Author Archives: thezman

Africa and Malthus

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In fifteen years, one out of every six people will be murdered. Of those who are left, 25% will be thrown into poverty. Millions more will commit suicide rather than face what will suddenly become a dreadful present. Marauding gangs lead by drug addled youths will harass what remains of civilization, as life descends into a Hobbesian war of man against man.

That sounds pretty awful, I bet. But, a world that suddenly has only enough food to nourish 70% of its people would quickly descend into violence and mayhem. How the mayhem would play-out would depend upon the people. When the French ran out of food, they perfected the use of the guillotine. In Africa, it has meant widespread famines where millions starved to death.

Africa is a net importer of food and it has a stratospheric fertility rate. I don’t think you have to be Raj Chetty to figure out that this will lead to some problems far more serious than income mobility or the lack of self-actualizing jobs. Africa is a low-IQ world with high disease rates and massive public corruption. Add in a staggering murder rate and it is not had to think the description in the first paragraphs is the best case scenario for Africa. The exodus that is on tap will make the current flood look like a trickle.

That, of course, is the specter haunting Europe. There are roughly a million Africans trying to get across the Mediterranean at this very moment. They are not starving or fleeing war. They are, most probably, members of what passes for a middle class in their home countries. They have the means to pay smugglers to get them north. They also have relatives, who made the trip before them, so they can have a cushion in their new home in France.

People on the Dissident Right like to talk about how the Euroweenies have no idea what’s coming their way. The implication is that the coming great exodus from Africa will wipe out the European just as Homo Sap wiped out the Neanderthals. That, I think, is very wrong. The Europeans know exactly what’s brewing south of them.

The sheer numbers are staggering. Sub-Saharan Africa has about a billion people. The EU countries have about 500 million people. If 20% of Africa heads north the EU suddenly resembles Baltimore in many places.

Or worse. Most of these immigrants will head to urban areas so imagine dozens of Detroits dotting the map of Europe. Throw in an equal number of Arab Muslims and , well, you have the diversity paradise our betters have been dreaming of for so long.

That’s never going to happen and the evidence is right in front of us. The Europeans are finding ways to turn back the boat people. If that fails they will start repatriating them in mass. Additionally, they will pay the Berbers and Arabs in the Maghreb to hold the line and turn a blind eye to the tactics they use to do it. The politicians in Europe are not going to commit suicide over the plight of Africa.

It’s not that they would not like to sellout their own people. It’s that they have bigger problems. The Russians are creeping in from the east. America is disengaging from the Continent. Most member states are effectively bankrupt, held up with currency games. The EU is too unstable to do anything other than take a hardline on African immigrants.

If the Africans can’t head north and they can’t stop breeding, then the choice is follow the old route out of Africa and head into Turkey and the Near East. While that would be hilarious for a number of reasons, it is unlikely. That leaves famine and war as tribes fight over the limited food supplies.

Yemen is probably a good example to hold in mind. The Saudis and GCC have been subsidizing them for years as the population far outstripped the country’s capacity to feed its people. It was a loser bargain. The Saudis wanted to keep the Yemenis in Yemen so they sent them food. Free food set the Malthusian event horizon further and further out, allowing the population to mushroom.

What not one thought about is how a population explosion would impact the other social infrastructure. Yemen was a land with cultural and civil infrastructure for about 2 million people. Now they have 20 million and the whole thing has collapsed into anarchy. I’ll just note that everyone has turned a blind eye to Yemen, letting the Saudis do what must be done to keep the Yemenis in Yemen.

That’s the likely outcome of the African population boom. Eventually, the Finnish model will be adopted by the EU, not the Swedish model. The Finnish model is to send food and reject refugees, arguing that food aid does more good for more people than importing refugees. The Swedish model is the opposite. Sweden is trying to turn their country into Syria with snow drifts.

Europe has too many other problems to try and pass that by their voters so they will adopt the Finnish approach. Inevitably, the French will lecture the rest of us for not sending more food and medicine to Africa and the US will be there to ship tons of food to the needy Africans. That, of course, will literally feed the population boom.

There’s an assumption that the West will not let the Africans starve and the blockade will be lifted, letting tens of millions of Africans to enter the West. History says other wise. The two big East African famines carried on with little more than hand-wringing by the West. The Rwandan massacres were allowed to go on without any in the West even mentioning it. Bill Clinton simply shrugged and went back to raping interns.

It’s common in the West to read about how we are post-Malthus. We are now in a post-scarcity world in which there’s more than enough of the essentials. The poor are fat and lay around all day in comfortable homes watching television. Machines will soon be doing all our work, leaving us free to live like Eloi.

In the coming decades, Africa is going to demonstrate that the Malthusian limit is still there. As we saw with the Ebola breakout, modernity means Africa’s problems can quickly become our problem. The nightmare future of Africa will be no exception. Our world will be a vastly different place in 20 years as a billion Africans figure out how to live on enough food for half a billion Africans.

The Mind of the Moonbat

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When I was a kid, my mother was friends with a woman who was not all that right in the head. It was never discussed, but every once in a while I’d hear my father make mention of the fact that she was a nut. Even as kids we got the sense that she was a bit of a kook. At some point she went back to college to study psychology and it became her obsession. I recall she left her husband to go find herself or some such nonsense.

Looking back, the thing that was the root cause of her nuttiness was her difficult relationship with herself. She was always defining herself in some way. By that I mean every conversation would feature a section where she told you what sort of person she was as it related to the topic. As a kid I always found that to be very odd so I guess it’s why it stuck in my head.

Later in life I ran into other people like this and started to figure it out. People who are quick to sign up for the latest trends or join the latest fads are searching for an identity they can embrace. They either don’t know themselves or they hate themselves, I’m torn on the idea, but they seek to adopt an identity that they think is imbued with qualities they lack naturally. My mother’s wacko friend got into psychology looking for a cure and instead she joined a cult.

Anyway, that came to mind when reading this link I saw posted by a commenter on Sailer’s site. The post about Baltimore tells me the writer does not have any black friends as that’s the sort of thing I see from white people who love black people from a great distance. As a minority surrounded by black people, I know racism is the least of their problems.

I decided to look at his bio and that’s when I was reminded of the crazy women of my youth. These types of unbalanced people invest a lot of time in projecting their desired identity. You can be sure that within five minutes of meeting this guy for the first time he will tell you he is an atheist. After that it will be feminism, anti-racism, science! and whatever else the Left is peddling at the moment.

I have a friend that is a moonbat and he displays these same qualities. He’s mad at me for mocking his cult so he sent me a long e-mail declaring me a non-person the other day. In it he praised himself for science!, rationalism and lack of ideological fervor. Reading the Statement of Principles from that site, I wonder if my moonbat friend is one of his readers.

These guys always pitch themselves as perfect logic machines that arrive at the exact same conclusions as every other Progressive by pure reason. My moonbat friend got mad after I kept pointing out that his journey of self-discovery looks exactly like the op-ed section of the NYTimes. For some reason it is vital to the well being of the moonbat to believe they discovered these truths independently.

What I’ve always found amusing about my moonbat friend is the great gap between what he thinks he knows and what he actually knows. It’s fun to call it the Dunning-Kruger effect, and that may be the case, but I also suspect the Interwebs plays some role. My moonbat friend, like many of them, has declared himself a climatologist, sending me links from science articles that I know he never read. He thinks because he can find it on Wiki, he knows it.

This passage is a good example:

On the level of society and how best to organize it, I consider myself a classical liberal in the Enlightenment tradition. In the matter of human self-government, the only fair and feasible choice is representative democracy, which gives all adult members of a society an equal say in how that society should be governed. To safeguard the rights of minorities, however, every society should agree to bind itself by a constitution which guarantees fundamental human rights and puts them beyond the shifting dictates of popular will. All groups should rationally agree to such a bargain, in recognition of the Rawlsian argument that today’s majority may be tomorrow’s minority.
It’s clear he does not know what the terms “classical liberal” and “Rawlsian” mean, but they sound cool so they make excellent decorations. When you are pitching yourself as a moist robot, it’s important to sprinkle your personal statement with references to things you think smart people know. My bet is he thinks classical liberal is like classical music, your know, really old and stuff.

I suspect what the Internet has done for these people is make it much easier for them to get conformation. My mother’s crazy friend had to head off to college to find people she could join in a search for a new identity. Today, she would just join a Facebook group and read the array of moonbat sites on-line. David Lee spends his time reading fever swamp sites.

Free Trade Fantasies

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Yesterday the guy who wrote this piece tried picking a fight with me on twitter over my observation that some trade deals are good and some are bad.  Libertarians hear the phrase “free trade” and they fall into a trance-like state. I think if you labeled dog poop “free trade” they would gobble it up like candy. That would be after they name-dropped David Ricardo and Adam Smith.

I’ve never had a twitter fight and I would certainly be willing to give it a shot. The trouble is started by using uptalk which makes me think of punching people in the face. There’s nothing that screams smug pussy more than slapping a question mark onto a statement. I’ve made it a rule to ignore people who do it. Reading his twitter feed, I get the sense he wears his ignorance like a shield and there is no point in debating such people.

But, I don’t know him or his work so I could be all wrong. Still, life is too short to waste time on finding out. My sense is his site is mostly libertarian spank material and I have no interest in it. I know all the arguments and much of what libertarians say is reasonable, but a lot of it is nonsense too. Humans are not moist robots and our relationships are not transactional. Economic man has never existed and that’s why libertarianism has never been tried.

Anyway, after all the red Team-Blue Team stuff, he laments that many Republicans and Tea Partiers think trade has hurt the country. To libertarians, this is like learning that half the country believes in witchcraft. As I wrote earlier, the phrase “free trade” has a narcotic effect on these people.

Shockingly, the former Half Sigma has a post up that gets at the problem with libertarianism in general and free trade in particular. I don’t think his idea for socialized banking is a great idea, but the point about pure markets existing only in the imagination is important. Political systems work as long as they comport with reality. Libertarianism works only in a world with perfect economic men ruled by saints.

Similarly, free trade is a boon to both countries as long as both countries have the cultural ethics of Canada. That way, people in both parties can expect their claims to be upheld in both countries. When one party to a contract is not holding up his end, the state must step in and enforce the contract. When that party’s home government is just as corrupt or incompetent, you get something other than free trade.

Not all countries have Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. Canada is not going to invest much into competing with America because both countries are culturally similar so cooperation is natural and mutually beneficial. China, on the other hand, is vastly different from the US. They see American and Americans as competitors, even adversaries.

That’s not to say there should be no trade with China. Like progressives, libertarians tend to see things in black and white. You’re either in favor of unfettered trade with everyone or you’re a close minded protectionist. Only libertarians and lunatics think this way. Most people fall into the middle area that thinks prudent trade deals with friendly countries are good, while reckless trade deals with rogue nations are bad.

All of this is germane to the TPP deal Obama is pushing. This deal is mostly a give-away to globalopolies, rather than a trade deal. The reason it is a secret deal is to keep people from seeing what’s in it, obviously. You don’t do that if you think the details are going to win you praise from the public. But, a lot of it has been leaked through various channels and it is what one would expect from a deal drawn up by global corporations.

It’s a reminder that being for free trade is like being for leprechauns riding unicorns. All of these deals should be looked at skeptically. The debate is not between free trade and no trade. The debate is over over how much power we want to cede to global corporations and foreign governments. Sometimes it makes sense to do deals with less than sterling countries. Sometimes the interests of multinationals coincides with those of Americans.

It can only be decided on a case by case basis.

 

Tom Brady: Victim of Racism?

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Every day, we are told by our betters that it is impossible for blacks to get a fair shake from whites, which is why we need to stack the courts, schools, HR departments and so on with blacks, regardless of qualifications. The bedrock of modern civil rights is set-asides and quotas to increase diversity, even when that means discriminating against whites.

At the same time, Michelle Obama says it is impossible for black people to escape their blackness. After all, if the Obama family is “knocked back” by racism, despite ascending to the heights of society, it is reasonable to think all black people are consumed with this issue. The woman is middle-aged and still obsesses over it, despite living like royalty so I guess she has a point. Black people can’t see past race.

Now, the drumbeat from the sporting press has been that Tom Brady must face a harsh penalty because black players get punished all the time. The perception is the only people getting punished are the black players. The fact that black players are ten times more likely to be arrested than white players does not figure into this. The heads on ESPN have been saying for weeks that the league has to be tough on Brady to make things seem equal.

The punishment announced this week is the same as players get for throwing their old lady down a flight of stairs or getting jammed up on rape charges. Serious stuff for maybe letting the air out of a few balls. In fact, it struck me as absurd until someone I know who has done legal work for the NFL told me the commissioner is scared to death of the media so he does what they want in these matters.

That got me curious. Who came up with the punishment?

Turns out it is this guy:

The guy who wrote the report is this guy:

Here’s his bio from Wiki:

Theodore V. “Ted” Wells, Jr. (born April 28, 1950) is a prominent criminal attorney. A litigation partner at the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, the National Law Journal has selected Wells as one of America’s best white-collar defense attorneys on numerous occasions. Wells received his B.A. from College of the Holy Cross, his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. He and his wife, former Secretary of State of New JerseyNina Mitchell Wells, reside in Livingston, New Jersey.

Wells attended Holy Cross at the same time as Clarence Thomas, now a Supreme Court justice. Both participated in a walkout based on their beliefs of unfair racially motivated practices, on the part of the college. The two were part of the same organization for African-American students at Holy Cross.

Let’s see. We have a howling mob demanding racial justice. We have black people running the investigation. We’re told that even wildly successful black people focus only on race. We have the whitest of white bread defendants.

Reverse the roles and what do you think our better would be saying?

Observations and Lessons From The UK Election

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When it comes to British politics, my go to guy is John Derbyshire. It’s not that he has a granular knowledge of every bit of maneuvering that is the staple of political coverage. It’s than he is properly skeptical and he gets the larger trends that have defined Britain for the last century or so. His roundup up of the UK election results is a nice summary of what happened and, to a lesser degree, what it portends.

When it come to European politics, including the UK, I enjoy Andrew Stuttaford. I don’t really think he fully grasps the nature of the global corporatists in the managerial class running Europe, but he is suitably outraged by what’s going on and does a great job underscoring the issues for those too afraid to read my blog. Here’s his latest and in the comments an exchange between Andrew and me.

That’s the warmup material.

My own view is the election, to the surprise of the people in charge and their attendants in the media, was about the national question. Specifically, will the English continue to have a nation of their own. Part of that is immigration and that’s what UKIP brought to the debate. Another part is England’s relationship with the Continent, the promise of the Tories to hold a referendum. Finally, the very idea of what it means to be British, English and Scottish, raised by SNP.

No one in charge, of course, wanted to talk openly about any of these issues, but the people in the streets did want to talk about them. Politicians go where the votes are and inevitably the parties all found a way to stake out their position. The most obvious is SNP, which may be the most cynical party in human history, but they ran on Scotland being for Scots, while Labour and Lib-Dems ran on formless internationalism, a sort of faculty lounge techno-fascism.

I say the SNP is cynical because if you read their position papers, they appear to be deliberately deceptive. The first graphs are all haggis and sheep buggering like a proud Scot. Then it devolves into academic jargon cheering on internationalism and multiculturalism. I suspect they know people only read the first two paragraphs.

Maybe it just sort of happened that way as the flag waving started to carry the party beyond their wildest imaginings. That’s not uncommon. We see this with candidates. When the crowd roars, it’s hard not to notice. Perhaps SNP sort of stumbled into becoming a weird fascist party that preaches international corporatism and good old fashioned patriotism. How they intend to square those is a mystery. Regardless, they made national identity a central issue of the campaign.

On the other side, UKIP made immigration a central issue. It was originally assumed that the Tories would suffer as a consequence, but it seem they may have benefited. The people looked at their options and ruled out the internationalists, Lib-Dem and Labour, in favor of the nationalist. The Tories may be weak tea, but they can be fortified. UKIP simply has too many weirdos for the average Brit. UKIP, inadvertently, dragged the Tory party into the nationalist camp.

That’s the first lesson of the election. Given a choice between the formless international corporatism offered up by Progressives across the West and even a mild form of traditional patriotism, the latter trumps the former and by large margins. Just imagine if Cameron was something other than a shallow twit who reminds most people of Piers Morgan.

What has been laid bare in Britain is the great divide is no longer between free market traditionalists and cosmopolitan socialists. No one is a Marxist anymore and everyone is some form of socialist. The competition these days is between parties claiming a better skill at running the welfare state. They quibble over minor aspects of the tax code and various nuances of the bureaucracy, but they agree on all of the big economic issues. Across the West, all parties have embraced managerial socialism as their economic model.

The great divide now is over culture and country. One side is post-national and post-cultural. The other is patriotic and rooted in the traditional culture of the country. You see this divide emerging everywhere in the West, outside of the US where the GOP keeps insisting it is 1978. The great political fights in the West will be waged between those with little or no loyalty to their host country and those who define themselves by the national and ethnic identity.

I think one reason this is blossoming in Europe and not in the US is the fact that Europe already has a lot of immigrants from alien cultures. Mexican carpenters sort of look like Italians, they go to church and generally fit into Western norms. Algerians and Pakistani Muslims clearly don’t belong and they are increasing making that clear to everyone. With a few million Africans poised to join them, the sense of urgency in Europe is greater than in the US.

There’s also the weird cultural ticks of Americans. We have romanticized immigrants and turned them into objects of worship. We also have a racial culture that makes it hard to say bad things about anyone not an albino. Further, both parties have embraced the American empire where the rest of the world is treated as provinces.

That’s the other lesson. What works in the UK is not necessarily going to follow in the US. Watch British TV and you see an unabashed parochialism that would be horrifying to American TV producers. Immigration policy in America must be discussed in economic terms, not cultural terms, at least for now.

On the other hand, American politicians look to Europe and they have felt the rumblings. The fact that Obama’s party is in revolt over his nation wrecking TPP plan is a good sign. They may not want to follow their analogs in the UK into the abyss. The GOP is going through an identity crisis that will be worked out in their presidential primary. For the first time in a long time, there’s hope.

Institutional Racism at Boston University

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Boston University has hired an antiwhite professor and appears to be encouraging her to go full bigot.

A newly hired Boston University professor has come under fire for several anti-white comments she made on Twitter, but the school says she is simply practicing free speech.

Incoming assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies, Saida Grundy tweeted a slew of tweets over several months blasting white males which have drawn criticism on social media, Fox News reported Saturday.

“White masculinity isn’t a problem for America’s colleges, white masculinity is THE problem for America’s colleges,” Ms. Grundy tweeted in March.

In another tweet from January, she wrote, “Every MLK week I commit myself to not spending a dime in white-owned businesses. And every year I find it nearly impossible.”

In another tweet she called white males a “problem population,” Fox reported.

The tweets were first discovered by University of Massachusetts Amherst student Nick Pappas, who compiled them on his website “SoCawlege.com.”

Mr. Pappas questioned Ms. Grundy’s ability to teach in a diverse classroom setting when she displays such obvious racial hostility on social media.

“You have to teach college aged white males eventually, no?…this seems like you are unqualified to grade their work as you clearly demonstrate some kind of special bias against them” he wrote, Fox reported.

Mr. Pappas told the network that he hopes to “show the rest of America how nasty people on the far left can get at colleges.”

David Horowitz, author of “Reforming our Universities” told Fox that he was “not surprised that Boston University is hiring a racist to teach African American Studies.”

“Anti-white racism is rampant in Black Studies programs which are generally indoctrination programs in left wing politics,” Mr. Horowitz said, Fox reported.

Boston University spokesman Colin Riley told Fox that the school stands by it’s decision to hire Ms. Grundy and said she is “exercising her right to free speech.”

Mr. Horowitz argued that the university’s response shows a double-standard on race.

“If she were a white racist rather than an anti-white racist, she would never be hired. Professors are supposed to be experts in some scholarly field, and professionals in their classroom discourse. They don’t have a license to indoctrinate students in their prejudices — whether those prejudices are right or left,” he said.

Sociology is one of those areas in colleges that have become a dumping ground for below average college students who should be turning knobs at a car plant. Instead they get tax money to waste time in nonsense majors like sociology. No one has ever dialed 911 hoping to reach a sociologist.

This reminds me of something that Razib Khan posted the other day, that I found utterly ridiculous. Self-reporting depends on self-awareness. The greater the self-awareness, the more accurate the self-reporting. You can’t tell me much about yourself unless you know something about yourself. No group of Americans is as lacking in self-awareness as progressives.

This BU example is where you see it. Can anyone argue that a white professor would keep his job if he tweeted that “young black males are the problem facing America”?? We know the answer. A few years back the president of Harvard was hounded off campus for pointing out, correctly, that girls are generally not as good at math as boys.

The Left Versus The Clintons

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It’s generally assumed that religions are punctilious about enforcing their rules. Particularly the rules regarding personal morality. This is due to the fantasy versions of religious history taught in public schools around America.

In those versions, the Puritans were severe sexually repressed fanatics who stoned women for showing a little ankle. Further back, the Catholic Church was slaughtering people throughout Europe for missing confession. Of course, modern Evangelicals are peeping in your bedroom to make sure you’re not having too much fun.

That’s all nonsense, of course. The truth is religions are terrible at self-policing. The exception is theocracy. When the church controls the state and has a monopoly of force, it then has the duty of enforcing the rules. Its legitimacy is largely based on enforcing the rules.

That means policing itself as well as the populace. If a member of the clergy gets caught stealing they will face a more severe punishment than a commoner because the church has to maintain its legitimacy. A crime against the state is a crime against the church and therefore must be punished.

Theocracy is a rarity in human organization. The norm is a separation. In a monoculture this is not a problem because the church can rely on their coreligionists in the state to manage the enforcement of man’s rules. The church is free to worry about the spiritual side of things. It’s why multicultural societies are rare and tend to violence, but a topic for another day.

Catholic France is a good example of where the state was run by Catholic men who were not men of the Church. Britain after the Synod of Whitby is another that comes to mind. Pre-Civil War America was a land with a secular government run by Protestant Christians who were more than happy to let the laws be informed by their faith. It’s why the Civil War can be viewed as a religious schism amongst American Protestants.

Religions in lands where the secular authorities are hostile have peculiar pressures on them to not police their own too rigorously. They tend to focus on crimes against the faith like heresy or apostasy. Challenges to the hierarchy of the faith are also monitored. The issues that could involve the secular authorities present a problem. Turning over a criminal to the secular authorities could both violate the faith and place the faithful at the mercy of those outside the faith.

An example of what I’m getting at is the Catholic Church scandals. Priests are supposed to remain celibate and those who don’t face sanction from the church, but not expulsion from the church. Even sex with minors does not get you tossed, as long as you confess the sins to a priest and make satisfaction for them. Turning the priest over to the secular authorities is not on the book. More to the point, it invites the secular authorities into the church, which brings about a whole bunch of new troubles.

Now, most of what happened in the Catholic Church scandals was just good old fashioned sloth and corruption. It was easier to sweep it under the rug so that’s what happened. Then there was the Lavender Mafia that grew like cancer on the priesthood. Those elements in the Church not only worked to cover up these things, those outside that element did not want to reveal the existence of a Gay Mafia in the Church. The result was a decades long cover-up.

Now, what does have to do with the Clintons?

The new religion that is growing in the ruling elite is facing the same problems all religions face. How do they police themselves without undermining the legitimacy of the faith? Compounding that problem is the fact that the religion is largely defined by its political activities. Turning over a defective member of The One True Faith means giving political opponents ammunition to use against the faith. The Clintons may be dirtbags, but they are still members of the faith in good standing.

Christianity sets out a clear path to salvation. Act in certain ways, believe certain things, participate in certain rituals and you are going to heaven. Your salvation is not determined by other men. The rules are taught to the faithful as a part of their participation in the faith. Your priest could think you are a jerk, but as long as you take communion, go to confession and live a Christian life, you’re all set.

The new faith is occasionalist, in that the rules are always shifting. What makes you a member in good standing is that the clerisy considers you are a good liberal. In part, that’s why Rousseau-ist cults are prone to radicalism. Being pious means being more pious than the other guy. The result is a race into fanaticism. It’s also why the only sins that Progressives take seriously are heresy and apostasy.

The Clintons present a challenge to the faith in that their sins are outside the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Bill Clinton is a deviant and a pathological liar, but he has been devoted to progressive causes. Similarly, Hillary is a humorless harpy and a crook, but she never goes against the faith. The extreme members of the faith don’t like her, but their reasons have nothing to do with her selling influence as Secretary of State.

This new religion, let’s call it Spiritual Marxism, has to figure out how to deal with sociopaths like the Clintons and that means building out fixed rules. For an occasionalist faith, as we see with Islam, this is nearly impossible. In the case of Islam it reduces the authority of Allah. For Progressives it means stripping power from the trend setters, the people largely responsible for keeping the flame burning.

But, the alternative is to sanction general anarchy and no religion can last if it an assault on order.

Mokita

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A recurring theme outside the fever swamps is the growing collection of things that everyone knows, but we’re not allowed to discuss. I think a lot of it is simply due to the emerging religion of the post-national West trying to work out the orthodoxy. It’s hard to hail the triumph of egalitarianism when clearly most people are not equal. While that’s being hammered out, you’ll not notice it – or else.

On the other hand, every human society has things it carefully places in its blind spot. Reality is simply too big and complicated to be anything other than messy for self-aware mammals. Religion used to solve this by blaming the gods, but now we just politely refuse to talk about those intractable or inconvenient aspects of human existence. Just for fun I thought I’d make a post of some of them.

Black people commit a lot of crime: The recent unrest in American ghettos has been great material for the TV news channels. The only thing better than burning buildings is seeing people loot the building first then set it ablaze. If they are doing it during the day it is even better as you can then get great closeups of the rioters.

The trouble is all the people doing this are black. In America, everyone knows black people commit an outlandish amount of crime. If you see black males on the street, everyone, including black people, assume they are up to no good. It is something everyone knows, but we choose not to discuss. When we are forced to talk about it, some other unrelated issue is brought into the discussion so we can talk about that, rather than the crime figures.

No one wants their kid to be gay. All parents say they are just happy if their kids are healthy. That’s mostly true, but no parent wants their kid to turn out to be a happy healthy homosexual. All of those pious Progressives haranguing us about the gays privately hope they never have to be in the same room with a gay, much less have one in the family. There’s a reason for all of the gay ghettos in places like New York, Boston and San Francisco.

Gay men are mostly assholes. Life for homosexuals is not a lot of fun. Unlike everyone else, their pool of potential mates is infinitesimally small. A normal man makes a pass at a women and it is not big deal if she is offended. A man makes a pass at a man and it is big trouble if the other guy is not into dudes. Life for gay people is not a lot of fun and that’s what makes them so unpleasant. We all know this, but what’s the point of saying anything about it? They are what they are and that’s punishment enough.

Lesbians are surly and unattractive. The pornography industry has convinced a lot of men that lesbians are hot super models or the girls down the hall, if you can just get them drunk. Of course, lesbians in the press avoid the normal kit as they know how TV works. Viewers want to see attractive people. That means lantern-jawed men and model quality women.

In real life, lesbians look like the guy who paved your driveway. They have bad haircuts and wear men’s clothes. For some reason, they like wearing men’s jeans and flannel shirts. Younger ones will have a face full of fishing tackle and tattoos. To add to the unpleasant visage, they are surly and miserable people. I’ve trod this earth a long time and I have yet to meet a sunny, bubbly lesbian.

The apple does not fall far from the tree. Education policy and all of our debates about crime, poverty and the underclass are all based on something we know is nonsense. That thing is the belief that the kid will grow up to be something different than his parents. The fact we all know is that almost all kids turn out to be, more or less, like their parents.

Public policy is based on the belief that the right teacher, the right program, the right social worker will magically overcome biology. We all know this is nonsense, but we go along with it because it beats the alternatives. The rare exception of the kid overcoming bad parents makes us feel good so we go along with the lie, even though everyone suspect it is a mistake.

Men are not all that interested in what women have to say. Here’s another biology issue. Males are programmed to seek mating opportunities. We fight one another, fight strangers, perform in public and do all sorts of things to increase out chances of mating. Whatever it takes to bag a female we will do. That includes pretending to care about what a woman has to say on most subjects.

The hard cold truth is women are bred for having and raising children. Men are bred for battling other males for the chance to reproduce. It’s why we used to say that men will trade money for sex and women will trade sex for money. The biological ends of men and women are the same, but the means are vastly different and neither side can offer much in the way of advise to the other, with regards to the means.

My guess is women don’t care what men have to say either, but most men assume that anyway. Women seem to think we are supposed to care what they have to say so we have all of these rituals where men pretend to care what the hot women in the office is saying about sales, but he is really just thinking about banging her.

The most bigoted people in America are black. In fact, blacks are actively encouraged to wear their prejudices on their sleeve. Every black comic does bits on white people. Famous black people put a lot of effort into “keeping it real” so they can be clear that they are not down with the blue-eyed devil. How many times have you heard a black guy say something like, “It is a black thing, you wouldn’t understand”?

What makes this most absurd is we also pretend that blacks are biologically incapable of being racist or prejudiced. No one, for example, ever says that Al Sharpton is a racist, because that’s not permitted. We all know that he is a hate-filled carbuncle of a man, but he’s black so we don’t say he is a racist.

Jews do run things. If you look around, it is not hard to notice that men of the tribe occupy a disproportionate amount of the nation’s high ground. Hollywood is run by Jews. The media is all run by Jews. Finance, obviously. Look at the list of richest 1000 and you see that 30% are Jews. It’s not a conspiracy or part of some master plan run from a secret location in Israel. Jews are just a wildly successful people.

Western societies reward intelligence and Jews are the smartest group of humans on earth. That means more of them will be equipped to succeed in a modern society, relative to their numbers, than we’ll see with other groups. Having smart people in charge of your country is a good idea so everyone goes along with it and never mentions it. The last time people noticed the Jews were in charge, a lot of bad things followed so we pretend not to notice.

Most people should not be allowed to vote. Paying attention to public affairs is tough stuff. First off, it’s boring. Thinking about the big game is a lot more fun than thinking about tax policy or abortion policy. Even if you have an interest in it, there’s so much bravo sierra in the media it is hard to keep track of things. Even smart people fall into lazy habits of rooting for Red Team or Blue Team without thinking about it.

Most people are not smart. In fact, most people are average to below average. We’re a country that lets retarded people vote. We all know this is a terrible idea, but we go along with it anyway. We hope that when it matters the serious people who know the right answers will also have the ability to convince the dumb people to pull the right lever. But, most of us suspect it would be better to just let the smart people vote, but we keep that to ourselves.

The Death of Pop

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One of moonbat friends sent this to me today. Being a moonbat, he stopped at the nice graph that he most likely did not understand. What he cared about was the headline. As a moonbat, he worships black people (from a great distance, of course) and he naturally assumes non-moonbats are racists who hate black people. That’s why he sent it to me. He thought it would bother me that hip-hop the most important thing since pockets.

Being a normal, I already assumed that pop music was mostly black. Every day of my life I hear heavy base coming from a crapbox, driven by a white kid or an Asian. Rock music largely died out when black people stopped playing instruments in the 1970’s. Hip-hop went mainstream in the late seventies with The Sugarhill Gang. You can count on one hand the number of black guys playing instruments in rock bands since then.

Anyway, not being a moonbat I looked at that story about the evolution of pop music and wondered what that has meant for sales. A little looking and I found this graph:

Interestingly, music sales started to fall off once hip-hop broke through to the mainstream. It continued to slide until CD’s got everyone to re-buy their music collections. The higher quality medium probably drove sales too. I know the first time I heard a CD (U2) I was stunned by the quality and immediately went out and bought a bunch of them.

Music companies were smart enough to know this was a great way to re-sell their catalogs, which they did. All of the big bands from the 60’s and 70’s not only released their old stuff, they released stuff that had not made the cut the first time. After a decade it started to fall apart as people learned how to rip mp3’s and pass them around to friends and strangers on-line.

Once you net out the boost from digitizing and repackaging music from the 60’s and 70’s, hip-hop has been a disaster for the pop music business. Demographics has something to do with it, but you cannot get around the fact that sales are at all-time lows, despite the country having more than a third more people. There’s a lesson in those numbers that extends beyond the music business.

Something similar happened with the NBA after the Jordan years. Thinking the key to prosperity was to embrace the hip-hop culture, the league encouraged the players to go full gangster rap. The result was a cratering of their TV audience, two labor stoppages and a decline in revenue from which they have yet to recover. Maybe it was just a coincidence, maybe not, but the sport still has an image problem.