The other day I made the point that the the Greek drama was about erasing countries from the map of Europe. Everyone is going to pretend for a while that Greece is a real country, but eventually even the dumbest Greek will figure out that their national government is meaningless. The real power lies much further north and they are not all that interested in what the Greek voters have to say about anything. You don’t have citizens without countries.

The question is how exactly society is going to hold together without the glue of national sovereignty. You can be loyal to your family, your tribe and your countrymen because you share a history, biology and destiny. Loyalty to a committee of technocrats in a glass and steel office complex in another country seems implausible.

The dreariness of that last paragraph made me think about something else. That is the fertility rates in Europe. Men have children because they want someone to remember them and carry on their name and their ways. I can’t imagine anyone thinking that about the global technocracy. Looking at the Total Fertility Rates of the Euro nations, I see I’m not alone.

To put those numbers into perspective, the populations to the south in Africa and to the east in the Muslim world have TFR’s double the typical European country. In some case it is four times higher. Demographers put the replacement rate at 2.1 so France is the only country planning to stick around for a few more generations. But, those numbers are inflated by immigrants so the TFR’s are probably lower across the board.

The odds of those numbers turning around are low because of this:

Again, Africa and the Middle East have median ages half that of Europe. The demographic collapse that is looming over Europe is not going to be arrested by men wielding spreadsheets. It can only be arrested by men wielding something else, but the men of Europe are too old to wield much of anything these days. That and they don’t seem all that interested in it anyway.

This old Greek proverb comes to mind. “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” Europe is at peace and is as prosperous as ever. It’s growing weak because their old men look around and wonder if it would have been better if they had never been born. Given the massive wave of migrants hitting Europe, it’s fair to wonder if the Europeans are just giving up.

John has left the island:

Yes, I have departed from Taki’s Magazine rather abruptly. The departure was *my* choice, the result of some deliberations about better managing my time and workload, with no ill feelings towards TakiMag. The abruptness was *their* choice: I would have preferred a more graceful leave-taking, with proper notice to subscribers, but they decided otherwise.

My weekly column at the magazine will *not* be resurfacing elsewhere; that is part of my workload reorganization.

Radio Derb, however, *will* be back on the air August 1st, hosted by VDARE.com http://www.vdare.com/posts (but I believe there’ll be a dedicated tab at the top of the VDARE page).

If we get all technical wrinkles worked out over these few days, the sound file will be available via iTunes and possibly also via YouTube, as well as on-site. As before, it will be archived, with a full transcript, at my own website http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/page.html after a

two- or three-day interval.

Further information will be posted on my home page http://www.johnderbyshire.com/index.html as things get sorted out.

I apologize for the disruption. I hope you will continue to tune in to Radio Derb at the new host site. I hope too that you will continue to read Taki’s Magazine, for whose hospitality and support I am for ever grateful.

I gather that John is scaling back his work. He is 70 now and probably thinking about how to best use the time he has remaining. He is still physically able to do the things he enjoys but at 70 you can never be sure that will be the case much longer so it is wise to knock as much off the list as quickly as you can.

I’m a fan of John Derbyshire and listen to his podcast each week. I did not subscribe for the pay version at Taki because I could not get their pay service to work. My first rule of commerce is that if you make it hard for me to do business with you, I will not do business with you. The Taki pay model, at least from my experience, was designed to chase away customers.

But, John would post his transcripts and audio later in the week on his site so I could listen to it there. Now I see that Taki has this up claiming that Derb has gone dark. They have scrubbed their site of his content so it is reasonable to assume there has been a falling out between Derb and Taki. On John’s site he says he shall return in two weeks.

I have no idea how popular Radio Derb is as a podcast. I enjoy it a great deal. John has a great voice and a good eye for content that will play well as audio. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I count his as one of the better ones. But, I’m a fringe guy and my tastes are surely not mainstream. Still, Derb has to be one of the more popular contributors at Taki.

John is a good example of just how far left the Overton Window has moved in my lifetime. Not so long ago John would have been a typical conservative commenter. When he began writing for National Review, he was rather conventional in his opinions, but much more empirical in his presentation. Today he is considered a fringe weirdo, a man wearing a tinfoil cap. That’s what happens when the inmates take over the asylum.

Let us hope he has not permanently disappeared.

Watching the hooting and hollering about Obama’s Iran deal, I’m reminded of something I thought I noticed about this administration from the start. It is two things actually, but both related. The first thing is Obama seems to work from a checklist of action items. An item on the list is lined out after a law is passed, an executive order is issued or, in some cases, he gives a speech about. Once it is marked as completed, he is done with it. It becomes old news.

That does not sound odd until you think about how the world works. A problem is identified then a solution is proposed. The solution is applied and it is a process to make sure the solution is working and the problem has been addressed. In a business, management does not write a memo and consider the matter closed. They follow up to make sure their policies are being implemented successfully.

In politics, an administration will judge itself and be judged by the success of its policies. If they make a deal with another country, they don’t throw it down the memory hole once the deal is signed. They keep talking about it and bringing it up if it is successful. If it is a failure then they spend time claiming to have fixed it. With Obama, once the law is passed or the order given, they have a press conference and forget about it. If someone brings it up later, we hear that the administration is not willing to “re-litigate” the matter.

That’s a strange tick, but what’s even odder is what’s on the list. I’ve written before about the Progressive timeline. Instead of viewing time as a linear thing, they see events on an emotional timeline. Events with great significance are close while those with lower emotional pull are further away. The Civil Rights Movement was yesterday, while their total control of American cities may as well have never happened it was so long ago.

With that in mind, Obama’s to-do list reads like a laundry list of slights and wounds to the liberal narrative. The deal with Iran and the deal with Cuba came out of nowhere. No American cared about either issue. The political class had no interest in Cuba and only cared about Iran in so far as whether Israel was going to nuke them. Out of the blue Obama does a deal with Cuba and then makes a comically bad deal with Iran, just to get a deal.

To Progressives, both Cuba and Iran have emotional resonance, because they are black marks on the narrative. Kennedy lost Cuba to the Soviets and was embarrassed by the Bay of Pigs. Therefore, finishing the job and bringing Cuba back into the fold was on Obama’s list. Similarly, Iran was Carter’s great failure. Progressives have always believed it is why the evil Ron Reagan became president. Proving once and for all that making a deal with Iran was the right policy, therefore, became an agenda item for Obama.

Early in the Obama administration, the big thing was resetting relations with Russia. It was always a strange thing as no one could quite explain what it meant. They had a big ceremony with the Russian ambassador and gave him a red button for some reason. In the minds of the Obama people it was “fixing” the Reagan legacy. To Progressives, the “belligerence” of the Reagan years was a big black mark on the narrative. Obama fixed it by giving Putin big red reset button.

That circles back to the first point. Fixing relations between two counties is a process. You have the breakthrough and then build on it over time to find common interests on which both sides can benefit by cooperating. For Team Obama, they ticked it off the list after the presser and then forgot all about it. The fact that relations with Russia are worse now than in the Cold War is irrelevant. All that matters is they ticked “reset relations with Russia” off their list and they forget about it.

The big one, of course, is health care. Obama spent all his good will with the public pushing through a bill that was nothing like he ran on as a candidate. In fact, it was pretty much what he said would never work when Hillary Clinton proposed it as a candidate. That’s not what mattered. What mattered was fixing the mistake of 1993 when Clinton failed to get health care done. Team Obama ticked it off the list and popped the champagne. All of the complaints and challenges ever since have been met with “we’re not re-litigating the issue.”

I suspect much of this is due to the fact that this is one of the least talented administrations in a long time. There’s not a lot of talent. Their best people are technocrats from the academy who see the world as a series of exams. Take the test, get a good score and move onto the next semester. That’s a strange aspect of the new meritocracy. They tend to think like college kids filling up their transcripts with grades, rather than as adults solving problems.

I also wonder if there’s not something else at work. Progressives have won all the big battles and most of the small ones. They have run out of bogeyman to rally the faithful. Forty years ago they could get the blacks so angry they burned down major cities. Today they can only rip up a few blocks in nowhere-ville and burn a few Confederate flags. There’s simply no one else left to fight that’s worth fighting so they going back and tidying up the past to fix the narrative.

Most people out on the fringe, which is getting rather crowded of late, are more than a bit angry and bitter. It’s hard to be a sunny optimist when you sense that the world is going to shit and there’s nothing that can stop it. Turn on the TV looking for sports, only to see them parading around a mentally disturbed man in drag and you have to wonder if blowing it all up is not what’s best.

The truth is mass media makes the weird seem common, but it is no more common than in previous eras. When I was a teenager back in the last Maunder minimum, a friend dated a girl who lived with her father as her mother had died when she was a child. Dad had no woman in his life, but he had a closet full of women’s clothes. As long as he kept it out of the streets, people politely ignored it. Today he would be on display by the mass media.

Similarly, the corruption we see with monied interests and the governing elites is nothing new. Kings granted lands and titles to their favorites who just happened to fill their coffers with gold.  A century ago bankers and monopolists controlled western governments, buying politicians at every level. Government has always been for sale and it always will be for sale as long as humans are in charge. No man is so virtuous that he will refuse the highest bidder.

The real trouble we face, the true crisis of the age, is the mounting incompetence at all levels of government. We can joke around about failing up, but it is a real problem when it involves necessary work not getting done. In a prior age, there was a limit to the corruption because things had to get done. In the “post-scarcity” world, the people in charge operate as if there’s never any cost to their failures.

And they can for forgiven for thinking this. Take a look at the career of Marilyn Tavenner. She has been in government and quasi-government her whole life. No, public hospitals in America are not private enterprise. Her career before getting to DC is impossible to judge from where I sit, but her Washington career has been nothing but a string of disasters. Now, she is cashing in to be lobbyist.

Former Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner has been hired as the new CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, representing an industry that she helped regulate during the turbulent launch of Obamacare.

The powerful K Street lobbying group’s announcement Wednesday comes months after Tavenner, a nurse and former hospital CEO, stepped down as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. At the agency, she was responsible for writing many of Obamacare’s rules and oversaw the troubled rollout — and repair — of the HealthCare.gov enrollment website.

If you are an aspiring screw-up, you have to look at this as a great inspiration. If you are good at polishing the right apples and know how to toady to the right people, you too can get fabulously rich off the taxpayers, even you are a colossal screw-up. In this case, Mx. Tavenner is hired because she is on good terms with all the other screw-ups in the bureaucracy.

Smart fraction theory asserts that a nation’s per capita GDP is determined by the population fraction with IQ greater than or equal to some threshold IQ. Consistent with the data of Lynn and Vanhanen, that threshold IQ is 108. The more people you have in that fraction, the more stupid people they can carry up the economic ladder. Detroit has few people with an IQ over 108, while San Francisco has many.

You have to wonder if something similar is going on with government.The Iron Triangle of government consists of interest groups, members of congressional subcommittees, and agency bureaucrats. Interest groups lobby politicians through their staffers (bribes) who pass laws for agency bureaucrats to implement. Since agency bureaucrats are not very bright, they rely on interest groups to write the implementing regulations.

That is not as bad as it sounds as industry works as a brake on the incompetence of the bureaucrats and the lunacy of the political leg. The trouble is the government has grown so large and complex, industry needs insiders to work the system on their behalf.  This is where screw-ups from the agency bureaucrat pool get into the blood stream of government.

The inept bureaucrat gets a job in the industry they regulate, but they are a screw-up so the industry finds a home for them back in the bureaucracy or on the staff of a politician, usually at a higher level than they started.In time, these staffers cycle back into the bureaucracy, replaced by some other screw-up that was plucked from the bureaucracy by the special interests.

In this process, the number of competent people remains fixed while the number of screw-ups multiply. There’s a point where agencies are so loaded down with stupid people and screw-ups they no longer function in a predictable manner. Most of what gets done is pointless, the rest is mischief.

The idea of a nation or country as an organizing unit of human society is a new thing in human existence. In the Bronze Age there were city-states organized around the palace economy system. A ruling clan could control multiple cities, but each city-state operated as independent entities. Each one had a palace through which the economy flowed. More important, the people in those polities identified with their respective city-state.

The last time I bothered to read up on the history of the nation-state, it was pretty clear that historians did not agree on much of anything anymore with regards to the birth of the nation-state. The way I was taught in school was that the nation-state was born with the Peace of Westphalia. The Westphalian System was the first time Europeans had what we would consider to be nation-states.

A nation was defined as a sovereign state with defined, internationally recognized borders populated with people sharing a language and culture. More important, the ruling authorities had exclusive dominion over domestic affairs. The rulers of France would coin their own money, manage their taxes and laws, arbitrate disputes between its citizens and maintain whatever political institutions it found appropriate.

For the West, this has been the definition of a country for 367 years.That’s a long time but it is still an exception in human history. The Roman Republic lasted 482 years. The Roman empire lasted 400+ years. Put another way, the nation-state system has been in place for about 5% of human civilization. City-states and empires have been the norm, along with ad hoc temporary groupings along geographic and tribal lines.

This summer, the Westphalian System, as a practical matter, has been ended.  Greece no longer possesses the things one uses to define a country. The “Europeans” now control the financial system and the currency. They will manage the national budget, setting spending limits and priorities. They will dictate the laws and regulations. More important, the national parliament no longer has any say over these things.

Greece is not a ward of the state. Greece is a ward of the new global technocracy. The alphabet soup of international organization were just ad hoc councils until now, as they had no real power, other than what the participants agreed to do with one another. In July 2015, for the first time, a supra-national organization has taken over a country. Greece is now a territory, a possession of the EU.

That’s the only way to read what has gone down over the last week. The deal Greece “negotiated” with Europe is a full and total renunciation of its status as a free and independent country. Tsipras admitted as much right after the deal was agreed to on Monday. “We managed to avoid the most extreme measures,” Tsipras said. “Greece will fight to return to growth and to reclaim its lost sovereignty.”

In another age, a trouble maker country like Greece would face invasion by other countries. If the Germans wanted the gold they lent the Greek king, they would have to take it by force. Today, they invade their financial systems and take the money that way. Of course, they are not really taking the money. They are simply transferring what’s left in the banks to the bankers in Europe. They will keep doing that to make sure future interest payments are met.

It’s a fascinating thing in that most people, including me, thought the Greek crisis was a threat to the EU model. It is turning out to be a confirmation of the model. Maybe the Greek people will revolt. Maybe there’s a Greek Gavrilo Princip waiting for Merkel somewhere. I don’t see any indications of that, but who knows what the future brings. For now it looks like a stunning coup for the Germans and their vision of Europe.

It is also a glimpse of what our rulers have in mind for the rest of us. Participatory government is not very useful in the global age. The Dutch East India Company had good reason to not go around the world spreading Dutch republicanism. It is a hindrance to doing deals. The modern global economy is for cloud people, through supranational organizations, to make deals. Voters just get in the way.

The next thing to watch is how Greek politicians and the Greek voters respond in future elections. If you’re a Greek voter, you have to know voting in local elections is pointless. Years of that exercise have only made your situation worse. Similarly, the young ambitious pols have to see that courting voters is a waste of time. Snuggling up to the technocrats in Brussels is the key to success.

Something no one in the major media bothers to discuss, because it is hard, is how the loyalty chain is supposed to work in this new global world. Kinship is the most basic form of loyalty. It is based in biology. You increase the odds of your genes carrying on by working with the people in your kin group. It is a basic evolutionary strategy. Similarly, the tribe is just an extension of this as is the clan. National identity is just the same concept scaled to its maximum.

The thing is, loyalty is both vertical and horizontal. The head of a family has duties to his family and his family has duties to him. These duties and loyalties are also between members of the family. In larger groups, these become more formalized in customs, rules and, when you get big enough, laws and religions. Still, even at the nation level, the call of blood is still there. Francois Hollande is loyal to France as a Frenchman. Merkel is loyal to Germany as a German.

How this is supposed to work in a global technocracy where the rulers are floating around in cloud cities, disconnected from the people they rule, is a mystery. How can Greeks have loyalty to Brussels? How can a Dutch technocrat working in a cubicle somewhere in Europe feel any loyalty to a grape farmer in Tuscany? To one another, they are not people, just numbers on a page.

What is imagined for us is a no-trust, transactional society where everyone is an economic man, whether he likes it or not. There will be no countries and therefore no citizens. Everyone will be a rootless, atomized cosmopolitan. The Greeks get to try it out first, but the rest of the world will soon follow.

One of the looming problems facing the country is the number of psychotic loons on the bench. These are fanatics who spent their lives trying to get on the bench so they could spend the remainder of their lives inflicting damage on the culture.

John Sununu talks about this in his recent book with regards to Judge Souter, who became a raging nutter once he got on the Supreme Court. We’re seeing it with John Roberts who should probably be removed for psychological reasons. His increasingly deranged opinions strongly suggest he is suffering from mental illness.

An example down stream is Richard Berman who is tormenting Dinesh D’Souza right now.

At a hearing Monday in Manhattan in which he ruled filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza must continue community service for four more years, U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman said he considers D’Souza’s violation of federal campaign-finance laws to be evidence of a psychological problem and ordered further counseling.

D’Souza’s defense counsel Benjamin Brafman provided evidence to the court that the psychiatrist D’Souza was ordered to see found no indication of depression or reason for medication. In addition, the psychologist D’Souza subsequently consulted provided a written statement concluding there was no need to continue the consultation, because D’Souza was psychologically normal and well adjusted.

But Judge Berman, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, disagreed, effectively overruling the judgment of the two licensed psychological counselors the U.S. probation department had approved as part of D’Souza’s criminal sentence.

“I only insisted on psychological counseling as part of Mr. D’Souza’s sentence because I wanted to be helpful,” the judge explained. “I am requiring Mr. D’Souza to see a new psychological counselor and to continue the weekly psychological consultation not as part of his punishment or to be retributive.

It’s tempting to recall that the Soviets liked sending dissenters off to an asylum so that way they could not only claim the person was nuts, but that saying what he said was nuts. Maybe that’s all there is here and Judge Berman is just an fascist hot head. It’s also possible that he has slipped a gear and this erratic behavior is a sign of a mental health problem.

His words about trying to help someone who clearly is in no need of help are just plain weird. Normal, well balanced people don’t talk like that in a professional setting. It’s possible he is trying to couch is malign intent to make a political enemy suffer in therapeutic terms, but that’s  worse. Having sadists on the court is not something a free people can tolerate either.

There’s a fine line between enthusiasm and lunacy. There’s a reason someone coined the term “fan” to describe over the top supporters of sports teams. Some percentage of people become untethered from reality over interest in a subject, like a sports team or even a whole sport. I’ve met college football fans in the South who will talk of nothing but college football.

I’ve always suspected that the same trait responsible for intense religiosity is responsible for intense enthusiasm or devotion to a narrow topic. I have no way of proving it, but that is my hunch. A lot of die hard Communists 100 years ago came from deeply religious families. It’s why Jews were over represented in Leftist causes. People immersed in hobbies often come from parents who were deeply committed to some cause or religion.

Those thoughts always come to mind when I run into electric car enthusiasts. They have the passion of a zealot for something that most people find uninteresting. 90% of people would be fine if a team of midgets were in the engine bay of their car, providing the propulsion. They just want to drive it where they need to go.

The electric car freaks and to a lesser extent the magic energy crowd, obsess over electric motors in the same way crazy old men in another era obsessed over steam engines. They lose themselves in minutiae and spend their free time re-reading details of the future electric car. They also write blog posts so other electric car fans can read and comment about their thoughts on electric cars.

One of the hallmarks of a cult is the adherents are convinced that the promised land is just over the next hill or around the next bend. The prophesies are inevitable and there’s nothing that will alter the future so they spend their time documenting the events leading to the ultimate event. Zero Hedge is a pretty good example. Greece did not blow up the world so they onto other “three key charts before the crash!!” postings.

From that post about electric cars:

Elon Musk has ushered in the age of the electric car, and whether or not it, too, was inevitable, it has certainly begun. The Tesla Model S has sold so well because, compared to old-fashioned gasoline cars:

I’ve omitted the list and want to focus on the highlighted words. I looked up the sales figured for the Tesla S. In 2015 they have sold 11,600, which sounds pretty good, until you look at the market sales data. So far in the US 5.3 million cars have been sold this year. Tesla has sold well, compared to previous attempts to market electric cars, but that’s hardly an accomplishment.

The Tesla Model S is a toy for a rich guy. It’s a $75,000 car that costs a lot to own, due to the infrastructure needed to charge it. If you live in Marin or Greenwich, it’s a cool status symbol and a fun toy for the weekend. When you blow $20K on a ski weekend, $75K for an electric car is just more grace on the cheap.

The rest of the post has that unhinged vibe that makes you wonder if it is not a put on. This item from his list of great benefits is hilarious to me: “It comes with an app that allows you to manage the car from your phone.” I’m pretty sure I’ve poked fun at people a few times using a line similar to that. “You can control your ice maker from your iPhone!”

The great hurdle for the electric car has been the same for 100 years. That is, how to quickly  and safely store chemical energy in a small container that can be quickly converted to kinetic energy. Gasoline and Diesel are really good for this. Batteries are not very good for this. Right now, the Tesla figures say it takes about ten hours to fully charge their car if it has the twin charger option.

That’s not useful for most people. Driving to work and back is fine, but if you have to go more than 100 miles from home, you’re out of luck. Given that material science has hit a wall in terms of battery design for these things, you can’t assume those charge times will drop quickly. Massive investment has yielded little progress. So much so, Elon Musk has dropped the search for a breakthrough and has invested big in conventional battery production. He’s betting against the breakthrough.

But, there may be a future for electric bikes and scooters. There are firms offering scooters that are fine for tooling around a city or campus and they can be charged quickly. The battery is removable so you can plug it in at school or work. A motorcycle with a 500 mile range and a few hours of charge time is another option that is within the possible.

All of those limits to electric cars have been known for years. The same is true with solar power, by the way. The science moves forward at a snails pace, pushing the day we are free from hydrocarbons further into the future. But, that never stops the fanatics. They are sure that electric cars powered by sunshine are just around the corner. All they need is a few trillion more dollars from the taxpayers…

The other day Steve Sailer posted this video in one of his posts about steroid use in sports. I think steroids is a topic that proves his point about not noticing. That is, not noticing things that fall outside the official narrative is essential to the Left, or as I prefer to call it, the New Religion. The video is mostly the event, but the first few minutes help explain a different point I often make about the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

In 1976 I was alive and I remember those games. The only thing normal people discussed about those Olympics was the East German women. They looked like men. It was a running joke in the public about how the East German women had deep voices and hairy chests. Around that time, Saturday Night Live did a skit where they had a bunch of muscular hairy guys dress up in drag, pretending to be the East German women’s Olympic team.

Now, the stupid bimbo doing the commentary is what’s important in the video. Despite the rather obvious fact that the East German women looked like men and the public was talking non-stop about it, she blamed the poor US results on, wait for it, chauvinism! That’s right. The reason the US girls were getting clobbered by musclebound “women” from the Soviet block had nothing to do with steroids. It was America not letting our girls train properly.

We’re looking at 40 year old footage that would work just as well today. The narrative says women are victims of the Pale Penis People so that is the only possible reason why the women were losing to these deformed freaks from East Germany. Donna DeVarona could have just watched the East Germans shooting up and she would have not bothered to take note of it. Instead her head was awash in thoughts of the patriarchy.

It’s why I tend to reject Sailer’s reductionism. I don’t think there is anything conscious going on with Progressives. They did not think to themselves after the South Carolina shooting, “Hey, now’s the time to go after that flag and show those Deep South rednecks who’s boss!” 99% of them don’t even know why they are riled up over the flag, anymore than the looters in Baltimore knew why they were supposed to be angry. They just are, because that’s who they are.

The social justice warriors of today have roots that go back to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Those original settlers were not fleeing religious persecution and looking to build a land where people could worship as they chose. That’s revisionist nonsense. Those followers of Calvin were aiming to build a “city on a hill” modeled on specific religious beliefs and they had no tolerance for dissent.

That utopian fanaticism has been a part of Yankee culture ever since. It was at the heart of the abolitionist movement. It has been the animating force of American Progressives for over 100 years. The narrative we see in modern public discourse always ends in the same place, the city on the hill where all men are equal. It’s as much a part of the Progressive nature as any other biological feature.

That’s why the South Carolina shooting was a triggering event for a general assault on the South by Progressives. They have always been at war with the South. It is what, in part, defines them. They have been fighting the Cavaliers since the English Civil War, because that’s who they are. To acquiesce to that flag is, in effect, to tolerate people with whom they have been at war since there was a beginning.

Again, it is not a conscious thing. An Italian does not wake up in the morning thinking, “I have to remember to use my hands a lot in conversation because I’m Italian.” The black guy is not standing on the corner fondling himself because he thinks he has to in order to be black. It’s a natural instinct like a kitten chasing a ball of yarn.

Another aspect of Puritan culture handed down to Progressives is the inability to mind ones own business. We have the image of the crusty old Yankee staying on his side of the fence and his neighbor doing the same, assiduously not noticing what the other is doing. This, like other myths, is pure nonsense. The Puritans could not stop meddling in their neighbor’s affairs. In fact, it was required.

Collective guilt was a key component of Puritan life. A town or village would suffer if they tolerated just one sinner in their ranks. That made prying into the daily affairs of your neighbors a responsibility of everyone. If the whole village is going to be judged by the conduct of the lowest, then raising the bottom is a holy mission.

This is on display in the video. What the dumb twit is saying is that America is losing to these godless heathens from Germany because America has sinned. The sin in question is not investing enough in women’s sports, which is caused by the much more serious sin of chauvinism.

The Roundhead – Cavalier standoff has always been at the core of American liberalism. Feminism is just one manifestation. The SJW’s of today conjure nightmares of hyper-masculine evil males that largely resemble cartoon characters of medieval noblemen. It’s not a conscious thing. It’s just the long shadow of the past in which they are their ancestors were raised. It’s who they are.