Over at Marginal Revolution, there is a long thread on the callous indifference of liberals to the damage they have caused with ObamaCare. I called out an odious commenter name Michael Foody for it. A striking feature of modern liberalism is the bizarre pleasure they take in the suffering of others. In my youth, they put a lot of effort into claiming they were motivated by compassion for the suffering of others. The poor, afflicted and oppressed were turned into posters they could wave around to close off debate. It was all nonsense, of course. Hitler did the same thing as did Stalin. They had different tastes in victims, but the trick was the same. Manufacture a reason for people to stop thinking so they will go along with your scheme. The tens of millions murdered by the twin towers of leftist European politics shows how effective it is as a strategy.

Modern liberals have abandoned much of this. They still have their imaginary victims and imaginary bogeymen, but they are not as practiced in the public sympathy acts. If you read the MR thread, you see quite a few commentators who appear to delight in the suffering of their fellow citizens. The Brookings Institute guy comes off like a Soviet Commissar when asked about the number of Ukranians they have starved. You can just imagine the fascist prick muttering, “Everything within the state, nothing without…” as he dismisses the complaints of those screwed over by this law. I suspect the truth is, they really are happy that people they don’t like, middle Americans, are getting screwed by this. The Left has believed the middle is the enemy since they set up the guillotine in the 18th century.

That’s the central truth of the cult of modern liberalism. They are motivated by a deep hatred of those they see as their natural enemies. Southern whites, the religious and the middle class come in for particular attention. Liberal policy choices are reactionary in that they are based on what they think these groups want. A harmless old woman like Paula Deen is savaged because she is popular with Southern Whites. The governor of Texas is mocked and ridiculed because he is publicly religious. Sarah Palin is the devil because she is 100% middle American. Normal people have seen her type at the PTA meeting, the soccer field and the grocery store. That’s why the Left loathed her so deeply and instinctively. She was the typical American mom.

As ObamaCare rolls out, it increasingly appears the bill was written to cause maximum damage to middle class institutions. They have rules that force the religious to pay for abortion and birth control. There are rules that make it difficult for small business to offer health coverage. There are rules that punish families. Now we are seeing that the new policies that are offered up as a replacement are two and three times as expensive as the old policies, while covering less. Yet, the ease of getting on Medicaid is much easier. This latest spasm of social engineering is another example of the top and bottom ganging up on the middle to inflict damage on those who pull the wagon.

According to a Danish economist, I’m a racist. The reason is I made the rather observation that Denmark has few NAM’s and that has a big impact on how their social services work. Judging from his post, I think merely pointing out the lack of a NAM population is racist. That’s not a surprise. We have reached a point that any mention of race or issues related to race is forbidden. I call it observationalism. It is the opposite of whatever causes people to say, “I don’t see race.” I see that on TV sometimes. I guess it means that someone has become so pure, they literally cannot tell the race of other people or themselves.

I thought about that while reading this story. Through the whole thing, get no hint of the ethnic element of the story. There’s a Spanish guy, maybe.  Pedro DeJesus is most likely Hispanic, but I’m probably violating some law by assuming that from his name. Otherwise, this could be a group of Swedes hunting down a Mongolian in a predominantly Nigerian neighborhood. You would think that the news account would mention something about the people involved. After all, a killer or killers are on the loose. Knowing something about them that could maybe lead to their arrest would be useful. Instead, we get “We’re told the suspect wore a dark-colored hooded sweatshirt.”

Good grief.

[subscribe2]In every time and every place there have been those predicting doom just over the horizon. Eventually, one of them is right and is often remembered long after by future prophets of doom. No one remembers the millions who were wrong, unless they flamed out in a particularly spectacular fashion or a psychologist wrote a book about them. I’ve often drawn on the later to harass liberals by comparing them to a cult. If you read the book, the comparisons hold up to a frightening degree, but that’s for another day. Today I’m reading JayMan’s treatise on why we are doomed. I’m sure the Zero Hedge types will be memorizing passages from it all week. After all, if you don’t like the current arrangements, they must not be sustainable and therefore must be on the verge of collapse. The classic in this genre is Marx, whose alienation drove him to create a worldwide suicide cult that eventually snuffed out millions. L. Ron Hubbard was a piker by comparison.

I have not read the whole thing or had much time to mull over his arguments, but what jumps out to me immediately is the Great Depression Syndrome. This is a cognitive bias I just made up to describe the myopic view of economics history. The economics profession is hobbled by it. I suspect it is because it is the big economic event that gave birth to their profession. That and they don’t have reliable data for prior events. Still, you would think someone would notice that the world was buggering along for a few thousand years before Keynes. The other issue is the cultural overhang. America the super power starts with World War II. The Boomers grew up hearing tales about their parents making it through the Depression to then beat the Nazis. This era that is headed for its denouement should be known as the Boomer Era as it has been defined by the quirks of that generation.

Anyway, the point of that last bit is the Great Depression is not the standard we should be applying today. Further, the Great Depression was not as great as the romantics claim. Previous depressions were as unpleasant and some worse. The Long Depression was worse, which is why it was known as the Great Depression, until the next collapse came along and that generation decided to celebrate itself after the war. It is probably fair to say that it is a better analogue to today than the Great Depression. Instead of one dive over the cliff, followed by a period of adjustment, there were a variety of shocks around the world that fed on one another. Today, Europe has different troubles than the US, which has different problems than Japan. Even so, it is not a great analogue. There are lessons to be drawn, but policy makers never learn from the past so it is left to history buffs. Read Currency Wars and you can get a nice easy to read history of the Long Depression as well as the Great Depression. Draw whatever lessons you like.

Then we have the Kitten of the Blogosphere’s take. I’ve long thought that reality would eventually beat the smug out of his generation, but he keeps proving me wrong. I guess that’s why I read his blog. Anyway, he too suffers from Great Depression Syndrome. In his case, no pics of bread lines today means it is better than the 30′s, because he remembers seeing all of those pics of breadlines back in school. The 1930′s did not have sprawling black ghettos either. They did not have trailer parks full of meth labs. My grandparents lived through the depression and never stopped yapping about it. The main take away for me is it was not that bad for the hard working and ambitious. After all, 80% of the population did have a job.  The poor were still poor, the rich were still rich and the working class was still working class. The middle class, however, was reminded that they are not upper class and never will be. That’s the lesson all the old people in my family took away from the Great Depression. The rich are always at war with the middle and they use the poor as a weapon.

Anyway, plenty of good stuff for the doom and gloom types. My view is we are going to experience shocks and adjustments for the next decade as the Boomer Era comes to a close. The political class will try every option to stave off the mathematical reality facing the nation until they are forced to do that which is necessary. Riots and revolution are unlikely. Instead it will be a slow winding down of Empire that will go through fits and starts. The next decade will see a contraction of US involvement in the world’s dung heaps. Domestically taxes will be raised, but real cuts will happen for the first time as it becomes clear we cannot have it all.

I can’t say i know a lot about the work of John Fund. I think he shills for the neo-cons in the Wall Street Journal. I see him there and National Review, but I don’t often read him. I suspect his will be one of the jobs automated in the future. Anyway, he has this post up at NRO. It is emblematic of what is defective with the conservative mind. They confuse policy, principles and politics. The current fight in DC has very little to do with policy and nothing to do with principle. It is primarily a political fight. Both parties fear they are losing their base. The best way to win over doubters is to pick a fight with the enemy. John Boehner is not a genius, but he figured out that he had to go along with the conservative members on this and take a stand. Otherwise they risked losing big in next year’s election. In the end, they may have to accept some minor cuts here or there, which will amount to nothing, but they will have rallied the base for the next fights.

Fund, like all of Conservative Inc does not get it.

The notion that adding a defund-Obamacare provision to the continuing resolution or debt-ceiling measure would actually result in defunding Obamacare sounded too much like the strategy the “underpants gnomes” adopted in that classic episode of South Park. The kids discover that gnomes are stealing people’s underpants.

I hope I get a chance to negotiate with these guys once in my life. I will become fabulously rich. In politics, you start out knowing you will cut a deal. Your goal is to make the other guy look awful so he will give you better terms. Forcing that old pervert Hairy Reed to go on TV and defend this mess is good politics. Any time you can get Pelosi or the Aging JAP on TV is a good day for Republicans. They will inevitably say something so bat-shit crazy the public will recoil in horror. Conservative Inc never seems to get this and instead demands immediate surrender so they can regroup for another day, when they have the policy just right.

Of course, part of this is that old hacks like Fund don’t want to rock the boat. He makes a nice living repeating what he is told on TV and in print. He is invested in the status quo. Still, even guys who are willing to speak their mind and should know better often confuse the three “P’s” of public discourse. Liberals seldom make this error. They aim to win first and figure out the other stuff later. It’s why they tend to win all of the fights.

One of the weird self-correcting phenomenon you see in drug markets – street drugs, that is – is the intolerance for fakes. If a dealer gets caught passing off baby laxative as coke he is going to be dead. It is not just that he ripped off his customers; it is that he cheats his fellow drug dealers. The guy selling fake stuff raises everyone’s costs and risks. Pawn shops willingly cooperate with the police to counter theft for similar reasons. Their customers are not going to solicit a business that supports burglary. Antique dealers try to uncover fakes as it undercuts their business. Why spend big money on an original when you can get a fake? That does not stop the fakers, but it is an organic mechanism to police it. Highly distributed markets can do this. Centralized industries like music and movies cannot so they lobby the state to crack down on forgers.

There is a vast middle ground where most of us live and that’s where fakers can cause the most trouble. I was looking at NRO for something to aggravate me and saw this in their list of articles. It is not an article, but an ad dressed up to look like an article. National Review agrees to place ads like this in their article queue in order to trick people into clicking on the link. Magazines now have multi-page advertizements made to look like one of their stories. Even more strange is the ad in question here is itself full of fake stuff. The whole xenoestrogen stuff is largely nonsense, at least as it relates to organic food. Plants have all sorts of tricks to ward off pests and they often consider humans to be pests. A cobra is organic, too.

It does not stop there. According to this story in the Economist, academic papers are also being forged. The market for fake term papers is well developed. You can probably outsource your thesis if you are so inclined. To no one’s surprise, the epicenter of this new fraud is China. It seems like their entire culture is designed around deception. We get the term “sand bag” from China. In the colonial days, Chinese tea merchants would put sandbags at the bottom of casks to defraud the British. It is a bandit culture with no history of integrity. I know of companies that have to use special coding on their boxes to distinguish their product from the fakes as the Chinese will fake even the most mundane things.

Like the fake news story, fake research has a terrible trade off. If I can no longer tell the real stories in a magazine from the ads, I stop buying the magazine. If we can no longer distinguish real research from fake stuff from China, we no longer do research because no one can trust it. It strikes me as I type this that the great challenge to the West is how to deal with the massive on-going criminal enterprise known as the People’s Republic of China. Their hacking, credit fraud, piracy and knock-offs have real costs to the West. How long before it stops making sense to do business with them? I block all Chinese IP’s from this site because of spammers. How long before banks start to consider doing the same?

Lion of the Blogosphere is wringing his hands over the prospect of a left-wing loon becoming the next mayor. I think it is rational to have some concern. New York has become quietly intolerant since the 1970′s and that intolerance has made the city a better place. By that I mean the citizens decided enough was enough and elected politicians willing to clean up the crime, urban blight and dysfunctional public sector. Rudy cleaned up the tourist areas and public parks. He reformed the police department. Bloomberg left things in place and convinced liberal New Yorkers that it was OK to be tough on crime. He also showed how they could avert their gaze from the realities of gentrification. That reality is rich white people buy up the apartments, evict the brown people and then move in the kids of rich people. If Richmond enacted the same polices as New York, liberals would be staging freedom rides to Virginia.

Now it appears the intolerant wing of the political class has tired of the fight and the lunatics are taking over. You’ll note that I do not call them the tolerant wing. The opposite of intolerant in politics is stupid. Civilization is about not accepting a wide range of human behavior. Laws against violence, rape, sex acts and so forth are what allows civilization to flower. To be a liberal means not understanding this basic truth of the human condition, which seems to be the case with the next mayor. That probably means he will attempt to roll back that which has worked and replace it with polices that have failed everywhere they have been tried. The question is will the voters put up with it.

New York could go one of two ways. Right now it is following down the path of San Francisco. Economics and subtle racism have made San Fran a NAM free zone. The city is 5% black and 15% Hispanic. The rest is Asian and white. New York is getting less black and more white. Part of it is due to the economy of the city. Part of it is due to gentrification. Part is due to those police tactics to chase NAM males out of the city if they were inclined to dress like extras from a Jay-Z video. How much of each is responsible for the transformation of the city is unknown, but my bet is the latter is a declining factor. It is why the loons feel it is safe to go after it now. The danger is gone and the bad men hired to clean up the streets can be dismissed. It is reminiscent of the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Once the tough guy does his job, he can be replaced by the soft guy who does not startle the ladies.

The first time I heard of modern supper clubs was from John Derbyshire. I don’t recall the specifics, just that he was a member of one in New York City. I want to say it was in one of his podcasts, but I don’t recall. That’s not important. I was surprised to learn such things were still going on. It seemed like a thing Victorians would do or perhaps rich people in the roaring twenties. When I think of supper clubs, the Jacobin Club is what comes to mind. Something clandestine and slightly heretical. I decided to see if any of these things existed in my part of the world and sure enough, they were around and not very secret about it. I just chalked it up to one of those things that was unknown to me but well known to most others. It is a big world, after all.

I saw this and immediately was reminded of it again. It turns out they are not legal and perhaps even subversive. Now the city intends to round up the miscreants and shut down their clubs. I suppose the next time we hear from John Derbyshire will be in the police blotter. It sounds absurd, but this is New York City. They want to regulate the amount of soda you can drink. They have been having the police hassle NAM males who are foolish enough to cross into Manhattan. This is not a place that thinks personal liberty and freedom of association have a place in their society. The mayor has been jetting around the country trying to get legislatures to strip citizens of their right to self-defense. What seems absurd today is conventional wisdom in New York City tomorrow.

All joking aside, it is one of those little things, a blade of grass stabbing through the asphalt, that encourages me a bit. Tocqueville found American’s obsession with what he called associations to be an important part of what made American liberty work:

The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

The fact that even in New York City, citizens are willing to commit little acts of subversion in league with others, often strangers, says the flame has not been extinguished entirely. The current arrangements cannot last and that means they will not last. The arithmetic makes it so. The question is what comes next. If Putin is right and we’re just a bunch of chumps like everyone else, then what comes next is going to be grim. If these little dinner clubs are any indication, maybe what comes next will not be so bad, perhaps even better than what we see now. It is a reason to be pessimistic in the short term, but optimistic in the long term.

One of the things you learn when you go from working class to middle class is that the men get softer the further you go up the class ladder. By softer I mean less inclined to throw a punch. At the lower end of the scale, you better be able to back up your words with your fists or a knife or a gun. Otherwise, you better know how to keep your mouth shut and steer clear of trouble. In elite society, alpha males are quick with the witty jibe and enforce their dominance with clever repartee. Careful politicking, networking and favor trading is how one advances in the upper classes. Words, not deeds, are the currency of the rich. In the lower classes, too much talking can get you killed.

I thought about that as Obama stumbled and bumbled is way back from the brink of war yesterday. He and all of his toadies, coat holders and rump swabs are from the same world. Upper middle and upper class childhoods. Prep schools then elite colleges. After college it was law school, government service and perhaps stints at elite Wall Street firms to take care of the finances, then eventually service in the upper reaches of government or perhaps an NGO. The closest any of these folks ever got to a fight was a spat at the gym. You’re not going to find anyone who has been punched in the face.

In the hermetically sealed world of American politics, this is not big thing. Everyone is playing by the same rules of the pseudo-meritocracy. Obama played the game better than most and was able to parlay his race into the top job. In foreign policy, things are a bit different. In the Syria crisis, one of the major players is Vladimir Putin. He has probably killed people as a member of the KGB. He has certainly ordered people killed as he has gone up the food chain. He’s not Ivan the Terrible, but he is a genuine bad ass who made it to the top of the heap in a world where mistakes get you killed or let you kill your rival. Putin has been punched in the face.

You may think I’m overdoing it with Putin, but consider another major player. That would be Assad of Syria. He could easily have negotiated a deal to leave Syria and settle in Europe. Hell, he could do a deal with Obama and moved to New York City. Instead, he stays in Syria, fighting the rebels. He has ordered his military to kill men, women, children, pets and cattle. According to various reports, 100,000 civilians have been killed since this thing started. It takes a genuine badass to be in charge of a tribe willing to kill anyone in their way. Assad may have got to his place through nepotism, but he remains in power by killing anyone who challenges him.

You can go through the entire roster of players in this story, Jews Arabs and Persians, and find a whole bunch of seriously bad dudes. The thing about bad dudes, whether they are Arab dictators or the president of the local Hell’s Angels chapter, is they have no illusions about the human condition. They trust no one and expect everything. They also know their limits. Sonny at the biker bar knows he is not talking you out of your interests. The House of Saud knows the only way to stay in power is to use it. Talking about it does nothing. They are not beheading homosexuals in Riyadh because they have nothing better to do.

That’s why Obama & Co were made into fools by Putin and Assad. These are men fully equipped to deal with the realities of that part of the world. They have no illusions about what can be done. Obama and his people walk around thinking that a clever speech or well crafted argument is going to get everyone to do what they say. That’s how it has always worked for them. It is how they were trained. Again, they have never even met a guy who has been punched in the face, much less had to compete with him. The result is they lost this round to Russia and our influence in the world is continues to evaporate.

I posted a comment on this post at National Review. I used to be a regular there, commenting on the blog. I stopped when the execrable Rich Lowry hired some loser to moderate the site. Instantly 90% of the users disappeared. Lowry had to spend a month begging people to return. I gave it another shot, but quit again when the same nonsense started anew. Lowry and the editorial staff at National Review are just a collection of middle-class strivers with nothing much to add. The only guy at National Review worth reading is Kevin Williamson and his flirtations with taboo subjects will surely get him sent off the island. There are two things that sniveling little twerp Rich Lowry will not tolerate. One is writers with talent and creativity. The other is anything that puts his TV gig at risk. Otherwise National Review is, at best, a souvenir program for the museum of late-20th century conservatism. At worst is is a platform for hollow men like Lowry to curry favor with the ruling class.

My comment was deleted and I’m not surprised. I made the point that precious fops like Potemra live in a city where it is official policy to hassle brown people on the streets. The intent of stop and frisk is to let the NAM know he is not welcome. Since the court struck down the Jim Bloomberg Law, the city’s chattering classes have been wringing their hands of New York becoming Detroit. Now word and deed are one as the official policy of driving out the blacks is matched by the public rhetoric. Yet, we still hear the lectures and the smug condescension over race. The same people demanding their Bull Connors put the dogs on every black guy wandering into Manhattan scream about Paula Deen and George Zimmerman. None of this is shocking as liberalism is a religion with many bogeymen. The result is a stunning lack of self-awareness. Liberals, almost always, reserve their harshest venom for the crimes they routinely commit. That’s how cults work.

The issue of race is one where the Right should be scoring points. Instead, punks like Lowry lead the charge against anyone who dares raise the issue. He is not alone. Dan McCarthy at The American Conservative is following the same path. It is no small thing that National Review is celebrating the purging of Ron Unz. Birds of a feather and all that. The reason behind these moves is the claim that it is bad for business. Donors don’t like it. Maybe. What’s really going on is the liberal TV outlets don’t like it. The dream of these climbers like Lowry and McCarthy is to get a permanent TV gig. You can only do that by being a suck up or a pioneer and they ain’t got the chops to be a pioneer. That leaves them on their knees in the executive suites of whatever TV channel that employs them. That means the Left lectures the Right on race and the Right forever apologizes for things it never did or said. Hitler, Mao and Stalin counted on the career man for a reason.

The whole point of being in the opposition is to oppose the prevailing orthodoxy. To do that you have to let a thousand flowers bloom. That means putting up with some weirdos and cranks, but it also means getting interesting perspective from guys like Unz, Sailer, Derbyshire and so forth. They have their own quirks and get things wrong, but they get a lot right too. When you’re the underdog, you need to be creative and take risks. Instead, the dying husks of Amercian conservatism are purging themselves of non-conformists and begging the majority to allow them to surrender. National Review has simply become the primary outlet of the collaborationist wing of the GOP.