Steve Sailer had this up on his site with some comments. It’s short so I’ll post the whole thing below.

Two groups who I think share a lot of unappreciated similarities are liberal gentrification critics and conservative immigration critics. Both want to take a dynamic and free society and freeze it in time, because they like it how it is now. And both assume we have a high level of ownership over our neighborhoods and our country.

It’s true both neighborhoods and the country overall exist within democracies and so we have some legitimate say in what happens there, but it’s simply not the case that we own it. Both contain homes and property owned by others, which you don’t own. As a result, your neighbors are free to sell their homes to whoever they please, and for gentrification critics and immigration critics this can be a problem. The United States is not our shared property, but a free country and free society where we have various rights.

Perhaps all the existing residents could decide that to the best of their abilities they want to legally freeze everything in time and keep it just how it is. But remember that the country looks how it does today because past residents were willing to accept change. The desire to freeze it now, to block new entrants and stop change, is a selfish act that denies future generations the right to see their country and neighborhoods evolve, just as they have evolved to this point.

Imagine if every neighborhood from the 1950s remained frozen in place, and strict laws managed to mandate static relative socioeconomic status and ethnic and cultural makeup. In retrospect of course it seems silly and hubristic to pick a singular point in time, -say 1955- and declare that everything is perfected now compared to all prior states and all possible future states. Of course when we’re taking about now instead of then, many find the right to preserve current conditions to be obvious and not silly at all.

Maybe this message is wholly unneeded for the sophisticated readers of the blogosphere, but I think for sure it is broadly under-appreciated. The only reason we have have gotten to this current state that you wish to preserve forever is that past generations resisted that impulse. It’s a free country, and that means we don’t own it.

The bit of commentary that got my attention and made me laugh is this:

I’m always amused by how people congratulate themselves on how sophisticated their simplistic ideas are. The concept of diminishing marginal returns appears to be unknown to them, for example, but that doesn’t dent their self-confidence.

Sailer is not a wordsmith or a humorist, but sometimes his dry wit is pretty funny.

Modern times means you can Google the writer and learn a lot. Adam Ozimek, according to his LinkedIn profile, has spent most of his life in college. He has had a short tenure at a consulting firm that sells expert testimony to trial attorneys. That sounds terribly dodgy to me, but everything to do with civil litigation is dodgy. Otherwise, Adam Ozimek has spent his life either in school or doing school work for hire. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing that would strike a normal man as work.

That’s the thing you always see with economists. It is rare to see one with any experience in the practical world. Most are career academics. Others bounce around government and private think tanks. In some respects, economics has become a guild like the law. It has its own language, credentials and hierarchy. The law is the marshal profession of the managerial class. Economics is the priestly order of the managerial class. If your kid has an abrasive personality he goes into law. If he is socially awkward he goes into economics.

Years ago I was involved in a lawsuit. During discovery, the topic of billing consulting fees came up. I forget the details, but there was a question about fees billed to the other party. The attorneys were flabbergasted by the idea of marking up fees billed to a client. At first I thought it was some sort of lawyer gag, but I realized they were serious. They simply had no idea how a business makes a profit. In this case the business hired consultants and billed for their time.

Similarly, I had a discussion with a German doctoral student at Yale over beers about business topics. He was an interesting guy and his specialty was currency markets. I have an interest in the history of money so that’s how we fell into conversation. Once we moved to more mundane matters like balance sheets and financial statements, the guy was completely lost. He expected to leave college and head into finance. I could not help but wonder how he would manage without knowing something about how a business functions.

The political class now draws its members from the managerial class. Ted Cruz was a lawyer, for example. Jindal was a consultant for McKinsey. Tubby from New Jersey was a lawyer for the government. The staff in Washington is chock full of guys with resumes similar to Adam Ozimek. It is fair to say that the people who run the government have little in common with the rest of us. They are brimming with self-confidence as they look through the glass of the terrarium at us.

It looks like the Greeks have decided to bugger the rest of Europe by voting in Syriza. I don’t know enough about Greek politics to know if they can govern alone. According to news reports, they are just shy of a majority so they need partners to form a government. Presumably they can find a few small parties to give them the seats they need, but that’s just my guess. The AP says they won 149 of 300 seats in parliament. Looking at the WSJ chart, it appears the communists got 15 seats so they will probably join Syriza in a coalition of the crazy to run Greece.

I would assume that average Greeks will now pull the rest of their money from the banks and stop paying their taxes. The Greek banks are on the knife’s edge due to the quiet bank run leading up to the election. All of them have reportedly applied for emergency liquidity from the ECB. The noises coming from Yanis Varoufakis, the incoming Finance Minister, suggest Alexis Tsipras is spoiling for a fight that creates chaos. It is an axiom of radical politics that crisis creates opportunities.

The crisis they seek now is with Europe. Reading the international news tells me the first step is to break out of the spending restraints placed on Greece by the troika. That should force a confrontation with the rest of Europe, particularly Germany. If not, then the next step will be to demand a restructuring of current debt. Syriza seems to think the Germans would rather be bled dry than let the Greeks walk. That’s the way to bet, given the way European politicians have turned themselves into pretzels in order to keep the project afloat.

The fascinating thing to me is that Alexis Tsipras is basically the young version of every current European leader. The typical Eurocrat was saying all the same stuff, when they were young, as Tsipras is saying today. It’s like time has folded on itself and the Eurocrats are now fighting their juvenile selves over a project they would have opposed in their youth. That should work to the advantage of the geezers, but so far the advantage seems to be with the young radicals.

The other thing of interest to me is what happens elsewhere with their radical parties. In a healthy social democracy, the main parties represent the core of the nation. What we’re seeing all over the West is the main parties are losing support from the core as they defend the privileges of the elites over all else. The people will have their tribune, so eventually a fringe party finds a way to make its case to the disaffected core. That’s what has happened in Greece and is in process throughout Europe.

The future is not written so there is still time for the more stable countries of Europe to reform and maybe what’s happening in Greece will be the wake up call they need. I’m not terribly optimistic about that possibility.  The main parties of Europe are now built on the idea of a single Europe with open immigration, a single economy and a single political class, independent of the people. I don’t think people realize just how radical the idea of Europe is in the history of man. There’s never been anything like it and the mainstream parties are all married to it.

That’s what brings me back to the irony of the young radicals facing off with the old radicals. Europe has been stuck in this endless loop for two centuries now. Each generation comes along with their plan to prove Rousseau right. When they inevitably fail, the next generation gets their shot to show the old fools how it is done. Alexis Tsipras talks like a college professor circa 1968 or 1848.

The endless loop of feudalism was eventually broken by the Black Plague. As an economic system it could not survive the massive disruptions brought by the plague so something else had to fill the void. But that was an economic arrangement, not an ideological one. It took the massive devastation of central Europe in The Thirty Years War to discredit the idea of a universal European church.

Rousseau-ism has proven to be much more resilient and adaptive. Christianity eventually broke on the wheel of science. Rousseau-ism keeps mutating. The European project is a radical adaptation of fascism – transnational fascism, but it is still the same old songs, just sung to different tunes. In one of life’s ironies, Syriza is reactionary, a demand to return to old school Rousseau-ism of a century ago.

My sense is we have entered a new phase. This will be marked by the slow bleeding of the core in order to buy off the fringe. The core is intellectually and spiritually exhausted. Success within the core is about managing decline. There’s no man on a horse riding in to reform and reinvigorate the core. Like a once rich family selling off the furniture to pays their debts, the core of Europe will keep printing and borrowing to pay off the fringe. Until they can’t do it anymore.

This story from the Beeb, as the Brits call it, is an excellent example of how globalism is eroding the nation state.

The Islamists who committed the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris should be not be described as “terrorists” by the BBC, a senior executive at the corporation has said.

Tarik Kafala, the head of BBC Arabic, the largest of the BBC’s non-English language news services, said the term “terrorist” was too “loaded” to describe the actions of the men who killed 12 people in the attack on the French satirical magazine.

Mr Kafala, whose BBC Arabic television, radio and online news services reach a weekly audience of 36 million people, told The Independent: “We try to avoid describing anyone as a terrorist or an act as being terrorist. What we try to do is to say that ‘two men killed 12 people in an attack on the office of a satirical magazine’. That’s enough, we know what that means and what it is.”

Mr Kafala said: “Terrorism is such a loaded word. The UN has been struggling for more than a decade to define the word and they can’t. It is very difficult to. We know what political violence is, we know what murder, bombings and shootings are and we describe them. That’s much more revealing, we believe, than using a word like terrorist which people will see as value-laden.”

This is an inevitable result of globalism. The BBC used to be a British company funded by British taxes. Now it is a global concern (still collecting British taxes) with more customers outside of Britain than within it. The elites running it naturally have little reason to be loyal to Britain or any other country in which they operate. Like their company, they are citizens of the world, which is a polite way of saying citizens of nowhere.

The global elites are the cloud people. They float above us, detached from language, culture and history. They have no loyalty to a country or the people and traditions of a country. It’s like the British Raj. The people in charge are fine with the rest of us engaging in our quaint customs, as long as it does not interfere with their looting of the resources. When the ground people cause trouble, then the cloud people step in to remedy it.

I suspect it is why our elites are berserk for mass immigration. At some level, the fact that clusters of people with a common ethnicity and common heritage exist is a challenge to the new post-national ideology. If Europe can be turned from a patchwork of peoples and cultures to a gray, featureless slurry devoid of cultural diversity, the elites will feel justified in their indifference to toward the people.

At other times I have used the word neo-feudalism to describe this new arrangement. The financial support of our elites comes primarily through government sanctioned skimming operations. The BBC would not exist without the British government and the British taxpayer. Much of the modern economy is simply socializing costs and privatizing profits with the former falling on the middle-class and the latter bubbling up to the elites.

Mere greed does not explain the berserk behavior with regards to immigration. It does not entirely explain why the BBC is willing to indulge in linguistic acrobatics in order to avoid describing reality. It turns out that Georg Lukács was right, but he was looking in the wrong direction. It is not the proletariat that achieved class consciousness through reification. It is the modern global elites.

The alienation that Marx and Lukács imagined as the natural result of a mechanized, material society never materialized as the lower classes always had other primary identities that trumped all else. The neighborhood, the gang, rooting for a particular football team are all ways working men give their lives meaning. No amount stuff can change that, particularly in a welfare state.

The modern global elites are formless and their dealings are entirely transactional. The rich and powerful of the Industrial Age used their wealth and power to build the cultural and political institutions of their country. They could look around them and see the envy and admiration of their tribe, they people, their country. Today’s elites hang out at Davos comparing Rolex watches and eating $50 hot dogs.

The class identity that our elites have realized is really an anti-identity. They hold the rest of us in contempt. That’s why the BBC looks for ways to poke the common Brit in the eye. It is why the NYTimes roots for whoever is fighting against the American service man, wherever he is sent to fight. It’s why elite academies keep retrograde companies like Chick-fil-A off their campus. They are who they are because they are not us.

I was paging through the twitter device and saw this posted by Gavin McInnes. The story itself is not the point of this post, but it is another example of how race is covered in America. If a white guy executed two black guys, the major news companies would devote all of their coverage to it for a year. That’s because it fits into the mythology that animates the liberal narrative. But, that’s a topic for another day.

I was thinking about writing something about it when sound mysteriously started coming through my speakers. For some reason I was using Chrome rather than Mozilla, the former not having the array of pop-up blockers, script blockers and flash blockers installed. I hunted around and found the offending video and stopped it. If you have clicked on the above link, you will be doing the same thing in a few seconds. I’ll wait.

1. Looking at the site, I noticed that the story was actually blocked until you took a survey. The page is plastered with ads, in addition to the video crap in the middle. Just doing a little estimating, I’m going to say that the page is 60% advertisement. The story takes up maybe 10% of the page. The rest is promotions for the site and other features on the site. They are perilously close to the point where the story is so hard to find in the clutter that we’ll need an app to help find it.

This is happening all over and not just on the Internet. Websites have no way to make money other than ads and even then the money is small. They have no choice but to pack their pages with ads. The weaselly tactics some use is not wise, but maybe they are desperate. Breitbart is a useless site, as far as I’m concerned, because it is so cluttered with ads and embedded audio. I really hate the embedded audio.

I was talking to a friend the other day after one of the football games about how a 60 minute game is now a five hour event. A football game is a three hour commercial with a football game woven into it. The promotion of it and other games before and after the game is just more marketing, disguised as content. Even replays have sponsors now so that we end up with “this replay brought to you by Viagra shows…” I’m all for the NFL making money, but do they really need to sell so many ads?

I read the other day that the NBA will start placing ads on the uniforms. It will not be long before technology allows them to have rotating ads on the uniforms. The courts will soon be plastered with ads. The NHL is using video technology to digitally place ads on the ice for TV viewers. During World Cup, they had ads crawling on the screen because there are no breaks in the game to run ads. That means the rules of the game will be changed so they can run ads during games. “This water break brought to you by…”

Getting back to the web page ads, there’s a limit. I don’t go to Brietbart because I hate the ads. Even if they don’t care about old hate-thinkers like me, there is a limit to the number of ads they can post on their site. Similarly, there’s a limit how much crap they try to sell us on our phones and TV’s. What happens when the limit is reached? The whole economic system of the west is based on never ending growth and that includes advertising.

What happens when there’s no more room to grow?

I’m fond of pointing out that we have allowed a lunatic cult to gain control of our country. The last fifty years has been the byproduct of the Cult’s war on certain parts of reality. Material progress has not been effected because, sadly, the Cult has not seen fit to declare things like gravity to be social constructs. But, there’s always hope.

The Cult’s war on the Panel Penis People goes on, nonetheless. In America, football is the sport of the core and most popular where the Pale Penis People reign supreme. That’s the heartland, south and southwest. In the hotbeds of liberalism, boys are forced to play with dolls and play Quidditch with the girls so they end up soccer fans. Thus the NFL is on the same proscribed list as Walmart, fried foods and gluten.

But, reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it. The recent panic over the relative inflation levels of the footballs used last week has now followed the same arc as every other moral panic/hoax from the Cult. It turns out that footballs naturally vary in pressure based on temperature change.

What’s amazing to me is how otherwise sensible people keep falling for these hoaxes. Just in the last year we have had two big hoaxes regarding the “war on black bodies.” There’s been a long list of rape hoaxes, culminating in the outlandish Rolling Stone disaster. Time after time it is shown that the progressive media is lying or deranged, but we keep falling for it.

This is why there was no serious internal opposition to Hitler after 1933. The loudspeakers were filling the public space with agit-prop. Similarly, the Soviets dominated the public communications, leaving no room for questioning. Today, the North Koreans maintain that lunatic regime simply by controlling the means of communications.

In modern America, the Cult holds all of the cultural high ground. Even when they indulge in the sort of lunacy we are seeing today, there’s no one on the stage pointing it out until the damage is done. Rape on campus may be nothing more than a sick fantasy of lonely coeds, but thousands of college boys are sitting in rape awareness classes, regardless.

Fox News, which was supposed to be the alternative to the dominant media, has been cowed into line by the Obama administration. For the first couple of years the Cult boycotted the network because Fox would not fall into line. Eventually, Fox did what was easiest and hired a bunch of moonbats and fired their dissidents. Certain subjects, like immigration are now forbidden.

Every human society with any level of complexity has an animating ideology. Hunter-gatherers rely on blood and time to establish their order. The old men are in charge and the young men are in training to be in charge one day. Big man societies rely on blood and a marginal advantage in material goods. The chief lives in a bigger huts and has extra food to hand out in exchange for loyalty.

States are different as they have lots of unrelated people living together. The boss has to have a reason to rule over those unrelated to him other than force. Subject people will never cooperate fully so you need something else. If the king is a god, then that will work. If the religion of the people says the king must have three big toes, then those with the third big toe are in line to rule. Magic blood was the basis for rule in the West for a millennium.

In modern times, this has flipped upside down. The ruling elites in America began to embrace this lunatic cult we call liberalism after the Civil War. Unlike the newly converted Kings in sixth century Britain, they did not try to convert the masses. Instead they sought to gain control of the existing institutions. Imagine Medieval Europe where the royal class is Catholic and the people are pagans, with a sprinkling of Catholics in the lower administrative posts.

In a way, we have been colonized. Modern America, and I suppose modern Europe, functions more like the British Raj than a self-governing ethno-state. The ruling caste is not defined by blood, but by credentials demonstrating the adherent’s fidelity to the faith. The masses are permitted some of their rituals and customs, as long as they do not interfere with the systematic looting of the country.

In conclusion, if you hold out any hope for America, you must be rooting for the New England Patriots to win the big game.

Last night, Ian O’Connor posted a column about the Brady Flat Balls scandal. It’s the sort of meat-head nonsense you get from sports columnists these days. The thing is, it contains a lie that has now been obscured with careful editing. The current opening graph is this:

Under his oversized ski cap, Tom Brady could not hide from the fact he was convicting himself in the court of public opinion. The quarterback of the New England Patriots admitted that footballs pumped up to 12.5 pounds per square inch are “a perfect fit for me,” yet swore he did not notice a difference in the AFC Championship Game when most of the balls had significantly less pressure.

The original paragraph and the basis for his entire rants read this way:

Under his oversized ski cap, Tom Brady could not hide from the fact he was convicting himself in the court of public opinion. The quarterback of the New England Patriots admitted that footballs pumped up to 12.5 pounds per square inch are “a perfect fit for me,” yet swore he did not notice a difference in the AFC Championship Game when the balls weighed two pounds lighter.

If you read the comments, people caught it quickly and mercilessly mocked the idiot for not understanding grammar school science. This guy actually thought footballs weighed 12.5 pounds, one pound of weight for every pound of air pressure. Therefore, a fully deflated football would weigh zero and float away.

I’ve had experience with sports reporters in press boxes and interview rooms. Most reporters are surprisingly obtuse. Sports reporters are uncommonly stupid. The only skill they possess is a willingness to spend their lives on the road watching ball games. That and the ability to avoid noticing anything prohibited. These are the same people who failed to notice the use of steroids in baseball, when it was obvious to most fans.

The other thing with this story worth noting is that Ian O’Connor pretends to be an intellectual on TV. Television is entertainment so all of the chattering skulls play a role, like comedians. Larry the Cable Guy is not actually a cable guy and his accent is entirely contrived, along with his act. O’Connor pretends to be the cerebral guy on the stage, despite having a two-digit IQ.

The difference between a comedian and the fake intellectual is the former is honest, while the latter is dishonest. Pretending to be an accountant, dispensing advice for a fee lands you in prison for fraud.  Pretending to be an accountant on a news program, dispensing advice for a fee wins you an Emmy. The parade of fake military experts is a good example of how lucrative fraud is on television.

The reason stupid people, like Ian O’Connor, are so common in the news business is narrative journalism. The news business has been dominated by the Cult for decades. Instead of reporting the facts of a story, it is a race to jam the facts into the narrative, which is always based on some left-wing fable.

O’Connor embraces this philosophy and flatters his bosses by pretending to be an intellectual, who embraces their philosophy. That means rising quickly to the top.

Multiply this a million times and you have the modern American news media.

This was on the front page of Yahoo.

A simple errand turned violent for Clarence Daniels this week when he went to Walmart for some coffee creamer and wound up in a chokehold.

Upon arriving at the Walmart in Florida’s Hillsborough County on Tuesday, the 62-year-old Daniels, who is black, grabbed his handgun from his car and slipped it into a hip holster underneath his coat. Watching this from inside the store was Michael Foster, a 43-year-old white man described by the Tampa Bay Times as “a well-intentioned vigilante.” As soon as Daniels walked into the store, Foster tackled him, shouting, “He’s got a gun!” Ignoring Daniels’ repeated yells of, “I have a permit!” Foster proceeded to put him into a chokehold. When sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene, they confirmed that Daniels was indeed a concealed carry permit holder and Foster was arrested and charged with battery.

Think about the thousands of crime stories you read where the race of the perpetrator is never mentioned. Here. the race of the victim is mentioned first. If you have any awareness at all, you know what’s coming.

Fortunately, no one was injured in the scuffle, which might explain why the incident was not widely covered and why the local coverage chalked it up to an honest misunderstanding. And maybe it was an honest misunderstanding. But Foster’s instinct to take matters into his own hands and attack a man he thought might pose a threat to his fellow Walmart shoppers pulls into focus the state of vigilantism in the U.S., and Florida in particular.

As long as the U.S. has existed, so too have vigilantes: civilians who, with no legal authority, take it upon themselves to enforce laws and punish wrongdoers, typically operating under the assumption that government or police cannot be trusted to do so. Vigilantism, by definition, is illegal. But throughout history, state and federal laws have blurred the lines between what is considered illegal vigilante behavior and what qualifies as justifiable self-defense. Perhaps nowhere else has that line become more blurred in recent years than in Florida, where Tuesday’s Walmart tackle took place.

OK, maybe it was a false alarm. Instead of being a story about evil white people assaulting black bodies, it is a story about evil white men and their vigilantism. or, maybe a story about the dangers of concealed carry laws.

A decade before the country broke into Civil War, the budding abolition movement prompted Congress to pass a collection of bills known as the Compromise of 1850. One of those bills was the Fugitive Slave Act, which, among its provisions, included the requirement that citizens help in catching fugitive slaves. The spread of abolition — and later desegregation—was met with the creation of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, that sought to restore “order” and intimidate civil rights-seeking African-Americans as well as their allies — often through violence.

Though much more loosely organized and existing further out along the societal fringe, racism is still at the heart of today’s larger vigilante groups. Only instead of free blacks and civil rights advocates, modern-day groups like the Minutemen militia target immigrants, sometimes even acting as volunteer Border Patrol agents in an unauthorized effort to crack down on illegal immigration.

Of course. It all makes sense now. Hyper vigilant white guy trying to be a good guy is really another racist like those slavers from last week who built the country on black bodies. Not only that, this incident shows that the very idea of borders and border control is a vestige of white racism!

Of course, not all vigilantes are motivated by race; nor are most of them affiliated with any sort of group. Benjamin John Francis Fodor, better known by his superhero name, “Phoenix Jones,” claimed to have been interested in breaking up brawls when he took to the streets of Seattle armed with a hooded mask, pepper spray and a stun gun before he was arrested in 2011 on four counts of suspected misdemeanor assault.

In attempting to enforce the law, vigilantes like Fodor often end up breaking the law themselves. This recent Walmart case is no exception. Because Florida is a “concealed carry” state, Foster had no legitimate reason to assume that Daniels was breaking the law before asking him to see his concealed carry permit.

Whew! It turns out that not all vigilantes are racists. There are some exceptions, like the one black guy arrested for vigilantism. But otherwise, all the white ones are racists!

In attempting to enforce the law, vigilantes like Fodor often end up breaking the law themselves. This recent Walmart case is no exception. Because Florida is a “concealed carry” state, Foster had no legitimate reason to assume that Daniels was breaking the law before asking him to see his concealed carry permit.

Florida is also, however, a Stand Your Ground state, a wide-ranging self-defense statute best known as the basis for the acquittal of George Zimmerman of the 2012 shooting death of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin. In the wake of the controversial Zimmerman verdict, Florida lawmakers met last year to clarify that Stand Your Ground does not permit vigilantism. Still, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department’s response to Tuesday’s Walmart incident suggests vigilantes aren’t necessarily discouraged as much as they are urged to patrol responsibly.

You see, even when good-hearted black people break the law it is because the laws were written by white racists. You know, the concealed carry laws are all written by the KKK to facilitate the war on black bodies. C’mon! Everyone knows that!

Given the lunacy on display here, I suppose it is fitting that she winds it up with the Cult’s favorite myth. That is the nonsense about “Stand Your Ground” laws having anything to do with the Zimmerman defense. That was a case of lethal force in self-defense. When a guy is bashing your head against the curb, you get to shoot him. That’s been true for about 15,000 years.

You would be forgiven for thinking that this was written by some angry black person. At least that would make some sense, but that’s not how it goes these days. It was written by a pampered, upper middle-class white girl. As soon as she lands a husband, it is off to Connecticut and a whites-only neighborhood and a lifetime of lecturing the rest of us about racism.

The other day, Kevin Williamson wrote this piece at National Review. It is interesting for a number of reasons. One is that I have always suspected Williamson is a bit brighter than his coevals at the magazine. Many of them are young and from the managerial class, thus having little to no experience with reality. By comparison, a middle aged man like Williamson sounds like Confucius. He has partnered up with Charlie Cooke, the British libertarian hipster, to form a sort of senpai – kōhai routine that makes Williamson sound like an old sage.

The older crowd at National Review has a refrigerator bulb quality to them. They are reliable and important to the functioning of the magazine, but you have no reason to notice them. If Rich Lowry were hit by a truck tomorrow, his absence, as well as his splatter, would be noticed, until a new editor was installed and the splatter mopped up. By comparison, a guy like Williamson is a towering intellect. His odd style and choice of topics stands apart from the older guys kicking around the site.

Even so, he seems like a bright guy.

Leaving the comparison stuff aside, I’ve often suspected he is at least vaguely aware of the problems afflicting the American Right and elite dogmas in general. He has written some things on race and culture, for example, that suggests he is a guy noticing things. His story on Appalachia and the Oxycontin Express is very well done and free of the modern habit of trying to jam everything into the mythology of our time. He has to make a living so he engages in the esoteric subterfuges to stay out of trouble, but you still  see enough to suggest he is a guy who could one day end up sleeping in Steve Sailer’s basement.

Anyway, the conclusion of the article I linked above has this:

During the Civil Rights Movement — the real one, not the ersatz one led today by Jesse Jackson et al. — politics did genuinely intersect with brunch. On one side of the issue were people who argued that the social situation of African Americans at the time was so dire and so oppressive that invasive federal action was necessary. On the other side were well-intentioned conservatives such as Barry Goldwater and any number of writers for this magazine, who argued that if the reach of Washington were extended into every mom-and-pop diner in the country, it would constitute a step toward the abolition of private life, that the natural and inevitable extension of the principle at work would ensure that rather than being treated as private property, businesses reclassified as “public accommodations” would be treated more like public property, that the greasy snout of politics eventually would stick itself into every last precinct of what had been considered the sphere of privacy beyond the public sector.

As it turns out, both sides were right.

That last sentence is the grabber. Both can only be true if you exclude the possibility of a moral society based on individual liberty. The godfather of the modern Right, Harry Jaffa, certainly thought that was the case. Equality trumps everything and no man’s liberty can come at the expense of another. When equality is in conflict with liberty, then liberty must yield, which may sound great until one tries to nail down what equality means and how to define it.

As I said at the start, Williamson seems like a bright guy and he surely sees the problem, but the alternatives are currently off the table. There’s no way to claw back the idea of individual liberty without opening up the old wound of race relations. Any attempt to restore liberty as the dominant partner in the equality-liberty relationship, lands you in the same trouble as Rand Paul found himself in when asked about the Civil Rights Act.The heretic has no future in public life.

The bigger problem is that the very ideas of equality are at odds with observable reality backed by an growing body of scientific evidence. Boys and girls are not the same. Intelligence is distributed unequally. Variations in environment, culture and history have led to differences between human groups that go beyond track and field. Even if accept the triumph of equality over liberty, you’re chasing an imaginary thing that can never be realized.

That can only end in madness. When one person goes mad, we can lick him up. When the ruling classes of whole countries go mad, the results are catastrophic. I don’t know how we break out of this spiral. The Cult holds all the high ground in American life. They run the the cultural institutions, the academy and most of government. Even if the people in charge snapped out of it and suddenly realized the insanity of their ideological obsessions, there’s no going back. After the Year of the Four Emperors, the ruling elite of Rome knew that the system was broken and could never be fixed, but there was no way to go back to the Republic. They just had to make it work, until it didn’t.

For as long as I have been alive, the Cult has had an obsession with children. Your children. One of the first Progressive causes was public education. The branch of the Left that descended from the Anglo-American (WASP) tradition sent their kids to private schools, but they had a keen interest in the public schools, nonetheless. Steve Sailer would argue that this was within the English tradition of plucking the best and brightest from the lower classes in order to cultivate them into the upper classes. Perhaps that was true in the beginning, but by the time the 20th century rolled around, it was about indoctrination into the Cult.

By the time we hit mid-century, most of the knowledge about human relations had been banned from the schools and the public square. Television, newspapers and movies excluded all of those retrograde ideas about humanity and instead embraced the new thinking. The schools, of course, were the best place to make sure the crime-think was squeezed out of society. If the next generation is raised in the one true faith, then you will not have to worry too much about policing them as adults, at least when it comes to the crime-think.

The communications revolution has created a whole new set of challenges. Crime-think is everywhere on-line. Kids can go on Twitter, Facebook and so on and be exposed to crime-think. Worse yet, some of them are prone to crime-think, maybe picking it up at home, which has been frustratingly out of reach of the Cult. That leads to crime-thinkers ganging up on right-thinkers in what the Cult calls cyber-bullying. This is when crime-thinkers post unapproved things on-line.

Since everyone has been bullied as a child – whether you know it or not – and bullies are the worst of the worst, the schools are getting the task of tackling the cyber-bullying epidemic that has swept the country. In Illinois, low level functionaries in the school system will be scanning the Interwebs for cyber-bullying by public school students. If one is found, the school will demand the student turn over his account information so the school can look inside his cranium via his social media accounts and scoop out the crime-think.

School districts in Illinois are telling parents that a new law may require school officials to demand the social media passwords of students if they are suspected in cyberbullying cases or are otherwise suspected of breaking school rules.

The law, which went into effect on January 1, defines cyberbullying and makes harassment on Facebook, Twitter, or via other digital means a violation of the state’s school code, even if the bullying happens outside of school hours.

A letter sent out to parents in the Triad Community Unit School District #2, a district located just over the Missouri-Illinois line near St. Louis, that was obtained by Motherboard says that school officials can demand students give them their passwords. The full letter is embedded below.

“If your child has an account on a social networking website, e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, ask.fm, etc., please be aware that State law requires school authorities to notify you that your child may be asked to provide his or her password for these accounts to school officials in certain circumstances,” the letter says.

“School authorities may require a student or his or her parent/guardian to provide a password or other related account information in order to gain access to his/her account or profile on a social networking website if school authorities have reasonable cause to believe that a student’s account on a social networking website contains evidence that a student has violated a school disciplinary rule or procedure,” it continues.

It’s not hard to see where this ends. A school lunatic will hear something unapproved from a student and immediately demand the kid hand over his passwords. Snooping around, they will learn that the kid got his crime-think at home and use his social media data to launch child abuse claims against the parents. It will end up in court, but the point will have been made. That young person will come away knowing that they are always being watched, even in private.  Compliance is not optional.

Like pedophiles, Progressives like ‘em young.

Or maybe I have ODD. Either way, it appears I am clinically insane. A lot of people have made this claim and now they have expert opinion on their side.

Is nonconformity and freethinking a mental illness? According to the newest addition of the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), it certainly is. The manual identifies a new mental illness called “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD. Defined as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, argumentativeness, and being easily annoyed.

The DSM-IV is the manual used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental illnesses and, with each new edition, there are scores of new mental illnesses. Are we becoming sicker? Is it getting harder to be mentally healthy? Authors of the DSM-IV say that it’s because they’re better able to identify these illnesses today. Critics charge that it’s because they have too much time on their hands.

New mental illnesses identified by the DSM-IV include arrogance, narcissism, above-average creativity, cynicism, and antisocial behavior. In the past, these were called “personality traits,” but now they’re diseases. And there are treatments available.

I’ve always thought psychiatry to be quackery, for the most part. Not all of it, of course. Categorizing types of mental illness is a legitimate science. Studying the links between genetics, brain chemistry and mental illness is very serious science. Working with a patient in order to figure out the proper medication to administer is sound medicine. Talking someone out of being crazy is pretty much just voodoo dressed up with exotic lingo. Talk therapy is exactly that, when you think about it. Would anyone try to talk someone out of a broken leg?

All of this is a symptom of our over-diagnosing and overmedicating culture. In the last 50 years, the DSM-IV has gone from 130 to 357 mental illnesses. A majority of these illnesses afflict children. Although the manual is an important diagnostic tool for the psychiatric industry, it has also been responsible for social changes. The rise in ADD, bipolar disorder, and depression in children has been largely because of the manual’s identifying certain behaviors as symptoms. A Washington Post article observed that, if Mozart were born today, he would be diagnosed with ADD and “medicated into barren normality.”

I suspect chemistry is the blame for some of this. Psychiatry lost a lot of its utility once the pill makers began to produce useful medications for things like depression. Spending an hour a week talking to a guy with a beard and turtle-neck became pointless once you could just take a pill. So, the shrinks went looking for new forms of crazy that did not have a pill.

According to the DSM-IV, the diagnosis guidelines for identifying oppositional defiant disorder are for children, but adults can just as easily suffer from the disease. This should give any freethinking American reason for worry. The Soviet Union used new “mental illnesses” for political repression.  People who didn’t accept the beliefs of the Communist Party developed a new type of schizophrenia. They suffered from the delusion of believing communism was wrong.  They were isolated, forcefully medicated, and put through repressive “therapy” to bring them back to sanity.

When the last edition of the DSM-IV was published, identifying the symptoms of various mental illnesses in children, there was a jump in the diagnosis and medication of children. Some states have laws that allow protective agencies to forcibly medicate, and even make it a punishable crime to withhold medication.  This paints a chilling picture for those of us who are nonconformists. Although the authors of the manual claim no ulterior motives but simply better diagnostic practices, the labeling of freethinking and nonconformity as mental illnesses has a lot of potential for abuse. It can easily become a weapon in the arsenal of a repressive state.

I’d add that targeting children is deliberate. Telling a hate-thinker like me that I have a mental disorder gets you nowhere. I don’t care and if you push it, I’ll punch you in the nose. Getting some half-wit school counselor to tell an unsuspecting parent that their little boy has “oppositional defiant disorder” is a money maker. The busy-bodies at the school get to push around the parents and the psychiatry rackets get another customer.

Psychology has been a favorite tool of authoritarians for a reason. There’s a loads of ambiguity that can be used to torment those who annoy the tyrant. Dragging the heckler off to the lunatic asylum is a less obvious way of handling the problem than having him thrown from the nearest cliff. Once the trouble maker is in the asylum, then the guys in lab coats can finish the job. Given the trajectory of our ruling classes, the shrinks are just getting prepared for the inevitable.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy being ODD.