Category Archives: Culture

Predatory Colonialism

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In the olden thymes, rich people from rich European countries would set up shop in poor countries. They would either subdue or kill the local chieftains so they could take control of the country. Then they would siphon off natural resources for use back home. Because the Europeans had an excess of young men looking for adventure, populating the colonies with Europeans was a good way to gain a tighter grip on the locals. In the Americas, the locals were shunted aside, killed or driven off. The point was to get at the valuables and send them back to the mother country. That’s the basics of colonialism.

Today, rich people from Western countries go around the world siphoning off human resources, the top talent, from the developing world, importing them into their home countries. There’s not a shortage at home, it’s just cheaper to bring in STEM workers from India as indentured servants. Similarly, it is cheaper to bring in Latino domestics than hire lower class Americans. But, just as with the older form of colonialism, this new form leaves the pillaged country the loser in the trade.

In the old days, the colonizer at least had some incentive to develop local talent. They needed people to run the plantations, the mines and the lumber mills. They also needed a trustworthy managerial class to carry out the mundane tasks of colonial rule. The first wave of post-colonial leaders in Africa were men educated in Europe and America. Ghana, for example, was lead to independence by Kwame Nkrumah, a man educated in Britain and America. India benefited greatly from the British colonial system. It’s fair to say that Britain left the country better than she found it.

The old colonial system was not all bad and in many cases, mostly good. The new colonialism is arguably worse than the old style because it impoverishes the subject countries without leaving anything of value behind. Skimming off the talented portion of the population, the smart fraction, walls off the country’s ability to advance into modernity. Harvesting the hard working and industrious, as America is doing to Latin America, leaves behind the worst parts of the population. Mexico is a narco-state, in small part, due to every Mexican with anything on the ball having left Mexico.

That’s the immorality of the open borders/no borders fanaticism of our ruling elites. They tell themselves they are doing the humane thing by letting the talented flee the provinces for the West. Tyler Cowen’s toady regularly makes this claim. Jeb Bush has made this claim. What they never bother to address is what happens to the people left behind. There’s a deliberate Detroit-ification of these places. The bulwark of their societies are hauled off to America leaving the rest to the mercies of the worst elements, suddenly unconstrained by the smart fraction.

There’s also something else. In every society there is an implicit bond between the elites and the rest, the rest with the rest and the elites amongst themselves. This lattice work of loyalties is what makes large scale human organization possible. Evolutionary psychologists call it empathy, the ability and willingness to mentally trade places with a fellow human being. That’s fairly easy when the other person looks like you, sounds like you and shares your heritage. Anyone who has been in a foreign land and spotted a countryman knows that look of recognition and the feeling of camaraderie that comes naturally in those circumstances.

Skimming the elites from subject countries breaks the bond between those society’s elites and their people. Importing labor to undercut domestic labor breaks the bonds between ruler and ruled in Western countries. Just as bad, this blended global elite has a transactional relationship amongst themselves. At least they assume that’s the basis of their dealings, but humans are not robots and those old biological loyalties are still lurking in the background. Europe is terribly close to war over Ukraine because one side thinks its just business and the other thinks it is tribal.

The argument against slavery was never just about the slave. The immorality of the custom damaged the slave master more than the slave by robbing him of his empathy. Similarly, the argument against colonialism is it required good men to do horrible things to other men for the system to work. Open borders and unfettered immigration has the same problem. Whatever the benefits, the disruption to the normal rhythms of society have costs that far outweigh those benefits.

The Left’s Embrace of Islam

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Belief is a funny thing. I can go to bed thinking my team won the game, despite having gone to be before it ended, and wake up to learn they blew it and lost. In other words, I can think one thing and suddenly think the opposite once new information is presented. I used to think BMW’s were great cars until I drove one. I still think they are great cars, but just not for me.  In other words, even in areas of taste, the rational part of our brain works from facts and experience. New information results in new patterns of thought.

That’s not how it works with beliefs. I know very smart people who are also devout Christians. They believe God created the heavens and earth. They believe God created man in his image. Evolution, as far as they are concerned is a nice hobby, but not science and mostly nonsense. They simply don’t believe any of it and no amount of data or experience can shake that belief. It’s why I seldom engage in debate with ID’ers. You can’t argue about belief as belief is immune to facts and reason. Therefore, there can be no debate.

The thing about faith and belief is you can fake belief to a point, but you can’t fake disbelief. You see that on-line when liberal sock puppets post on conservative sites. They try really hard to pretend to be down with the issue, but they just can’t stop themselves from inserting exceptions. The best example I recall is the fake Jon Huntsman supporters from the fever swamp showing up in the comment sections. They would swear they were “right-wing conservatives” and then launch into what was essentially a liberal fantasy about Jon Huntsman. They simply could not maintain the facade. Their belief was too strong.

Faith is a biological thing. It is thought that belief as a human trait co-evolved with language. That makes it one of our oldest traits. Religion is a part of every human society that has existed. There are no records of any society devoid of some form of religious faith. It’s why when people say America or the West is becoming less religious, they are mistaken. Less Christian for sure, but the believing trait is still there in the same degree. It is just expressed differently. The political and social ideologies of the West now serve as the vessel for the religious impulse. As Rousseau called it in the Social Contract, the West now has the Civil Religion.

If you have been reading my stuff, you know I’m fond of calling American Liberalism a cult. It operates like a cult, even having a Führerprinzip. It’s temporary and tied to the democratic processes, but the dynamic is the same. Obama is the cult leader now, but will soon be replaced by whoever runs for president on the 2016 ticket. Obama worship will continue, but his leadership role of the one true faith will be handed to another. It’s not an accident that their heroes are all referred to by three letters, FDR, JFK, MLK, RFK, BHO. Bill Clinton is about to be demoted simply because no one calls him by his initials anymore.

So, where am I going with this?

This post by Jonah Goldberg got me thinking about what’s happening with the Left and Islam. Since Rousseau, radicals have had a loathing for Christianity. It has always been the big scary monster in their myths and legends. Today, they fret more about Bible-toting grannies in the South than bomb wielding Muslims in their own backyard. If you put “Christian backlash” in a Google machine, it returns over 8 million results. The phase “Muslim backlash” nets 1.7 million results, most about anti-Muslim backlash by Christians.

As an aside, you’ll note how they changed Reverend Martin Luther King into Doctor Martin Luther King. There’s never any mention of his faith. The same is true about the early Progressives of the the late 19th and early 20th century. There’s no mention of the fact that early Progressives claimed Christ as their source of legitimacy. The Temperance Movement, for example, is now cast a bunch of crazy church ladies, rather than progressive reformers. For the modern Left, Christianity is now beyond the pale, as unacceptable as racism or antisemitism.

This derangement is evident in the Obama administrations biological aversion to mentioning Islam in the context of the barbarism we are seeing in the Near East. Their refusal to accept a link between attacks on Jews in Europe and the fact the attackers are all Muslim has become a sick comedy. Obama was on television the other day complaining about the Crusdades, as if we have a problem with terrorism from the Knights Templar. As laughable as it is, they can’t seem to stop themselves. As I said, belief is a visceral thing. It’s biological. The modern Left has somehow come to believe that Islam is their soul mate in some way.

This bit from the Goldberg column is a good example:

In an essay for the Wall Street Journal, Secretary of State John Kerry asserts that “violent extremism can’t be justified by resorting to religion. No legitimate religious interpretation teaches adherents to commit unspeakable atrocities” such as those committed by the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other Muslim fanatics. For those who invest in John Kerry supreme religious authority, that statement is unquestionably true. The problem is that very few people take their religious cues from Kerry — or Obama.

Kerry is repeating a line common on the Left. It is the No True Scotsman fallacy. In this case, Kerry is saying no true religion advocates murder. That’s nonsense, of course, which is why it is a fallacy. Now, if you are a fan of esoteric writing, you can argue he is telling the flock that Islam is not behind these acts and it is just propaganda blaming innocent Muslims. After all, not true Muslim advocates terrorism so it must be something else at work, like easy access to guns or racism.

That’s how Muslims hear it and I suspect that’s the true intention here. Kerry is clodhopper so I doubt he wrote the essay. It sounded nice so he signed off on it. The people who wrote it and the many speeches of Obama on the topic are true believers like Obama. They see in Islam a natural ally and therefore cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the obvious. There was a time when it was polite to avoid pointing out the link, in the hope that more sensible Muslims in the Middle East would deal with these lunatics. We’re well beyond that so it makes no sense to pretend Islam is not at the heart of ISIS, for example.

Still, the Left is embracing Islam and that’s no small thing. I’ve often wrote that modern progressive thought looks a lot like Islam. The anti-rationalism, the mysticism and the occasionalism are there in both groups. It’s a one way love affair, of course, but the Left’s deep hatred for Christians appears to have pushed them into an emotional partnership with the barbarians beyond the edge of civilization. For this generation of Western radicals, ISIS is the Black Panther Party of their parents generation.

My Fridge is Spying on Me

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On my last trip out of the ghetto, I rented a car at Logan Airport. It was a nondescript sedan as you would expect from a rental car company. It may have been a Hyundai or possibly a Toyota. All of our cars look the same nowadays so I suppose it does not matter. At some point I stopped to fiddle with the radio, hoping that maybe the satellite radio was working. I don’t have a Sirius subscription, but I would if I spent a lot of time in the car. It’s a great service. Fiddling around, I noted that the car was Bluetooth enabled meaning I could (maybe) play music from my phone, but I had things to do so I went on my way, leaving it for later.

At some point as I was tooling around Cambridge, a friend called and suddenly the radio stopped. Then the phone ringer was coming through the car speakers. When I answered the phone I was hearing the call through the car’s speakers and speaking through a hidden microphone somewhere. It was a little disorienting at first as I was not expecting it. Later in the day I had time to fiddle with the radio again and I noticed my phone had synced with the car automatically. I left the Bluetooth enabled on my phone by mistake. Thus, my phone and this strange car were able to conspire without my knowing.

I noticed that a lot of phone data from previous renters had been loaded into the car’s radio. Who knows if they knew it. I deleted my phone from the list and shutoff my Bluetooth. I keep nothing on phone of any value, but my phone is willing to partner with just about anyone, it seems, so who knows what mischief it could drag me into. My phone has now become another sentient thing I have to look after or beware of, as the case may be.

It’s going to get much worse as our rulers insist on wiring up more of our stuff so they can keep better track of us. The Internet of Things trend promises to let all sorts of people keep tabs on us in our homes. The same people who are always getting hacked and losing our credit card data will now be in charge of making sure the fridge does not tell tales out of school about us. I’m sure that will work out just fine. What could possible go wrong?

Of course, these services will be offered “free” but you will consent to having the electric company turn off your lights at night, the gas company monitoring your heat usage, the diet police watching your beer consumption. At first it will just be friendly e-mails and texts about your wastefulness. I get these now from the power company telling me I use more electric than my neighbors. They include a little graph, I’m always in red, and “hints” about how I can be a better steward of the environment. What comes after the “hints” is probably a knock on the door.

Increasingly, the private space of life is contracting. The government gets to read your private correspondence without notice. They can listen to your mobile phone chatter. They analyze your financial data looking for trouble. Now they have our health care data and will surely be using that in ways that only paranoids from a prior era imagined. If you complain about it at home, within earshot of the television, that could be a problem. Your TV is no longer a trusted member of the home.

All of it is for your own good and mostly welcome by the public. The thing about the custodial state is the inmates quickly get used to the walls, the gates, the guards, the instructions. Even the worst police states on earth have a cooperative and docile population. North Korea is arguably the worst place on earth. They regularly make the uncooperative hold a mortar shell until it goes off. The people have been on the edge of starvation for decades, yet they peacefully submit. Most Americans will have no trouble submitting to Big Google as long as the flow of goodies does not stop.

A world without privacy or volition is not entirely alien to the human animal. Early man surely lived in close proximity with his clan, sharing all of the intimate details of life with the clan. Well into settlement, privacy was a rarity. Heck, well into the 20th century, outhouses for two were common in rural America. If you can share a two-holer with another member of the family, there’s not much you are going to think is private. I suspect communal living amongst the Vikings is why some Scandinavians are so shameless.

In the “hodgepodge” society our rulers are planning for us, privacy will not exist. Everything you do will be monitored by someone and therefore made public at some point. In such a world, there’s no need to for any sense of shame. There would be no point. In prisons and basic training, the near total lack of privacy fundamentally alters human relations. Our rulers with their dreams of trench socialism, are sure the hodgepodge will be like boot camp or an army base. History says it will be more like San Quentin or North Korea.

In a world where even your fridge is spying on you, there can be no trust. We have plenty of experience with low trust societies like those in sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East. North Korea or Albania back in the Soviet says were examples of extremely low trust surveillance societies, but they were homogeneous. A heterogeneous, zero trust society sounds a lot like Angola State Prison, but our rulers are convinced otherwise. I’ll be dead before reach that point, but that’s where we are heading.

The Tyranny of Youth

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I’m an old man and that means I get cranky when the kids walk on my lawn, if I had a lawn. Like all old people, I was young once. That’s what gives old farts an edge over young pups. We remember what it was like to be them, but they have no way of knowing what it is like to be us. That, alas, is the only benefit of being old. Well, that and the willingness to say things in public that you’re afraid to say when you’re young. Otherwise, I fully admit to agreeing with W.C. Fields when it comes to young people.

I’m exaggerating a bit, but the tyranny of youth culture has gotten out of hand. Mark Steyn has commented for years that male leads are getting younger and more feminine. If I recall, he used the example of William Shatner playing Kirk in the original Star Trek series. Shatner was in his 30’s and playing a role as a middle-aged man. The current Star Trek movies feature boys in their 20’s playing boys in their 20’s inexplicably given command of a starship.

I’m not a big consumer of pop culture and maybe that’s why. Once I reached 30, everyone in music, TV and movies started looking young and silly to me. Even so, pop culture has always been juvenile and repetitive. The Honeymooners, for example, has been a standard template for TV for as long as I’ve been alive. I Love Lucy has been the template for couple-based sitcoms for fifty years now. Eventually, it gets boring for adults so it is left for kids, who are seeing it all for the first time.

That’s no what this post is about, however. The whole youth culture thing is now invading public affairs. The rulers feel it necessary to have bimbos as spokeswomen. Public affairs programming is beginning to look like the cafeteria at your local college. Rather than crabby old guys and gals with years of experience talking about the news, we have hot looking airheads repeating what they heard from some other hot looking airhead.

It’s not just TV news either. The reason for this post is something I saw on National Review the other day. If you look at the picture of the writer, it’s clear he is a child. He looks like he should be organizing the fraternity keg party this weekend, not offering opinions on the Federal Reserve. As an adult, I have no reason to care what this young fellow has to say about anything so why in the world is he offered up as an expert?

So that I don’t sound like a terrible meanie, I’m sure Jon Hartley is a fine young man with a world of promise. His resume says he graduated from U. Chicago with a degree in economics. He held jobs doing statistical work in public and private firms. He would make a great intern at a big bank or possibly a PhD candidate at a university. He’s clearly ambitious and one of his ambitions is to be famous. All of that is wonderful and I wish him the best.

Regardless, he is unqualified to write opinions about current affairs. That pipe I talked about the other day is already packed full of nonsense. The tiny capillaries that remain open to the transmission of sensible information cannot be clogged with the musings of children hoping to be famous one day. Surely there are seasoned adults with knowledge acquired through experience willing to write for these sites. if not and all we are left with is the tyranny of baffled young people it’s time to consider disbanding and going our separate ways.

Nero Bush

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When reading about the Julio-Claudian dynasty, I’m always struck by the juxtaposition of Nero and Augustus. Nero seems to have hated the very idea of Rome and everything associated with it. Every description of his time as emperor brings to mind someone obsessed with debasing everything around him, including his own position. Shocking the sensibilities of the nobles and offending the people appears to be all that mattered to him.

Augustus, it seems to me, loved the idea of Rome. For instance, he carried on many of the Republican traditions, despite the fact he was the emperor. There was certainly a political motive to pretending the old system was still in place, but he had to have a fair amount of respect for the idea of Rome to see the value in maintaining the customs. Of course, Suetonius claims he said, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” That’s the mind of man in love with his city and what it represents.

I’m surely over simplifying, but this is not a post about Rome. I just find Roman history a great starting place when trying to noodle through events of today. One thousand years of history provides a lot of useful examples and lessons. Add in some of the great historians and chroniclers and you get a great source of material for a blog post by a random idiot.

Anyway, I was thinking about that when reading this the other day.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that her greatest success as a politician was the rise of Tony Blair to lead a party he called New Labour: “We forced our opponents to change their minds.” As yet, Barack Obama can make no similar boast. Just the opposite: He radicalized his Republican opponents, and empowered most those who agreed with him least. With the presidential campaign of Jeb Bush, Obama can finally glimpse Thatcher-style success. Here, at last, is an opponent in his own image.

What can the son and brother of a president, grandson of a senator, and great grandson of the founder of the Walker Cup have in common with the son of a failed Kenyan politician? Look beyond the biography to the psychology.

The first part is nonsense on stilts, but this is David Frum and most of what he says is nonsense. He does have solid connections to the neo-conservatives so it is often worth weeding through the nonsense to learn what’s going on with the Cult of Leo Strauss. The last bit is what got my attention. Obama is a bitter weirdo whose presidency looks like a revenge fantasy from someone with a deep antipathy for America. Making this comparison to Jeb Bush is no small thing.

This bit he quotes from Bush is stunning to me:

I’m bicultural—maybe that’s more important than bilingual. For those who have those kinds of marriages, appreciating the culture of your spouse is the most powerful part of the relationship. Being able to share that culture and live in it has been one of the great joys of my life. We chose Miami to live because it is a bicultural city. It’s as American as any, but it has a flair to it that is related to this bicultural feeling. I wanted my children to grow up in a bicultural way.

You cannot be bicultural. To quote my ancestors, a man who chases two rabbits catches none. You can be an American with an appreciation of or even a fondness for another culture. You can be a Mexican with an appreciation of America. On the other hand, you can be an American who moves to another land and adopts the culture of that land, just as millions of Mexicans have adopted American culture. You cannot be on both sides of the fence. Claims as such suggest to me that Jeb Bush really does not like America all that much.

As Jeb Bush himself notes, there is a Bush family tradition of moving away from the culture into which one is born, to plunge into another. George H.W. Bush, born to a family of Northeastern grandees, reinvented himself as Sunbelt conservative. George W. Bush, born in New Haven, Connecticut, was the only member of the next generation of Bush brothers not born in Texas, and yet became the most Texan of them all. Jeb Bush moved away first from Texas, and then from his family’s patrician identity as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

By itself, this can be easily seen as a tick of successful families. The sons want to distinguish themselves from the father so they go another way. It’s one thing for one son to embrace the earthy side of the family. It is quite another for the other son to go so far as to embrace another country’s culture entirely.

Bush seems to have something more in mind than just the familiar (if overstated) claim that immigration can counter the aging of the population. He seems to think that there is some quality in the immigrants themselves that is more enterprising—more dynamic to use his favorite term—than native-born Americans. This is not only a positive judgment on the immigrants themselves. It is also a negative judgment on native-born Americans.

I used to wonder how anyone could think it wise to put a guy like Obama in the White House. You have a better chance of getting struck by lightning and hitting the lottery on the same day than meeting a man with Obama’s bio. He is the very definition of un-American. At least his supporters could claim he embraced America and loved his countryman. It’s an implausible claim, but not an impossible one.

Jeb Bush hates his country and his countrymen. That’s clear in all of his utterances. Putting this man in the White House is akin to handing the purple to Nero, after knowing what Nero intended to do as emperor. At least the Romans had the fall back policy of assassinating their intolerable leaders. We have to hope there’s a Sirhan Sirhan out there and he is able to slip past the Praetorian Guard. That’s not much of a fall back plan.

It’s also no way for a sane people to manage their affairs. I’m not prone to doomsday thoughts, but this may be the critical moment in the history of the nation. If this self-loathing lunatic is put in the White House, the country is finished. Even if the people rise up and stymie this guy’s drive to gut the country, the consequences of that will be almost as bad. The senate murdering Julius Caesar may have stopped Julius Caesar, but it also put an end to the Republic.

Nero Bush must be stopped.

 

The Replacements

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It is about ten degrees today, at least it was, so everyone is bundled up as if they are stationed at the Arctic Circle. I come out onto the street and I’m greeted by a big talking garbage bag. It has legs and I see a set of eye peering out at me. Two little boys are tagging along and the bag is speaking to them in Arabic. Such is life in the ghetto. it is where you get to see the business end of ruling class social experiments.

Muslim women walking on the street in the niqab or the burka are not just following a custom. It is a statement. In Muslim lands the point of the outfit is to warn off other males. It is a form of modesty and it is a warning. These women belong to men not you and you better keep that in mind. In America, the outfit is to let you know that the Muslims are taking over this turf and you better get used to it.

Islam does not play well with others, but Arabs don’t play well with others either. It is a toxic mix that has left the Middle East a hyper-violent, chaotic jungle in the desert. When Muslims move out of their homelands into other lands, they first work to displace the locals and then they inflict their customs and religion on whoever is left. Hamtramck Michigan is a good example. The US government probably plans to put the Yemeni refugees they keep recruiting in Hamtramck.

Sally Howell, a professor in the University Michigan system, has written extensively about Muslims in America. One of her themes is how Muslim immigrants can bring down crime in a city. She points to Hamtramck as an example. What she does not mention, and what never gets mentioned, is how this happens. Of course, we all know the answer to that, it’s just not proper to say it in public. It’s that old mokita again.

In the Imperial Capital, population displacement became the tool for urban renewal. The Washington Post ran articles about how the Hispanic immigrants were lowering crime rates. It was always the same gooey nonsense you get from immigration romantics, but that was just frosting. The message being sent to readership was that the immigrants were not adding, they were replacing. MS-13 tends to take a dim view of the locals. A rash of machete attacks sent the message. Washington is no longer an urban jungle.

Steve Sailer is fond of pointing out how Section 8 is used to clear out undesirables from urban areas the Cult wants to reclaim. They move the problem to some unsuspecting suburb and then move in gays and hipsters to spruce of the former ghetto. It’s a form of ethnic cleansing. Instead of shooting the unwanted population, they bribe them to leave. Hell’s Kitchen, for example, has become Hell’s Breakfast Nook.

Immigration serves a similar role for the people in charge. Chicago and Baltimore, for example, have been desperately trying to attract Hispanics to “clean up” their cities. The problem is the violence is too frightening even for Mexicans, who know a thing or two about violence. Muslims may turn out to be their solution. Baltimore looks pretty good compared to Sana’a.

With Jeb Bush the most likely president, you can be sure he will import millions of Muslims from the countries his family screwed up a decade ago. There’s more than enough displaced Muslims in the Near East now to fill up a couple of America cities so he’ll have plenty of support from the Democrats. His own party just wants Hindu and Chinese slaves for Silicon Valley and Hispanic slaves for the service industry.

Ask not for whom the talking trash bag ululates. It ululates for you.

The Elite Monoculture

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Libertarians and some conservatives often argue that Western political thought is divided into two camps, the heirs of Hobbes and the heirs of Locke. One camp wants to impose their vision of society on the people, while the other camp wants to let the people figure it out on their own. There’s really no third choice, so it is not a terrible way of looking at political philosophy. Democratic political systems would fall into the latter group and everything else would end up in the former group.

That’s fine but not useful beyond labeling the bad guys as authoritarians, which is probably the point. Both Locke and Hobbes started from a premise that we now know is ridiculous. Early man was not in a state of perpetual war or perpetual cooperation. Early man, before settlement, lived in small bands of no more than 150 members. Within the group, there was most likely little violence and communal property. Between groups, violence was common and brutal at times.

Putting that aside, the better way of looking at the great divide is between those who think there is a perfect social arrangement and those who do not. The former imagine there is a perfect way to order human affairs to achieve maximum happiness. That perfect way is both discoverable and achievable. Morality dictates that anything and everything be done in order to reach this state of social perfection. The Rousseau camp is focused on the end and prepared to use any means necessary to achieve it.

The other mode of thought rejects the human perfectibility. The best we can do is incrementally improve the material state of society by adding a few grains of sand, each generation, to the foundations of society. That necessitates preserving the traditional institutions, while adding to them as they are the storehouse of knowledge, built up over countless generations through trial and error. The Burke camp focuses entirely on the means knowing the ends are beyond the ability of man to perfect.

Obviously, that’s a very simple way of looking at things. Since the French Revolution, the Team Rousseau and Team Burke have been battling over the shape of western society. One side trying to create the perfect society, whatever it takes, and the other side trying to stop them from pulling the roof down on everyone. It’s a one way fight, of course, as the Team Rousseau attack and the Team Burke defends, but it takes a long time to pull down 2,000 years of cultural institutions.

This is supposed to be reflected in the American political system. The Democrats are Rousseau-ist fanatics and the Republicans are the Burkean Conservatives, defending America from the rage zombies of the Left. A lot of people believe that is how things work. Sensible people are convinced that if the GOP can get control, they will roll back the welfare state, chase the sodomites from the Temple and bring America back in line with her constitutional past.

At the same time, liberals are sure the other guys are going to roll back the welfare state, chase the sodomites from the Temple and bring America back in line with her constitutional past. They toss and turn at night over the prospect of another Bush siting on the throne. They think Sarah Palin is hiding under their bed, ready to stuff their uterus with Bibles and sew their legs shut. It’s why they never quit, no matter how disastrous their schemes.

Kevin Williamson goes goes down this road in his piece on the authoritarian impulses of the Left.

The Right is finally coming around to the understanding that what mainly distinguishes it from the Left is not its general preference for muscular foreign policy, its not always convincing defense of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or even its relatively faithful reading of the Constitution, as important as those things are. Rather, the fight between Right and Left is about coercion.

One side is willing to use any means necessary to reach the promised land. The other side is restrained by the means they will tolerate and they are willing to accept less than optimal results. If the people prefer high tariffs, for example, that’s fine as long as it is debated and enacted in a constitutional process. The Right can argue for something on rational grounds, but accept less knowing that people are seldom rational. That’s the claim, least ways.

That would be great, if it were true, but it has not been the case for a long time now, at least in American politics. In fact, what we call “conservative” is pretty much just the same stuff we call “liberal” but with slightly different ends. This thread on NRO is a good example of what I mean.

Abby McCloskey supports a universal maternity benefit on conservative grounds. Some women, including many high-wage workers employed by large firms, already have access to paid leave through their employers. The women who’d benefit most from a universal maternity benefit are low-wage workers employed by small firms, for whom paid leave is virtually unheard of. These women tend not to have the savings or the family support they’d need to ride out a long spell without paid work. When they fall out of paid work to care for a newborn, it can be difficult for them to find their way back in. Moreover, lengthy interruptions in work experience can lower one’s wages considerably over time. That’s why McCloskey, writing in Forbes, has suggested that a modest universal maternity benefit is best understood as a way to keep working mothers from falling into hardship without punishing employers. Because the benefit she proposes is fairly small, to help ensure that it doesn’t crowd out more generous paid leave policies currently offered by employers, McCloskey estimates that it would cost only $2.5 billion to provide six weeks of paid leave to workers without other paid leave options, an amount she believes can be raised by eliminating waste from the $93 billion spent on unemployment benefits in 2012 and the $200 billion spent on disability insurance each year.

Those ruling class women have all sorts of privileges that come from their status. They have private trainers and dieticians so they can remain slim and attractive, even into late middle-age. Maybe we should mandate that too. What you see here is a fight between green eye-shade types over which Utopian fantasy is more cost effective. Abby McCloskey, I’m sure, considers herself a conservative firebrand, yet she accepts every key premise of the Rouuseau-ists. Namely, the perfect arrangements are discoverable, achievable and we have an obligation to pursue them – no matter what.

The typical Republican and most so-called conservatives accept this without question. Bush the Minor famously said that “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, Government has got to move.” This is the very definition of the custodial state, the dreamed of end result of every Rousseau-ist cult since 1789. It is simply impossible to believe that and think they can be any limit on state coercion of the citizens. Those are the words of the police state. Yet, he was applauded by his party and most of the professional Right.

Young people can be forgiven for thinking a Ted Cruz is a far right conservative. It’s what they know and what they have been sold. Reality is a different thing. Our political culture now functions within a broom closet of the main room of western political thought. Within that small intellectual space, everyone agrees on the big stuff and most of the small stuff. The big fights over who gets to parade around in purple while the semi-permanent custodial state keeps a lid on things, like game wardens at an animal preserve.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of some readers, the Roman Republic came to an end in no small part because the ruling elite of Rome was unable to think critically about their dominant paradigm. The French Revolution was as much about the calcified ruling elite’s inability to understand the threat, much less respond to it. As the American political culture narrows and the factions close ranks, their ability to reform and respond to new threats diminishes. Correspondingly, the people’s ability to make their demands know through democratic processes also diminishes.

Lying Is Not A “Mistake”

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In modern times, famous people get a free pass on their crimes by pretending it was a “mistake” or possible an “error in judgement.” A mistake is when you put the wrong gas in your car because you were not paying attention. An error in judgement is when you hire the woman because she is hot over the more qualified fat guy. Telling people you had a near death experience in Iraq, when nothing of the sort happened, is none of those things.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted Wednesday he was not aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a false claim that has been repeated by the network for years.

Williams repeated the claim Friday during NBC’s coverage of a public tribute at a New York Rangers hockey game for a retired soldier that had provided ground security for the grounded helicopters, a game to which Williams accompanied him. In an interview with Stars and Stripes, he said he had misremembered the events and was sorry.

The admission came after crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes that the NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire. Williams arrived in the area about an hour later on another helicopter after the other three had made an emergency landing, the crew members said.

“I would not have chosen to make this mistake,” Williams said. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.”

What the bleep does that mean? Are we to believe he was forced to lie about what happened? Is there some new medical malady that compels people to spin tales of daring that never happened?

Williams told his Nightly News audience that the erroneous claim was part of a “bungled attempt” to thank soldiers who helped protect him in Iraq in 2003. “I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,” Williams said. “I want to apologize.”

Williams made the claim about the incident while presenting NBC coverage of the tribute to the retired command sergeant major at the Rangers game Friday. Fans gave the soldier a standing ovation.

“The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG,” Williams said on the broadcast. “Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.”

Williams and his camera crew were actually aboard a Chinook in a formation that was about an hour behind the three helicopters that came under fire, according to crew member interviews.

This is not about getting a fact wrong or misremembering a name or place. He made up this whopper so he could get adulation he did not earn for deeds he did not do. In other words, like every other coward, he wants glories for courage he has never been able to muster. That’s a sin in itself, but to then profit from it by dragging others into the lie (his support crew, co-workers, etc) is disqualifying.

A lot of what’s gone wrong traces back to the near total lack of shame by our elites. They simply refuse to uphold their end of the bargain. Williams should have admitted the lie, apologized to all concerned and then resigned. In a better age, his superiors would have left him alone in his office with a bottle of whiskey and a revolver. Instead, he offers a fake apology and carries on as if nothing happened.

Rich and Dead

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This Peter Frost column on the Parsis is getting some attention on the fringe. Fertility rates are a bit of a hobby-horse issue on the fringe, but for good reason. In every branch of natural science, reproduction rates are a key measure of health. A species with a declining fertility rate is assumed to be under stress or its environment is under stress. In fact, it is usually the key metric waved around by the greens when demanding some new rule on humans.

The exception is humanity. No one ever applies the same metric to the human species. The great irony of the environmental movement is that they insist humans are not part of the environment. For them, we are everywhere an invasive species.

Mangan has a take on it:

It seems more and more clear that the demands of the market economy come at a price. The enthusiasts for capitalism like to point out how much wealthier it has made us. Before capitalism, or before the Industrial Revolution, incomes were barely above subsistence level, whereas now everyone can afford iPads. But they elide over, or don’t even recognize, the trade-offs that are made to become wealthier. Until relatively recently, even under capitalism and as recently as the 50s and 60s in this country, families still had more than enough children to further their patrimony. But as we become ever wealthier, and opportunities for doing do become more widespread, capitalism steadily erodes what’s left of the old ways, including family ways, of doing things. That would be my interpretation anyway.

It is a testament to the power of the Progressive faith that this assertion is still with us. The Left insists that prosperity eliminates the need for lots of kids. The logical end point is a replacement rate or even a click lower for extended periods. Children become a luxury item once they no longer contribute to the prosperity of the family.

That reduces all human relations to their material content.

It’s also mostly nonsense.

Children have always been a cost in Eurasia. Even in sub-Saharan Africa where low parental investment is the norm, children are a net drain on their families in most cases. Humans, like all living things, have an impulse to reproduce. Without it, we would not be here. The one thing every extinct species has in common is the failure to reproduce. Even those wiped out by predators simply failed to reproduce before it was too late. It’s why it is hard to eradicate rabbits.

Plummeting fertility rates remain a puzzle to the people who care about the topic. Fertility does track closely with religiosity in the West. When church attendance declines, marriage rates decline and then fertility rates decline. This is true within the US as well as across Europe. Poland is one of the better examples because of the accident of history. They were a Catholic society trapped in time during the Soviet era.

Then they were exposed to Western culture in a massive wave following the fall of the Iron Curtain. Church attendance rates collapsed and fertility rates collapsed. A similar phenomenon happened in Quebec, but without the communism. There is was most likely the language barrier that insulated the culture for so longer. Regardless, when church attendance collapsed, fertility followed.

Now, that does not mean one causes the other. But, the correlation is unmistakable.

There’s a line in the movie The Matrix where Agent Smith explains how the first Matrix was a disaster because it was perfect. Humans could not accept it. The machines figured out that their human batteries needed an imperfect world. The implication being that we evolved for a specific environment. While all species adapt over time, there are limits and the time line must be imperceptible. Put humans in a radically different environment and they quickly die off, just like any other critter.

That very well may be what we are experiencing in the West and what the Arabs are desperately fighting. Modern Western culture is almost entirely transactional. There’s no continuity with the past and therefore no understanding of the future. Ours is a material, sterile world, one for which we are poorly designed. Why would humans bring children into a world with an unknowable future? What’s the point?

There’s an old Greek proverb. In good times, old men plant olive trees whose fruit they will never taste.

The Looming Weirdo War

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This was linked on the great Maggie’s Farm blog this morning.

Used to describe something that’s been around much longer than the word itself, the phenomenon of homonormativity is considered by many to be destructive to the queer rights movement and to the larger queer community.

Homonormativity is a word that addresses the problems of privilege we see in the queer community today as they intersect with White privilege, capitalism, sexism, transmisogyny, and cissexism, all of which end up leaving many people out of the movement toward greater sexual freedom and equality.

Feminism is unabashedly anti-capitalism now. By capitalism, she means free markets, not the concentrations of wealth derided by traditional conservatives. The writer, for example, is in the MacCult. The preferred economic model of these folks is closer to Mussolini than Marx. She’s OK with enormous companies that turn their owners into super-rich billionaires, as long as the companies are of the one true faith. Walmart is bad capitalism and Apple is socially responsible entrepreneurship.

The other crimes (sins?) are just new names for the same old insanity second wave feminism offered up. The “cisgender” thing should be categorized as a mental illness. If someone declared Newton’s laws of motion “oppressive” we would lock them up, for fear they would jump in front of a car or jump off a building. If instead of saying they were a third sex, these people insisted we pretend they are invisible, they would be wearing a jacket with no sleeves.

First, let’s examine it’s counterpart, heteronormativity. This is a word that similarly describes the evaluation of “normal” sexuality that we see in our culture, from the policy and institutional level down to the interpersonal.

Muchisbeingwritten about heteronormativity, which describes the assumption and promotion that heterosexuality is the only “normal” and “natural” orientation out there, privileging those who fit the norm and positing anyone outside of this as abnormal and wrong.

Our culture is deeply heteronormative, but as queer experiences and rights become more accepted, a policing of sexual and gender expressions within LGBQ spaces is also growing. This is homonormativity.

Homonormativity explains how certain aspects of the queer community can perpetuate assumptions, values, and behaviors that hurt and marginalize many folks within this community, as well as those with whom the community should be working in solidarity.

It addresses assimilation, as well as intersection of corporate interests and consumerism within LGBQ spaces.

It also describes the assumption that queer people want to be a part of the dominant, mainstream, heterosexual culture, and the way in which our society rewards those who do so, identifying them as most worthy and deserving of visibility and rights.  

Bold in the original. My base assumption in life is that the invention of new worlds or jargon follows the invention of new lies. Words have meaning and when a people use an agreed upon lexicon, lying is difficult. Thus the need for new words and new grammatical constructions. Whenever I’m confronted with jargon I get suspicious.

In this case, these people are trying to cloak their true intentions. It never has been about rights or even acceptance with regards to homosexuality. It is certainly not what is at play with the more deranged members of these sexual identity cults. It’s about offending normal people. The guys in sundresses want to parade around your kid’s school because it offends you. The worst thing that could happen to them is for people to accept it. South Park did an episode on it.

As we’ve seen the issue of marriage equality gain success, swooping the nation in election after election, we have to question its position as The Gay Rights Issue™.

Fighting for sexual liberation and equality is, of course, so much more than fighting for the right to marry, but how is the positioning of marriage equality as the major issue also promoting homonormativity?

Marriage as an issue sets up the requirement that all relationships should mimic this heteronormative standard of sexuality and family structure. It promotes the idea that all people want to emulate straight monogamous couples.

When we focus only on this issue, we exclude polyamorous and other non-normative relationship structures as acceptable, as well as, of course, those who don’t want to get married.

Even as marriage becomes inclusive of a particular kind of queer relationship, it perpetuates a policing of other kinds of relationships, maintaining the borderline of what is an “acceptable queer relationship.”

The focus on marriage challenges very little, prioritizing the legal sanctioning of one’s relationships over real relational and societal transformation.

By showing that people outside of the heterosexual norm want the same things that “traditional, straight America” wants, themarriage equality movement fights to gain access to this social institution by reproducing, rather than challenging, heterosexual dominance and normativity andusing this as a basis for who deserves rights.

I’ve often remarked that inside of a mass movement, people find clarity. That’s what keeps them in the movement. Every failure and every setback is explained in someway that signals to the adherents that they must redouble their efforts. Every success is met with sound reasons why they must keep fighting for whatever it is the movement uses as a lure for the adherents. In some case, plain old delusion works fine as in the belief gay marriage is popular at the ballot box.

Putting that aside, the incoherence of these crotch-cults is what will ultimately pull them apart. Gay marriage is the obvious example. Homosexuals have a near total lack of monogamy. The social science is quite stunning, but social science is not science so it can always be disputed. Real science tells us that homosexual males account for 1.6% of the population and 65% of syphilis cases. Syphilis rates are a good proxy for promiscuity rates. People with astronomically high promiscuity rates are never going to adopt marriage, which has proven to be the case.

Therein lies the problem. In addition to having the dog chasing the car problem that is a feature of all mass movements, the sexual identity cults have the additional problem of success invalidating the cause. Social adoption of gay marriage will just prove it was ridiculous from the start. Similarly, normalizing all of these other fetishes will only make those causes appear more absurd.

When the dog catches the car, we all see there was never a car. He was just running around and barking.

The article is a crazy quilt of jargon and locution aimed at people in the third wave feminism cult so it is easy for a normal like myself to misinterpret it. Still, the vibe is undeniable. The gals at the womyn’s studies department are getting uncomfortable with the queers. It’s not just that they are jealous of the success of gay males in the culture. It’s that the queer rights stuff is making it impossible to turn weird for the sake of being weird into a political cause. The womyn are about declare war on the queers.