I was driving yesterday thinking about being interviewed by Bill Maher. This was not some sort Walter Mitty fantasy. For some reason I was thinking about the time I was sitting next to Bill Maher at a restaurant in Miami a dozen years ago. He was at the table next to me and that had us sitting within a foot of one another. He smelled like feet and looked like he had not slept in a week. I think his companion was a hooker, but maybe he just has a thing for skanks.

That led me to think about how a loathsome creature like Maher has managed to get rich in entertainment. Why would anyone agree to go on his show? Ann Coulter used to be a regular and I recall hearing her say she counts Maher as a friend. Maybe my experience is not indicative of the real Bill Maher, but people I know who do know him say I’m being too kind. Maher is worse than I think.

That’s what led to my imagining what it would be like to sit on his show and interact with. I have, from time to time, watched his HBO show. It is mostly for anthropological reasons, like watching a show on Pygmies or the Papuan. Instead of primitives, it is Progressives performing for other Progressives, not thinking much about who else is watching. It’s like being a fly on the wall of a Cult meeting.

The thing with Maher is that he is a good example to use when explaining how members of a religious cult understand and respond to the world outside the cult. From my small sample size of viewings, the typical show is Maher and other members of The Hive leading the audience in the current hymns. Once is a while he has a normal person on in the same way tent preachers bring the town drunk up to be healed. The point is to use the hapless sinner as an example.

On a few occasions I have seen a normal shine the focus on some defect of The Cult and this is where you see Maher show himself to be a full spectrum moonbat. He has a physical reaction to hearing contrary information, squirming in his seat and rolling his eyes. It’s not intended to to be dismissive either. It’s a genuine physical reaction to unclean thought invading the safe space.

I’ve tested this on my moonbat office manager. I’ll engage her in some normal chit-chat knowing that she will eventually figure out how to conform the topic to one of the three solas of the One True Faith. This is where I pounce and point out some defect in the faith or some corruption of the party. She will recoil in horror and look furtively around the room, the fight or flight mechanism kicking in like a shot of adrenaline.

The other thing you can observe with Bill Maher is the tactic of shifting the focus. His heretical guest will point out that Obama lied about something or other and immediately Maher will respond with something about Bush or Palin or some other monster in the moonbat pantheon. The purpose is to change the topic of discussion away from that which vexes the faithful to something more pleasing.

In comment threads of new stories critical of Ben Carson, you will see moonbats jumping in when someone points out the double standard applied to black Republicans versus black Democrats. This is very bad think so they chime in with made up stories about how the racist white press in the olden thymes tormented the heroic Obama. That shifts the focus from present reality to something imaginary.

I used to think this was a defense mechanism, a herd instinct in the human personality toolkit that is tapped into by the hive minded or maybe dominant in these people. Every herd animal has some way for members to warn the herd of danger. Progressives hooting about stranger-danger is just an adaptation of this. The trouble with this theory is that Progressives are forever trying to pick fights with normal people. Instead of being a defense mechanism, this is an attack mechanism.

That’s been my observation of shows like Maher’s and others where three-on-one is moonbat fun. They bring the bad thinker in who valiantly tries to make his points. The tactic of shifting the focus inevitably puts the victim on defense. The segment was supposed to be about Obama, for example, but instead devolves into another critique of his critics, hinting that maybe the bad thinker is a racist.

The lesson here is that when dealing with a moonbat, the key is to always keep the focus on them. They are highly skilled at shifting the focus as it appears to be a biological instinct, but if you have some discipline, you can have some fun watching them squirm in agony. This old video of British airhead Piers Morgan being tormented by Ben Shapiro is a great example.

If you watch carefully, you see Morgan desperately trying to shift the focus from himself in order to put the guest on the defense. First he tries the “how dare you stuff” hoping this will put Shapiro off his game. When that fails he desperately tries to change the subject and have the guess address arguments made by some third person.

I’ve always through that this video should be mandatory viewing for the training of normal people going on these shows. This does not happen because the Cult signs the checks and the surest way to get fired is to challenge the One True Faith effectively. Even so, for normal people dealing with the moonbat relative or lunatic at the office, knowing how to keep the focus on the moonbat is a valuable skill. If I ever find myself interviewed by Bill Maher, I hope to remember it.

America’s Newspaper of Record brings word that Amazon has opened its first bookstore, as in brick-and-mortar bookstore.

The opening of Amazon.com’s first brick-and-mortar store on Tuesday proves that software is not really “eating the world,” as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it in 2011.

In his widely noted Wall Street Journal column about predatory software, Andreessen wrote:

“Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company — its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its Web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.”

Retail stores are still not strictly necessary, and yet Amazon now has one in Seattle. That’s because the book market has proved less one-dimensional than publishers and sellers feared in 2010 and 2011.

In September, The New York Times revealed that the Association of American Publishers had registered a 10 percent decrease in digital book sales in the first five months of the year and that the number of independent bookstores was actually growing.

The failure of the Great Pumpkin to rise from the pumpkin patch and sprinkle the children with free eBooks is hardly surprising. I used to go around and around with moonbat friends about this issue as they were all convinced that we would soon be reading everything from a magic tablet. Physical books were old and stuff so of course they serve no purpose.

As is always the case with Utopians and futurists, they naturally assume that because they cannot see the obstacles to their fantasies, those obstacles must not exist. Full steam ahead! In the case of books, the glorious future of eBooks faced the very real obstacle that they were not a very good replacement for real books. They are and remain, a solution in search of a problem.

Don’t get me wrong, I consume most writing off a screen. I read a book or two per month, sometimes more sometimes less. I read a ton on-line. It has been so long since I’ve held a newspaper I can no longer remember when. The other day, I was getting coffee and someone asked if they had a newspaper. To me, it sounded like he wanted to know where to tie up his horse.

The thing I was never able to explain to my moonbat friends with regards to eBooks is that books as we understand them, along with bookstores, publishers, writers, editors, layout men, illustrators etc., did not spring from nothing. They evolved over time to solve the problem of quickly and easily distributing content to as many people as possible in a way that profits the people involved in that process. It is not easily replaced.

Movable type was invented in 1040. The printing press was invented 400 years later. In other words, it took 20 generations for there to develop a need for the mass production of printed material and a solution to be developed. We have another 30 generations to get us to the paperback that you can take to the beach. The point being is there is a lot of trial and error in those bodice-rippers you wife reads.

Utopians never think of these things as they think that their inheritance dropped from the sky. They have no appreciation for what they see around them. All they know is the sleek looking iPad is cool and all the cool kids have them so let’s close down the bookstores and make everyone read eBooks. That’s an exaggeration, but that’s the level of thinking. The people betting on eBooks were betting that 50 generations of work could be replaced in a wave of the hand.

I say all this as someone who reads eBooks. I read physical books too, but I also read eBooks when convenient. I re-read Camp of the Saints the other day off my tablet. The book is terrible and I would not display it on my bookshelf so I saved the money and downloaded it. The thing is, I don’t read a lot of books that suck and I tend to make notes in the margins when I read so the physical book works better most of the time.

Further, if I leave a book on a plane or at the beach, no big deal. If the sun melts my tablet, that is a big deal. If I drop my tablet down the steps, that’s a big deal, while dropping a book off the roof costs me nothing. These are things the Progressive mind can never contemplate as they see no value in them, because they see no value in people. My preferences are immaterial to the material mind.

This blinkered reasoning is standard fare these days so I’m an outlier. The physical book was as good as it needed to be and mail order was fast enough and cheap enough. For something to replace this model it had to be different, offering things you could never get in a book like embedded video or multidimensional plot strictures for fiction where every reader get s a slightly different experience. Instead eBooks are just books that make your eyes bleed.

Walk around any big company and you will find lots of people that appear to do nothing but busy work. They have titles and responsibilities. They perform all sorts of activities, but it is nearly impossible to figure out how these activities help the company. In tough times, these are often the people who get let go and everyone who is left moans about having to do their work, but in a month or so no one notices anymore.

Government and the academy are loaded with people that do nothing but busy work. I once knew a guy whose mother was a year from retirement from the government. Her department was closed and instead of transferring her elsewhere, they just let her run out her time in an office. She spent her days making scrapbooks of the grand kids. They even gave her an office with a window.

I knew a guy who worked for the city of Boston and all he did was attend meetings. His day would start with a meeting and he would go from meeting to meeting all day with breaks for lunch and answering voice mails and so forth. I had some fun trying to pin him down on what he actually *did* every day. The best I could tell, he’s gift was in never answering the question.

Maybe the reason the workforce participation rate is at all-time lows is because of a side effect of automation. That is, there’s no need to automate busy work. The process of automating essential work is making it harder to add extra people who spend their days keeping busy. As companies automate essential work, there’s less waste, as in the guy in the cubicle who spends all day on Facebook.

The area I notice this most often is in IT departments. Companies of any size will have at least one IT person. Often they have several. One guy handles desktop support, while another manages their software and corresponding database systems. Some other guy is the boss and he usually spends his days in meetings, not actually doing work. All of these people appear to be essential when something goes wrong, but things don’t go wrong very much anymore.

These jobs could be and used to be combined. I’m old enough to remember when there was not much of a need for desktop support because everyone used dumb terminals. This can be done today with things like Citrix and thin clients. Similarly, the IT guy was never in management meetings. Like engineers, these were guys who did work, not talk about it. We’ve created a lot of busy work in IT.

The place where you see endless busy work is the academy and the “think tanks” that have sprouted up like dandelions all over the Imperial Capital. In the academy, the study of the obvious has become a staple of life. Every day we see something in the news feed that can be classified either as the “study of the obvious” or the “study of the imaginary.” The latter pretty much keeps the economics departments around the country going.

I think it is part of what is driving the replication crisis in the soft sciences. Most of these studies are cooked up in order to fulfill grant funding conditions. The government doles out money and part of the deal is a paper on some topic. The result is loads of “research papers” that are simply gibberish.

The old saying that idle hands do the devil’s work applies to busy work. My suspicion is most of the people rattling around the academy are better at fraud than anything academic. Take for example this guy who did a guest post on the Ron Unz site. Ron posted it mostly because it conforms to his view that biology does not exist. Ron is a denier!

Anyway, look at the bio of the writer, Chanda Chisala:

I am from Zambia, Africa. My formal educational background is in Biochemistry, but I have never practiced it or worked in that field. I started my web company immediately upon graduating in Biochem at the University of Zambia. I also formed Zambia Online in 1998 and it is still the most active Zambian web site today (see Zambia Google rank).

“Human Supremacism” is what I call my philosophy. It simply means that man is the highest kind of being possible in reality, and it means that every individual is absolutely the highest kind of being in the universe. This is the only logical foundation for the ideology of human rights. No one has a right to control another human being, not government, not society, nothing, because nothing is above any human being. So, observing human rights simply means that you can’t involve any human being in any kind of interaction without their permission. And this interaction means interacting with any of their property. Governments exist solely for the purpose of sustaining this principle. Anything they do above that is not their duty and it is usually a violation of human rights itself. Human supremacism.

In 2008, I was granted the Knight Fellowship by Stanford University to study “the impact of the internet on the future of African journalism, and the philosophy of human rights.”

In 2009, upon completing my Knight Fellowship program, I was invited back to Stanford by the Hoover Institution as a Visiting Scholar.

At the risk of sounding uncharitable, Mr. Chisala has no business being on a college campus. The reason he has never worked in biochemistry is there is no one in Zambia in need of a biochemist and no one outside of Zambia would hire a biochemist from Zambia. STEM fields are notoriously un-PC because they are right answer fields. Checking the right boxes does not trump getting the wrong answer.

Having figured this out, Mr. Chisala set about a career as a hustler that has taken him all the way to Stanford. His personal philosophy reads like something you see in high school yearbooks, but that’s not what matters. He’s checking the right boxes at Stanford and that’s what matters. He gets to fritter away his day writing nonsense about the Internet in Africa, a topic no one cares about, including Africans. This is busy work.

The assumption by the robot future guys is that we will reach a point where the robots either wipe us out of become our caretakers. We will become Eloi and the machines will be our Morlocks, without the harvesting and eating part. A world kindergarten where humans are free to play like children, while their robot overseers look out for their safety.

Maybe the alternative is a world composed of busy work. The robots will figure out that humans need to feel important and that means performing work. The robots will create a world where it appears all of us are doing important stuff, but in reality we are just spinning our wheels, killing time in busy work, like maintaining blogs.

In another age, David Brooks would have been a guy standing against the wall at the town hall meeting, where the fate of Esther was being debated. Some would argue that a good dunking was enough. Others would argue that burning at the stake was the only way to make sure the devil was not living in the village. Later, David would make clever and witty observations about the night’s events to his coevals.

Poor Esther, however, would have spent that night looking for David to come to her aid believing he would explain to the townspeople that she was not a witch or possessed by the devil. After all, the well regarded Mr. Brooks had counseled her to trust in the good judgement of the townsfolk and trust in God to carry her through this ordeal. A whole lot of Esthers have gone to the gallows waiting for their David to rise and speak on their behalf.

David Brooks is pitched as a conservative voice at the New York Times, but I can’t think of single right winger who would consider him a fellow traveler. Brooks is what the Cult of Modern Liberalism imagines a good and sensible conservative should be, as opposed to those malignant Morlocks on the other side of the wall. For Progressives, Brooks is a good person with some contrary ideas about how best to run society.

As is always the case with the Cult, reality is something different. Brooks is a Public Protestant. That is, he is not overly concerned with private morality. He was, for instance, one of the first to dismiss the indecency charges against Bill Clinton. Instead, men like Brooks imagine themselves as anointed by God to carry out God’s work and try to make the world a more perfect and less sinful place.

When men like Brooks think and write about morality, it is not in the context of his relationship to the Almighty. It is about your relationship with the Almighty, which happens to be the managerial class, of which Brooks is a member in good standing. This profile of Brooks provides an example of what I mean.

In general, Brooks contends, journalists balk at sharing moral viewpoints, and readers bristle upon receiving them. His critics find him an insufferable scold, a pompous sermonizer. “I think there is some allergy our culture has toward moral judgment of any kind,” he reflects. “There is a big relativistic strain through our society that if it feels good for you, then who am I to judge? I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I’d rather take the hits for being a moralizer than to have a public square where there’s no moral thought going on.”

Therein lies the difference between the Public and Private Protestant. The Born Again Christian would prefer it if the public square was family friendly, but that has nothing to do with their relationship with God. It’s why we see these folks retreating from politics again. Their salvation is a personal matter, not a political one. Once there is no room in politics to debate issues like abortion and marriage, there’s no point in participating.

For Public Protestants like Brooks, the public square is all consuming. The anointed are not judged by their private relationship with the Almighty. They are judged, along with the society they maintain, on the general morality of society. It’s why they are endlessly meddling in the lives of the people. If they let you fall into a degraded state, it reflects on them so they believe they are obligated to prevent that from happening, whether you like it or not.

The trouble that is brewing in the Republican Party is directly tied to this divide over morality. David Brooks is considered a conservative at the New York Times because he resists the current fads roiling the ruling class and instead adheres to old Yankee sense of public obligation and public authority. The Progressives really don’t disagree with him on these points. They just think he is old fashioned, which is closely associated in their mind with reactionary.

Outside of this ecosystem, where the bulk of GOP voters reside, this dynamic just looks like two sides of the same coin. Paul Ryan hugging Barak Obama as they agree on how much of your money to spend on their public improvement projects strikes many GOP voters as a betrayal. In the room where these two men are hugging, it feels like they are adversaries. Outside the room it looks like they are partners.

That’s because outside the room, most American are Private Protestants. I’m using the term as a non-sectarian, cultural label. Lots of atheists, Catholics and Hindus reject the serve-the-world/save-the-world ethos of the ruling class. These voters are looking from Republican to Democrat, and from Democrat to Republican, and from Republican to Democrat again; but it is impossible to say which is which.

Since the 19th century, America has been dominated by the old Roundhead culture that dates to the founding. The south has been too weak economically and culturally to push back. The middle has thrown in with the winners out of necessity. The choices before the voters since the middle of the 20th century has been between the hair-on-fire fanatic and the prudent scold, with guys like Brooks filling the role of the latter.

Politics is about numbers and the numbers no longer favor the Roundhead coalition and that’s what leaves guys like David Brooks sleepless at night. His role as the sensible antidote to the fanaticism of his coreligionists is of no value when there is a more cavalier coalition to counter the Roundheads. That’s what we are seeing signs of in the Trump coalition.

The space for the Yankee scold to operate is getting small. Perhaps that’s why David Brooks is suddenly struggling with his relationship with the Almighty. He keeps working on that sermon, making weekly improvements, but the number of people in the pews gets smaller and smaller. Pretty soon, all the Yankee scolds will be left searching for a congregation.

There’s a genre of expository writing where the author explains in detail how he got something completely wrong. The name for this form is “nonexistent” because no one ever does it. Similarly, you will never hear a lecture from an economist explaining how he got some prediction totally wrong. For instance, Obama’s economic team swore that the stimulus bill would set off an economic boom through the magic The Multiplier. They were wrong and it was a flop, but no one talks about it because it is simply not done.

This is something you see in all fields, not just public policy. You never read about scientists discussing how they screwed up an experiment or fell for some nutty idea that sounded good at the moment. What we expect and what we get is equivocation, denial and when that does not work, an attempt to flush the incident down the memory hole. It usually works too. Paul Ehrlich was hilariously wrong about human populations, but he has paid no price.

The weird thing about this, I think, is we know that being wrong is usually more important than being right. When you are a student learning mathematics, you are required to show your work in detail. The reason is the teacher wants to see your mistakes. In sports, coaches focus on the mistakes even after a big win. The reason is we learn more from our errors than through our successes. It’s an axiom of life that old people teach to young people as they help them get over some difficulty.

I think one reason why public people never admit being wrong is they know that a lot of people really want them to be right. The people telling the public that economic science said the stimulus bill was a sure fire cure for the economy knew that a lot of people wanted that to be true. They voted for Obama believing he was Jesus. Those economists selling the stimulus probably believed it too. They really really wanted to be on the winning side of history. When that did not happen, they could not face it so they did not face it. The dogs barked and the caravan moved on.

Our side of the game is not immune to this either. Read Zero Hedge and you come away thinking the world is about to explode any minute. Every day they have a post title something like “Five Charts Predicting Armageddon.” That’s been a feature every day since it started in 2009 and the world has not exploded. More important, being wrong for six years has not discouraged them. In fact, they are more certain than ever, operating under the theory that they are due, I guess.

It’s not just the fringe weirdos on our side. Reagan was convinced that taking tax hikes off the table would eventually force the welfare state into retreat. His reasoning at the time sounded great. Make tax hikes the third rail of politics and it leaves borrowing as the only way to finance the government. Eventually, the bond markets would force a roll back as the deficits would grow so large that eventually no one would lend. Reagan came into office when debt was at $900 billion. He left with debt at $2.6 trillion. Obama will leave office with $20 trillion in debt.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. In the 1980’s people knew that no country could survive with public debt equal to or greater than GDP. Now, that mountain of debt may one day topple over and take us all down, but it is not happening tomorrow. As it stands, the great day of reckoning over public debt is 25 years late and nowhere to found. That’s important to keep in mind when thinking about the current issues of the day. The odds are, we are all wrong about what’s coming next.

The people in charge, the central planners running the economy through the central banks, are often mocked by people on our side. After all, every effort at central planning has failed miserably so why should this time be different. The thing is, it has been different and it remains different. Say what you will, but the massive debt and real estate bubble that burst seven years did not plunge the world into depression. Maybe it was dumb luck or maybe the central planners are better than we think. I’m not saying they are perfect or that they really know what they are doing, but I don’t see any soup lines either.

It’s possible that the looming custodial state, where the Cloud People rule over the Ground People like game wardens, is going to be wonderful. The Ground People will embrace being cared for like children and accept being pushed around by the authorities when necessary. The sense of looming catastrophe that animates much of the alternative right will turn out to be completely misplaced. Instead, it will be viewed as a great leap forward for humanity.

Or, I could be completely wrong.

Gun grabbers and their enablers in the social sciences are fond of cranking out studies that show high gun ownership correlates to high suicide rates or high murder rates. They collect up some statistics from crime reports and then try to match that up to gun ownership rates or gun laws. Usually there will be some sort of scary heat map showing the bad places in bright red and the good places in a nice color like green or blue. The point of the exercise is to claim that science! is against guns.

One of my favorite gags is to point out to these very serious people posting these claims that their “reasoning” is based on magic. After all, the underlying premise is that the mere presence of a gun causes someone to kill or commit suicide. It’s as if they think people see a gun and are suddenly compelled to shoot themselves or someone else. The shaping of metal and plastic into a gun imbues it with magical powers that seizes the minds of normal men, causing them to go violently crazy.

This sort of magical thinking is so common in the education rackets that no one bothers to notice. The chant, “Diversity is our strength” is just assumed to be true so no one thinks about it. If a school does not have black kids in it, then it is assumed to be an incubator for the Klan. If a school has no white kids in it, the assumption is that the school is a plantation. Only through the right mix of hues can a child magically absorb knowledge.

No one bothers to explain why diversity is good or beneficial. The reason for that is there is no explanation. The “experts” look at numbers on a page and say, “these school have good results while these schools have bad results. The solution is to send the kids from the bad schools to the good schools!” The magic lies in the building as that can be the only explanation, other than racism, of course. Racism is always a good fallback if magic is not a good answer.

Nowhere is magic more obvious than in the topic of race. The other day I did a few riffs on this story about how the sandman is a racist. When considering physical phenomena, the logical place to start is with biology, if it involves living creatures. Otherwise, physics is the place to start. That’s entry level reasoning. Yet, in matters of race, biology is immediately ruled out in favor of mysterious forces that can be quantified with statistics, but only explained with the Ouija Board.

Steve Sailer has been having a lot of fun with the cooing over Raj Chetty’s big project, pointing out the many methodological flaws. In John Derbyshire’s latest transmission from the bunker, he introduces us to a new term that describes what Sailer has been discussing. It is called “Magic Dirt Theory.” The dirt in places like Utah where children do very well possesses special qualities that are lacking in the dirt of places where children do poorly. After all, what other explanation can one draw from this map produced by Raj Chetty?

Magic Dirt Theory is what’s behind the push to export troublesome populations out to the suburbs. Through the use of Section 8 housing vouchers, the oppressed can be sent out into the burbs to live in apartments built on the magic dirt that makes the suburbs so attractive to white people. In no time, those troublesome populations will magically transform into highly productive, self-actualizing citizens, contributing to the wonderfulness of suburban life.

The beauty of Magic Dirt Theory is it reinforces the magic of race. If the whites raise an objection to having their neighbors owning pitbulls or having loud parties on week nights, it is just proof that the horrible bad whites are trying to deny blacks access to the magic dirt. The only solution is to redouble efforts to transplant more blacks into places like Ferguson Missouri. If the magic dirt does not take, then it just shows how powerful the magic of racism really is and why the good thinkers must never quit trying to beat back the bad thinkers.

Magic Dirt Theory. The cause of and cure for all that ails the Progressive mind.

On Saturday mornings, I go out for a coffee at the donut shop and spend a an hour reading the Interwebs, e-mail, twitter, etc. The shop is owned by Indians (dot not feather) and my guess is they originally came from the northeast of the subcontinent. Their English is good enough to further suggest they come from a higher caste or maybe even spent time in the US as students.

After the donut shop, I head over to the dry cleaner to drop off and pickup. I have no interest in pressing my shirts and trousers so I have outsourced this task for thirty year at least. The dry cleaner is run by a nice Korean lady who speaks very poor English. I’ve picked up some words and phrases from her, but my Korean is strictly for entertainment value. We do our business in broken English.

I then stop at the Spanish market next door and get a coffee. My Spanish is good enough to get by so this gives me a chance to practice a bit, but the people running it speak Mam, which is a Mayan dialect so Spanish is their second language. It makes for an interesting fifteen minutes. The people from that part of the world are a happy people so they enjoy my efforts.

Then it is off to the McDonalds to pick up my regular. I have hot cakes and sausage most Saturdays as a reward for remaining on the sunny side the grass for another week. The McDonalds is staffed by blacks from the neighborhood so that means they speak their brand of ghetto. I speak some ghetto, but only enough to follow popular hip-hop songs. The menu is an amusing mix of Spanish and English. The customers are mostly old white people marking time.

Polyglot, multi-racial and multicultural cities are not a new thing in human history. New York City was America’s first melting pot. The early settlement by the Dutch was a trading port and had a little from each category of humanity. Greater New York had a slave trade with the last slaves being freed in 1827 so even the horrible crime thinkers from the Cavalier side of the family were represented.

Most Americans live in traditional American societies, but this is rapidly going away, while places like New York and San Francisco are becoming mono-cultural. When in the suburbs, I’m surprised by how quickly the old white English speaking world is being washed away. Retail stores are all run by foreigners. Labor is mostly Spanish. The foreign youth adopt the habits of ghetto youth creating a weird blended youth culture that will be “American” culture in a generation.

It’s comforting to think that the people will rise up and put an end to this, but that horse left the barn a generation ago. The time to put a halt to the invasion was in the 1980’s when they passed their last immigration bill. The anointing of Paul Ryan and (most likely) Marco Rubio means the war is over. The battles left to be fought are rear guard actions and the normal mopping up after one side wins and the other is vanquished.

I’m often asked why I live where I live, but the fact is I’m living in the future. If you are a young person today thinking you will live your parent’s life in a white suburb, you’re going to be very disappointed. Your world will be one where you are just another minority in a polyglot, fractured culture that largely depends on a coercive custodial state to maintain order.

The definition of success in a fractured jumble of a world will have nothing to do with social status or economic success in the traditional sense. Being a high status Mam speaker can mean nothing to the ghetto speakers next door or the Koreans down the block. How could it? The Mam speaker will have no way to transmit to the Korean why he believes having a large noisy muffler on his truck is a big deal.

Similarly, financial success will be a zero sum game. It pretty much is now as we have been in a no-growth economic order for decades. The Mam will get relatively rich by beating the Koreans at exploiting the ghetto for government cash. Clannishness will be a pretty good group survival strategy so the Irish will finally have a shot to be something other than the lyrical nitwits of the Anglosphere.

Otherwise, the future is the Babel I see on my Saturday morning. That’s appropriate given the people mostly responsible for it. There’s a generation or two, maybe or three, to secure a place within the emerging cloud cities, but at some point they blow the bridges and close the gates. Plan accordingly is my advice to the young.

Steve Sailer did a post on this hilarious story in National Journal. I say it is hilarious because of the absurd claim that racism is keeping blacks up at night. Blacks are obsessed with race, but even they take a break from the topic on occasion, like when they go to bed. But, the scolds who are forever lecturing us never take a break. They are eternal.

What caught my attention was this line:

“ON THE QUES­TION of how to ex­plain the black-white sleep gap it­self, re­search­ers have a num­ber of re­lated the­or­ies. (There is a con­sensus that in­nate bio­lo­gic­al dif­fer­ences between blacks and whites are not a factor.)”

It’s not enough to just ignore what the author clearly thinks is racist. Just ignoring it could be viewed as insufficiently enthusiastic for the One True Faith. The author puts that disclaimer in there so everyone can relax and focus on the candy the Great Pumpkin is going to bring all the good little boys and girls in the pumpkin patch. The rest of the article is just a long pat on the head for the faithful.

It’s becoming a standard feature these days in public writing. The author feels it necessary to sprinkle their work with quotes from the catechism, enthusiastic dismissal of bad-think and the celebration of good-think, even when none of these things has any place in the story. Fundamentalist Muslims do this as well. They could be sending driving directions to a relative and it will be sprinkled with praise for Allah and maybe a verse from the Koran, just so there can be no mistake.

Anyway, I added a comment to the Sailer post which got this reply from someone labeled AndrewR:

In the most recent NR issue there literally was an article about attracting more blacks to the GOP. There were paragraphs dedicated to advocating the end of policies with “disparate impact” on blacks.

https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/425617/civil-rights-republicanism

As an aside, it’s juvenile and needlessly inflammatory to say things like “sodomite adoption.” You appear to have the intellect to avoid saying things like that, so please do so.

My guess is that AndrewR is a homosexual. The worship of buggery has reached a point where homosexuals now think they are a priestly class, entitled and obligated to police the thoughts of others. He follows that up with this:

“Sodomite” has an obviously derogatory connotation.

No matter what one’s feelings about gays or any related issues, there is absolutely nothing to gain by alienating gays and their friends, but there is a lot to lose. Gays are not ideologically monolithic and many of us want nothing more than to be able to discreetly live lives true to themselves in a legal and dignified manner. Personally I can’t stand most of the Gay Pride types. Most of them are basically radical feminists with dicks. Many gays abhor the degeneracy understandably associated with the gay lifestyle (pride parades, etc), and many have no need to call their relationships “marriage.” As for adoption, I think straights should take precedence but it’s very hard to argue that a child would be better off in the foster system or in an orphanage than in a stable, loving house with gay adopted parents. As for natural birth, I strongly oppose gay couples choosing to have biological children but I’m not sure it should (or could) be legislated against.

But I’m digressing here. My main point is that no person who actually cares about effecting political change can afford to alienate gays at this point in time. Certainly a couple generations ago there was very little cost to alienating a group that largely lived in the shadows and had few defenders. And no one knows what sort of fate the future holds for gays in terms of political power and visibility. But undoubtedly at this point in time no serious political movement can afford to use language that would alienate essentially all gays.

To repeat, my guess is this guy is gay and one of those strangely prudish gays that tsk-tsk any bawdy talk, as if they are living in 19th century England. The image of gay males on TV is always the flamboyant, Liberace type that is outlandishly promiscuous in his homosexuality. There’s another type that is the complete opposite of that popular image, the type that thinks gay pride parades are an embarrassment.

Even if my assumptions here are all wrong, the point is that homosexuals now have a veto over public discourse. They’ve become an axe wielding lunatic in the middle of public debate that everyone tip-toes around in order to avoid setting them off. My interlocutor in the Sailer post is walking around thinking he could be sent to the lithium mines if he upsets the local homos. No doubt he truly believes he is doing me a favor my warning me about the dangers of angering the gays.

It’s not going to stop with the homos. Every fringe weirdo is lining up to get their veto. Halloween has been canceled on the college campus because it is impossible to dress up as anything other than a block of wood without upsetting someone with a grievance. Vast swaths of knowledge about the world are now off limits because people fear upsetting one of these scolds.

This is the logical end of Utopian cults. The adherents endlessly compete with one another to be the most pious. Think of a herd of zebra where the animals are always jostling to be in the middle of the herd, away from the outer dangers. The herds eventually gets so densely packed it ceases to be a herd at all. It’s just a a jumble of snouts and hooves.

That’s what is happening with the Cult. Each group of weirdos wields their veto with increasing ferocity, in pursuit of perfect purity. It’s a recursive cycle of lunacy that eventually consumes the whole thing, like a dying star collapsing in on itself. The trouble is these nuts are going to take a whole lot of normal people with them into the abyss.

Cults need enemies and when real ones are not around, they invent monsters to give the faithful something on which to focus. Orwell understood this, even though he did not use the word “cult” to describe the maniacs of his age. Where Orwell was wrong was in thinking that only apostates could become the Emmanuel Goldstein. The truth is, any bogeyman, real or imagined can fill the role.

You see it is this story on gamergate:

Two media organizations are threatening to withdraw from the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, next year after organizers canceled two controversial panels dealing with online harassment.

SXSW organizers this week said they would cancel the panels in response to threats of violence. In response, BuzzFeed and Vox Media said they would not participate in SXSW if the event does not find a way to address the online harassment issue.

One canceled panel centered on “Overcoming Harassment in Games” and the other was titled “SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community.”Organizers apparently feared the panels would become a flashpoint for the ongoing controversy in the video game community pitting those who say the games need to be more diverse and progressive against those who say games are being tainted by political correctness. This latter group has dubbed itself “gamergate.”

You have the usual elements. The bullshit claims that they are receiving threats followed by a move to keep contrary opinions from getting a hearing. It’s another example of how the front lash anticipates the backlash with make believe. Of course, the whole thing is coordinated so the lefty media can then pile on and claim Emmanuel Goldstein “gamergate” is the villain.

The censoring of bad-think is a singular obsession these days with the Cult. The reason is the internal logic of cults prevents them from accepting contrary opinion. They either find a way to filter it out or they find a way to stamp it out. That’s why there is a war on comment sections. It’s not that the Cult wants to suppress dissent. It’s that they want to be insulated from it.

That’s where I think people err, when it comes to examining the motivations of the Left. What drives them is a physical revulsion to facts, opinions and arguments that contradict the One True Faith. People who join mass movements do so to swap out their detested identity with that of the group. Therefore an attack on the group identity feels like a physical assault to them.

Of course, people inside a cult think it is perfectly logical and moral. It’s why Progressives have taken to dressing up like nerds and waving tables and graphs around while shouting the latest slogans. Science! has taken the place of God and the moral authority that binds their received logic with moral certainty. I have friends who can’t count their balls twice and get the same number lecturing me about the science of global warming.

To circle back to where we started, the gamergate stuff is a non-violent version of what we are seeing in Mesopotamia. ISIS shows up in a  village and declares their version of Islam the default and everyone has a choice, convert or die. Progressives show up in the rough and tumble world of gamers and declare themselves the arbiter of what is and what is not diverse and progressive. Everyone else has a choice, submit or be cast out as a bully or harasser.

This tactic is being applied to social media, comment sections of news sites and anywhere else the fundamentalist Progressives see weakness. Progressive say they encourage “feedback” but it has to comport with a set of rules that makes it impossible to contradict the One True Faith. Whole swaths of reality are ruled off-limits because they are deemed “offensive” or “insensitive.”

Again, look at the choice of words. Contrary opinion is viewed as a moral assault, equal to a physical assault. Telling someone to bleep off on twitter is the same as punching someone in the nose. Both are called “bullying” as if they are the same things, because to the hive mind, they are the same thing. The One True Faith is what defines these people so anything that undermines the faith threatens their existence.

My favorite defense mechanism is when they declare contradictory opinion to be a personal attack. Telling someone, for example, that they are bad at math for thinking socialized medicine can simultaneously increase demand while lowering prices on a fixed supply is deemed a hate crime. Personal attack has now been defined as anything that makes a Progressive sad.

I think if you want to be a sunny optimist, you have to look at these little wars where the Progressives try to censor dissent. They tend to lose them and lose them ignominiously. They look like idiots trying to harass fat dorks who like playing video games where they pretend to be a macho stud getting the busty girl. They sound like shrill harpies when they rail about science fiction being too science-y.

Just as Islam is running out of gas and collapsing under the weight of its internal contradictions, this latest manifestation of Public Protestantism will collapse as well. When you’re reduced to championing a mentally ill man as woman of the year or as a feminist icon, you’re in the end phase of your movement. These attempts to stifle dissent are probably a last gasp attempt to keep the tide of reality from swamping their dingy of lunacy.

I have a friend, who is a typical moonbat in that he repeats all the current opinions in The Hive, but insists he reasoned his way to these positions. On more than a few occasions I have pointed out to him that his “reasoned opinion” is identical to what is in the lefty media, often word for word. The result is silence as members of a cult just filter out anything that contradicts the faith.

This is a common feature of mass movements. The people inside don’t think of themselves as members of cult. They think the opinions and beliefs they adopted from the movement were arrived out by reason. They don’t notice that their opinions are identical to their coreligionists. They just think the people who think like them are smart like them. This insider/outsider mentality is a feature of every cult.

You see this in the Cult’s never ending fear of The Backlash™ that has become a staple of modern news stories. After 9/11, all of the moonbats were wringing their hands, fearing that the sight of the Trade Center in rubble would cause those evil white men in the provinces to go bonkers and attack innocent Muslims, who just want to live in peace because Islam is the religion of peace. After all, nothing is worse than The Backlash™.

This obsession with The Backlash™ was on display with Clock Boy in Texas. The narrative says Texas is the epicenter of evil white men so they must really hate Muslims. If The Backlash™ is going to appear anywhere, it will be Texas, or maybe South Carolina, when they are not busy hanging negroes. That’s why the Cult was so easy for Clock Boy’s old man to troll. He grew up around fanatics. He knows how they tick, pun intended.

The frustrating thing about The Backlash™, from the point of view of the Cult, is that there is no such thing as The Backlash™. It’s imaginary. That’s why it fails to show up and do its thing as all the prophesies predict. The solution is to simply fake it so the faithful will not lose faith and there is no better place to do it than the college campus.

The American college campus is a land of make believe where every sort of lefty lunacy is celebrated and indulged. Professors who are not sufficiently enthusiastic for the latest fads are hounded mercilessly. Those who are not of the One True Faith keep their heads down and avoid notice, fearing the lunatics in the same way people avoid the Religious Police in Saudi Arabia.

That’s why the list of college hoaxes is so long. You have the highest density of fanatics, absolutely convinced The Backlash™is going to appear at any moment, so it is conjured.

A coalition of interest groups wants the U.S. Department of Education to require colleges to monitor social media and protect students from threatening and offensive comments.

The request was made last week by 72 women’s and civil rights groups, who claimed that harassment and threats on anonymous apps like Yik Yak are an emerging Title IX issue, according to Inside Higher Ed. “Students on college campuses throughout the country have with increasing frequency used anonymous social media applications, such as Yik Yak, to target women students, students of color, and sexual minorities with harassment, threats, and other forms of intimidation with impunity,” the coalition said in a press release. “Earlier this year, students at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), for example, were threatened through Yik Yak with rape and murder after they spoke out against rape culture.”

The groups complain that the typical response to such incidents by university administrators has been “to disclaim responsibility for harassment and threats that occur on that platform” because the site is anonymous and accessible without using university servers.

In the UMW case, Feminists United on Campus (FUC) and Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF), both members of the coalition requesting federal intervention, filed a Title IX suit against the school, charging administrators with a “systemic failure to protect students from a sexually hostile school environment, from sex-based cyber assaults, and from threats of physical and sexual violence.”

The pattern is always the same. The lunatics make a nuisance of themselves and then say they are the victim of The Backlash™, claiming death threats or now, rape threats. In this case we have two imaginary bogeymen, The Rape Culture™ and The Backlash™. The Social Justice League is real, but it’s enemies are not as there is no such thing as a rape culture or a backlash.

These prurient scolds calling their group Feminists United on Campus (FUC) cannot see how this looks to normal people. They lack that capacity. They think they are being provocative, when they are simply being vulgar. The insider/outsider logic, however, only sees the outsider as an undifferentiated other. The people inside the group all think it is funny and meaningful and that’s all that matters.