Category Archives: Culture

Rule By Poser

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Way back when the Bush administration launched the invasion of Iraq, the prevailing assumption among those who were in charge was that it would be a cakewalk. The people would embrace us as liberators. People who had some clue about how the world works knew it would be an ugly mess, as is the case with all wars. War is, by definition, the ugliest of human activities. It’s purpose is to kill and destroy.

Inevitably, stories turned up about abuses. One essential way to prepare soldiers for war is to dehumanize the enemy. Men, even trained killers, are not going to kill people they see as sympathetic. There’s no way to finely calibrate the mind of a soldier so in every war there are abuses, even when care is taken to avoid them. That’s why things like the Abu Ghraib prison incident happened. War is and always will be an ugly business.

That knowledge should lead Western governments to use their technological and economic advantages to avoid getting into wars with the barbarians on the edge of civilization. Instead, they start wars they never intend to win, so they can preen and pose about their virtue and morality, when something terrible inevitably happens. It means some guy in uniform gets to be strung up in order to please the vanity of our rulers.

Sergeant Alexander Blackman shot dead an insurgent on September 15 2011 after he had been injured by Apache helicopter gunfire.

The 42-year-old was originally known as Marine A to protect his identity from terrorists.

He grew up in Brighton and has two sisters and a brother, according to the Justice for Marine A website.

The keen sportsman is a skilled canoeist who competed at national events.

He joined the marines aged 23 and married his wife Alex in 2010 after the pair met in the Somerset town of Taunton.

At the time of the 2011 killing Blackman was serving in Helmand province with Plymouth-based 42 Commando.

Blackman was ”dismissed with disgrace” from the Royal Marines after serving with distinction for 15 years, including tours of Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland.

He was handed seven years for manslaughter, but having already served almost three-and-a-half years since his conviction for murder, he could be free within weeks of the sentencing on March 28.

Sgt Blackman shot an injured Taliban insurgent in the chest in 2011 before quoting Shakespeare at him.

He said: “There you are. Shuffle off this mortal coil you c***.

“It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us”.

He then told soldiers: “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I just broke the Geneva Convention.”

The shooting was captured on film but has not been released out of fears it could be used as terrorist propaganda.

Dramatic footage that has been released shows troops cheering as an Apache warship fires some 139 rounds at militants trying to sneak up on British positions.

Another clip shows Sgt Blackman and Jack Hammond, known as Marine C, find an AK47, a hand grenade and spare ammunition next to the injured fighter.

Blackman ordered colleagues to move the enemy fighter out of sight from British Army surveillance cameras mounted on balloons.

Blackman was convicted of murder in November 2013 by a court martial in Bulford, Wiltshire, and sentenced to life with a minimum 10-year term.

It was the first such conviction of a serving British soldier since the Second World War.

Judge Jeff Blackett told Blackman at his sentencing: “If the British Armed Forces are not assiduous in complying with the laws of armed conflict and international humanitarian law they would become not better than the insurgents and terrorists they are fighting.”

There you have it. He handed down a sentence as a public act of piety, signalling to the other lunatics in the ruling class that he is some sort of special snowflake for throwing the book at this soldier. It’s also why the West has not won any wars in a long time. Instead of focusing all energy on killing the enemy and breaking their stuff, all energy is put into maintaining moral superiority, even if that means losing.

The point of war is to kill the enemy and break up their stuff. The hope is they quit before you kill all of them and break all of their stuff, but you plan otherwise. If the Afghans knew all along that helping Osama bin Laden was most likely going to mean their cities and large towns would be flattened, they would have chose differently. Let’s assume they played it the same and Bush had firebombed Kabul, what would have been the result?

Yeah, there would have been a lot of hand-wringing and pearl clutching in Washington, but every other nutjob in the Middle East would have been re-calibrating his plans. A lot less death and destruction would have come as a result. Instead we have decades of killing to no logical end. We have an endless war of attrition just so Western leaders can have chances to let us know that they paragons of virtue.

What’s truly insane about all of this is the people in charge seem to care more about the opinion of the enemy than they do their own people. Maybe Sgt Blackman should have been punished, but the only reason to punish him is to maintain good order in the ranks. It’s not that he killed a wounded man. It’s that he violated the rules of engagement and encouraged others to do the same. It should be ZFG about what the terrorist think.

But, that’s not the world today. Our rulers care more about foreigners than they do their own people. If it were otherwise, the rulers would be quick to paper over these sorts of incidents, defending their fellow citizens against these sorts of accusations. Given their policy preferences, and the way they conduct foreign policy, it is safe to say they truly hate the rest of us. We have to hate them back.

I Am Invisible

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For as long as I have been alive, I’ve felt different. It was one of those things I only noticed when the other kids did not notice it. Their lack of noticing is what make it so clear to me. I could never come up with the right words so I kept my thoughts bottled up, knowing that no one would notice, hoping I could ignore it. The other kids did not notice it because I’m invisible. That’s right. I’m one of millions of Americans who are invisible.

The opaque community takes their opacity for granted. They just think the fact that they reflect light is normal, while not reflecting light is strange or weird. They just take it for granted that others can see them so they pretend to see us. This attempt to normalize the invisible by insisting we can be seen has gone on for too long. It is time for the invisible community to be seen, so to speak. We have be living without shadows for too long!

This is nonsense, of course, but is it any more ridiculous than men in sundresses demanding the rest of us pretend they are girls? Bruce Jenner is not a female. He is a male. He can dress up as a girl and have himself mutilated so he looks like a girl, but he is a man. Humans come in one of two sexes, male and female. This is a matter of genetics.

The veracity of my claims to invisibility are just easily tested. You could hold up a mirror and see if I have a visible reflection. If so, then I am not invisible. Alternatively, you could put a light on one side of me and check to see if the light passes through me. If I blocked the light, then I am opaque. This is basic physics and a debatable topic.

The question is why are we forced to indulge the lunacy of one denial of reality, but not other forms of reality denying? One reason is that burly men in sundresses appeals to the flat earth society types, who insist humans are born as amorphous blobs. Claims to invisibility don’t further the cause of the blank slate. That and forcing the rest of us to ignore the invisible would be counterproductive for attention seekers.

There’s also the fact that the lunatics promoting this stuff truly believe it horrifies the sane, normal people out in squaresville. A big part of radicalism from the French Revolution to the present, is the desire to be shocking and outrageous. Radicalism, political or cultural, is mostly a temper tantrum by people who can accept the world as it is. Just as a spoiled child throws tantrums in public, the radical seeks to offend those they see as normal.

Then there is the Theodore Dalrymple observation from years ago:

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

That’s the lesson from this story about a good, progressive mother of small children, having to stand silently as a burly man, claiming to be a women, uses the lady’s room at Disneyland.

So yes… there were women and small children using the restroom and this man was walking around knowing no one would say anything.  So here I am…writing this blog, because honestly I need answers. We can’t leave this situation ambiguous any more. The gender debate needs to be addressed… and quickly. There have to be guidelines. It can’t just be a feeling. I’m sorry. I wish it could, but it can’t.

A society in which no one knows the rules, except the rulers, is a society that cannot self-organize. It must fall into authoritarianism. In fact, it must embrace authoritarianism, because there must be order. Even the madness of North Korea beats anarchy, where it is a war of all against all. To no small degree, the people pushing the denial of biological reality are doing so in order to expand their authority over the rest of us.

There’s another angle here though, one that is not reductionist. Progressives have been in control of America since the Civil War. The great industrial wars of the early 20th century, then the long Cold War, worked to restrain some of the worst impulses that are let loose when a person or group has unchecked power. Those restraints are gone so all of the reckless tendencies of Progressives can be indulged, seemingly without consequence.

In other words, this reality denying madness we see going on with Progressives, has a late phase degeneracy vibe to it. Most of this nonsense is happening in well insulated compounds like the college campus. The Progs have total control so all of their worst instincts are free to run riot. It’s not some new phase in the long civil war, but the final burst of maniacal lunacy before there is the knock on the door and reality bursts in.

The Null Culture

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Tyler Cowen is one of those guys worth reading in the same way Thomas Friedman used to be worth reading. There’s nothing about his arguments or analysis that is new or interesting. In fact, when he ventures into these areas he reveals a mediocre mind. The value is that he provides an insight into the thinking of the Cloud People with regards to the issues of the day. He’s a weathercock for the Cloud People.

Maybe this is intentional or maybe it is accidental. That can be debated and many of his most loyal fans start from the assumption that it is intentional. They believe his cryptic writing style is to encourage a hermeneutic reading of his posts and columns. Cowen indirectly encourages this by constantly referring to Strauss as if he is a deity. Many of his posts have a “read between the lines young grasshopper? vibe to them.

Another way to look at this style is that it is intended to mask the fact that he has no new insights or ideas to offer, so he puts the focus on the alleged game of expository cat and mouse. In the same way female pop stars dress like whores to hide their lack of talent, writers like Kevin Williamson, for example, rely on bloated prose to mask their lack of talent. Maybe that’s Cowen’s game.

Regardless, his latest column on Bloomberg is an example of his usefulness as a window into the hive mind of the Cloud People.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, food has replaced music’s centrality to American culture. These are invariably somewhat subjective impressions, but I’d like to lay out my sense of how the social impact of music has fallen and the social role of food has risen.

In the earlier era, new albums were eagerly awaited and bought in the hundreds of thousands immediately upon their release. Diversity in the musical world was relatively low, as genres such as rap, heavy metal, techno and ambient either didn’t exist or weren’t well developed. It was also harder to access the music of the more distant past — no Spotify or YouTube — and thus people listened to the same common music more frequently.

One of the remarkable things about the Cloud People is they have a non-linear timeline that has more holes than the fossil record. For most of them. the world started in the 1960’s. That’s because the Cloud is dominated by Boomers, but it is also when the Cloud started to form up as a social force. The result is they have two versions of the past. Their past, the 60’s and 70’s, and the long ago past, when Lincoln defeated Hitler.

This ahistorical world view is why they reflexively compare every foreign leader to Hitler and every problem in world affairs to Munich. It’s even more present tense for domestic matters. They have never stopped fighting the Civil Rights Movement. T.N. Coates makes $50K a speech because his kid brushed up against an old white women on an escalator once and that was just like the cops attacking the blacks at Selma.

Anyway, Cowen is obsessed with food and the so-called foodie culture. He correctly points out that this is a common obsession in the Cloud. He does not phrase it that way as that would require a degree of self-awareness he does not posses. Many of his posts and columns are about his trips to find something new to eat. Whenever he is preparing for a tax-payer funded junket overseas, he posts a bleg for restaurant tips.

So-called foodie culture is interesting in that it is not really a culture. It is the result of lack of culture. The people endlessly searching for a new dish or new cuisine do so because they have nothing of their own or at least nothing they wish to hold up as their own. The endless search for some new exotic cuisine is a distraction from facing the fact that their own culture is dead and its artifacts are now just museum pieces.

Culture is the spirit of the people. Their customs, foods and social structures are the result. The moveable feast that is foodie culture is not a celebration of something holy or sacred. It is shiva for people who no longer have any attachment to the rest of us or our share past. They see themselves as rootless visitors, sampling life in the hope that it will provide their lives with meaning, or at least make them mildly interesting to others.

Foodie culture is a null culture, the abnegation of culture. The Cloud Person going on about the food stalls they visited in Thailand is someone trying hard to not be from here, to not be of here, to not be a part of you. It’s why fusionism is so popular in the foodie world. It lets every person have their own thing, so they can avoid sharing their thing with others and therefore avoid the burdens and responsibilities of shared culture.

It also is why the managerial state and the Cloud People society dependent on it is brittle and fracturing. It has nothing to offer. If culture is old men planting trees in whose shade they will never sit, the managerial state is the burning of those trees in an outdoor fire pit so the imported cook from Thailand can prepare traditional dishes from his homeland. The former outlives the man, while the later cannot outlive the fire.

The Skins Game

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There’s a popular quote from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, where one character asks another character how he went bankrupt. The response is “Gradually and then suddenly.” It’s funny because it is true. The great upheavals in human affairs seldom happen without warning. They are always part of a long process that was plain to see, but people preferred not to notice it so it rolled along until a crash or revolution.

A generation or two from now, people will look back at America and wonder how racial conflict broke out after what many thought were years of social progress. After all, the good whites had atoned for all the bad things done by bad whites. In reality, those years of “progress” were just accumulating bad habits and bad decisions, disguising an underlying rot. American society is headed for a bad place and you can see it here in this story.

Outrage has grown at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, as the school faces layoffs and increased class sizes due to a law limiting funds for schools with a higher white student body.

The Los Angeles Unified School District provides more funding for schools where the white population is below 30 percent.

In a letter to parents, the district noted the highly regarded middle school had been above the percentage for the past couple years.

The racial formula was a condition imposed by court decisions dealing with desegregation in the 1970s.

Los Angeles has a form of misery sharing in their school system. Since people vote with their feet, they naturally tend toward self-segregation. This means the schools tend to reflect this as kids go to the schools closest to where they live. To remedy this, the good schools are punished as a way to “even the playing field.” It’s an insane effort to implement the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron.

A look at the makeup of this particular school offers a glimpse of the future. The first thing you see is the school is 47% Hispanic, which in Los Angeles is going to mean Mexican, with a sizable chunk of Central Americans. It is roughly 30% white, 11% Asian and 7% black. The test scores, across all races, are above average for the city. This means the school can have a decent basketball team, but still do well in the math bowl.

The North Hollywood area is not a slum, but it is slightly downscale. The demographics, as of 2000, were Hispanics 57.7%, whites 27%, Asians 5.7%, blacks 5.6%, and others at 4%. Gentrification is underway so those numbers will begin to change as the renters are priced out of the market. In other words, the local schools will either have to import diversity or build private schools. Otherwise, they will be de-funded by the city.

The sound you hear is the ratchet clicking. As these sorts of incidents happen, everyone begins to think in terms of race. The honkies can accept writing checks to the blacks, maybe, but the Hispanics? The Asians, of course, see no reason for cutting checks to anyone. The Hispanics are in a bind as they try to work out whether it is better to be on Team Honky or Team Black, but they are not going to cut checks to the blacks.

The Cloud People imagine a world built like a sports league. The rich successful teams write checks to the poor, unsuccessful teams. That works in baseball as the Yankees and Red Sox need opponents for their games, so they agree to pay Tampa to field a team. In real life, people don’t think that way. The Asians are never going to think they need a really good hoops team, so they will hate writing checks to Team Black.

As the racial spoils system settles into society, new types of response develop for each group to maximize their slice of the pie. One example is gentrification. This is where rich white liberals buy up parts of the ghetto and then drive the hues away with high rents and heavy policing. This way they can have nice urban playgrounds for their kids to enjoy the cosmopolitan lifestyle, without being stabbed by a junkie.

What we have going on is a racial undertow, where the current at the top appears to be flowing in, but underneath, a stronger current is flowing out. In a society with one defined minority group, the majority will go along with helping the minority. When you have nothing but minority groups, which is where America is headed and where LA is now, you end up with the skins game and that is always a zero sum game with winners and losers.

A popular quote in the hate-think community is from this interview with the Lee Kuan Yew. “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” That is the example of history and it is why Singapore has always been an authoritarian society. It is the only way to keep peace. Men with guns have to supervise the skins game.

It is why humans across the globe instinctively reject multiculturalism and diversity. Even the lunatics preaching this nonsense avoid diversity and multiculturalism. They always live in rich white neighborhoods and send their kids to private schools. They like diversity and multiculturalism from a safe distance. Humans know another thing that is popular in the hate-think community. That is, Diversity + Proximity = Violence.

 

Stranger Danger

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I don’t have a television subscription anymore. I use the Amazon Fire for my video entertainments. It’s a useful device for those who have cut the cord. One of the apps on the thing is for SkyNews, the Murdoch propaganda platform that is the retarded little brother of the BBC. It’s pitched as the “conservative” alternative to the government run BBC, which means it is pretty much just a ruling class echo.

I was working on a small project in the living room so I put on the television to see if there was something worth watching. SkyNews had a program on about the latest Muslim mayhem in London, so I thought I’d give that a go. It was some sort of panel show, hosted by a guy who looked like a homeless man. He was an old guy kitted out to look like a college professor, but he was so shabby, he looked more like a bum than a professor.

The Mr. Chips routine remains popular on television news. They take a stupid person, dress him up to look like a college professor and then have him say his lines with an avuncular voice. Hilariously, the actors they have playing these roles on the news are almost always as dumb as hamsters. I guess a degree of dullness allows the actor to play the part without any self-regard. Maybe it is just one of life’s little ironies.

Anyway, the old gasbag droned on for a few minutes at the start, reminding us of the proper way to virtue signal about these Muslim attacks. He was also careful to make clear that no one, under any circumstances, is to speculate about why Muslims keep going bonkers and attacking people in Western cities. In fact, he was careful to not use the word “Muslim” and even suggested that the man’s identity remained a mystery.

Then, it got ridiculous. It was a panel show so the hobo went around and introduced his panelists. It was four women, all in their prime powerskirt years. These are the years when a powerskirt is still feeling the biological clock so she is not entirely without hope of being a women, but she is at her maximum anger at reality for not yielding to the latest feminist pieties. Of course, one was black and another South Asian, because that’s who we are!

The first powerskirt to speak sounded like a JohnRivers parody on Gab. She opened with how much she cares about the victims and how passionate she is for victim’s rights. Powerskirts are always passionate about stuff, just like Hitler. She then lurched into a tangle of sentences about how this incident opens the doors for hate and how any assault on London’s multiculturalism is far worse than a few white people being murdered.

What’s striking about watching these modern lunacies acted out with British accents is it makes the lunacy so much more obvious. What the hell does “open the door for hate” even mean? I bet the stupid twat who said it has no idea either. It just appeals to the fevered female mind. Similarly, they have deified the word “multiculturalism” as if it is a real thing, when in fact, it is just a word for the nullification of culture.

The funny thing about her little performance was that you could see her nostrils flaring and her cheeks getting a bit flushed. Maybe she is well-trained, but my take was she really meant every word of the nonsense she was saying. That or she was sexually aroused by it. Who knows, maybe the thought of being slaughtered by Muslim savages is arousing to these people. It’s not entirely out of the question, given the state of men these days.

That really is the issue. The men of our ruling class have no pride or self-respect. They got to where they are, largely untested as men, so they have no sense of achievement. As a result, the women have no respect for them or the culture they are supposed to symbolize. Consequently, we have a ruling class populated by hand-wringing pussies and terminally pissed off women, looking with envy at those swarthy guys on the border.

I snapped it off, thinking that it would probably be a good thing if an Exploding Mohamed walked into the station and ended things for all of them. Frankly, if I was walking outside the studio and Mohamed came running toward the entrance, I’d offer to hold the door for him. The people inside are hostile strangers to me. The only thing I know about them is they hate me for reasons I cannot address. Otherwise, I don’t know them.

That is the the final resting place of multiculturalism. A people without a shared past cannot have a shared future. The Muslim invader cannot look around the landmarks of London and feel pride. His people did not build these things. His ancestors were on the wrong end of a bayonet charge by the people who built Big Ben and London Bridge. The people who made these things are strangers. Their descendants are strangers to him.

Men cannot live as isolated, transactional economic units. Nature abhors it. It’s why the gray featureless world our rulers imagine is so horrifying to the Mohammedan. It’s why populist movements are sprouting up all over the West. Man is a social creature. In order to have strong bonds with each other, we must share strong bonds with our past. The people who rule over us must share those bonds too. They cannot be strangers.

It’s why, after every one of these attacks, the powerskirts and hand-wringing pussies rush out to fret about The Backlash™. At some level, they know that the real threat to their position is not the random muzzie, strapped with explosives screaming “Allahu Akbar!”, rushing into the offices of SkyNews or into Parliament. The real danger, what they truly fear, is that guy deciding to hold the door for Akmed. Then it’s all over for them.

The Political Class Murders Itself

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The point at which the Roman Republic moved from republic to empire is generally placed at the point when the Senate granted Octavian almost unlimited power and he adopted the title Augustus. Some historians argue it was when Caesar crossed the Rubicon or when Octavian defeated Antony at Actium. The implication is that once the transition was started, there was no turning back. The more useful analysis is to think of it as a process, with roots in the Republic, that evolved to the point where dictatorship was inevitable.

The die was most likely cast when the Republic began to compromise its own rules for limiting and distributing power. The system they had created was a reflection of the tribal realities of the early republic. In order to keep any one family from gaining too much power, they systematically limited the time anyone served in office. The system also forced an apprenticeship on those who went into public life. This had the benefit of making public men buy into the system. Therefore they were willing to defend it.

That meant the system had a policing mechanism to sort out enemies before they could cause trouble. An ambitious young man could not skip any steps on his way up the ladder, so once he got up the ladder, he was not agreeing to any changes in the process. Defending the system was a way to defend one’s prerogatives, but also a way to defend the system from lunatics. Verpus Maximus may be smart and talented, but he was not only going to wait his turn, he was going to do all the jobs necessary to prove his worth.

This system started to break down with the rivalry of Sulla and Marius. Sulla was the first man to hold the office of consul twice. He also got away with marching an army on Rome itself, in order to defeat his rival, Marius. Both of these acts were supposed to be disqualifying, but exceptions were made for expediency. Sulla sided with the Senate so the Senate bent the rules to serve themselves. A good case can be made that this is the point when it was all over for the Republic.

It was just a matter of time before someone used Sulla as a precedent.

It is a good lesson to keep in mind as the politicians in the Imperial Capital wrangle over what could be a very dangerous scandal for them.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes declared Wednesday that members of Donald Trump’s transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under inadvertent surveillance following November’s presidential election.

The White House and Trump’s allies immediately seized on the statement as vindication of the president’s much-maligned claim that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phones — even though Nunes himself said that’s not what his new information shows.

Democrats, meanwhile, cried foul.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel, cast doubt on Nunes’ claims in a fiery statement and blasted the chairman for not first sharing the information with him or other committee members.

Schiff also slammed Nunes for briefing the White House on Wednesday afternoon given that the Intelligence Committee is in the middle of an investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, including possible collusion with the Trump team.

The political class chased Nixon out of town for talking about the use of the FBI and CIA as weapons against political opponents. The rule in politics has been that the use of the IRS or the intelligence agencies was expressly prohibited. There could be no exceptions for obvious reasons, as it would give these bureaucracies dangerous power. That was the lesson of Hoover. If the CIA or IRS are allowed to use their powers to gather dirt on elected officials, then they can control elected officials. That’s the end of democracy.

Of course, there’s another reason to take certain weapons off the table in politics. That’s self preservation. In prior ages, where the winners had the losers killed, the challengers would always have as their goal, the death of the current ruler. That prompted the ruler to get ahead of the curve and have any potential challengers killed, before they could be any trouble. This was Stalin’s game and he just about gutted the the intellectual and political elite of Russia in the process. They still have not recovered from it.

That’s what makes this so dangerous. It’s now clear what happened. The Obama people started spying on Trump once he had the nomination or perhaps even earlier. They may have started earlier with an eye on helping the Republicans knock him off in the primary, but that’s not clear. They figured that Clinton was a lock so they were not careful about covering their tracks. The Clinton people are as dirty as it gets so they were not going to be ratting on anyone over it. If anything, they would expand on it.

This is where the Russian hacking story comes into the picture. Once disaster struck and Team Obama realized they had a problem, they needed cover, so they started with the Russian hacking nonsense. They would then claim that it was all an accident and they were just trying to prevent Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale from attacking our democracy! It’s also why Obama signed a retroactive Executive Order giving cover to the intel agencies for their domestic spying activities. They were creating a cover story.

The complication is that it appears that at least one person has perjured himself over this and that one person is FBI Director Comey. There’s no way to square his testimony with these new revelations. The best he can do is split hairs and claim he was not part of the spying effort. Of course, there’s no way to touch him as he runs the FBI. In fact, there’s no way to investigate any of the intelligence organizations. This is the point where many of the robot historians of the future will say the American political class murdered itself.

Unless there is some will to address it, and that’s highly unlikely, we now have a new normal where highly politicized intelligence agencies are used by both sides to discredit one another and discredit any attempts to reform the system. It’s no longer a game of rules. It is a zero sum  game of power and that cycle only ends one way, with someone marching their army on the capital and taking control. As with Rome, whoever emerges as the dictator will not have murdered the system. The system will have murdered itself.

Female Trouble

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The one thing that Europe has in common with America is the thorny issue of immigration, especially the problem of Muslim immigration. Europeans are also facing the problem of sub-Saharan African immigration, which is a different problem. Black Africans are not yet forming up terrorist rings and threatening to destroy Western civilization, at least not on purpose. The daily drumbeat of terrorism stories we see in the news are all tied to Islam and its hostility to Western civilization. The fact is, Islam is incompatible with the West.

The question that never gets asked is why are European politicians so wedded to the idea of open borders, when it means Muslim immigration? Letting Poles move from their homelands to London, as tradesman, is one thing. There’s an economic argument there, not a good one, but at least there’s an argument. Making it easy for Mercedes to build car parts in Slovakia has an economic argument to it. Again, it is a fallacious argument, but you can see how some people, especially politicians, could be dull enough to fall for it.

There’s no economic argument for importing Syrians or Turks. Muslims are overwhelmingly represented on the welfare roles. In Denmark, people from MENA countries make up 5% of the population, but consume 40% of welfare benefits. This is a story across Europe. It is not just the new arrivals. Turks in Germany have been there for a couple of generations and have been the worst performing economic group in the country. Estimates put the total working population at 20%, while the rest live off welfare benefits. Then there is the issue of sky high Muslim crime rates.

There is no economic argument in favor of importing these people. Businesses that want cheap labor have options within Europe. Like US companies, global European firms have used Asia for slave labor in the old dirty industries. Just like Silicon Valley, European tech firms have used indentured servants from India and China to undercut domestic wages and dodge local labor laws. The fact is, human capital from MENA countries has little value in modern, Western countries. The only people benefiting from the importation of them are security firms and prison builders.

That leads to the other possible reason the political class is in love with mass immigration from Muslim countries. Is there popular support for importing these people, despite their uselessness as citizens? Again, there’s no data to suggest this is the case. European leaders could have put the issue to the voters, but they fanatically avoid it. In fact, anyone who dares run on the issue is branded a Nazi. Politicians love democracy when they are assured of winning. They avoid it when they are assured of losing. Therefore, it is safe to assume they don’t think this is a winner for them.

What makes the political math crazy is the polling shows quite clearly that the majority of the public would support a ban on further Muslim immigration. Clever politicians could easily dress such a thing up in flowery language and have a winning issue. Even not-so-clever politicians could simply call for a halt to further immigration, without naming Muslims directly. One of the French candidates could cut Le Pen off at the knees by simply adopting a restriction position on immigration. Yet, all of them go the other way.

If it is not good economics or good politics, why is the European ruling class hell bent on replacing their native population with openly hostile foreigners? Mass insanity is the tempting response, but that’s just another way of blaming magic. If it were mass insanity, it would have some sort of external cause, like a virus that strikes middle-aged white politicians. How come it only seems to cause hyper-altruism among people in political power? It’s a fun thing to say, but it is not fruitful speculation.

A better answer may be that this is the inevitable result of the feminization of Western civilization. The most important country in Europe is ruled by a barren old women, who started out in life as a communist. The most masculine politician in France is Marie Le Pen. Germany’s opposition party is led by a mousy little wood nymph named Frauke Petry. Even the Brits turned to a woman to lead them out of Europe after the Bexit vote and the collapse of Cameron’s government. The West is now a matriarchy.

Look at the reaction to Donald Trump among the ruling class of the United States. He is detested, mostly by upper class women. Their reason is he has a penis and enjoys using it. As a comparison, Le Pen’s support is lowest among upper middle-class women in France. Sweden, which now runs on the principles of the womyn’s studies department at your local university, is also  the poster child fro immigration restriction. The broads in charge of that country have destroyed at least two of their cities with Muslim migrants.

The fact, men and women are different cognitively and well as physiologically. This is not just old school male chauvinism. It is solid science. Women like drama and emotional theater. They also like the idea of the alpha male coming to their rescue. Put women in charge of a country and they will set about creating danger and chaos so that the males will come rescue them. That’s where the swarthy rapists from the south come in. Europe and America settled their differences and ran out of dragons to slay, so the gals created new one in the form of Muslim lunatics imported into the West.

The trouble is the men of the political class are mostly pussies. Look at the men in positions of authority in the West. Barak Obama was a wigger dork. Paul Ryan is a ridiculous pussy, afraid of his own shadow. The males in Western politics are effeminate, fragile peopel, who spent their youth in the library. There are no tough guys, former soldiers or adventurers in Western politics. It’s all power-skirts and the men who secretly wish to dress like them. The result is the female side is creating drama and the male side is sobbing in the corner, promising to hold the camera steady.

Is Europe Lost?

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Imagine an island populated with a tribe of people. The Blue People have been a stable population of about 9,000 people, distributed over three generations. One day, a new people begin to arrive. The island of the Red People exploded and refugees are floating up on the beaches of the Blue People island. The result is about one thousand Red People are now living on the island. It is an accommodation the natives are happy to provide and the newcomers are generally thankful for the sanctuary.

The demographics of both groups are reasonably stable, with the slight difference in fertility rates. The Blue People have a TFR of 2.0 and the Red People are at 2.5. To keep this simple, we’ll assume war, famine, disease and so forth are not issues. Think of this as an economics model, where reality is excluded, in order to make a point. Even though the Red People are breeding at a slightly higher rate, the differences are so slight that hardly anyone notices. Even so, in ten generations, the number Red Children will equal the number of Blue Children.

Now, let’s imagine that the Red People have fertility rates closer to what we see in the Muslim world. That means they will rival the Blue population in just five generations. If the Blue People see their fertility rates drop to something closer to modern European rates, the populations on our island are equal in three generations. It’s why the question of Europe’s future is first and foremost, a math question. Which is why, as Steve Sailer pointed out, no one likes talking about demographics in Europe these days.

While demographics are destiny, things change quickly. Arab fertility rates have been plummeting for more than a decade. Iran has a TFR below replacement. The same is true of the Turks, who are also suffering a brain drain. Then there is the political dimension that can seemingly turn on a dime. This is why the political season in Europe is a fixation of the global press. Normally, these elections are just ceremonial, as the political parties agree on most everything, except who gets to steal first from the treasury.

Brexit changed that and the rise of the Trump Party in America now makes even the smallest election on the Continent into a big deal. It’s why the government media made the recent Dutch election into a referendum on their hopes and fears about what’s happening in the West, with regards to the rise of patriotic parties in opposition to far-left globalist parties currently in power. Geert Wilders, the very odd looking Dutch politician was pitched as the challenger to the very acceptable Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

The setup was that the Dutch had a choice between a lunatic hate-thinker and the normal, sensible establishment man. There was even an effort to throw Wilders in jail for blasphemy. The reason the media chose to pitch this election as a referendum on patriotism is that there was no chance for Wilders to “win” the election. The Dutch make it so that no party ever gets a majority of seats in their parliament. Instead, the “winning” party forms a coalition with some of the “losing” parties to get a majority government.

Wilders and his party are well outside the political center so there was zero chance of his party being included in a ruling coalition. In other words, the result was known in advance so it was a safe bet for the globalists to carry on as if it were a referendum on their blessed rule. The post election stories declaring populism dead were written in advance of the vote. Wilders did well and his party increased their number of seats, but fell short of exceptions. Even so, the globalists cheered, hoping this was an omen.

Again, no one really cares about the Dutch. They are the least representative of Europe and that has always been true. But, the global ruling class is looking down the road to the French elections and later the Italian elections. There is a decent chance that Le Pen wins the first round of the French election, which would be very embarrassing to the European elite. They could live with that, as the main parties can be sure to join forces in order to defeat Le Pen in the second round.

There is some small chance that the mainstream parties could falter or fall into squabbling and not be able to present a united front. The French ruling class is showing signs of decay. You see that with the candidates they have offered up in this election. It is a rogue’s gallery of careerist hacks with the personality of government clerks. Scandal is also a problem with some of them. Then there is the fact Le Pen is getting close to 30% of the vote. Events keep conspiring to reward her positions, with regards to immigration.

The fact is, Europeans are starting to notice the numbers. It may not be so easy, as the Red People and Blue People on our imaginary island, but Europeans can spot a Moroccan when they see one. They notice that the guys rioting are Turks and the guys stabbing people on trains are always yelling “Allahu Akbar” while doing it. They also notice that the people in charge have no answer. As Chris Caldwell points out in this Mark Steyn interview, they are left with trying to convince people that this is the new normal.

Even so, it is hard to get away from the math of it. Europe is old and barren, while the swarthy invaders are young and fruitful. Demographic transformation can happen quite quickly, which is why the natives are now rightfully fearful of islamification. A majority population, increasingly worried about the foreign minority population, ruled by a governing class paralyzed and unable to respond, is a recipe for a very bad result. Europe will quickly reach a point where they have to abandon social democracy in order to survive.

The alternative is Europe ceases to be Europe.

Mencken Lives

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Years ago, reading Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, I was struck by a line early in the book, where he criticized the American Left for not remembering their own intellectual history. What struck me about it was that Goldberg seemed to be astonished by this revelation. It is tempting to think, upon learning something new, that you are the first person to have the insight. Young people tend to suffer from this, coming home from college convinced they know the secrets of the universe. In the case of the Left, Goldberg may have been the last person to notice the Left’s hatred of the past.

The other thing that was striking is that modern conservatives suffer from the same defect. Read any of the so-called conservative writers of the Official Right™ and you get the impression that the world began in 1938. Every bad guy in the world is Hitler and any hesitation about rushing into war is appeasement. More important, they think the great intellectual tradition of the Right starts with the day Bill Buckley penned God and Man at Yale. Everything before that is fairy tales and mythology from a foreign people.

Of course, this is not an accident. Buckley conservatism was a break with the old traditional Right, if it was ever actually of the Right, which is debatable. George Will famously called Buckley’s Yale book “a lovers’ quarrel with his alma mater.” It was also a good way to describe the conservatism of Bill Buckley and his followers. It was and still is a lover’s quarrel with the Left. Put another way, it was the child admonishing the parent for not living up to the ideals the parent preached to their children.

To be fair, the Buckleyites borrowed some political objectives from traditional conservatives, along with some of the language of the Right, but it was essentially a Progressive heresy over the issue of communism. It’s why the Buckleyites had exactly zero wins in the culture war. They never bothered to fight it. Their singular reason to exist was opposition to communism, foreign and domestic. It’s why after the Cold War, they declared themselves Big Government Conservatives.

Anyway, Goldberg’s ahistorical view of conservatism came to mind when reading this post over at the ironically named The American Conservative.

H.L. Mencken has a conservative problem. The Baltimore journalist became the poster boy for literary modernism thanks to his literary criticism and nationally syndicated op-ed columns, in addition to his work as a magazine editor, most notably at American Mercury. But he ranks well behind the modernist poets T.S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens as an acceptable literary figure for conservative consumption. The reason has much to do with Mencken’s skepticism and irreverence. He mocked Puritanism famously as the cultural force that gave Americans a moralistic squint. Worse, he recommended the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as an antidote to Victorian morality and then promoted Theodore Dreiser, whose novels offended censors. Mencken proved his heretical ways at the Scopes Trial, where he mocked the prosecution led by William Jennings Bryan and the “simian faithful” who hung on the Great Commoner’s every word. Everywhere Mencken turned, his mantra seemed to be “just say no” to inherited moral, intellectual, and literary standards.

The most recent conservative complaint about Mencken is that he was an elitist who ridiculed his fellow Americans. Kevin D. Williamson of National Review objected that the debunking mentality prevalent in Mencken’s work represented a “genuine fervor to knock the United States and its people down a peg or two.” For Mencken, “the representative American experience was the Scopes trial, with its greasy Christian fundamentalists and arguments designed to appeal to the ‘prehensile moron,’ his description of the typical American farmer.” Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute registered a similar complaint in his book The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Undermined the Middle Class. He charged that Mencken was part of a company of liberal thinkers who wanted to create an American aristocracy that could “provide the same sense of hierarchy and order long associated with European statism.”

The unhinged madhattery on display here is breath taking. The starting point of Anglo-Saxon conservatism is skepticism, particularly a skepticism of universalism and Utopian lunacies like Puritanism. Similarly, the Right has always accepted that humans are a hierarchical species by nature. Therefore, the structure of society, including the political system, will always reflect this reality, as it has at all times and all places. Egalitarianism is a fetish of the Left, not the Right. Yet, the modern Right now claims it for their own.

Those two paragraphs describe what Buckley Conservatism is today. It is vinegar drinking prudery, a cartoonish version of Christian piety and unquestioning reverence for the jingoistic version of American history, that has little resemblance to reality. Put another way, it is kept men tut-tutting about manners, droning on about the old church and demanding you send your sons off to fight pointless wars of choice, claiming it is your patriotic duty. No wonder its constituency does not extend beyond the Imperial Capital.

Mencken was a man of his age so much of what he wrote about no longer has relevance or it strikes the delicate ear of the modern reader as hate speech. He also wrote a lot and that leads to a degree of inconsistency and incoherence. When you are writing to be read, your first goal is to be entertaining, so a degree of logical inconsistency is inevitable. Even so, Mencken is an important figure to study, because it is the conservatism of his era that is roaring back in the form of the populist upheavals we are seeing in our politics.

The Fading Star

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Tyler Cowen posted his latest Conversations with Tyler. His guest was Malcolm Gladwell, the famous gadfly and popularizer of the blank slate. Of course, Cowen slobbers all over him, because that’s what good thinkers are supposed to do when they get to meet someone like Gladwell. It’s a way of letting the other good thinkers know you are not the sort that colors outside the lines. Gladwell is one of those guys who is more famous for what he represents than anything he has said or written.

Celebrity intellectuals are not famous because they have offered up a great insight or discovery. There’s no money in that. New ideas challenge the orthodoxy. The people with the money to help an aspiring celebrity intellectual live the sort of life they deserve tend not to like challenges to the orthodoxy. Instead they gravitate to people who confirm that the current arrangements are as the heavens ordained. That’s Gladwell. His celebrity is rooted in his ability to flatter the Cloud People.

The typical path to celebrity for these guys is not much different than the way mediocre comics get rich and famous. The game is to flatter the right audience. Making a bunch of bad whites in the hill country feel good about themselves is not a path to the easy life. You can make a nice living, but you’re not going to be doing Ted Talks or getting five figures to do the college circuit. Figure how to let the Cloud People on the Upper West Side feel like champions and you have the golden ticket.

People fond of biological realism and quantitative analysis tend to enjoy making sport of Gladwell, mostly because he makes some hilariously stupid claims. His 10,000 hour rule argument was so stupid it was not even wrong. Steve Sailer has made a hobby out of pulling apart Gladwell’s claims. Sailer is a smart guy, who understands that if he tossed Gladwell off a roof, Gladwell would eventually hit the pavement below, so I suspect he is offended by the idea of a bullshit artist like Gladwell getting rich by peddling nonsense.

The thing is, guys like Gladwell exist off a number of biases and one of them is that they are sincere in their intentions. They truly believe the things they are saying. The difference between a con-man and a moron is that the moron really believes what he is saying. The grifter not only knows he is spouting nonsense, but he crafted the nonsense to take advantage of people. A big part of the Gladwell act is that he presents himself as a sincere dork, who just happens to notice that his audience is on the right side of history.

Of course, what really helps Gladwell is the fact that he is mixed race and  the best kind of mixed race. His mother is black and his father is a English honky. Unlike Barak Obama, Gladwell can pass for white so he gets to play both sides of race street, sort of like how white women like to say they are part Native American. It is the dream of every Progressive white women to get all the victim points of being black, without having to actually be black. As a result, Gladwell makes an excellent totem.

In fairness, Gladwell did catch lightning in a bottle with his first book. It came out just as the Great Progressive Awakening was getting started. Many Progressives saw the Bush election as a tipping point. Bush winning the White House was the nightmare made real and it became a rallying point around which their great cause would be based, at least until that incarnation of the 12th Invisible Hitler was vanquished. Gladwell’s book confirmed what many Progressives were feeling, particularity those in the chattering classes.

As the Great Progressive Awakening comes to an end, so does the rock star status of Malcolm Gladwell. His last two books sold well, mostly due to his name, but both were panned by critics. He was never really an idea man, more of a zeitgeist man. From his perch at the New Yorker, he could take the temperature of his fellow Cloud dwellers and come up with ways to titillate them. The mood has turned dark and angry in the Cloud, so Gladwell’s child-like sense of wonder does not titillate like it did at the beginning..

He will get the same treatment as Jon Stewart, who was replaced as the Official Cloud People Comic by a colorful array of bitter losers. Stewart’s exaggerated irony face routine was replaced by a turkey-necked old hen, who spends 30 minutes a night screeching into the camera. Stewart’s comedy was for people who believed they were riding the tides of history to the promised land. Samantha Bee is for losers, who are being carted off to Babylon and a life of servitude. Somewhere, a blue haired lesbian with a face full of fishing tackle and an apartment full of cats is writing the next Cloud People best seller.