Monthly Archives: November 2013

The Cruelty of Men

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Anyone who has played sports, committed crimes, belonged to criminal organization, served in the military or been to prison knows that males can be violently cruel. On that list, two are considered honorable activities, while the other three are counted as dishonorable. Yet, the qualities one needs to thrive in all of them are the same. You have to be tough minded. You have to be willing to use violence to establish your place in the group. You have to overcome physical fear and take physical punishment.

In all cases, you will be confronted by other males who want to dominate you, sometimes in extremely unpleasant ways. In every locker room, there are guys trying to push around other guys. You earn respect from your teammates by pushing back. In prison, you better be willing to kill that guy or you’re going to be his punk. Men can be horrible to other men, but modern times and a feminized culture push this truth to the fringes. Still, it is an immutable part of the human condition.

Once in a while it creeps into view. A current example is the case of Miami Dolphin’s lineman Richie Incognito. Reportedly, he harassed a teammate to the point where the guy quit the team and went to get psychiatric help. I’m quite sure that every player on the team knew what was going on and many participated in it. The victim was probably despised by everyone because he was taking it. No man respects another man who will not fight back.

The over-class can preach the contrary in TV and movies, but no one respects a wimp, a pussy or a punk. That’s why no one came to the guy’s aid. Incognito is a horrible human being, by all accounts, but as far as the other players were concerned, he was the better man. It’s terrible and it is cruel, but it is the way men are to one another. This poor sap will get help, but he will never play football again. Like the Ned Beatty character from Deliverance, he can never look another man in the eye again.

Incognito has been suspended and will face some sort of punishment. As long as he can play the position, he will get work and be welcomed by other players. They may think he is a bad guy, but they will respect him. That’s the other side of this sort of thing and why campaigns against bullying are pointless. Men, by nature, respect the bully more than the bullied. In the evolution of man, being counted on to fight is an important asset. When the other tribe is coming for your women, the wimp is a liability.

Anarcho-Tyranny

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I’ve never been a believer in supplements. The reason is I’m a natural skeptic and the claims always set of my BS detector. The other reason is I know a bit about nutrition and science. Humans have evolved as omnivores. We can get the nutrition we need from a wide range of sources. In modern times, with so much food available to us, the odds of missing something important are close to zero. It’s why no one calls in sick because their rickets or scurvy is acting up. We have more than enough food.

All of those fat people waddling in and out of Walmart are not lacking in essential vitamins or minerals. Similarly, the health benefits of these things are dubious. It is rare that you see real science backing a claim. Even in cases where there is some correlation between a supplement and a positive life outcome, the benefits are weak. Take a vitamin may help in some small way, but not enough to worry about not taking one. That said, most of it is harmless so taking a multivitamin every day is not going to kill you.

At least that’s what I used to think. I read stuff like this and wonder how many people have been harmed by this crap. Whenever I watch TV, I see ambulance chasers looking for victims of one drug or another. Often, the causes of the alleged injury is something I heard marketed just the year before. Maybe it is just another scam, but some portion are legitimate. Given that these companies appear to be jamming whatever they can find into gelcaps and selling it to the public, I suspect a lot more harm is being done than we know.

Among their findings were bottles of echinacea supplements, used by millions of Americans to prevent and treat colds, that contained ground up bitter weed, Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive plant found in India and Australia that has been linked to rashes, nausea and flatulence.

Two bottles labeled as St. John’s wort, which studies have shown may treat mild depression, contained none of the medicinal herb. Instead, the pills in one bottle were made of nothing but rice, and another bottle contained only Alexandrian senna, an Egyptian yellow shrub that is a powerful laxative. Gingko biloba supplements, promoted as memory enhancers, were mixed with fillers and black walnut, a potentially deadly hazard for people with nut allergies.

I suppose a terrible farting spell is not the end of the world, but it is not something you should expect from a pill being sold in America. We have this massive regulatory state and yet they allow crooks to sell fart pills to the public without any consequences. Giving people a “powerful laxative” when they are hoping for a little help with their depression is downright monstrous. Unless what is bringing you low is a lack of fiber, and that seems highly unlikely, giving depressed person the runs sounds quite cruel.

All of this is fraud and is easily policed. The trouble is we have a government that is no longer interested in this basic functions. These require effort and risk by the bureaucrats within the custodial state. These companies have money and lawyers. They can fight back. Crimes like fraud are allowed to go on because the state has no desire to enforce these laws. Yet, someone with a real drug that can help real people will be faced with the wall of regulation promulgated by the state.

Dropping Facebook

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I am not a young person, but I am not old yet either. That means I am less inclined to adopt new technology than a 20-something, but I will if it is practical. The older you get, the definition of “practical” tends to narrow. A teenager views a smart phone as a necessity, while a senior views it as a novelty. I have a smart phone and rely on it a great deal, but I also know I could get along without it, because I remember a time when these things did not exist. The dark ages get a bad rap. It was not so dark.

Facebook was sort of the reverse. In my youth I was an early adopter of mobile phones so I moved up with the technology. Facebook sis not exist in my youth, so I was a late adopter. Anyway, one of my friends badgered me into signing onto Facebook a few years back. I setup a page and did nothing with it. I added friends for the first month or so then I stopped. I would log in daily to see what was posted and maybe comment on occasion, but mostly it was a daily peak into on the lives of friends and some strangers.

The fact is, I never really used it much. I like my friends, but I have no need or desire to communicate with them daily. E-mail is better anyway. The friends of friends who come into view from time to time are not very interesting. It seems that the more prolific users are crazy. They are like drug fiends who will do anything to get attention on-line. They quickly run out of good ways to get attention, so they lurch into the unlimited supply of bad ways to get attention. You learn a lot about people a a result. None of it good.

My liberal friends have some real wackos in their circle. If you are logging onto a website of a politician to tell them and the world how much you love them, you need a psychiatrist, not a platform. Otherwise, the daily fare on Facebook is boring scraps of information about the collection of average people in my life. God bless them, but they are just not that interesting. Neither am I. I read a lot and know a lot of things that most people don’t know, but I am no more interesting than the next guy.

So, I deactivated my account. It seems that may be the one thing I have in common with young people. Facebook is now losing its cool factor with the young. I’ve always said it was a fad, but I started to wonder if I was mistaken. It turns out I was right. We know that a very large number of the accounts on Facebook are fake. We also know many are dormant. More important, we know that most of us are not that interesting. Facebook is like reality TV, without the parts created by writers to make it interesting.

The whole rationale for the company, however, is they get young people hook ed on the site, so they can sell them stuff or have the ad makers sell them stuff. If it turns out that they do not get young people, then you have to wonder if Facebook is a viable business, at least in the long run. The myth of marketing is that you have to sell young people in order to sell older people. Maybe that’s false, but if they are not selling young people, what are they selling to old people? That’s never been very clear with Facebook

Putting that aside, I wonder if social media has the legs experts claim. For all of human history, we lacked social media. Humans socialized in person. We have evolved to be good at it. We have never been good at communicating through writing or pictures. Almost all human knowledge is passed along in-person. A good way to look at it, consider the telephone. People will call one another to arrange a get together. No one meets with someone to arrange a telephone call. That would be absurd.

Telephone technology is a decent alternative to in-person communication, but not the preferred one. Social media like Facebook is closer to phone tag than anything else. It is people leaving message for one another on the refrigerator. Again, it works to a point, but it is never replacing normal human in-person interaction. Then there is the openness of these platforms. Despite the madness for an open society by the usual suspects, the truth is white people like their privacy. Facebook is anti-privacy.

The Madness of the West

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Every society has its lunacy. Almost always, it stems from ignorance. Ancient people believed that the gods arrange the stars and made the sun rise and set. They lacked the capacity to understand the science we now take for granted. Their mythologies provided a useful explanation to a natural phenomenon. What seems nutty to people of today, made perfect sense 2500 years ago. It explained what they saw and that was enough.

Late 19th century Americans fell for all sorts of patent medicines, thinking they would improve their health. In most cases they were harmless scams. In some cases they were poison. Today, people believe organic food is better than the regular stuff. They don’t know that most of what they buy as organic is the same stuff as the non-organic produce sitting in the next bin. Again, it is mostly ignorance. You’ll find that the people with the weird food fetishes know the least about how food gets from farm to market.

That said, this is weird beyond words. Since the dawn of time, we have known that humans come in one of two sexes. We know a lot about the genetic differences between men and women. The Olympics actually tests female athletes to ensure they are not dudes. There is some very tiny portion of people who possess both male and female genetics, but you have a better chance of being struck by lightning twice on your way to cashing your winning lottery ticket than every meeting such a person.

The people going in for “gender reassignment” are not in that group. They are mentally ill in the same way people who think they are space aliens or animals. No matter how earnest and sincere an “otherkin” may be, they are not animals. Indulging them is not an act of kindness. It is cruelty. Allowing someone to live in a disturbed state of delusion is cruel and we should not do it. Encouraging people to mutilate themselves in order to act out their delusions is monstrous. The people promoting it should be stoned.

That said, you can see where this is headed. First there is the demand that these degenerates be tolerated. Then they have to be accepted. Then the morality flips and you are no longer a good person for being indifferent. Now you must celebrate their degeneracy as some sort of moral good. In the near future, normal people will have their lives ruined for not showing the proper enthusiasm for the guy in the sundress chasing after the kids at the playground. This madness can’t end fast enough.

Collapse Takes Time

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One costly side effect of spread of mass media is that likable stupid people have the opportunity to spread nutty ideas. Walter Cronkite was a hugely popular because he perfected the avuncular style that people naturally trust. He seemed like a nice, thoughtful older man who was only there to inform the viewers. We now know he was a pathological liar and willfully misinformed his viewers on behalf of the Left

The cable news channels and network news operations are always looking for that person who can gain the trust of the viewer. If they can peddle the old time religion at the same time, that person is getting very rich on TV. A good example on the Right is financial pundit Larry Kudlow. On TV and radio he comes off as a super-nice, old financial hand, whose wealth of experience makes him uniquely qualified to assess the economy. He gets treated as a sage, despite being wrong about most of the things he discusses.

For all his wrongness, he is a good bellwether. He can be counted on to pitch the company line. In his case, the company is the GOP and the go along to get along gang of Conservative Inc. Seeing this today, we can assume that the GOP will be satisfied to say they are right, but otherwise do nothing to claw back some of the last five years. The signals are being sent to the party and its cheerleaders that the cost is clear. No one will expect them to actually do anything once they have some power.

The usual suspects will churn out some books about how to repeal this or reform that liberal policy. The GOP will offer up candidates long on complaints about the welfare state, but short on desire to do anything about it. The GOP will soon offer up a laundry list of things to fix it. The dynamic of the next 15 years as the boomers age off will be one where one party promises to fix it and the other promises to expand it. The logic of it is now off-limits. Instead, we are looking at a long losing fight against mathematics.

The line now from Conservative Inc is, “it will collapse under its own weight.” That’s true, but it will take 15 years. In a business, pushing off bankruptcy for fifteen years is a good thing. Most businesses don’t last that long. For government, the longer reform is delayed, the worse the cost of collapse is when it comes. In fifteen years, there will be a lot of white people expecting their checks and a lot of brown people expecting their free stuff. When the money runs out, things will get ugly in a hurry.

That’s the insidiousness of social democracy. You get the benefits up front, but push the cost way past the point when current office holders are gone. Whatever the structure, democracy ends up as a some type of tragedy of the commons. All of the incentives are for living in the moment and pushing the costs off to the next generation. It’s why every democracy ends in dictatorship. It’s also why the so-called conservatives are just fraudsters. They know this, yet they go along with it because it pays well.

Intolerant Cruelty

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Over at Marginal Revolution, there is a long thread on the callous indifference of liberals to the damage they have caused with ObamaCare. I called out an someone calling himself Michael Foody for his arrogance. What’s remarkable about the exchange is that he and his supporters are incapable of mustering empathy for the people that have been harmed by this ridiculous program. It’s as if they are enjoying the suffering of others.

A striking feature of modern liberalism is the bizarre pleasure they take in the suffering of people they consider inferior. In my youth, they put a lot of effort into claiming they were motivated by compassion for the little guy. The poor, afflicted and oppressed were turned into posters they could wave around to close off debate. It was never sincere, of course, as appealing to the masses is a common tactic of authoritarians, be they of the fascist variety of the communist type. Hitler and Stalin were men of the people.

Modern liberals have abandoned much of this. They still have their imaginary victims and imaginary bogeymen, but all of their empathy, if we can call it that, is directed to people in their own class. Progressivism is the religion of the managerial class, the new class, that sees itself as apart from the rest of us. In fact, it appears the identity of these people is defined by their hostility to the rest of us.

If you read the MR thread, you see quite a few commentators who appear to delight in the suffering of their fellow citizens. The Brookings Institute guy comes off like a Soviet Commissar when asked about the number of Ukranians they have starved. You can just imagine the guy muttering, “A single death a tragedy.A million deaths a statistic” as he dismisses the complaints of those screwed over by this law.

It is increasingly clear that the appeal of this program, and maybe the entire Obama administration, is that they think white middle class people hate it. In other words, the Obama presidency is just a long act of spite. If middle class white people started warming up to Islam, the Left would swing over to the neocon position and demand endless wars in the Middle East. That’s the central truth of the cult of modern liberalism. They are defined by a deep hatred of those they see as their natural enemies.

Southern whites, the religious and the middle class are the enemy. A harmless old woman like Paula Deen is savaged because she is popular with Southern Whites. The governor of Texas is mocked and ridiculed because he is publicly religious. Sarah Palin is the devil because she is 100% middle American. Normal people have seen her type at the PTA meeting, the soccer field and the grocery store. That’s why the Left loathed her so deeply and instinctively. She was the typical American mom.

As ObamaCare rolls out, it is becoming obvious that the bill was written to cause maximum damage to middle class institutions. They have rules that force the religious to pay for abortion and birth control. There are rules that make it difficult for small business to offer health coverage. There are rules that punish families. Now we are seeing that the new policies that are offered up as a replacement are two and three times as expensive as the old policies, while covering less.

The thing about compassion is there is a limit. You can only give so much. Cruelty, on the other hand, never has a limit. You can always find some new way to be monstrous to people you hate. When it is a contest to see who can be the most intolerant of the dispossessed whites, the process spirals out of control. That’s what the future holds for us as the Left competes with itself to find even more creative ways to attack the enemies of the state. This will be an age of intolerant cruelty.