If you are on twitter, you no doubt have seen the twitter meme #cuckservative popping up on or against right-wing (allegedly right-wing) twitter feeds. Or is it twitterers?  If you put the term into a Google machine you get a decent array of stories discussing it. This summary from VDare does a good job describing its origins. Here’s a bite-sized story on the origins of the “social media fire storm” otherwise known as a tempest in a tea kettle.

A year or so ago I was made aware of the cuckold fetish by the usual way we stumble onto strange things these days. I put the word into Google, which I often use for spell check or to research the etymology of a word. I had no idea there was such a “thing” as a cuckold fetish, so I was more than a little surprised at what came back from my search. I admit to being a bit of prude so maybe all the cool kids are into this and I’m the weirdo.

It’s that prudishness that causes me to turn my nose up at this trend and the phrase itself. The word itself, cuckservative, just sounds disgusting. Some words are naturally pleasing to the ear, even when they describe disgusting things, while other words sound harsh and crude. The term for this effect is synesthesia.  In this case, cuckservative sounds crude because it is crude.

That said, big-foot journalists are noticing it and feel the need to comment upon it. The people rallying to the cause tend to make for colorful stories in the liberal media about the need to crack down on racism so my guess is this turns into a fiasco for the people championing it. The media will find a couple of colorful nutters ranting about the “Negroes” and make them representative of the racist bogeymen the left swears are lurking around every corner.

That’s the media circus. The real story, I think, is that ultra-fringy types have been able to get the attention of the for-hire conservatives that have come to dominate Conservative Inc. The reaction seen on twitter suggests to me that these people have been caught entirely unaware of the deep resentment toward them amongst many on the Right. Erick Erickson, for example, has been going around thinking he is a man of the people only to learn that the people are laughing at him.

I’m picking on Erick Erickson here only because I saw his twitter spat the other night. For all I know he could be a rock-ribbed conservative with impeccable credentials. I don’t read his site very often. I just look at foaming at the mouth rants like this one he posted and I suspect he’s a guy who likes speaking down to people like me. If I’m wrong I will be grateful for the correction.

What’s striking about this to me is we saw something similar in Europe where utra-fringy groups, branded as off-limits to decent people, gained support mocking the ruling elite over issues like immigration. They had their share of cranks and wack-jobs dressing up as Hitler, but they also had snarky amused types who made sport of the very serious people  warning about the comedic threats on social media. Before long a lot of normal people started joining in on the fun.

The best example of this phenomenon is Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement. It’s best weapon has been mockery. It’s very hard to demonize someone who is laughing and having a good time. This was something the American Right said they learned from Reagan. They were running around calling each other happy warriors throughout the 90’s, but that was mostly to hide the surrendering. Now, the Right is nothing but dry technocrats.

Donald Trump is where he is right now because he is good at mocking the very serious people in the GOP and in the media. Ted Cruz is probably even more critical of his party and the media establishment, but he is about as funny as cancer.I saw him on television the other day and I was reminded of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, except Cruz is not as self-deprecating.

The ground is shifting under the feet of the ruling classes. They can sense it, which explains the hysterics over Trump and to a lesser degree Sanders. Kevin Williamson, the very serious person at National Review, has written dress-over-the-head rants about both Trump and Sanders this month. In fact, he has written two rants about Sanders and two about Trump, all of them implying they are Nazis and their supporters insane.

Not being a seer, I have no idea what will come of this #cuckservative thing. My inclination is to say it will flame out and go away. Similarly, the people in charge will figure out how to deal with the growing tide of popular discontent. No matter how revolting the leaders, the people will not revolt. It’s no longer in the fiber of the people. But, maybe I’m wrong.

The other day, John Derbyshire had a column up that sparked a few somewhat unrelated thoughts about the general topic of social science. I read a fair amount of sites that would fall into the broad category of social science. I’m also a history buff and I have an obsession with religion and mass movements. Throw in an unrestrained enthusiasm for biological realism and I get a lot of exposure to the culture of social science.

John offers up a line that reminds me of something you see a lot in social science.

Putnam is, in short, a bigfoot scholar who can dress, cook, and serve a fine table of research in the human sciences … which he then, for reasons ideological, finds himself unable to digest. For a guy prominent in a field that has the word “science” in its title, he has a weirdly blithe approach to matters of cause and effect.

The word “why” comes a lot, especially in the comment sections of articles. That would, at first blush, seem logical. Understanding why something happens or why people act in certain ways is the sort of inquiry you would expect from science, even the soft sciences. Simply knowing that men prefer blondes is fine for marketing, but science should want to know why this is so.

That’s almost never what you encounter in the soft sciences. Instead, the word “why” always precedes a threat or warning in the social sciences. “Why blacks score lower on tests is most likely a legacy of racism” is letting you know that there can be but one answer and you’re wise to avoid the topic entirely. It’s not an angle of inquiry, it’s a flashing red light signaling danger.

The alternative is to assume a cause and then ask, “Why slavery continues to cast a shadow over black achievement led to a study of why….”  This is not a search for truth. It is a Jesuitical tactic intended, at best, to illustrate some pages of the Progressive catechism. The author is hoping to more fully explain some article of faith with a new take on the data. Education is riddled with this sort of language.

The allergy to knowing the answer to all of these questions shows up in the use of statistics. There are three aspects to inquiry. There’s observation, speculation and data. The overuse of statistics has relegated observation to a minor role and made speculation a heresy.Ooffering up a possible explanation for observable phenomenon is met with a rash of demands for “data to back it up!!”

When reading a paper, the author’s need to offer data to support even the casual use of semicolons results in text that is more footnote than text. I’ve read legislation amending the regulatory code that is easier to read than the typical social science paper. The fear of not providing data makes these papers unreadable, which is why so few are actually read. In fact, 90% are never cited by anyone, suggesting they are never read by anyone.

Maybe related, but I don’t know, is the fact that popular social science is never questioned. Malcolm Gladwell got rich publishing bullshit. Like a lot of people, I got a lot of yuks from his 10,000 hour rule, but he sold a lot of books and many of the beautiful people still site him. John makes a similar point about Robert Putnam, which is all of his proposed solutions have been tried dozens of times and no one ever points it out.

I also suspect there’s some outright bullshit in the popular stuff. This from John’s column brought that to mind:

Goffman, a young white woman, spent six years living among black proles in a Philadelphia slum for which she invented the cover name “6^th Street.” Again, the main part of her book—pages 9 to 194—is simply descriptive. It is in fact really just journalism, with very few numbers and not a single table, graph, or chart.

I should add that On the Run is rather good journalism, quite gripping to read. The chaotic lives of black proles are vividly described. The young men dodge police, plan for their next drug test, and engage in concurrent sexual relationships. The young women raise kids, hold minimum-wage jobs, and fight over the men.

John was probably unaware that a lot of sensible people think her book is bullshit. I’ve lived around black ghettos for a long time and cute little white girls don’t last long in the ghetto unless they are from a state agency or the police. How much of Goffman’s book is real is unknowable, but that’s true of a lot of what passes for social science. Goffman’s book is rare in that someone read it and the Internet forced a debate on its veracity.

Probably the biggest defect in social science is the fact that they never seem to get anything right. Chemistry has added immensely to human happiness. Physics and math have pushed material prosperity for centuries. Social science, in contrast, has nothing but a long list of goofy fads to show for itself. Worse yet, much harm has been done to humanity by following the ideas coming out of social science.

Mass media was not always about giving the megaphone to the stupid and crazy. In the early days of newspapers and almanacs, the producers were trying to transmit news and, often, high culture to the masses. The people producing the first mass production printed material were making a living, but they also were improving the lot of their fellow citizens. Ben Franklin is the best example of someone doing good, while making money, literally and figuratively.

Closer to our current age, movies and cartoons borrowed heavily from high culture. If you watch old Bugs Bunny cartoons, you’ll note a great deal of sophistication, like references to literature and classical music. The default assumption in western societies has always been that everyone looks up for inspiration. That’s no longer true. Now it is assumed that everyone looks down, trying to emulate the dysfunctional and deranged.

The question is whether the culture has changed media or that mass media has changed the culture. Maybe it is both. A good example is this story from the Telegraph about an old guy getting savaged for trying to be funny.

We live in a strange time in that the people in charge of the culture are at war with human biology in ways that we have never seen, at least not to this scale. In prior ages the religious would rage against vice, but that had some logic. A population of drinkers or gamblers is a drag on society. For most of human history scarcity was the the norm so society could not afford a lot of dead weight. Virtue had practical purposes.

Sexual taboos were mostly to keep the peace. Males compete with one another for females and females compete with one another for males. It should be easy to see how that can lead to trouble so cultures developed rules to limit violence and ritualized the competition. In the early middle ages, the Catholic Church implemented rules for sexual conduct to end things like cousin marriage, which people figured out was a problem.

Today, the people doing the ranting and raving about biology are religious fanatics from the Puritan tradition of Yankeedom. They’re driven by a desire to nose around in everyone’s business and push people around. There is a big hole where God used to exist and they deny their thing is a religion, but otherwise the people at the NYTimes could be sporting big buckles on their shoes and black hats.

He was not above seducing a young model by showing interest in her father’s cancer. He promised other women his mentorship and career advice before pushing them for sex acts. And he tried to use financial sleight of hand to keep his wife from finding out about his serial philandering.

Bill Cosby admitted to all of this and more over four days of intense questioning 10 years ago at a Philadelphia hotel, where he defended himself in a deposition for a lawsuit filed by a young woman who accused him of drugging and molesting her.

In other words, Cosby is like any other man. The drugging and raping stuff would be a crime, of course, but the rest of it is what every man does, particularly powerful men. It’s not clear Coz ever did any raping, as he has never admitted to any of it. Women seek the attention of high status males and high status males use that as a way to get them in the sack. Welcome to biological reality Graham and Sydney.

Even as Mr. Cosby denied he was a sexual predator who assaulted many women, he presented himself in the deposition as an unapologetic, cavalier playboy, someone who used a combination of fame, apparent concern and powerful sedatives in a calculated pursuit of young women — a profile at odds with the popular image he so long enjoyed, that of father figure and public moralist.

In the deposition, which Mr. Cosby has for years managed to keep private but was obtained by The New York Times, the entertainer comes across as alternately annoyed, mocking, occasionally charming and sometimes boastful, often blithely describing sexual encounters in graphic detail.

He talked of the 19-year-old aspiring model who sent him her poem and ended up on his sofa, where, Mr. Cosby said, she pleasured him with lotion.

He spoke with casual disregard about ending a relationship with another model so he could pursue other women. “Moving on,” was his phrase.

He suggested he was skilled in picking up the nonverbal cues that signal a woman’s consent.

“I think I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things, whatever you want to call them,” he said.

Through it all, his manner was largely one of casual indifference.

Of course he is indifferent. He’s probably baffled that anyone would be shocked that he liked women. Cosby is from a generation when people were not surprised that men pursued women. We used to know these things but after decades of control by religious lunatics named Graham and Sydney many people are shocked to learn that Bruce Jenner is not the norm.

This turns up in the date rape nonsense. We used to know that some males will cheat in the pursuit of women. The “Spanish Fly” hoax of the 60’s and 70’s did not spring from nothing. Elixirs to make women horny and stupid have been around since the dawn of civilization. That’s why letting girls hang out with unattached males was greatly limited. People knew that some percentage of men would “take advantage” of young women.

Lunatics from the womyn’s studies departments, however, have made everyone forget that, so every weekend young girls get knee walking drunk with strange men and some percentage of them wake up regretting their choices. That’s why Graham and Sydney are so baffled by the Coz. For their whole lives they were taught that only monsters like Hitler did these things so they are properly outraged when Cosby is nonchalant about it.

Interest in Mr. Cosby’s deposition grew this month when a federal judge unsealed a 62-page memorandum of law in the case, which had been settled in 2006. The memorandum contained excerpts from the deposition, including Mr. Cosby’s acknowledgment that he had obtained quaaludes as part of his effort to have sex with women.

The parties have been prohibited from releasing the memorandum because of a confidentiality clause that was part of the settlement agreement, but the deposition itself was never sealed. This month, Ms. Constand’s lawyer asked the court to lift the confidentiality clause so her client would be free to release the nearly 1,000-page deposition transcript. The Times later learned that the transcript was already publicly available through a court reporting service.

What the Times leaves out is the judge should never have unsealed the documents, but he is a fellow fanatic so they just assume it is proper. This is something you always see with fanatics. The ends justify the means. When Obama was running for Senate, fanatics got sealed documents into the hands of the press in order to eliminate his competition. In California, a judge willy-nilly overturned a marriage referendum simply because he did not like the result.

Another aspect of this story that you see regularly with Progressive fanatics is the grudge. They never forget a slight. Cosby made the mistake of railing against black ghetto culture and siding with traditionalists over personal responsibility. The Cult never forgets and they eventually found a way to hang him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m fond of pointing out that America has a lot in common with Iran these days. The fetishes and fascinations of our ruling lunatics are different from those of the Iranian lunatics, but the underlying motivations are the same. A group of fanatics is trying to force the rest of us into their fanaticism. Here’s a good example.

Local police received a complaint when a shopper discovered Nazi and Confederate merchandise at a popular flea market last weekend, according to Chief William Wright.

An officer responded to the Redwood Flea Market on South Turnpike Road Sunday to investigate the report and found Nazi and Confederate memorabilia for sale. He told the complainant, who is Jewish, there was nothing police could do because the merchandise was on private property.

“There was a table set up with this material,” Wright said, unsure of the exact amount, but speculating several showcases. “It’s not criminally illegal, but obviously it offended this person. It causes some people a sense of being uncomfortable. Certainly the owner could preclude this merchandise.”

The complainant, a town resident, feared possible backlash and asked to remain anonymous. He told the Record-Journal that in addition to several showcases there was Nazi merchandise, including German helmets with swastikas, images of Hitler, and Jewish stars of David, in a truck.

“I was shaking and almost vomiting,” he said. “I had to run. My grandmother had numbers,” he said, referring to the Nazi system of tattooing numbers on prisoners.

I doubt that this man’s grandmother had such a tattoo. The tattoo that looms so large in modern lore was not common. It was just not terribly practical. But, inter-generational transitive post-traumatic stress is still a big deal for many Jews. It’s an excuse to make a scene in public trying to get some grace on the cheap.

Ken Dubar, who owns and manages the flea market, disputed the man’s account of how much anti-semitic and Confederate merchandise is at the weekend venue.

“There may be some of those items, some collectibles and some might be counterfeit,” he said.

Dubar also emphasized police found no evidence of any crime.

Jason Teal, president of the Meriden-Wallingford NAACP, said he was not familiar with the flea market and had not heard any complaints about the merchandise being sold there.

“It’s difficult because it’s on private property and it’s considered free speech,” Teal said.

The man also contacted Mayor William W. Dickinson Jr., who immediately asked Wright to determine if any laws were broken.

“I had to check with the chief over what is actionable and what isn’t,” Dickinson said. “Unless something violates state or federal law, there’s no jurisdiction for government to do anything. We had to ask, is it something controlled by law?”

Unremarked here is the fact the local cop was not sure if there was a crime. That’s how far down the fascist hell hole we have fallen as a society. I’m old enough to remember when “this is a free country” was the default response to this stuff. Even lunatics like the guy making the complaint would have been tempered by it.

Today, it is just assumed that the lunatics have the whip hand. Everyone, including the cops, figured it is best to ask permission than to run afoul of the religious authorities. This is no different than what you would see in Iran or Saudi Arabia. People are more worried about the fanatics than the cops.

The irony here is the lunatic who made the scene not only will not be charged, but he is now pretending to be the victim. The newspaper is hiding his identity as if he has something to fear, when he’s the one making a nuisance of himself. That  is the real danger we face. These nuts are convinced they are defending themselves as they try to pull the roof down on all of us.