over the other, and the downstream effects it has on people’s behavior.
All of the “get off my lawn” rants about how the kids ain’t right with their vidyas and porn and sex and the city don’t mean a damn thing as long as the government chooses to subsidize certain dyscivic behaviors with their handouts from the black robed goon class. All of which dates back to the good ol’ days of yore when the “masculine” men were in charge, their manliness certainly didn’t prevent the hens from taking over the roost.
There’s certainly something to what you say. Men aren’t without culpability in this situation. That said, when tens of millions of American jobs have been exported to Asia and Latin America, and millions of Third Worlders have been imported to take the jobs that can’t be exported, it’s a lot more difficult for a man to earn what used to be called a family wage.
If we were to remove migrants and women from the U.S. workforce, our men would benefit greatly from upward pressure on wages. Better wages to take care of their women and children with, women at home focusing on raising quality people.
@Ursula
Yea but then they would be more independent and the women would be more dependent on them and not the government…They would also be more inclined to homeschool their kids with a stay at home mom which the gov. statist hate… Everything that makes men more manly and women more womanly the gov. will try to destroy…
It’s not a money thing. In my professional life, I only deal with middle class and above folks. Every single one could easily have the wifey at home on their generous salary. None of them do. Their wives are programmed from day one not to rely on a dude. It’s also very important for status competition to be working professionally as a chick, otherwise you are not keeping up with the Jones and are considered a hillbilly prole with bad manners. Many have a single kid or two but send them to daycare immediately to resume their worthless professional life. Meanwhile, where I live in the sticks have plenty of stay at home mom’s where pops is a truck driver or farmer or mechanic.
People need to get away from the human as a rational self interested money maximizer. Culture matters, social siginalling matters, status competition and class matter. These working mothers rarely do so out of dickensian hardship due to male wage decreases but out of a desperation for meaning and following societies cultural roadmap for salvation.
A critical feature of the old community-family ecosystem circa 1970 and before was the tacit understanding, the social contract if you will, that certain jobs were reserved for males providing for their families and that such jobs paid a wage sufficient to support a middle-class existence.
This is not to say that no women worked. Then, as now, single mothers and women on their own had to support themselves. It is merely that such women largely gravitated to the traditionally female-heavy occupations.
In 1970, it was still possible for a young man who’d just graduated from high school to secure a good paying job at a factory as an auto-worker making cars, for example, and thereby be able to afford to marry and start a family. There were ample opportunities in the skilled trades for such young men as well. That work is largely gone now, to foreign countries.
Older readers will remember that back in those days, the want-ads in the papers were often segregated by sex, i.e., “jobs for men” versus “jobs for women.”
Most of the young men who didn’t attend college or start work immediately after high school went into the military. In those days, unlike today, the military was seen as an explicitly male – yes, you read that right – “male” – occupation. Today, seems like every ad one sees is a recruiting ad for the military feature women – and not men – in uniform. From the looks of these ads, one could be forgiven from assuming that GI Jane doesn’t even need GI Joe’s help anymore! No men need apply.
Kevin Michael Grace made a good point last night on Luke Ford’s podcast. Ford brought up that most people will not identify as feminists now. Grace countered we are all feminists now, just look at the early objectives feminism had, they have all been implemented now. Even conservatives wouldn’t argue with them. It’s Feminism 2.0 with it’s even nuttier ideas that people are objecting to.
At any rate, I have two baseball games to attend tonight in my town.
Spot on! Most of today’s “conservatives” are the progressives of five or ten years ago. They basically accept 90 % of the feminist agenda, only rejecting the most outlandish 10 %. Yet, it is the whole of feminism that plummets the birthrates while disconnecting/disorienting society in exactly the manner that Z has described. Counter-intuitively, the wackiest ideas of feminism are actually the least dangerous — as they can’t attract sufficient support, even among a lot of women. The more mainstream tenets have become entrenched in our culture and are having a much more pernicious effect. But don’t expect your standard-issue right-wingers to figure that out.
P.S.: I remain a huge baseball fan myself. Never cared for soccer. My interest in basketball and football has been on the wane the last few years.
There are studies now that provide strong support for the ideas in this post. One is on day care centers in Bologna, Italy; the study shows that replacing mothers with employees of a public (high quality) day care centers lowers the IQ of children. There is another study on day care centers in Tennessee, large randomized, controlled, that proves the same point. Both are getting flak, but they are high quality studies.
Two thoughts on soccer.
1. I agree with you – it’s a horrible sport – and I was really good at as a kid because my mother wouldn’t let me play football. The minute I got to college I signed up for the Rugby team.
2. Youth soccer is way too much of a commitment. Year-round travel and practice, tournaments and games hundreds of miles away, forgoing all other sports – all for a game nobody watches and the immigrant kids will still be better.
Lacrosse is becoming the alternative spring sport for kids who aren’t good enough to make the baseball / softball teams. And you don’t have to worry about a Mexican kid showing up and taking your starting position.
I don’t hate the sport of soccer. I hate American soccer fans. European and South American fans are just like normal fans in America. They love the teams their fathers loved. That’s normal. American soccer fans are gold plated phonies.
I played a ton of soccer as a kid. Loved it. It is a shit spectator sport.
I do like the tribal aspect here, I watch within a couple of yards where my great grandfather watched the team we support, Anfield Liverpool is a crucial part of the working class identity here.
Fair point. Goodison Park aswell has a very strong traditional fan base. I have a passing support for United as it’s the team my Dad followed, I’ve been to Old Trafford approx 20 times. For big European games and games against Liverpool, Chelsea, City the atmosphere is great, regular games can be pretty poor. In saying that the noise in Anfield for a big game is seriously inpressive. Despite trading hands frequently Liverpool still has a strong working class identity.
That’s the UK though.
Soccer is not a big part of the American sports scene even today. I played a tad when I was young but it was a nascent sport and I lived in Football country anyway
Beyond that we couldn’t afford it.
Frankly I think the Vikings got it right, boys were trained in wrestling and sword play starting at age eight and played ball games on their own time
they had a baseball and possibly football like game , competed but they were recreational activities not pro sports.
I don’t have kids – so talking to my work buddies about what they have to do with their kids is somewhat of a revelation. They talk about taking their ten year olds on “travel games” where they go to different STATES to play other teams. When I hear this my natural reaction is WTF. There were youth leagues when I was a kid (more than 30 years ago) – but you didn’t get in a bus and carry your ass on a 3 hour trip to another state with a bunch of 10 or 12 year olds. They didn’t have teams with dedicated box trailers loaded up with all their stuff and the name of the team on the side. It was all dumped in the trunk of the coach’s car or van and you played teams in your town or maybe from surrounding towns.
It was a HOBBY. Something kids did to engage in physical activity with each other – and some parents did to support the kids. Now it’s like every parent thinks their kid is the next world superstar in whatever sport he (or even more dumb – she) – is playing.
I live in MA – and a few years back one of the parents in town -who owns a chain of successful local businesses – got an effort together to replace the football field with artificial turf. I know some in local government and town affairs – and apparently this guy thought his kid was going to be the next NFL superstar. The kid had already been kept back one year in school to try and up his play. So now it was that he wanted to have the kid play on artificial turf – because that’s what the pros play on. The problem was – other parents got behind him – and they wanted the town to spend the money – and it was something like $1 million. They ended up playing some political shennanigans – got money from here and there – and got the field installed.
I have close friends with daughters in the school system – and apparently after the field was installed – nobody else can use the field. No soccer, no band practice – and no school graduations. So now the town has to pay even more to rent a local indoor stadium for high school graduations. So now the damn sportsball parents have screwed the town for $1mil – and screwed them again every year when there’s a graduation. Thanks a freaking lot.
And here’s the real issue: this is MASSACHUSETTS. No pro level football players are coming out of some lily white suburb in MA. So the entire thing is just an exercise in typical liberal fantasy thinking.
It’s rabid and idiotic everywhere. Here in Michigan it’s hockey. Travel teams or not the parents or the pushiest of them organize tournaments out of state often. I have had some mothers come in my business and ask to sponsor her son in hockey. My incredulity must have been overwhelming as they leave rather promptly.
Here (New England) it’s hockey, baseball and lacrosse. Of course the states here are small, so travelling to ME or VT for a tourney isn’t so bad.
@ David_Wright
Your experience with being asked to sponsor a child for hockey is probably a custom which filtered into Michigan from Canada, where such is very common and utterly-uncontroversial. Maybe you’ve heard the old quip about hockey and religion in Canada, “Hockey isn’t a religion in Canada, it’s more important than that.” They take the game very seriously indeed. It is something close to a national obsession. Hockey-playing kids with potential are often recruited by junior teams in another city or province, so Canadian families – especially grandparents, empty-nesters, couples without children, etc. – have an elaborate network setup to board these teens as sort of surrogate parents while the kid plays hockey and goes to school.
Not sure if this is like your experience, but thought I would chime in with my two cents worth.
Used to secretly root for the teams of Hispanic kids from the poorer towns around us in travel soccer. They played well and the parents were not rabid assholes.
Great work, Z. Now everyone spread this meme to the youth, and start taking back the culture.