Category Archives: Politics

Beta Male Nation

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Regardless of how you feel about Obama’s politics, you have to admit that the people behind him are very good at selling their man to the public. Their get out the vote efforts have run circles around the GOP. They created a voting block out of single women. The “Julia” campaign may have seemed creepy to a lot of normal people, but it worked on the target audience. The young gals changed two elections based on their belief that the GOP wants to pack their uterus with bibles and sew up their vaginas.

This add appears to be targeting homosexual males.

Lots of people on the Right are howling with laughter at this add, but it would be wise to consider the possibility that it is a good marketing campaign. After all, the people behind it have put a man in the White House based on their ability to target the aspirations of Progressive white women and black church ladies. In 2004, the idea of a mixed race guy with a Muslim name becoming was as laughable as this advertisement.

This fruit looks a lot like the actor from Big Bang Theory. That is a very popular TV sit-com featuring nerdish beta males, replaying the Friends show of the 1990’s. It’s popular for a reason. Look around at the stars popular with youth and you will not find a lot of tough guys facing off against the bad guys. It is almost exclusively sexually ambiguous males and masculinized females. Body spray makes millions for chemical companies because millions of young American males want to smell like a woman.

It’s 9 Thermidor Year II

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For those of you not up on your revolutionary history, that is the date of the Thermidorian Reaction. In radical circles, it has a different meaning. It is the inflection point in radical politics where the movement veers off into madness. The otherwise sensible people who were pushing the movement along begin to have doubts and question the people they have been following. The revolution, at this point, begins to eat itself, as radicals seek out doubters and the sober minded react to the craziness of the radicals.

For more than 200 years radicals have been replaying the French Revolution hoping for a different result. In every case, the radicals never see that they are following the same path as those who came before them. It suggest there is something about radicalism, maybe a biological quality to the radicals themselves, that results in this pattern. For some reason, they can never see that they are following the same story arc as prior radical movements, even when they are led by people who are students of prior radical movements.

Anyway, I first heard it is used when reading about the Berkeley Citizens Action struggles in the 1980’s. The New Left settled into the city and went about building a a radical organization. They used a document called The City’s Wealth to map out a strategy to gain control of Berkeley, which they eventually did in the 1980’s. That’s when Berkeley got into declaring itself a nuclear free zone and campaigning for various communist causes in South America. It is also when the city’s schools and quality of life began to collapse.

The radicals were so concerned about polishing their radical credentials and debating their radical theories with one another, they failed to figure out how to run a practical organization. They also started succumbed to the normal human temptations, like getting their money mixed up with the city’s money. Eventually the city’s less crazy liberal population revolted and started to throw out the radicals. Left-wing observers on the West coast called it America’s Thermidorian Reaction.

That may be what’s happening with the Affordable Care Act. It was the crowning achievement of the Left’s capturing of the national government in 2008. Five years on it is an unfolding disaster that is threatening the revolution. On the one hand, the old school types like Bernie Sanders are unhappy about the bill not going far enough. They were never happy about this, but hoped it was a first step. The liberals who are more concerned with practical politics are in a full blown panic as their poll numbers collapse.

On the other hand, this may signal the collapse of the more pragmatic wing of the Left, the wing led by people like the Clintons. They may be crooks, but they come out of the moderate strain of 60’s radicalism, that thought this government could be re-purposed to Progressive ends. The other wing, the anti-white wing, is not all that interested in reforming the system. They wish to sack it and then attack their white oppressors. They may see this failure as the failure of pragmatism and then demand more radical action.

The GOP’s Demographic Problem

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John Derbyshire’s latest racist, right-wing extremist extremism is up at VDARE. I’m a big fan of John’s work, even though I think the people at VDare are a bit weird. Not the bad sort of weird, more like the eccentric sort of weird. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s an oddness about some of them. Perhaps it is the effects of working with taboo material for so long, like radiation sickness. But, it takes all kinds and my tastes are not conventional. Anyway, his column has some interesting facts like this one.

The 1911 census in the newly-founded British dominion of South Africa showed whites as 22 percent in a population of 6 million. By 1980, although their actual numbers had more than tripled, they had dwindled to 16 percent in a population of 28 million, with a birthrate half that of blacks. The demographic writing was on the wall. (Whites are now nine percent in a population of 53 million, just twice the proportion of whites in 1970s Rhodesia, and of course still falling.)

I had that on my mind as I was reading something on National Review. The comment by Scott Wilson is the important bit:

Had the electorate in 2012 looked like the electorate in 1988, Romney likely carries all but a handful of states. Romney carried white voters in every age demographic. The GOP doesn’t have a policy problem, and frankly it really doesn’t have a candidate problem, although I understand the comfort in thinking those things might be true; if they were true, our problems would be fixable, or at least more easily fixable.

No,our problems are demographic in nature, and for that, there really isn’t any short-term cure. Sadly.

That, of course, brings to mind this Steve Sailer post from after the last election. A little math confirms something about modern American politics. Blacks vote democrat 100% of the time. Thinking there’s any chance of changing that is crazy. Right away that gives the democrats 13% of the vote. Hispanics are not as big, but they consistently go 70% for democrats. That’s another 6% of the vote bringing the floor for Democrats to 20% of a national election. In some states, that floor is higher, because of a smaller white vote.

When you look at the white vote, 20% have been calling themselves liberal for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. That’s another 15% going democrat bringing their floor total to 35%. Now, polling consistently puts the percentage of whites calling themselves conservative at 40%. Even though many in that group are libertarian, anarchists and just angry misfits, let’s assume they vote for the GOP. That puts their floor at 30%. That sounds pretty close, but the 35% is much more reliable and dedicated.

It is not hard to see what happens when you increase the Hispanic vote. If we amnesty 20 million Mexicans, that doubles the vote share, bringing the Democrats over the 40% threshold. That means they need just one in three  whites to carry an election. Even now, they need just 40% of that group. Scott Wilson is largely correct. The GOP has a demographic problem more than anything. The share of the vote off-limits is forever off-limits. The share that makes up their base is increasingly unreliable. The crackup we are seeing with Boehner is simply a reflection of slow tearing apart of the GOP.

The End of MARs

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The budget deal “negotiated” by Paul Ryan is a good example of why the GOP is struggling. The deal itself is mostly just some tinkering with minor elements of the overall budget. Spending does not change, taxes go up a tiny bit and some formula for hiking pensions is altered in a trivial way popular with people in the ruling class. This has the added benefit of allowing people claiming to be experts to get jobs in the bureaucracy, figuring how the new rules can be implemented. Regulation is a jobs program.

In reality, the reforms do nothing and the experts are just functionaries. The American system of government is designed to make change difficult even when the ruling class wants to make changes. When that intentionally sclerotic political system sits atop a massive continent-wide bureaucracy, change is damn near impossible. It’s like steering a super tanker with an oar. Maybe it can be nudged a bit, but the effects takes years for anyone to notice. When they are defending the status quo, change is impossible.

That’s the problem for the GOP. Historically, they have been the party of good management. They appeal to the middle class largely by promising stable, sensible management of the state. They are the squares. Radical change is not their thing. Even when it is their thing, like it was 30 years ago, it was more like the parents coming home to discover the remains of a house party. They make the kids clean up the mess and put the house back into its original order, or something close to it.

The trouble comes when a significant portion of their base has become radicalized. Guys like David Stockman and Rick Santelli make a living appealing to that growing segment of the population. Multiculturalism and globalism are creating two types of radicals in American politics. There are those who want to press the gas and drive society over the multicultural cliff, while another segment wants to grab the wheel and steer the car in another direction, without really knowing where to go or how to do it.

The Middle American Radical is restless. The country has been overrun by lunatics and they want something done about it. The trouble is the lunatics have a political party of their own called the Democrat Party. The MARs have tried over the decades to transform the GOP into a fighting force willing to take on the lunatics. The trouble with that is the GOP establishment is not radical. It is a collection of squares, chamber of commerce types and financial elites. Mitt Romney and John McCain are not radicals by any definition of the word. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are stay the course Republicans.

These folks know their constituency is not interested in radical change. They like things the way they are right now. Their constituents, of course, are the donors who bankroll their campaigns and the Republican Party. The donor class may be small in number, but they control most of the cash. You’ll note that the same people underwriting the GOP underwrite much of the Democrat Party and underwrite organizations promoting forever war in the Middle East. They are not interested in making any changes.

The Reagan Revolution was about rollback. In some important ways, the Left was pushed back, but in other more important ways, the Left prevailed. The MARs, being sensible people, accepted that you can’t win every fight. You come back another day and they did in 1994 with the Contract with America. They forced some reforms onto Clinton, but lost most fights. Again, win some lose some but live on to fight another day, which was supposed to happen when Bush was elected. That never happened.

Instead it was mostly a stalemate over foreign policy while the Left swept the field on the domestic side. The MARs began to question their allegiance to the GOP and started to walk away from the party. Mitt Romney lost because a whole lot of folks, supposedly in the GOP base, walked away. The ridiculousness of Mitt Romney, a liberal from a weird religious cult, being the standard bearer for a party that allegedly represents the interests of white people, is one of those things that will be studied for a long time.

That brings us back to the budget deal. Doing this deal is good tactics. As a party, the GOP needs to stand aside right now and let the clown show unfold. ObamaCare is a disaster that is cratering support for the Democrats. It is not going away either. In fact, it promises to get worse next year. That will impact the economy, no matter how much the BLS fakes the numbers. Sometime in the spring they can roll out a list of promises that are reasonable and current. Then they can sail to another midterm victory.

That’s the problem though. Good tactics are not what their voters want. This theater of the Left making demands, while the reasonable boys in the GOP meets them half way and finds a way to make it work is not selling. Those Middle American Radicals stayed home in 2012 in enough numbers to tank the election for Romney. In the 2016 election, they may just show up and vote for some outsider who promises to nuke the whole thing. At that point, the party is over for Conservative Inc and the party of squares.

A Big Hoax

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The Left can believe things that are obviously wrong. So much so, they can convince people who should know better that up is down and down is up. Health care is a great example. For example, the ObamaCare debacle is turning into the greatest public works failure in the history of man. If the Hoover Damn had cracked open on the first day and crumbled into a pile of stones, it would not be as big a failure as ObamaCare.

Every day brings another hilarious failure of the website or some aspect of it. What has gained less attention is the fact few people have bothered to even try to sign up. Of those, almost all should have been on Medicaid all along. The Left claimed 20 million Americans were without insurance and would buy it if it were cheaper. They claimed another 20 million or so were young people who should be paying into the system, but are not.

The Left believed the 40 million uninsured myth with the intensity of a fanatic. As the numbers come in, they hold to it. Even non-Liberals still accept the claim. Never mind that the figures never held up to experience or reason. If you are young, you don’t need insurance. If you are poor or old, you can go on the dole. If you have a job, you most likely have a policy from work. Small business people have private plans.

Of course, a trip to the local ER shows it is full of illegal aliens who should not be here in the first place. The great uninsured never existed in numbers worthy of this initiative. The uninsured, those who legitimately exist, are like the unemployed. They are a temporary class, a shifting, dynamic cohort that is transitioning from one job state or life state to another. There was never a great emergency to be addressed, but the Left believed it.

The great uninsured was a big fat hoax. They never really existed in numbers warranting state action. Instead of asking to look behind the curtain, everyone went along with the claims made by the Left. So much so we have a multi-trillion dollar disaster on our hands that will end up helping a handful of people, who probably never needed the help in the first place. Those who did need help could have relied on existing programs.

Even now, the debate still focuses on how to replace it or how to fix it. No one is bothering to ask why the premise of the thing is not holding up to empirical fact. You can be sure that if anyone publicly challenges the claim they will be called a monster. Obama will keep wheeling out white people supposedly helped by his program and the liberal press will yammer about the lack of an alternative. No one will question the premise.

Another Celebration for the Left

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The death of Nelson Mandela will no doubt result in a sanctimonious circus for the usual suspects on the Left. These people cannot control themselves, so even at funerals they put on a show, intended to display their virtue. That’s how it goes with these things. It is a shame because Mandela’s death could be one of those moments to think about the realities of Africa, but the people who deified him really don’t care about Africa or Africans.

Instead, it will be a week of one-upsmanship on the Left, as they compete with one another to be the most worshipful of a man who was mostly a failure. Chris Mathews is a great example. He lives in one of the whitest neighborhood in America, which happens to be outside of Washington. The Baltimore-Washington area is close to majority black, so a white-only town stands out. Yet, Mathews will lecture the rest of us about race.

Mathews is emblematic of the Left’s relationship to blacks. For the Left, blacks are merely a totem. They are something one worships in the abstract because it riles the enemies of the Left. At least they think it does. In the fevered imagination of the Left, The Man hates blacks and is always trying to keep them down. Naturally, The Man is always a cartoonish version of the the WASP elite, rather than a liberal Jewish guy.

Of course, the Mandela worship has always been about the Left celebrating itself and this funeral will be another example. They love Mandela because they backed him against the bad whites, who were on the wrong side of history. If Mandela had died of a stroke before apartheid ended, he would have been forgotten. It was never about him or his cause. It was always about the narrative in which the Left is always operating.

It is a shame because Mandela really was an extraordinary leader by the standards of Africa. His coevals on the continent competed with one another to be the most maniacally murderous and destructive. Idi Amin was a cannibal, for example. No African country emerged from colonialism and then prospered, except for two. Rhodesia thrived for a time under Ian Smith. The other is South Africa, at least until now.

The fact that South Africa did not follow the same path as every other African state is due to Mandela, in no small part. That’s not to say he was a saint or even a moral person. It’s just that he was not like the typical African leader, who runs his country in the same way local drug lords runs their gang. There was a chance to make the Mandela model the minimally acceptable in Africa, but that never happened and never will now.

None of that will get much of an airing this weekend. Instead it will be the Left congratulating itself for opposing Apartheid and embracing Mandela. It will also be an excuse to revive their passion for Obama. You can be sure our African prince will be there talking about himself, not so subtly reminding the Left why they worshiped him up until last week. The only thing missing will be a wicker man full of white people to burn.

No one will dare mention the deteriorating conditions in South Africa as the black majority slip back into their natural state and set about murdering the white minority. Whatever legacy Mandela could have had will be forgotten after the Left is done with his memory this weekend. In a decade, when the white minority is fleeing South Africa, no one will look back and wonder if it was a good idea to oppose Apartheid. No one will care.

The Words of Fake Intellectuals

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Certain words and phrases take on meanings because of who uses them. For instance, the noun “moderate” in the political context always means liberal. The only people who ever use it are liberals. All of my “moderate” friends, for example, are conventional liberals, who faithfully line up for the democrat in every race. They always lament the lack of “moderate” republicans. Of course, moderate republicans are always liberal.

In the context of personal health, the word is an adjective for the pests and scolds who think they can tell us how to live. In those cases, “moderate” means self-denial. Moderate drinking means no drinking. Moderate eating means no food you like. The common thread here is that fanatics have run off with a perfectly good word and turned it into a chilling horn blast signaling the arrival of people who reminder you of your ex-wife.

The neologism “wonk” is a favorite word on the Left. They say it means policy expert, but it really means agitprop expert. Ezra Klein is a good example. He repeats the politically acceptable dogma in slightly new ways, which makes him a favorite of the people in the political class. Nothing he has ever written would require critical thinking or knowledge of the subject. He just flatters his fellow Progressives, by telling them what they want to hear.

While in theory, the word “wonk” is supposed to mean a policy expert or perhaps an expert on existing regulations, it almost always means flatterer. A wonk is someone who comes up with clever sounding ways to conform what the political class thinks about something at the moment. Not even the political class really, just the army of camp followers that make up the commentariat. To be a wonk is to never question anything.

A word that has been totally corrupted is “data.” To the people fond of using it in social commentary, the word is a synonym for signs, like the ones a shaman would see in goat entrails. You see it in that Klein piece. “HealthCare.gov is clearly working better. But is it actually working? It depends on how you read the data.” This suggest data itself is meaningless, as what matters is who is reading and, of course, their motivations.

Look at the construction. He declares this thing is better, then suggests it may not be working at all, depending on information that has not been presented. In this case, “data” means “who you ask.” To an empiricist or anyone vaguely familiar with practical mathematics, data is what your mathematical representation of reality has to include in order to meet the minimum test of validity. To Klein, data is a sign to be read.

The dilettante is “a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.” In this increasingly fraudulent age, the pseudo-intellectual is something of a dilettante, but instead of learning enough to fake it, they make up new language or corrupt the existing language, so they sound smart without having to know anything about the subject. They don’t know anything. They know about things.

Perhaps another way to put it is we live in a meta-era, in that our intellectual class does not know things or even things about things. They are meta-intellectuals, in that they know things about being an intellectual, the clothes, the verbal cues and so forth, but they are not intellectuals nor to they know any. That’s really just a nice way of saying they are fakers, which is why they like fake language. They are as phony as three dollar bills.

Scaring the Bleep Out Of The Honkies

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Something that jumps out when reading the chapter on Weather Underground in Destructive Generation, is that a big part of the attraction of radical politics in chaotic mayhem. Early on, the Weathermen did a lot or organizing. That required the leaders to travel around the country to visit other radicals. One of them was Bernadine Dohrn, Obama’s patron in Chicago. She was the main recruiter for the group.

In one passage, Horowitz described how she and her companion at the time liked to cause mayhem on airplanes, so the passengers would think they were crazy. The point, she said, was to “scare the shit out of the mother fucking honkies!” They would engage in raunchy behavior or dress in outlandish clothes, for no other reason than to irritate the other people on the plane. Their goal was to be disruptive just to be disruptive.

This is a major feature of radical ideology. The revolution is not going to start by itself, so the vanguard needs to first destabilize the system. The proletariat needs leadership, but they also need to be freed from the shackles of the system. The way to do that is to attack the institutions of the bourgeoisie. As faith in those institutions falters, the middle-class will be forced to choose sides. Those who side with the radicals will be rewarded. Those who side with the establishment will be killed along with the ruling class.

That’s why bombing campaigns were popular with the New Left here and in Europe. If the police and courts cannot protect you from the revolution, you’re not going to support the system. The point of this form of terrorism is to reveal the rulers as illegitimate, by making it seem  like their impotence is deliberate. Instead of blaming the bombers, the people begin to turn on their rulers, opening the door for the radicals.

Now, the New Left was not a real Marxist revolutionary group. They were just spoiled middle and upper-middle class kids from good families. They liked all the good stuff of the system, they just wanted to shortcut their way to positions of power. The Marxism language and radical politics were always a pose for people like the Weathermen. They just liked causing trouble. Most of their time was spent doing drugs and fornicating.

The few sober moments were spent screaming at one another about why they have done nothing but get high and fornicate like animals. A handful of hardcore nuts did some real damage, but most were just there for the party. Those nuts, however, were attracted to the cause for the opportunity to cause mayhem. By the time Dohrn and Ayers were running things, that’s all there was as the 60’s had petered out.

The way Horowitz describes these people, the impression is that their lust for mayhem was driven but a desire to get attention. One of the founders spent a lot of time cultivating an image suggesting he came from the lower-class, when he was a rich kid. Dohrn strutted around dressed like a hooker and banging men in public. Ayers worked hard to cast himself as a lady killer. The whole list of founders is distinguished by the amount of time and effort each put into crafting an attention grabbing image.

It’s easy to understand why these people were fond of declaring that all politics is personal. For them, it was literally true. The lust for mayhem became a part of these cultivated images. All politicians are in it for personal reasons, but most are defined by things outside of politics. Radicals are only defined by their politics. They have no true self that can exist outside their current politics. It’s why they are so angry and violent. Any push-back to their program is a personal attack, as it literally is personal for them.

It reveals something about all radical politics, regardless of the age or the issue. These people define themselves by their politics, which are by nature in opposition to the normal social order. They have to both attack that normal order, trying to overturn it, but also do so in a purely personal way. The effort they invest into “being different” is not really about the thing they are pretending to be. It is about that which they are rejecting.

A Stupid Fat Guy

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It’s probably immoral to make sport of big fat guys like New Jersey governor Chris Christie, but everyone does it. Fair or foul, it is assumed that obesity is a character flaw, an indication the person lacks self-control. For a politicians, it is an easy line of attack, but it does not seem to be a huge problem for them, no pun intended. There have been plenty fatties in politics. Christie is going to run for president and he probably will have a lot of support, despite being a morbidly obese man with an obnoxious demeanor.

He has the support of the party establishment. He is a moderate. He got a lot of votes from blacks and Hispanics. He is a fund raising machine and he has the support of the GOP governors. That’s a winning hand in a wide open field. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have their followers, but they lack the sex appeal and resources to build on it. Plus, the donor party hates these guys as they don’t always follow orders. Christie can be relied upon to do what he is told, without trying to think on his own too much.

Of course, he has the habit of rushing over to grovel before the Left, which makes him the ideal Republican these days. Here he is coming to the defense of Mario Cuomo’s kid, which is the go to move for the GOP wimp. That means as president, he’ll make a lot of noise, but in the end will surrender to the Left in every issue. That makes him the ideal candidate for a party that exists only to defend the Democrat party. Having a a guy who reminds everyone of Ned Beatty as the GOP standard bearer makes perfect sense.

The Never Ending Madness

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Way back in the before times, I was involved in a unionization effort at the company I was with at the time. The Teamsters were trying to organize some part-time drivers and other similar sorts of labor. Most were guys working in these jobs were just doing it to pick up some extra money. It was a piece work deal. A man showed up and he was put to work on whatever was needed at the time. A small percentage tried to make a full-time job of it, but the hours were limited to 25 a week in order to discourage it.

Of course, a group of guys trying to make a career of washing cars or shuttling them to and from a location would always try hard to get more hours. When the company held the line, they contacted the union and the result was a union campaign. The Teamsters won by one vote, mostly by threatening the guys who were not interested. The result was they got a bunch of rules and new pay rates. The truly part-time wanted nothing to do with it and the original organizers were washed out one by one. It was a disaster.

It’s not hard to see something similar happening to fast food workers if they try to form a union. The companies will simply start automating the work and the result will be fewer people making slightly less, while the SEIU gets a piece of the action. Unions are not bad per se, but service worker unions prove little in the way of services to their members, while siphoning off a piece of their check. The SEIU is pretty much just a money racket for the Democratic Party, not a genuine labor movement.

The mathematics of fast food means it can never work. McDonald’s has about 25% of their costs in retail labor. That $7 meal you get in the drive through is a $1.75 in human costs. Doubling the wages does more than double the labor cost. It jacks up taxes and benefit costs. These franchises will have legal and personal costs associated with dealing with a union workforce. Since no one is buying a $10 union meal from McDonalds when they can get a $7 meal from some other option, the result will be ruinous.

Of course, what never gets mentioned is the fact that these jobs were never intended to be careers. They were originally for kids and adults looking for part-time work. The manager would make a career of it, but the front-line people were always intended to be temporary workers in a homogeneous society. That is, your kid got a job at McDonalds, working for someone who lived in the community. The franchise was locally owned, so it was like going to work for a neighbor. That was the point of franchising.

That meant a different relationship between the owners, customer and workers than we see today. Go into a McDonalds now and the staff are weird little brown people from another land. They barely speak English. The manager is just a employee from somewhere, working for a company that has twenty franchises. As the customer, you have no emotional attachment to the place, as it is run by strangers and owned by some out of town interest. The workers peasants with no better options.

It is something to watch in the coming years. Chick-fil-A relies on the old model of hiring locals needing part-time work. They pay better, but expect more. The experience is vastly better for the customer, as the people are pleasant, speak English and seem to care about doing a good job. No one talks about unions and the customers have no reason to think the workers need representation. McDonalds relies on indentured servants and illegals and their reputation has declined as a result. Which model will prevail?