I have mentioned before that I am not a big consumer of television. I own a TV just so I can watch sports. This time of year, I am pretty much just watching baseball. I have the MLB subscription so I can watch the Red Sox. I do not have anything against TV, but I never developed the love for it as a kid like most people. I might watch a show in syndication if it was popular and I will download movies, but these days it is done in batches. Binge watching is pretty much the only way I can watch a series from start to finish.

Anyway, someone recommended a program to me called Justified. I had never heard of it, but the internet tells me it was extremely popular. That is the thing about the modern mass media culture. You can be a huge star, even though most people have never heard of you. A TV show can be a hit, by attracting 2% of the audience. The culture is so balkanized, we are all just ships passing in the night and TV reflects that reality. My guess is Justified was popular with normals, but unwatched by the folks in Yankeedom.

Anyway, the show itself is fine. It sort of reminds me of the fad in the 70’s of the cowboy detective. I forget the names of the shows, but the twist on the traditional police show was to have the hero as a sort of an updated western sheriff with the hat, boots and pithy country expressions. The show is based on an Elmore Leonard novel so it has lots of catchy dialogue. That was a Leonard trademark, the banter between characters that was simple, but packed with meaning. I suspect that is the attraction of the show for fans. There is a lyrical quality to the writing.

I have only watched the one season, but what strikes me is that the male lead is pretty much a normal male lead. In fact, all the men are the sort of men you see on earth or at least you used to see on earth. The beta male hipster thing is a sad reality of our age. The women are also normal women. We hear lots of complaints about the feminization of men, but the presentation of women in pop culture is equally bizarre. I can see why this show would be popular with the gals, as it has lots of relatable female characters in it.

I have often wondered just how popular the modern female heroine is with real women. There’s endless hype for Hunger Games types of gals, but I never hear real women talk up these types of films. I suspect it is a lot like the homo movies. We are buried in hype about them, but there is little to no demand for gay cowboys or the life story of Liberace. Then again, I am just a broken down old hate thinker so I could be all wrong. Maybe the young gals of today all dream of wearing Lycra jumpsuits and beating up men.

The other thing that struck me is the fair treatment of downscale whites. It still has lots of stereotypes about toothless hillbillies banging their sisters, but it is much more nuanced than you typically see. The war on bad whites has been raging for so long now it is easy to forget that bad whites are people too. They are just presented as people. It is a sad statement on our age when it is unusual for our betters to present normal people as genuine people, rather than as bad guys and monsters in their morality plays.

Anyway, the other indulgence on the TV front was the movie Martian. Once I could download it free (I am ridiculously cheap) I watched it as I heard it was a really good sci-fi movie. Maybe my standards are out of whack or I lack the proper frame of reference, but it seems rather mediocre to me. Matt Damon was good being Matt Damon on Mars. The other actors are unknown to me but they seemed like they were doing a good job. The visuals were great, but it just seemed sort of blah.

The thing is, I expect the visuals in modern movies to be great. We are long past the point where CGI is new and cutting edge. Every movie now has outlandish special effects. The days of model spaceships hanging from fishing line against black paper are long gone. I had the same reaction to the movie Gravity. Yes, it is neat how they make it look real, but they are supposed to make it look real. That is the point. Not making it look real would be unusual. I cannot remember the last time I saw a movie where the effects were not realistic.

I have this debate with friends. Modern sci-fil is lacking because they invest everything in the visuals and scrimp on the writing and character development. They care more about getting tight shots of the actresses ass in the Lycra jumpsuit than telling the story. The Martian turned out to be Castaway on Mars, except Matt Damon was vastly less introspective and interesting than Tom Hanks. Hanks came back a better man. Damon comes back and we are led to believe he was turned into a self-absorbed douche by his experience, which was what he was before his adventure.

At the risk of sounding like an old coot, the stories were better when they had none of the modern visual aids. A show like Star Trek had to be carried by the story and characters. Watch an old Western and they are basically stage plays put on film. They were more respectful of the audience, because the audience had to fill in the blanks with their imagination. The writers and actors had no choice but to invest in the writing and character development. That is all there was, for the most part.

Of course, that sort of brings me back to the beginning. These long form serial dramas we see on cable like Justified, work because they do invest in the writing. These shows have plenty of costume and setting work. Game of Thrones is set in adventure land with magical midgets and dragons. But that is not what these shows are about or why people watch them. They are well designed and executed dramas with good writing and acting. They are traditional western entertainment, which is people entertaining other people by telling their tale.

I saw on-line that Chicago rang in the start of the summer murder season with their 60th homicide of the year. In the ghetto, Memorial Day is the traditional start of crime season. The weather is nice so everyone is outside, making them easier to shoot. Chicago gets a lot of attention because it is a big city so the crime numbers are gaudy. That and the mayor is a former Obama and Clinton rumpswab. Here is a handy website that logs all the crime in the Windy City if you have an interest in the details.

The thing is, Chicago is a city of 2.7 million people. For a city that size, sixty murders is a great start to the season. Last year they finished with 507 murders. Doing a little math, they are on pace for an all-time low, if current trends hold, which is unlikely. Even so, Chicago is not in the top-10 list of most violent cities. The last look had them in the 30’s and that was after their record setting 2015. The apparent drop in homicide so far will drop them down the per capital homicide rankings.

[edit] I misread the Chicago murder stats. That is 60 for the month of may, not year to date. I will not have the editor killed for this horrible error.

That is what makes Baltimore an interesting place. The city is not excessively big. The census puts the population at 600,000, but the flight from the city has surely lowered that number. Even so, they managed 344 murders last year. That is a homicide rate three times that of Chicago. This year the body count is at 108 so they are a little off the 2015 pace, but not by much. The late spring in the Mid-Atlantic has probably tamped down the numbers a bit. Gunning down Trayvon over his sneakers is not so much fun in the wind and rain.

When you look at the details, the pattern is obvious. Murder in towns like Baltimore is nothing like you see on television and it sure as hell is not like the libertarian scolds imagine. It is not well-organized street gangs in territorial wars over the drug trade. Instead, it is low-IQ knuckleheads shooting each other over petty slights. The drug trade is real, but it is ad hoc and disorganized at the streets level. The beefs that lead to murder are just as likely to be over sneakers as drug deals.

It is what drug legalizers never understand. The drug game in America’s urban reservations is not what drives crime and social dysfunction. Libertarians imagine that legalizing drugs will lead to young black males throwing down their guns and heading off to community college. Legalize drugs and they will find something else to fill the void in their lives. Murder and mayhem in the ghetto are about the most basic of human attributes – status.

Talk to a cop that works the ghetto and he will be the most cynical guy you will meet. The reason is he spends his days working cases that have no rational explanation. Ray-Ray pops Darius one night not because of a business beef. No, Ray-Ray did not like the way Darius looked at him at a cookout so he walked up on him and started blasting. Sometimes, there is simply no reason at all. Ray-Ray just decided to kill Darius “cause he got to go.”

Of course, no one in the neighborhood talks to the cops. Again, the white romantics get it all wrong. The “community” is not hostile to the cops because of race. They are hostile because they are hostile to everyone. The ghetto is not a community. It is just a bunch of people who live in close quarters. One neighbor will steal from another and then shamelessly be seen on the street with the neighbor’s property. It is the one place where Hobbes was right.

All of the sentimental explanations for the ghetto are to avoid the reality of the situation. More important, they allow good whites to avoid facing up to doing what has proven to work. You did not see this level of dysfunction and violence in the black neighborhoods in the 50’s and 60’s. Every metric for blacks has gone the wrong way since desegregation. Literacy, crime, drugs, illegitimacy, etc. are all worse for blacks today than they were in the bad old days of segregation.

That is not to say integration magically turned some blacks into savages. It is that intolerance of bad behavior was an essential element of segregation. Whites had a “zero tolerance policy” for certain types of behavior from blacks. Black leaders, not wanting trouble, would police their ranks more ruthlessly than those imaginary bad whites the good whites are endlessly telling us are the cause of all bad things. Segregation made black leaders responsible for their people and therefore intolerant of misbehavior.

Over the last forty years, every black person with a clue has gotten as far away from the black neighborhoods as possible. The result is the ghetto is now a concentrated population of the worst black America has to offer. There is no one inside to police the ranks, so we end up with a blue wall around the reservation that maintains the border. When a body turns up, there is some effort to find the killer, but most times the crime goes unsolved.

There is no going back to segregation even if there was the will to do so, but there are lessons to be learned. The one lesson from the bad old days is that intolerance is under appreciated. Celebrating the dysfunction and general lunacy of the underclass not only encourages it, but it also gives people, who should know better, a reason to ignore it. The music company executives, for example, who promoted hip-hop in the 80’s, should have been keelhauled. Instead, they were made extraordinarily rich from the promotion of murder and mayhem.

Intolerance is why stop and frisk worked so well in New York. It took the status out of thug life. If you went out with your pants around your ankles and your hat on sideways, the cops would humiliate you on the street. No one looks hard when they have their hands against the wall and a cop has pulled their pants down, looking for weapons and drugs. Remove the status from thug life and you get less of it. Ban the public display of “black culture” in West Baltimore and crime drops quickly.

When I read the founding texts of Western Liberalism, I’m often struck by how right they were about some things. Read Rousseau and you see that the men of the Enlightenment were figuring out evolution long before Darwin came along. They did not call it evolution and they were not approaching it from a biological perspective, but they understood there was a period before human settlement. They knew that period of human organization required different men than the world at that time produced.

That said, they got some big stuff wrong too. The “state of nature” was nothing like Hobbes imagined. It was not men in a constant state of warfare against one another. Of course, the blank slate stuff upon which Rousseau built his moral philosophy is, we now know, complete nonsense. We are what our DNA instructs, for the most part. There’s not only variation between people, there’s diversity between groups of people due to generations of inherited traits, within isolated groups of humans.

There are two things to learn from that. One is that tens of millions of people were murdered because Rousseau was completely wrong about the nature of man. That’s a big mistake. The other take away is that even when a theory seems to explain what we observe, it could still be wildly wrong. For instance, the ruins at Gobekli Tepe are forcing archaeologists and historians to rethink the civilization timeline.

On the day I visit, a bespectacled Belgian man sits at one end of a long table in front of a pile of bones. Joris Peters, an archaeozoologist from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, specializes in the analysis of animal remains. Since 1998, he has examined more than 100,000 bone fragments from Gobekli Tepe. Peters has often found cut marks and splintered edges on them—signs that the animals from which they came were butchered and cooked. The bones, stored in dozens of plastic crates stacked in a storeroom at the house, are the best clue to how people who created Gobekli Tepe lived. Peters has identified tens of thousands of gazelle bones, which make up more than 60 percent of the total, plus those of other wild game such as boar, sheep and red deer. He’s also found bones of a dozen different bird species, including vultures, cranes, ducks and geese. “The first year, we went through 15,000 pieces of animal bone, all of them wild. It was pretty clear we were dealing with a hunter-gatherer site,” Peters says. “It’s been the same every year since.” The abundant remnants of wild game indicate that the people who lived here had not yet domesticated animals or farmed.

But, Peters and Schmidt say, Gobekli Tepe’s builders were on the verge of a major change in how they lived, thanks to an environment that held the raw materials for farming. “They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticated—and the people with the potential to do it,” Schmidt says. In fact, research at other sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of Gobekli Tepe’s construction, settlers had corralled sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the world’s oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe’s construction.

To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.

The model of human development has been based on the idea that humans began to learn how to farm and domesticate animals while living as hunter gatherers. Groups of humans figured out that they could improve their prospects by cultivating wild crops, thus providing a hedge against the bad times. This led to the slow development of cooperative societies and eventually settled agriculture-based communities. Large scale social organization beyond blood relations happened after agriculture, not before.

The existence of large structures requiring lots of people working together over a long period of time, perhaps across generations, before the advent of agriculture is a big deal. It means cooperation is the result of something other than economic necessity. In other words, people started cooperating for some reason other than it made for better living conditions. The theory presented in the linked story suggest the motivation was spiritual. The people who built Gobekli Tepe did it to please the gods in some way.

This may not sound like a big deal, but consider that the last 300 or so years of Western political debate has been between Team homo economicus and Team homo reciprocans. If both are just manifestations of a basic human drive for spiritual salvation, then basing economic and political systems on either is only going to end in tears, which would be a good way to describe the 100 million or so dead trying to prove Rousseau was right. It means our self-interest and cooperation are bound by something else.

I’ve written a lot about how our ideological impulses are just channels through which our natural religious impulse flows. Those of us less inclined to believe, tend toward political skepticism. Those more inclined to believe, tend towards mass movements like socialism, communism, libertarianism, etc. Much of what vexes the modern West is the deluded belief that we have evolved past our superstitions and spiritual impulses. Maybe that’s all wrong and maybe it is important.

When I was a young man, my grandfather would tease us boys by telling us “In my day it was wooden ships and iron men. You boys will be lucky if you are wooden men in iron ships.” I’m not so old that my grandfather lived in the age of sail, so it was just a way for an old man to have some fun teasing his grandkids.

That said, he had a point. A boy coming of age a century ago was facing a much tougher world and would have to be tougher to live in it.  There’s little doubt in my mind that men of my generation are softer than the men of father’s or grandfather’s generation. It’s not just the material excess we have today. When I was a little kid, I had it much easier than the prior generations. My grandfather, for example, quit school at 13 and went to work in a coal mine.

Steve Pinker has made a strong case that men have grown decreasingly violent over each generation. His data corresponds with the historical record, which is what makes it such a strong argument. We know, for example, that banditry was a serious issue in the Middle Ages. Traveling from one town to the next was dangerous. Today, we travel from town to town without thinking about bandits, other than cops running speed traps. The only danger there is to your wallet.

One of the reasons he points to for the decline in violence is the feminization of men, which he defines as a growing awareness of and respect for the interests of women by men. I’ve always paused on that one simply because it runs counter to what we know of history. Women have often been the cause of violence and I don’t just mean men fighting one another for women. I mean women instigating wholesale and particular violence. Roman history is littered with women who killed a lot of men.

That said, you can argue that women are less tolerant of wholesale violence, on average, than men so as women increased their influence over western society, violence dropped. At the same time, as the value of violence dropped, men less inclined to violent solutions rose in status, while the tough guys fell in status. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance plays on this theme. In a civilized world, the tough guys are marginalized and the smart guys rise to the top of the social hierarchy.

To circle back to where I started with this post, the pop heroes of my grandfather’s generations were gangsters and cowboys. In my generation, we still had some of that, but the male leads were more contemplative, using their wits and charm more than their brawn. Watch a current movie and the male lead is a small, wimpy guy, who cowers to women. The alternatives are cartoon tough guys that resemble video game characters, more than real males.

I’ve always wanted to think this is just Hollywood being overrun by social justice warriors and liberal fanatics. Fifty years ago, Hollywood cared about making money so they made movies to please the audience. Today they care more about making commentary so they make films that lecture the audience. That and the drop in skill means they are less adept at using subtlety to make their propaganda.

Still, events do make me wonder if there’s been a collapse of manliness and Western men have gone full Eloi.

A respected violence researcher has declared that the Cologne sex attacks show German men have forgotten how to fight, and it’s a good thing.
Jörg Baberowski gave a speech recently at the Philosophy Festival  in Cologne on Thursday night saying that the New Years Eve sex attacks in Cologne prove that German males have forgotten how to stand up for themselves. He said the fact that the German men had not come to the aid of the women being sexually assaulted by large gangs of migrants showed a reluctance to be violent and commented: “We see that men in Germany no longer know how to deal with violence,” Stern reports.

However, immediately following the remark Baberowski, who is a historian at the Humboldt University in Berlin, said “thank god” that German men no longer know how to stand up for themselves or face violent conflict. He claimed that is was good that German men relied solely on the state to take care of them and protect them. He claimed that the New Years’ attacks were a failure of the state to protect its citizens and that if the government can’t guarantee that safety then the confidence the citizens have it it will be shaken.

Thinking back to my youth, I recall hearing lectures about the importance of letting the authorities handle whatever trouble was brewing. Lecturing boys about using their wits versus their fists was common enough to stick in my memory. There was also the idea of “being the bigger man” and not responding to physical challenges. I was reminded of that watching this from Milo Yiannopoulos’s event at DePaul University.

One of the things that men my age will talk about with one another is how young white males never get into fights. I’ve had interns tell me they have never been in a physical confrontation with another male. I’ve never considered myself a fighter, yet I was in a scrape every week growing up. That was just what boys did. Even into my teen years, things we often settled physically, even if it was quickly broken up.

Getting back to the Milo event, I keep wondering what would happen if someone popped one of these BLM cunts in the mouth. If Milo had knocked her cold, I’m thinking that would be the last of these confrontations. The risk assessment by these people would change overnight. Taking on the honky would suddenly come with real danger. Whatever benefits there are, assuming there are any, of refusing to fight, there’s no doubt it encourages troublemakers like that woman to get increasingly aggressive.

Watching the reaction from his fans on-line, I feel like I’m from another planet. Frankly, I cringed watching that video. Yet, the reaction on twitter suggests most people think he was the winner in that exchange. If that’s “winning” then I don’t want to see losing. To my old eyes, that looked like a white guy being dominated by a scrawny black bitch and then slinking away. I get that he is a gay guy and maybe the rules are different, but still, it was hard to watch, much less cheer.

Maybe the great wimpening has reached the point of no return. Traditional forms of masculinity are dead in the West and will not be revived until sometime after the Caliphate is established. Those dusky fellows rampaging through the streets of European cities are unlikely to sit there and take a lecture from a mouthy twat from Black Lives Matter. If Western men can’t stand up to mouthy college twats, they stand no chance against the Mohammedan.

The Muslims are not wrong about everything.