Category Archives: Culture

The Odour of Honeysuckle

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One of the more entertaining aspects of the Trump Effect is watching members of the so-called conservative media throw around the word “conservative” like is some sort of magic spell. They utter the word within various incantations intended to make Trump disappear. Others use it to ward off the hordes of Trump supporters they fear are about to break their beloved party.

The word “conservative’ has lost all meaning, which is what you see in this post on NRO the other day. Jim Geraghty is no Genius T. Coates, so you have to look past the logical fallacies at the beginning, but you’ll note that what Geraghty thinks of as “conservative” is just a shopping list of Republican proposals with a healthy dollop of social engineering.

The panic among the chattering classes is obvious and the Geraghty piece has the feel of someone bargaining for his life. The only thing missing is the “I’ll give you anything you want” line that Hollywood imagines everyone says when facing death. A year ago, they were sure that one of the guys from central casting would be the nominee and now they see it all falling to pieces. The dirt people have breached the walls.

Whenever I read these columns, I keep thinking of the bit from Braveheart at the first battle. This was before Mel shows up to give his big speech. The troops are about to split after seeing the English forming up and one of the nobles pleads with them, “Men, do not flee. Wait until we’ve negotiated.”  That’s GOP Inc. these days. They want one last chance to negotiate.

The problem for Conservative Inc. is they conceded a critical principle a long time ago that puts them forever at odds with traditional American conservatism. That is, they surrendered on the fundamental right of association, which is the bedrock of American conservatism. Once the state can dictate to you with whom you can associate or disassociate, you are no longer a citizen. Every conceivable right depends on the ability to band together or walk away, as necessary.

The remedy was to grasp about for ways to gain the ends that naturally flow from freedom of association, without upsetting the Left over the issue of race. The trouble is that it was always a matter of time before the Left could close the loop and make everything about race. They even made the weather a racial issue so anything of consequence was going to be easy pickings for the Cult.

Long ago, the official Right came to an accommodation with the other side of the Yankee ruling class. A movement that fundamentally stands outside the traditions and instincts of Public Protestantism is forever trapped in that framework. Public intellectuals of the Right spend their lives trying to make their movement, their philosophy, comport with the ethics and aesthetics of the Progressives.

Once the Right gave into the Left on association, equating it with racism and therefore off-limits, the Right stopped being an opposition movement and became a partner. One side wants to use the power of the state to compel certain behavior, while the other sides either counsels caution or argues for different goals. Whether or not the state herds the people around is no longer an issue up for debate.

That’s what has the official Right in a panic over Trump and the growing resistance to immigration. If the people can debate who is and who is not allowed in for settlement, then freedom of association is back on the table. That means the average American can decide with whom he lives and, by extension, with whom he refuses to associate. More important, it calls into question the modern Right’s place in the ruling consensus.

In the novel The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson is the son of a once prominent Southern family who is at school at Harvard. Quentin wishes to reject his father’s antiquated philosophy, but the world he lives in seems constantly to affirm that view of the world. Eventually, unable to reconcile his place in the cultural timeline with the world in which he lives, he throws himself off a bridge and drowns in the Charles River.

The official Right finds itself in a similar dilemma. They desperately want to find some way to reject the past without succumbing to the present. The Bill Buckley experiment has been a generational attempt to accommodate traditional American conservatism with the dominant Public Protestantism that we now call Progressivism.

For a long time, they were sure they unriddled it, but now here they are facing what they see as the Snopes clan. They look at Trump and his supporters as vermin who threaten the great project. Instead of strolling the ivy covered walls of elite institutions, the official Right is about to drown in the odor of honeysuckle. Like Quentin Compson, they see no way to resolve the past with the present.

The End of Things

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After the American Civil War, the big issues, with regards to politics in the country, were decided. The vanquished portions of the nation would have a say in the running of the country, but only within the constraints of the settled upon political system. America would be a country with a strong central government that would dominate the federal system conceived by the Founders. The debate would be about how much it controls and how quickly.

The idea, for example, that the restraints on the national government listed in the Bill of Rights should now apply to state and local government would have seemed odd to the Founders. States, for example, had official religions. As late as the 1830s Massachusetts provided tax money to local Congregational churches. The 14th Amendment applied the Bill of Rights to states, thus altering the fundamental relationship between the states and the Federal government.

From the Civil War forward, politics in America was largely a domestic dispute between the factions within the victorious coalition. You see this in the choice of presidents. The First “southerner” to win on his own after the Civil War was Wilson in 1912 and he remains the greatest of outliers in American politics. Both Johnsons and Truman got there by virtue of death. The next true southerner to win was Carter and again we see very strange conditions.

You can probably argue that the post-Civil War arrangements would have collapsed in the 20th century except for the great wars of Europe and then the Cold War. The crisis in global capitalism leading up to The Great War and then the war itself, placed enormous power in the hands of the federal government. The rise of America as global hegemon after the Second War made Washington DC the capital of the world throughout the Cold War.

Then something happened, something no one seems to discuss much these days. That is, the collapse of the Soviet Union and along with it the end of ideological socialism. Up until the 1990, the world was defined as capitalism on one side and Marxism on the other. Suddenly, one end of the scale collapsed, at least in terms of economics and morality. In the blink of an eye, being a Marxist went from avant-garde to ridiculous.

The 1992 election was cast at the time as the point where the Baby Boomers took over and that was true to a point. It was also the point where the Democrats threw in the towel on socialism. They embraced global capitalism with the enthusiasm of a convert. It’s not an accident that the great banking “reforms” happened in the Clinton years, embraced by both parties.

The trouble for both parties is they lost their reason to exist when ideological Marxism collapsed. It is always argued that this has been worse for the GOP than for the Democrats, but the opposite is true. In the Clinton years the Democrats went from being the majority party to the minority party. From 1994 onward, the party was in a steady retreat politically and ideologically.

The 2000 presidential election felt like a pivotal one because you had a vestigial Southern Democrat versus a Yankee heretic. The main source of hatred toward Bush from the Cult was his apparent rejection of the culture of Yankeedom for the culture of Hooterville. The venomous hatred of Bush was what you see from the betrayed. The Left was the shrewish ex-wife and Bush was the philandering husband.

That anger was put to good use. By 2006 the New Left had a sales pitch, even if they had nothing to pitch. Voters will pick energy over lethargy and the Democrats in the mid-2000’s had plenty of energy. Then they found Black Jesus and could run as moral crusaders, even though they could not articulate the point of the crusade. They had to search around the fringes for victims to champion and wrongs to be righted.

Homosexual marriage, tranny rights, ghetto rage, micro-aggressions and faux rape culture are all the result of grasping around at the edges of life looking for something, anything, which can be made into a banner. Each grasp deeper into the darkness returns something even more preposterous. Liberalism, and by extension the Democratic Party, has become a roadside freak of self-beclownment.

So-called serious progressivism today is mostly just nostalgia. Lefty plutocrats like Rahm Emmanuel, a man who made millions in a no-show job on Wall Street, vacations in Cuba while Chicago descends into a race war. George Soros, the great benefactor of modern progressivism, is a billionaire global capitalist.

The Left and by extension the Democrats, now embrace the same economics as the so-called Right. Both sides lust after riches in the financial markets. Both sides embrace global corporatism. The Left champions the liquidation of labor rights through advocacy of open borders. Think about that. There’s a reason it is hard to see the difference between the parties. There isn’t one.

Much is made of the circus going on in the GOP primary but look at the Democratic side. The party that used to brag about its youth and creativity is offering a worn out old grifter and a ridiculous commie that looks like he strolled out of a 1940’s movie on communism. The two of them are out campaigning in mobility scooters. The one young guy in the race can’t draw flies.

The great reordering that is under way is due to the collapse of the raison d’être of the American ruling class. What animated politics in America for the last several generations has been the interplay between Progressives and the defenders of the status quo, played out in the shadow of the Cold War.

The Left collapsed as an intellectual movement when the Cold War ended, but the Right collapsed as a pragmatic alternative. You can’t have one without the other. In a single generation, the Left has adopted the economics of the Right and the Right has adopted the politics of the Left. Neither side has a reason to exist outside of naked greed.

The New Containment

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The policy of containment, with respect to the Soviet Union and the Cold War, evolved at the end of World War II and into the post-war period because the other options were not practical. Sending the US army to push the Russians out of eastern Europe would have been an impossible sell to the American public, assuming it was even possible. Dropping a nuke on Moscow would have been a public relations disaster.

On the other hand, simply letting the Russians dominate Europe was out of the question politically, even though many within the American ruling elite were communists. There had to be a way to keep most of Europe free that did not result in a war with Russia. Containment was the near perfect solution. It kept the Russians in check, created thousands of jobs for the Yankee elite and fed the military-industrial complex.

That’s not intended to imply that the people who crafted and developed the Western response to the Soviets thought all this through in advance. It just evolved into the best solution. At the onset it scratched the itch, the need to respond to Soviet aggression, but over time it proved to be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of various constituencies within the ruling class.

The funny thing about the Cold War is it preserved the American ruling consensus long after the facts on the ground justified it. The public was not going to support overturning the apple cart as long as the threat of nuclear annihilation was very real. That naturally made anyone advocating great change a threat and they were easily painted as a hothead or commie.

The result was a self-policing where the Left kept their commies in the lower ranks and the Right kept their hot heads out of sight. Within living memory, a ridiculous fop like Barak Obama would have been kept in the community organizing department where he could not cause trouble. Of course, fear of nuclear annihilation kept the public from questioning the arrangements, even if meant keeping the black man down.

Since the end of the Cold War a quarter century ago, the ruling elites have lost their footing, staggering around like drunks. In Europe, the main parties are imploding into a single party relying on skullduggery to overcome a lack of purpose. The recent French elections demonstrate their willingness to lock shields to preserve the status quo, even when they can’t come up with reason for maintaining it.

In America, the Democrats are a party for men in dresses and women in muumuus. The Republicans are the land of misfit toys, politicians just not weird enough for the other team. The ructions in the GOP primary reveal the party establishment to be hollow men with no reason to exist beyond habit. The Democrats look like God’s waiting room, an old pinko in a pantsuit versus an old an old pinko in pants.

For the past few decades, there’s been no real cost to excess, but that’s changing as the demographic explosion on the fringes of civilization threaten the West with an invasion of barbarians from over the horizon. Islam presents both a cultural and demographic challenge. Africa presents a demographic and biological challenge. So far, the ruling elites have failed to come to terms with this looming threat.

It strikes me that the rise of “far far far extreme right wing” parties in Europe and the rise of the “extreme right wing racist Donald Trump” in America may turn out to be a catalyst for how the ruling class responds to the next great challenge to civilization. While abandoning anti-racism, multiculturalism and egalitarianism is unthinkable, all three can be shoehorned into a new policy of containment.

Keeping the Mahommedan bottled up in his own lands, a new policy of containment, has obvious practical benefits to the West. Capping off Africa by making the Mediterranean a real barrier to entry (and maybe bribing the countries of the Maghreb), helps solve the African explosion as well. The Arabs would simply refocus their attention on making the Sahara a natural barrier again.

At the same time, containment means not mucking about in the affairs of the Mahommedan. In the Cold War, the West left the Eastern Bloc to the care of the Soviets. They had their sphere of influence and we had ours. The new containment would follow the same model. Let the Mahommedan manage his lands as he sees fit, but keep him bottled up in those lands, behind a technological, cultural and military curtain.

The benefit to the ruling class is it gives them a natural reason to exist. They are holding back the tides and sensible citizens will not want to risk that by supporting fringe candidates. It also brings back the natural self-policing that comes from permanent war. The Left will suppress their one-word fanatics, while the Right will keep their invade the world nutters under wraps.

Of course, the military and the diplomatic core will have plenty of reasons to get money and jobs for their people. Muffy Pemberton can pop out of Harvard and take a job in the diplomatic corps, while Dwayne Haskins can make a career out of standing guard at the borders. The Yankee ruling class gets the band back together, just focused on a different enemy. They can even, wink-wink, argue about which side has the best approach.

The sales pitch can center around the fact that it is more effective to send aid to these people than it is to resettle them in the West. There’s also the benefit of keeping their best and brightest in their home countries so they can help develop their societies. There’s the obvious safety angle, keeping the Mahommedan from exploding in your local coffee shop. It’s an easy sell with obvious benefits.

Containment. It’s not just for commies anymore.

Star Wars and Fake Nerds

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The other day, a woman gave me the business over my lack of enthusiasm for the new Star Wars movie. When she told me about how she was going to the first night, I said I had saw the original three, but skipped the reboot. I may have caught clips here and there, but otherwise I had no interest and I have no interest in the latest rendition. When I called it cowboys and Indians in space, I seemed to have crossed some line.

In his latest transmission, John Derbyshire takes a similar position, but for a different reason and probably a better reason than I offered. John grew up reading classic science fiction, so he knows good sci-fi and Star Wars is just crap by comparison. I agree with that, and I would add that Star Trek, the original version, is the gold standard for Hollywood science fiction.

Way back when Star Wars came out in the late 70’s, it was largely considered a kids movie. The adult sci-fi weirdos were into Star Trek, with the first convention happening in 1972. Guys spending Saturday night playing Dungeons and Dragons or learning to code on their Commodore PET were doing so wearing Spock ears, not fondling a fake light saber.

But we now live in the age of the fake nerd, and I think that’s where Star Wars fits best. The people that “fucking love science!” and watch Big Bang Theory can’t shut up about Star Wars. It’s another method to signal their membership in the cult of pseudo-scientism. They may never have made it past geometry in school, but they swear they grew up on comic books and were always a nerd.

Fake nerds are everywhere in the media these days. Jonah Goldberg is the one that always comes to mind when I think about this stuff. He has invested a lot of time casting himself as a bookish nerd-boy who grew up reading Batman comics and watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island. Maybe it is true or maybe it is just clever marketing. You never can know for sure with people in the media.

In sports media, the fake nerd is everywhere because statistics are such a big part of sports. ESPN loves dressing up a millennial as a dork and having him rattle off numbers on TV. It’s often hilarious as the typical sports reporter is innumerate, barely able to count to ten without help. But they dress them up as nerds, anyway, figuring it is what the public expects.

Of course, turning science into a religion is why we have kooks like Bill Nye demanding to have skeptics thrown in prison. He’s a good reminder that you can be batshit crazy and still be able to design a decent toaster. The amusement park manager, Neil deGrasse Tyson, made it through a doctoral program, but found better money in peddling pseudo-scientific nonsense to rich people.

The funny thing about the fake nerd stuff is that real nerds are usually active people who enjoy the outdoors, playing sports and doing the sorts of things normal people do. I used to play hoops with a bunch of programmers. I know a few body builders who are engineers, one is a rocket scientist at NASA. In my experience, the highly numerate tend to be a little nuts and anything but nerdish.

Of course, the fake nerd stuff is just a pose. We live in an age of marvels where the technology is far outpacing most people’s ability to keep up. In that regard, our era has another striking resemblance to the late 19th and early 20th century, before the great wars. When Wells, Gernsbacker and Verne invented science fiction, it seemed as if science would conquer the human condition.

A century ago, to be thought of as smart you had to be a tinkerer and love what passed for science and technology at the time. Everyone was convinced that all the answers were just around the corner and the pace of technology would only accelerate. Taylorism was the economics of its day and everyone that was thought to be intelligent was into science.

A big difference between then and now is that fake nerdism is probably filling the void where religion used to reside. A century ago, even the most empirically minded went to mass, just to keep up appearances. Today, no one believes in anything, so everyone falls for everything. Slap the word “study” onto any batshit crazy idea and your fake nerd friends will be posting infographics about on their Facebook page.

Queen Sive Oultagh’s Children

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If you pay any attention to American politics and you can look past the shouting and hand waving, you’ll notice that both parties are strikingly similar. In the House, the leader of the Democrats is an old woman from the most left-wing congressional district in the country. The Republicans are led by a strange little man from one the most liberal states in the country. Wisconsin is the ancestral home of the Progressive Movement.

As I pointed in my award winning post on the voting nations and America, the Republican Party is a southern party with northern leaders. Those northern leaders are thoroughly disconnected from their voters, but thoroughly connected to their analogs in the other party. America has been run by a Yankee coalition since the Civil War and we are now in the midst of a Yankee Crackup.

The ructions in the primaries are entirely due to the yawning chasm between the people and their rulers. Donald Trump is leading in the polls because he is a rebuke to the party leadership. A long time ago I compared him to Beppe Grillo, who was similarly dismissed as a clown and a publicity stunt until his party started winning elections. Even now, the European political elite dismisses these populist movements.

Dismiss is not really correct, though, is it? In Europe, Merkel is making war on the native population by actively encouraging a Muslim invasion. Whole German towns have been turned into Arab ghettos overnight. The reason seems to be nothing more than spite. The evidence is as clear as day that the people do not want this, so what other reason is there for pushing a policy that the people despise?

Now we are seeing something similar happening in the US. The budget pushed through by Paul Ryan is not just bad politics. It is a contradiction of everything he promised just a month ago when he got the job. It’s as if he deliberately assembled a bill that contradicted everything he promised just to stick a finger in the eye of his own voters. The reason to think the point of this point is to spite his voters is the immigration stuff. How else can you interpret such an outrageous betrayal?

Anyway, this latest insult to the people by their “representatives” got me thinking about the Irish Potato Famine. In America this event has largely been flushed down the memory hole because the Irish-Americans find it embarrassing. An estimated one million Irish died from famine within half a decade. Millions more simply fled the country for the rest of the English speaking world. Ireland lost 25% of its population in five years.

Historians blame the famine on a number of factors, but it was the political arrangements that set everything in motion. Oppression of Catholics by the English resulted in a system where the farm land was owned not by Irish, but by English landlords who lived in England. These absentee landlords relied on middlemen to collect rents and enforce their rights against an indigenous population that was trapped in a feudal system.

We live in a different age, but we are facing something similar in America where the financial elite are entirely divorced from the rest of America. They flit around between financial and political capitals without much contact with the people. They are the new ascendancy class and their middlemen are the political parties, who enforce the rules and guard their interests.

The Irish Famine was directly the result of a potato blight, but what should have been a minor disruption in farming was turned into a disaster by a break in the normal feedback loop in a society. The ruling class were slow to react and indifferent to the initial suffering, because the Irish were not their people. They may as well have been Bantus living in an African jungle. Politics then, as now, was local and all the politicians were across the sea, instead of talking to their people.

America is not going to be struck by a potato famine, obviously, but we are being hit with an immigration disaster and a looming financial disaster. The ruling elite is plundering the country and indifferent to the people. Instead, they rely on politicians like Paul Ryan to enforce their orders and collect their rents. The rents in this case are indentured servants brought in to displace native workers. Instead of being throw off the land, Americans are being thrown out of their jobs.

Historical analogies are never perfect. There’s no sign of Ribbonism or Whiteboyism breaking out in America, but who knows what tomorrow will bring. In some respects, the websites and podcasts of the dissident right are filling the role of those Irish secret societies. Our rulers and their middlemen are hardly aware that we exist. What they do know about us tells them we are trouble and must be suppressed.

The Death of Islam

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If you lived in 11th century London around the time when Harold Godwinson was making the mistake of leaving too many troops in the north, your life was rather shabby compared to the life of a man living in Damascus or Samarra. This was the Golden Age of Islam. The Muslims were on the cutting edge of commerce, math, science and economics. If you were looking down from above, Islam looked like a winner.

Granted, the Muslim advance into Europe had been halted, but they still controlled large parts of Europe and controlled the Mediterranean. As a practical matter, just in terms of peace and prosperity, Islam looked like a superior model to what existed in Christendom and Asia. It was not just at the top either. Literacy rates, and life expectancy were much higher in the caliphate than anywhere else.

Fast forward 200 years and life in London would not have changed much. The typical peasant would have had a life similar to his ancestors under someone like William the Conqueror. To the East, however, little guys on ponies had defeated the armies of Europe and were poised to drive all the way to the Atlantic. The armies of the Batu Khan had smashed the Rus and were ready to ride to Paris.

To the south, those same guys from Asia were sacking Baghdad, burning its libraries and murdering most of the male citizens, while impregnating the females.  Historians estimate that a million citizens of Baghdad were killed in one week. The destruction was so massive, the population of the region did not recover until the 19th century. The Mongol Invasion ended the Golden Age of Islam.

By the 14th century, Islam was still dominant in what we call the Arab world, but it was not producing or even augmenting an ascendant culture and people. In fact, as the culture of the Near and Middle East collapsed, it took Islam with it, turning it into a tool for jostling between clans and tribes. The Muslims held on militarily through the 20th century, but that was largely due to the Turks and their long involvement in Europe going back to antiquity.

Even so, by the late Middle Ages, life in the typical European village was not that much better than life in the typical Muslim village. If you just looked at the top, the Ottoman Turks looked strongest, but the seeds of decline were apparent. While the West was on the cusp of great technological, cultural and financial revolutions, the Ottomans were still running a system Diocletian would have understood.

As the West moved from the Middle Ages into the Early Modern Period, it was about to rocket ahead of the rest of the world technologically, culturally and military. The typical villager in Europe was living a vastly more prosperous life than his contemporary in Baghdad or Tripoli. The religion, the culture, the demographics and even the climate all came together to produce what we know to be the modern world – in Europe.

Islam never made it out of the Middle Ages until Western prosperity overflowed its cups and brought material wealth to the Arab world. Even so, Iraq is still a Medieval society equipped with satellite dishes and mobile phones. Their culture, economics and politics remain locked in the amber of a bygone age. Even their revolutionaries sound like extras from a B-movie about the Crusades.

That’s not just a reality we in the West accept. It is a reality that every Muslim from the Arab world faces and grapples with every day. The culture that produced him lost to the culture that confronts him. No one stands in line for the latest Muslim mobile phone. There is no Muslim Silicon Valley. The armies of Allah throw rocks at the space ships and lasers of the infidel. To be a Muslim is to be a loser.

That daily reality is in his pocket when he looks at his cell phone. It is on TV where all the actors wear Western clothes. It is in his house where his sister demands to wear makeup and live on her own, dating men outside the family. Even at mosque he is reminded that he is on the losing side of the fight. He rides a Western made bus or drives a Western made car. He texts his coreligionists on an Apple iPhone, not a Mohammad Phone.

There is an argument that Islam is on the rise. As we see Muslims pouring into Europe and even America, the argument goes, Islam is like rising flood waters, about to wash away the West. That misses what’s happening at the roots of Muslim culture. Every one of those Muslims is on a journey that will end as it did for John the Savage in Brave New World.

The Muslim defines himself by his family relations. He is everyone who came before him. His culture is their culture and their culture defines him. Those Muslims on the road to Berlin can either abandon themselves and their identity in order to join their new world, or, they can embrace death. The self-detonation phenomenon is just a dramatic way of choosing the latter.

The thing is, both choices have the same implication, the death of Islam as an organizing philosophy. Just as the Muslim is faced with the reality of assimilation, Islam is faced with the same choice. Islam can cut itself lose from its past and embrace the material world of Western culture or it can blow itself up in a last final act of vengeance against the victor. Either way, Islam is dying.

The Sunni-Shia war that is centered in Syria is perhaps the way forward so Islam can evolve and become a workable mode of thought in a modern technological world. Like the Thirty years War, maybe old Islam is burning itself out and what comes next is a lighter, personal version of Islam. The Thirty Years War left large chunks of central Europe depopulated and others reduced to cannibalism so these transformations carry a heavy price.

Islam is collapsing and it could very well take the rest of us with it. The central challenge to leaders of the West is how to manage this civilizational collapse, which primarily means containing it. The past year has been about piety contests over who can invite the most Muslims in for settlement. The coming decade will be about who can keep the most Muslims out of the West.

 

Cutting The Cord

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Yesterday I got home early and flipped on the news for some reason. The only time I bother with TV news is when something big happens and they have pictures or video. Otherwise watching some dunces read from the teleprompter is of no interest to me. The shout-shows are even less interesting as they never have anyone on representing my ideological perspective. for whatever reason, I had the urge, so I put on Fox News.

They have a show called The Five starring Greg Gutfeld and some other people who are unknown to me. I saw a middle-aged guy who reminded me of every marketing VP I’ve ever met. There was a little blonde scold that I think worked for Bush. Being Fox, they had two bimbos with big hooters to fill out the set. Presumably, the gag here is they have five people on the set, hence the name.

I only watched for a few minutes as they were taking turns showing their outrage and dismay over something Trump said about a reporter. It was like an AA meeting where instead of taking turns confessing their sins, they took turns confessing Trump’s sins. “Hi my name is Greg and Donald Trump is a big meanie.” The way they were carrying on I thought maybe Trump dropped the F-bomb on some nuns, but it turns out he just said something mean to a reporter.

As I turned it off, I was thinking about why Fox would be anti-Trump. It seems to me that their target audience overlaps quite a bit with the sort of people who like Trump’s bluntness and candor. From what I gather, they have a parade of chattering skulls day after day saying bad things about Trump and his supporters. That strikes me as foolish, but maybe I’m misjudging the Fox New audience.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the cable news rackets. I’m about to cut the cord and go Kodi/Sling for my video entertainments and the one thing I will not have is a cable news channel. I’m not really sure I care, but I suspect the reason none of them offer a cable-free service is they know there’s not that much interest. I’d watch free, but I would not pay and I doubt many people would pay to see Fox or CNN.

The thing is, American news operations are pretty much the opposite of what they claim. They always talk about speaking truth to power, but that’s nonsense. They are not reporting on the doings of the powerful for the benefit of the people. They are lecturing the people on behalf of the powerful, operating as a propaganda organ for the managerial state.

Conservative media like Fox was supposed to be what the Progressive media claims to be, but it really has not worked out that way. Instead, they function as the media arm of the Republican Party. One of the reasons I no longer watch Fox News other than when there is a disaster is that I know what they plan to say before they say it. It’s the same old cheers I’ve been hearing since the Bush years.

One of my themes here is that the two parties are really just two sides of the dominant culture of America. You see this with the cable news operations. In the 90’s, CNN was the dominant operation and reflected the ruling consensus. It was called the Clinton News Network for a reason. Fox came along simply because CNN was so flagrantly biased in favor of one side.

In the 2000’s, MSNBC became the super Progressive challenge to CNN. This reflected the Progressive takeover of the Democratic Party and ruling elite. Fox boomed as the other side of the coalition needed a media outlet of its own. Poor CNN, which represented the old Clinton-Bush consensus, fell to third place. There were times when CNN had no ratings, suggesting no one was actually watching on purpose.

Fast forward to now and CNN has absorbed the MSNBC crowd to become the left hand side’s media outlet. They are now #2 in the ratings behind Fox News, which is the right hand side’s propaganda outlet. Whether or not the viewership numbers reported are accurate, I don’t know, but hardly anyone watches any of these channels. They exist as entertainment for the political class.

That’s why they are fighting the cord cutting and unbundling. Make CNN optional and they lose 99.99% of their “subscribers.” Fox would probably lose 95% of their subscribers. Fox could probably live off ad dollars, but as a much smaller operation. MSNBC would go bust in a week and the extra channels like CNBC would be gone in an hour.

Like so much of modern life, normalville is farmed for taxes and fees to keep the managerial elite in the lifestyle they expect. Working men are paying $100 a month for TV service so Bill O’Reilly can peddle his crappy books. If you want to be an optimist, the coming implosion of the cable model is one place to look. This rentier system that is the modern American economy is slowly unraveling, one cord cutter at a time.

Thinking About Stuff

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Thinking about things is both easy and hard. It is easy to sit around, like the mass of our academics, frittering away the day dreaming of nonsense that is of no consequence to anyone. If you are, for example, Leah Lowthorp of Harvard University, thinking about the world is easy. She is the Harvard College Fellow in Folklore & Mythology so she spends her days thinking about elves and sprites.

If on the other hand, if you wish to understand something about the real world, thinking about the stuff you see and hear for the purpose of discovering truths about the world is hard. The world is complicated. There are easy to recognize trend lines, but seemingly infinite variables underlying them. Even the stuff we think we now can be turned on its head quickly.

I would imagine that most of my readers have heard about the many worlds interpretation and some of you may even know the math. I used to have a reader who was a doctoral candidate in physics, but I have not heard from him in some time. Regardless, this is extremely tough stuff that is well beyond what most of us can comprehend. I suspect most people reject the “Big Bang” because it makes no sense to them. It does not make that much sense to physicists.

Anyway, this came to mind when reading this post by Steve Sailer today. Sailer is a smart guy, but he has his blind spots and knowledge holes just like everyone else. My first reaction was to jump on the fact that political parties are not very good proxies for ideological groupings. One of my pet themes is the broader, more subtle cultural groupings that define American political life.  Somewhere in the comments I make that point.

In those comments is something that got me thinking about how hard it is to think about this stuff in a clear way.

Worth reading all of the posts Jayman links to. He has written on this extensively.

It is also worth considering how much the political orientation gap among white Republicans and white Democrats has widened over time. In the mid-seventies, white Republicans were only slightly more likely to self-identify as politically conservative than white Democrats were. That difference has trebled in the last four decades to the point that white Republicans are now far more likely to identify as conservative than white Democrats are.

Political orientation is probably more heritable than partisan affiliation. I’d guess the gap will appear wider on the liberal-moderate-conservative spectrum than on the Democrat-independent-Republican one.

Two variables that are stronger predictors of fertility than political orientation or party affiliation are educational attainment (inversely correlated, especially for women) and religiosity (positively correlated–to the extent that high IQ people who attend religious services regularly outbreed the irreligious at every level of intelligence, social class, race/ethnicity, etc.

Parenthetically, educational attainment looks to be the driving force, not intelligence. Fertility by wordsum score varies little once educational attainment is controlled for, but educational attainment is a strong predictor even after wordsum score is controlled for–put more clearly, educational attainment is 5x as strong a predictor of fertility as IQ is.

The strong inverse relationship between education and fertility shows up strongly on the international level as well.

For as long as I have been alive, the official religion has claimed education results in fewer children. Specifically, educated women have fewer children. Even more specifically, stupid uneducated women have litters of rugrats because they are too dumb to work a rubber. This is the automatic response from Progressives anytime the topic of fertility comes up. I have heard it since forever.

That’s always struck me as ridiculous. Stupid teenage girls know where babies come from and how they are made. Humans have understood the mechanics of baby making since the dawn of time. The ancients knew about the use of Silphium as a contraceptive and abortifacient. The women of Rome were not heading off to the university to study folklore, yet they seem to have known where babies came from and how to prevent pregnancy.

Further, there are plenty of examples to the contrary. In the English speaking world, there was a time when the upper classes had loads of kids as a way to signal their success and intelligence.Then we have modern Iran where women don’t have ready access to formal education and their TFR is below replacement. The connection between education and fertility, if one exists, is not necessarily causal.

That’s where things get hard and maybe why the official response is the official response. There’s something that drives women to seek out credentials and it also may drive them to avoid motherhood. In other words, there’s some third element that explains the correlation between education and fertility. But, thinking about that is hard and it may reveal things that are unpleasant. Best not to get too close to those truths.

Watching the iceberg of life is easiest from a distance. Get too close and you discover unpleasant things, like there is a big portion of it under the waterline ripping a hole in the hull of your ideological ship. Everyone on the Titanic was wiser about the human condition after the ship started taking on water, but it came with a dear price. Most people are happy to not know and you can’t blame them for that.

Even so, fertility rates tend to fall when a society’s prospects are on the wane. In times of stress, we typically see a spike in religious observance. Yet in the West, church attendance has collapsed along with fertility rates. At the same time, the quest for credentials by women is at an all-time high. The women of the West are telling us something through their behavior, but no one seems all that interested.

Imagination Land

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If you view the mass media through a skeptical lens, you can’t help but notice how parts of the official narrative are at odds with observable reality. The “whole black lives matter” nonsense is a good example. It is a handful of paid trouble makers, but the media carries on like it is a great wave sweeping society. Even race obsessed blacks know that the biggest threat to black lives in America is black lives.

The thing is, the flow of made up nonsense is so steady and universal, it is easy to stop noticing it. Everything is warped to fit the narrative in a million little ways that is hard to notice after a while. Take a look at this “news” story in the sports pages.

A Florida State official said in a deposition that 20 rape claims had been made against Seminole football players in the last nine years, according to the Associated Press.

Melissa Ashton, the director of FSU’s victim advocate program, made the statement last summer during a deposition in the ongoing civil lawsuit filed by former student Erica Kinsman against the university. Kinsman said the university failed to respond to her allegations that former quarterback Jameis Winston raped her.

The deposition was released as part of an open records request by the Associated Press.

Ashton also asserted that she thought football players received special treatment at the school and that most of the alleged victims declined to press charges for fear of retaliation.

A Florida State spokesperson told the Associated Press that the school could not confirm the number of allegations because communications with victims in confidential through the victim advocate program.

The first red flag is the weird data set of nine years. That tells me they are trying to have fun with numbers to get a scary statistic. Even so, let’s use the nine year figure. How many players would have gone through the program in nine years? Roughly 300 is the number. A college program carries 100 players and adds/subtracts 25 per year. Using a full roster in year one. they added 200 new players over the subsequent eight years.

Let’s assume for a second that these rape claims are actually rapes and not the more common “next morning regrets”, that’s 20 rapes in a pool of 300 men. Let’s assume the worst case and none of the “rapes” were committed by the same men. That’s a 6.6% rapist population. Even the most outlandish estimates from the rape industry claim 4.5% of males are rapists.

So, the reporting of the “rape epidemic” seems plausible, until you think about how a man gets a scholarship to play football at an American college. For their demographic, these males have higher grades and test scores than their coevals. They overwhelmingly come from two-parent families compared to their cohort. They have participated in extracurricular activities for most of their primary school years.

More important, they are subjected to extensive background checks that go back to elementary school. These kids have been recruited since they hit puberty. Teachers, coaches and counselors have been hovering around them 24/7 as soon as they showed promise as an athlete. In college, they have full time minders to watch over them.

The point being is that the likelihood that football players will have a 50% higher rape rate is at odds with everything else we know. Scholarship athletes have higher graduation rates than the general student population and lower overall crime rates than their demographic cohorts (age, sex, race). In other words, the rape industry is suggesting that the “rape culture” as it pertains to athletics is this wild outlier, completely out of sync with all of the other statistics.

Of course, that’s not the case. One of those rape claims is against Jameis Winston. The police, Feds and school have investigated this, depriving him of many normal protections in an effort to corroborate the accuser’s charges. The facts suggest the accuser got drunk, went home with the player, woke up and figured out she may have won a golden ticket. How many of the other charges are similarly bogus is unknown, but some surely are.

That’s the easy stuff to spot for a crime thinker like the people reading this blog. Shame on you! The hard part is picking out the more subtle agit-prop baked into mass media reports. The line, “most of the alleged victims declined to press charges for fear of retaliation” is the sort of thing we always see in these stories, but never see much in the way of supporting evidence.

What we’re supposed to believe is the college campus is a testosterone fueled penis culture where women are treated like the TV show Mad Men imagined women were treated in the olden thymes. Here we have legions of examples where males are driven off campus for wearing a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo, but they have a free hand to wear the coeds as hats.

At Yale, a women falsely accused a male student of rape. Her charges were dismissed as entirely without merit. She was permitted to harass the male student and have her friends harass the guy. The campus even helped her do it. Yet, we’re supposed to think that women who were actually raped really fear retaliation? The only way to believe that is to believe the same admins celebrating “mattress girl” are then shaming real rape victims.

Mass media is Imagination Land for the ruling elite. Granted, much of it is deliberate. The people running the BBC want to use their power to shape behavior, promote their friends and skim money from the people through taxes. The same rackets exist everywhere in the West. That said, a lot of it is just a general insanity that has infected these people, like a rage virus. For them, reality has become the enemy at the gates.

What Comes Next

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Steve Sailer has an excellent column on how Europe can manage its Muslim lunatic problem. The other day, I made the point that the will of the people cannot be ignored forever. If the politicians can’t be made to do the people’s bidding, they will get new politicians. If the parties are too corrupt to produce the right politicians, then we get new parties. Ultimately, if the political system proves useless in dealing with threats, then the people get a new political system.

The French Revolution is the most common example of the people getting a new system. Through trial and error, they eventually got to the Second Republic. In America, the Constitution may still be the theoretical framework of the nation’s political system, but our government is nothing like it was 100 years ago or at the founding. As times change the political system changes, sometimes peacefully and sometimes violently.

The changes Sailer discusses are changes in the political system. Implementing a system of collective guilt where the clan of a criminal pays for the crimes as opposed to the current method of punishing just the criminal, requires a radical change in the political system. Sailer is no doubt being facetious with this, but it is not far-fetched. There has to be a way to keep the peace and if the current arrangements cannot keep the peace, we will get new arrangements.

John Derbyshire the other day mocked up his chart of probable outcomes with regards to the immigration issue. It sounds reasonable if one assumes the political systems remain static and you reject other possible outcomes, like revolts, anarchy, pestilence, war, etc. The countries of Europe, for example, have not faced an invasion like this since Batu Khan stood at the Mohi River.

The political systems and cultural structures in place did not evolve to face invasion, at least not invasion from over the horizon. Europe is what it is today due to the internal forces of Europe. For instance, the authorities no longer wear uniforms and solute one another in public. Instead, they wear pants suits and grin like chimps, so no one thinks they are Hitler.

What John gets right is the math, which stands to reason. The math makes clear that the ruling elite’s desire to replace their native populations with foreign imports is doomed to failure. A critical mass of Muslims will simply force changes on the political system that either trigger revolts or sends the West spiraling into anarchy.

Take a look at the responses from Western governments to the latest Muslim attacks. Civic life is being sharply curtailed, and restrictions are being placed on citizens. All over Europe, large public events are being cancelled because they fear a Muslim may detonate and kill a bunch of spectators. The Germans government is telling people to avoid walking in large groups so as not be a target.

Today, the French president is out there welcoming 30,000 new suicide bombers into France. There’s simply no way they can keep importing Muslims and remain France. They know this, at some level, which is why they put in jail anyone who points it out. Holland says, “France will remain a country of freedom” unless you’re opposed to the Muslim invasion. Then it is not a free country.

Because the people in charge have defined themselves in such a way that open borders is the only option, they must implement these sorts of polices in order to prevent mayhem. The Muslims will adapt and find new ways to blow themselves up in public. That means new restrictions. This cycle can only go on for so long before even the most docile honky throws down his pacifier and picks up a rock.

It’s tempting to assume that whites are too timid and lost to fight back. Some are, for sure, but action in the streets has a funny way of bringing out the revolutionary in even old men. A big part of what plagues the West is there’s no place for men in modern societies. Rioting Muslim hoards in the streets suddenly will spike the demand for white males willing to crack skulls. The supply will soon follow.

History says this sort of large scale, transformative event washes away the old solutions for long ago problems. What comes next is something different. Again, Europe is politically and culturally alien to its past of just a century ago. Two great wars did that. An invasion by millions of Muslims will surely mean a different Europe, even if they beat back the tide.

That’s where John’s five scenarios falls down. Whatever comes next means the West stops being the West, politically and culturally. If it lets in the Muslim invaders, it becomes Muslim and follows the path of every other Muslim society into a dark age. Alternatively, it becomes a police state to keep the Muslims from killing everyone else. Or the West changes to beat back the tide and do what is now unthinkable.

Regardless, what comes next will something entirely different than what we are today.