When I was a boy I had a thing for taking stuff apart. I was curious about how things worked. For instance, I once took the TV apart when my parents were away. Thinking back it is amazing that I did not electrocute myself. It’s also amazing that there was a time when parents thought it was fine to leave an eight year old home alone. It was a different country back then. Kids in my underclass neighborhood were home alone all summer with little to no supervision.

Anyway, my thing for taking stuff apart became a problem so my poor parents bought me some nerd toys to keep me busy. I got a toy like this to learn how electricity worked. I got a chemistry set which I wound up using to kill the fish with by accident. The theory behind the toys was to encourage the smarter boys to use their brain, instead of playing sports all the time. In the 1970’s, it was still assumed that boys played sports, got in fights, rough housed outside and so forth.

I may be mistaken, but the “nerd” was a term people used. Being bookish was a thing and it was like being gay in the working class. Kids with brains and curiosity therefore were guided into manly ways to use your head. My chemistry set, for example, had a recipe for gun powder. Imagine something like that today. The shrieking from the usual suspects would be deafening. The electricity set had plans for building radios, just like they used in the army. It was a way to make being smart have utility.

Even way back in those olden times, people were starting to sense that having brains was going to be more useful for boys than being tough. The technological revolution was just starting to have a practical impact on the average people. My father, a steamfitter, got a calculator, which cost a bundle, from his employer to do layout work. My mother, a secretary, had to learn how to use a word processor. My first typewriter, in 1980, had an LCD screen to preview what I typed before committing it to paper.

It was already clear that the world was entering a fork in the road. Down one path the smart people would go and down the other the not so smart.  Parents, even old school working class types, saw the writing on the wall and started to encourage their kids to become nerds. My father thought it was fascinating that I had a head for numbers. He would quiz me all the time. When I took up chess, my grandfather would always want to play, as he loved the game of chess.

Here we are four decades later and the nerds run the world – sort of. The political class is still the same sort. Few have any math or science. The financial class, the folks really in charge, rely heavily on a technological elite, as well as people from the STEM fields. The rise of the quant, that guy who started out in physics, but ended up creating investment models, is proof the nerds run the world. Money men ar still portrayed as alpha males, but the alpha male on Wall Street is now a Korean or a Jewish nerd.

Nerds have certainly become a dominant force in modern societies. They have supplanted the “working man” in the popular culture. You just don’t see too many TV shows, for example, where the main character is a blue collar guy. When you do see blue collar guy in popular culture, he is either a  clownish exaggeration intended to make sport of the working man or a modern of the noble savage that is supposed to validate the prevailing assumptions about society, culture and politics.

Instead, the popular shows have snarky, high IQ nerds as stars. Big Bang Theory is a great example of this taken to the absurd. Anyone familiar with people in fields like theoretical physics knows they are not living in a hip apartment doing fun and interesting things. But, that’s TV. it is all fake, even the nerds. Cop shows now feature girls using technology to outwit the offish white criminals. Criminals on TV, of course, are nothing like reality, as far as complexion and competence.

That’s the other thing we have now – fake nerds. It makes sense. If the archetypal hero is a nerd, the beautiful people will imitate him. The fashionable Left has latched onto this with a death grip. I regularly see my lefty friends linking to stuff like this. None of them can add past ten without help. They majored in soft subjects like art of sociology in college and struggle with basic technology. It is really important to them, however, to be pro-science.

That means memorizing the latest from the Climate Change Cult (CCC), berating Christians for creationism and talking about their favorite science shows. The parents always swear their kids mastered the iPad (Apple being another pseudo-nerd symbol) at birth. That’s always amusing. Every Progressive mediocrity swears their kid is exceptional, which violates a basic rule of biological science. We now live in a world where every kids is above average.

Another manifestation of the fake nerd is the stat geek. ESPN has a fellow named Pablo Torre, who ticks a number of boxes. They have him on to perform the role of the young, hip math savvy sports analyst. I looked him up and found he was a sociology major at Harvard. The fact that he went to a swank prep school and Harvard suggests he is of above average IQ, but his last name suggests he could have gamed the system so it is hard to know. Still, he has no math or science.

Now, he is pitched by ESPN and he plays along, as a stat geek. He’s the nerd with the numbers, juxtaposed with the dumb guys in the sports department. In reality he reads FanGraphs, gleans a few statistics that sound cool and then spouts opinions on TV and the internet. Nothing wrong with it, but it is clearly an act, no different than someone playing a doctor in a drama. That’s TV, but TV shapes and reflects the greater culture.

The new cool is pretending to be someone who had a pocket liner as a kid and still pines for his slide rule. Just as the 70’s hipsters were products of squaresville, today’s nerds are most likely liberal arts majors that cannot figure out how to change the time on their car’s radio. That’s not what matters though. What matters is everyone knows how much you freaking love science. To say otherwise is to risk heresy.

The most ridiculous manifestation of this is the “policy wonk”,  who plays the role of expert on government and social policy. Like the fake nerds in sports, these nerds majored in journalism or public policy, maybe took a basic stats class. Otherwise they have no math or science. Their “wonkery” is nothing more than memorizing the policy positions of their party and then reciting them in clever ways on TV or print. The clever part is key. “Snark” is the call of the fake nerd, no matter the field.

Snark is an ironic disdain for convention that is really just a signaling mechanism. The snarky fake nerd makes some comment about Southerners, for example,  rejecting evolution as a way to publicly identify himself as an inside the set of right opinions. His coevals will respond with something similar, thus establishing that they too are members of the proper set. The person who takes issue with the comment is then identified as the outsider. Snark and irony are just public displays of membership in a group.

This has been making the rounds on social media. It is an old post, almost a decade old, so it will be curious to see if the authoress will be forced to recant it. Ms. Bindel is upset that some crazy person hired a doctor to butcher him into looking somewhat like a woman and he now he wants to be a rape counselor. By the logic of modern “gender studies” he is on solid ground. After all, gender is a social construct. he can be a women if he wants and everyone has to pretend he is a women.

She’s right, of course. There’s no such thing as a sex change procedure. It is all cosmetic as far as biology is concerned. If this guy is dug up 500 years from now, the DNA test will say he was a man. The reason for that is you cannot alter your DNA. Therefore, his sex is male because his DNA says he is a male. He may think he is a woman, a goldfish or a starseed. That just proves he is in need of psychiatric care. If he was convinced he was an elf from the North Pole, he would be in an asylum.

What makes this stuff amusing, obviously, is it is the intersection of one type of reality denying lunacy colliding into a different brand of reality denying lunacy. It’s a bum fight between left-wing crazies. In this case, it is angry old-school feminism against faddish degeneracy. For the longest time, cropped hair lesbians, dressed like loggers, were the cutting edge of academic fashion. All of a sudden whites guys in summer frocks are getting all the attention. It’s unfair!

Ms. Bidel writes, “Feminism is supposed to be based on the premise that prescriptive gender roles are a cause of women’s oppression.” She could have written that feminism is about rallying the the hobbits to defend The Shire and been on more rational ground. Men and women have different biological destinies. Thousands of years of evolution have made the sexes what they are, including their roles in human societies. Division of labor between the sexes is an incredibly useful adaptation. It may be inconvenient for some small portion of males and females, but Mother Nature does not care about your feelings.

In fact, mother nature has a funny way of punishing humans for defying reality. It usually means death and/or great suffering. Animals with weird mating or dietary adaptions like Pandas tend to get wiped out. Or, like the Shakers, wipe themselves out. That’s what appears to be happening with human populations that have adopted the voodoo of feminism. Fertility rates plunge. It turns out that men, rather than keep playing their role, have adapted too. The feminist demand for attention has resulted in them being ignored.

A long time ago in a far away land, a lowly business professor at a state college showed that a famous person from Stanford was a fraud and a con-man. The famous Simon – Ehrlich Wager Wager is one of those events that holds the attention of both sides of the political elite. Betting against over all human progress has proven to be a suckers bet for roughly 10,000 years. On the other hand, those inclined toward cynicism take pleasure in unmanning charlatans like Ehrlich on philosophical grounds.

Guys like Paul Ehrlich will always be with us, mostly because they are not about being empirically right, but about being morally right. There not appealing to facts and reason, when they stand out demanding the rest of us repent. What they are really doing is appealing to the managerial class, who view themselves as the keepers of public morality, by way of flattery. You see, if you agree with Ehrlich, then you are a good person, because all the good people agree with him.

Steve Sailer linked to this and provided some commentary. While Sailer can be a bit dismal in his analysis, he strikes me as a fairly optimistic guy. Optimists are people who think things will be fine in the long run. They may have doubt about the short run, but they think things tend to work out fort her best. Sailer seems to think that the people in charge will figure it out and make the necessary course corrections. One day, Steve will get to see his beloved California restored to what he recalls as a child.

I don’t know, but I would assume Sailer looks back fondly on the unmasking of Ehrlich as a fraud. It supports his generally optimistic view that things tend to get better in the long run. Therefore, when someone comes out with some gloomy predictions, Sailer tends to be more dismissive that most people. That’s why the Simon-Ehrlich wager still resonates after all these years. For the optimists, it is confirmation. For those in power, it is an excuse to ignore the warnings of their critics.

Maybe human progress is inevitable and the sort of dire prognostications like the ones in that linked post can be safely ignored. Maybe Ehrlich was just a grifter and his failure has no meaning whatsoever. The predictions in that post look quite reasonable. There’s very good reason to think that the American Empire is slowly moving to a denouement that will be no more pleasant than the end of previous empires. if in ten years those things are true, the politics of America will be very rough.

It is easy to chuckle at stories like this one from Massachusetts. Every day some new outrage emanates from these hotbeds of lunacy. Right now, Massachusetts is the epicenter of the suicide cult we call Progressivism. This is a state that replaced a liberal Republican with a fake indian, who is as dumb as a goldfish. They followed that up by replacing their retiring senator with an aging child weirdo nicknamed Mr. Frosty.

Massachusetts a good state to examine when trying to understand the currents in modern Progressive identity. About 45% of the population is normal. Another 45% is deep in the weeds of the Progressive theology. Massachusetts has the third lowest rate of church attendance in the nation and one of the lowest marriage rates. Unsurprisingly, they have one of the lowest fertility rates. Progressivism is not a fruitful religion.

The secular religion of liberalism is, like all cults, is based on self-loathing. Christianity and Judaism, in contrast, begin with the belief that God loves his creations. At their purest, they are a celebration of life and living. Adherents are attracted to these religions because they provide affirmation of humanity. For Jews, they believe they will one day spend eternity with their god. Christians will go to heaven.

Secular religions work the other way. They are premised on the belief that the adherent is vile and worthless. They join the movement in order to exchange their identity for that of the group. Progressivism offers a sort of cleansing, where the hated self is subsumed into the greater identity of the cause. The American Left has always been about self-abnegation, a weird sort of sacrifice of self to an all encompassing community.

Their fanaticism is due to the lack of a limiting principle. In Christianity, there is no salvation on this earth. You can practice all the rites and rituals, live a moral life, but to do so excessively is to risk the sin of vanity. Put another way, Christianity draw a line at virtue where beyond it offers nothing extra. Progressivism does the opposite. The adherent is always looking to be just a bit more pious.

Also note that the inclusiveness is just a modern implementation of the Puritan sense of communal salvation. That tradition of assuming a community is only as righteous as its worst sinner has transformed into a demand that everyone must included in everything, or else. Diversity is just code for denying that people can have private lives and private affairs. If everyone can’t be in it, then it is immoral.

A world without borders is a world with just one border, a prison wall that keeps everyone inside so they can be supervised. That’s what Progressivism is today. It’s a license for the self-righteous to root around in your life, looking for signs of bad thoughts. The result is the end of all private association and all unsupervised separation. Their vision of society is something closer to a prison, than a utopia.

The first time I heard of modern supper clubs was from John Derbyshire. I don’t recall the specifics, just that he said he was a member of one in New York City. I want to say it was in one of his podcasts, but I don’t recall. That’s not important. I was surprised to learn such things were still going on. It seemed like a thing Victorians would do or perhaps rich people in the roaring twenties. When I think of supper clubs, I think of something clandestine and subversive, the sorts of things popular with heretics.

I decided to see if any of these things existed in my part of the world and sure enough, they were around and not very secret about it. One of my business acquaintances is in one that meets once a month. They have invited speakers who give a short talk and then socialize with the club members. In the case of my acquaintance, the theme of the club is civic activism. They help get rich people involved in various causes to improve the city or get some law changes they think needs changing.

Anyway, I saw this and was reminded of Derb’s clandestine supper club. It turns out they are not legal and perhaps even subversive, in a  strange modern way. Because everything in modern life is regulated, especially in a place like New York, not getting permission to have dinner with friends is something close to an act of treason. I suppose the next time we hear from John Derbyshire will be in the police blotter. It sounds absurd, but this is New York City. They want to regulate the amount of soda you can drink.

All joking aside, it is one of those little things, a blade of grass stabbing through the asphalt, that encourages me a bit. Tocqueville found American’s obsession with what he called associations to be an important part of what made American liberty work:

The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

The fact that even in New York City, citizens are willing to commit little acts of subversion in league with others, often strangers, says the flame of liberty has not been extinguished entirely. Granular control of the lives of the citizenry has a cost, as people just won’t cooperate. The current arrangements cannot last and that means they will not last. The question is what comes next. If these little dinner clubs are any indication, maybe what comes next will not be so bad, perhaps even better than what we see now.

I commented on this post at National Review and the commnet was quickly removed by their moderators. I made the point that pretentious people like Michael Potemra live in a city where it is official policy to hassle brown people on the streets. The intent of stop and frisk is to let the black know he is not welcome. Since the court struck down Bloomberg’s stop and frisk rules, the city’s chattering classes have been wringing their hands about New York becoming Detroit. Now word and deed are one as the official policy of driving out the blacks is matched by the public rhetoric.

Despite this, we still hear the lectures from the smugly self-righteous over race. The same people demanding their cops stop every black guy wandering into Manhattan, will scream about Paula Deen and George Zimmerman. None of this is shocking as most of the people doing this are Progressives and they need bogeymen men to exist. The result is a stunning lack of self-awareness. Liberals, almost always, reserve their harshest venom for the crimes they routinely commit. It’s the sort of thing that goes on in a cult.

Now, I used to be a regular in the National Review comment section. I stopped when Rich Lowry hired someone to moderate the site. Instantly 90% of the commenters disappeared and Lowry had to spend a month begging people to return. I gave it another shot, but quit again when the same nonsense started anew. The only reason to read the site nowadays is to read the comments. There at least you see that there are still people with an awareness of what’s happening in the country. It’s somewhat encouraging, frankly.

Lowry and the editorial staff at National Review are strivers, not all that interested in raising uncomfortable observations. They are the definition of careerist. The only guy at National Review worth reading is Kevin Williamson and I strongly suspect he is a complete phony. Otherwise National Review is, at best, a souvenir program for the museum of late-20th century conservatism. At worst is is a platform for hollow men like Lowry to curry favor with the ruling class.

If National Review were actually trying to oppose the left, as they like to claim in their funding drives, they would love the issue of race. Instead, they are doing everything they can to insulate the Left from the growing number of whites wondering if they should not embrace identity politics for their own sake. It’s not just National Review. Dan McCarthy at The American Conservative is following the same path. Buckley conservatism is pretty much just pear clutching and purges now. It has nothing else to offer.

The reason behind these moves is the claim that it is bad for business. They say the donors don’t like it, but they fail to mention that many of their donors also support Progressive publications. Of course, all of these writers dream of landing a TV gig at a Progressive cable channel, so they make sure to never write anything that will truly vex Lefty. That means the Left lectures the Right on race and the Right forever apologizes for things it never did or said, because in the end, they are all at the same trough.

The whole point of being in the opposition is to oppose the prevailing orthodoxy. To do that you have to let a thousand flowers bloom. That means putting up with some weirdos and cranks, but it also means getting interesting perspective from guys like Unz, Sailer, Derbyshire and so forth. They have their own quirks and get things wrong, but they get a lot right too. When you’re the underdog, you need to be creative and take risks.

Instead, the dying husks of American conservatism are purging themselves of non-conformists and begging the majority to allow them to surrender. National Review has simply become the primary outlet of the collaborationist wing of the GOP. In fact, it was always just the outer limit of what was allowable within the prevailing Progressive orthodoxy. Buckley was a right-wing Progressive with expensive tastes. The thing is, people are starting to notice that it was always part of the long con.

I’m fond of using the word “reality” in discussion with members of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Part of it is that it makes them crazy. They love to end debate by uttering catch phrases like “as a member of the reality based community…” that are finished with a recitation from the catechism intended to end the discussion. In other words, it is just another way they declare themselves our moral superiors, giving them thr ight to rule facts out of bounds when they contradict tenets of the one true faith.

Over at Marginal Revolution an hysterical homosexual took me to task for using the term in a post about religion and fertility rates. I’m assuming he is a homosexual due to the overwrought use of the word “intolerant” when discussing religion. That’s one of those things you see with gays in the academy. They use the word intolerant a lot. It is, as they say, a dog whistle. Pointing out observable facts sent him racing to the fainting couch.

I thought about that when reading this story about the rape scandal at Vanderbilt. From news accounts, this appears to be real rape or “rape-rape” as Hoopie Goldberg calls it.  A young woman was violated by a group of football players while she was unconscious. The documented actions of the accused indicate a consciousness of guilt and an attempt o hide the facts from authorities. On the surface, it looks like a real crime was committed.

Whether or not they are legally guilty of rape will be left up to whatever peculiarities of Tennessee law that apply. Sex crimes are funny, as the statutes reflect regional sensibilities. Age of consent is a good example. In some states, a woman getting passed out drunk and then crying foul stands no chance, because the law requires the court to evaluate the credibility of the people in order to determine consent.

Anyway. what these men did to this woman should be punished with a long stretch in prison, assuming the facts back the narrative in the press. If it was one drunk guy and a drunk girl, then that’s a different story. These players seem to have been sober, knew she was beyond drunk and then acted in a way after the incident to suggest the presence of a guilty mind. That’s not kids making a mistake. It’s criminals committing real crimes.

They are not, however, 100% responsible for the events. If a man jumps into a lion’s den wearing a meat suit, we blame him, not the lion. Similarly, if a woman goes out partying with a man and gets so drunk she is unconscious, she bears some responsibility. Now, men are not animals so they don’t get a pass like with the lion, but they are not immune from nature. This is something people knew up until last week.

Young men since the dawn of time have been willing to risk everything for sex. It is as much a part of our biology as left handedness or stereoscopic vision. It is why women have been taught to be weary of young men since the dawn of time. It’s why there were prohibitions against young people hanging around one another unsupervised. it was to protect the men from themselves and the women from the men.

That held until the magical thinking of feminism came along with all of its nature denying beliefs. If we arrange things the right way, they argue, women can be men, just without dicks. Men can be pleasant lesbians with dicks. Otherwise, sex as a biological characteristic can be willed away. Boys can be raised as girls and girls as boys. Like everything else with Cultural Marxism, sex becomes this gray, formless nothingness encompassed by the hollow word “gender” that means everything and nothing.

Reality does not go away when you stop believing in it. By nature, boys want to have sex with girls. They will go to great lengths to do it. Getting a girl drunk so she will give in to a man’s advances dates back to the first discovery of alcohol. Teaching women that this does not exist is like teaching them that gravity is a social construct. It is not just madness, it borders on the criminal. This young woman could easily have avoided this terrible thing by following the wisdom of a thousand generations of women before her.

Again, this does not absolve these young men, but a sensible society would find some way to mention the reckless stupidity of this woman. Everyone is far too afraid as the witch doctors and medicine women of feminism will never permit it. Instead the male student body of Vanderbilt will be subjected to lectures about denying their biology and the women will be told they are failing as women if they observe a bit of restraint when dealing with the opposite sex. It is senseless madness, but that’s where we are in America.