Monthly Archives: October 2014

Transitive Mercerism

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Lena Dunham is or was the star of a TV show that 99% of America never bothered to watch or even notice. The target audience for her act is neurotic single young women, who obsess over their vagina. Given the way the political class carries on about single young women who obsess over their vagina, it must be a growing demographic, but it could just another front in the war on white people.

The only reason to know anything about Ms. Dunham is this hilarious column by Kevin Williamson. It appears Ms. Dunham has decided that the next phase of her career will be as a public nuisance. That’s probably being unfair to Ms. Dunham as it is assumes her transition is deliberate. Reading the piece Kevin links to in his column, it looks like Ms. Dunham is too stupid to plan something like this. Consider this story.

“Girls” creator Lena Dunham writes in her new memoir that she was raped as a 19-year-old college student. Over the course of two chapters, she explains that it took her years to come to terms with what happened and to be able to talk about the complexities of her experience in a way that felt truthful to her.

In the chapter “Girls & Jerks,” Dunham recalls an “ill-fated evening of lovemaking” with an infamous on-campus Republican. Describing the lead-up to the incident, she writes: “All I knew when I stumbled home from a party behind him was that he was sullen, thuggish, and a poor loser at poker. How that led to intercourse was a study in the way revulsion can quickly become desire when mixed with the right muscle relaxants.”

Dunham goes on to set the scene that unfolds between them in her apartment, during which she thought the man was wearing a condom but later realized he wasn’t. The condom, Dunham noticed, was actually hanging from a nearby potted plant.

Ms. Dunhm was never raped, of course. Ms. Dunham is a professional fabulist and making stuff up is what she does well, relative to her other talents. The give away is when she says, “come to terms with what happened and to be able to talk about the complexities of her experience in a way that felt truthful to her.” The reporter and Ms. Dunham may not realize it, but this is just another way of saying it took her two years to dream up this tale so that it sounded believable.

The current fad in the war on men is a recycling of an old favorite of second wave feminism that says all sex is rape. The irony is that this type of tantrum is the sort of thing June Cleaver would have done when she was vexed with Ward. She would deny him her affection. Today, the modern gals demand the boys get written permission before having sex.  The gals over at womyn’s studies did everything they were told, but biology will not yield to their demands. It’s just not fair!

Anyway, that’s one angle. The angle for Ms. Dunham is transitive Mercerism. Dragging some sad sack on stage so everyone can feel bad for him – and feel good about feeling bad for him in public – is nothing new. Second tier entertainers have found an audience by going on stage and pretending to empathize with the sad sack. That way the audience gets to feel good about feeling joy over their hero relating to the sad sack in a very personal way.

The self-absorbed like Ms. Dunham take it a step further and make claims about being a victim. Rape fantasies are popular with the gals for some reason. I suspect that’s because it’s hard to disprove and you sound like a jerk if you call them a liar, like I’m doing here. It’s solipsism, of course, but it is an effective way of becoming a public irritant, which seems to be Ms. Dunham’s goal.

Her parents, according to her biography were attention whores who made a nice living off modest talents. Ms. Dunham seems to have inherited those gifts. I suppose if your desire is to be the sand in the nation’s vagina, conjuring up PG-13 rape fantasies is oddly relevant.

Selling Product

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Conservative Inc. is term that turns up on the Right. The reason is they use politcs to sell stuff to people, rather than effect public policy. Michelle Malkin, a nice women, has made a tidy living repeating mindless platitudes on TV. She’s just a spokesmodel for Conservative Inc. Her job is to move product. She does that through TV appearances, blogging, radio, Twitter and so forth. Ann Coulter also churns out books and columns aimed at selling Ann Coulter, which also sells TV shows, radio spots, etc.

Another less obvious one is the consultancy rackets. Karl Rove has made himself millions dispensing bad advise to GOP candidates. The big money though is in selling hope so his army of fellow consultants can get paid by campaigns. Getting your buddies to tell National Review readers that Ed Gillespie has a prayer in his Senate race, means more money for Ed Gillespie to spend on consultants, ad buyers, pollsters, etc. It’s a lot like how the stock market used to work. They called it the churn.

This is an egregious example.

The new Quinnipiac poll of the New Jersey Senate contest shows Jeff Bell only 11 points down to Cory Booker, 51 to 40 percent, among likely voters. It goes without saying that a race can move a dozen points in the final five weeks of a campaign—especially when a little known challenger (but one who’s well-regarded by those who do know of him) is taking on a pro-Obama incumbent who’s barely above 50 percent in an anti-Obama, anti-incumbent year. (Obama’s approval in New Jersey is hovering around 41 percent.)

But take a further look at the poll results. Booker leads Bell, 51-40. Seventy-six percent of Booker supporters and 84 percent of Bell supporters say their mind is made up. Do the math. Among those whose mind is made up, Booker leads Bell 39 to 34 percent.

So Booker’s hard lead over Bell is a mere 5 points. He’ll outspend Bell over the next month. But money can’t buy you love. Sometimes, it can’t even buy you votes. If New Jersey flips in November, we’ll remember this Quinnipiac poll as Jeff Bell’s fire bell in the night.

First off, it is obvious click bait. I saw it on Drudge so it means a few million hits on The Weekly Standard site. Pitching an unwinnable race in New Jersey is not going to help Jeff Bell, but no one cares about him anyway. The real pitch is for the “wave” theory, which says “If Bell has a shot, imagine what your local GOP candidate could do with just a few dollars more from you!” It’s all about moving product. Books, magazines, TV shows and the massive consultancy racket that finances the mandarin class.

Foreign Policy Shopping

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I have never had a foreign policy or a world view on foreign policy. I’m very interested in the world and all of its weirdness, but I’ve never been all that interested in how our rulers interact with it. They are going to do whatever they want to do, regardless of what I have say about it. I try to keep up and read some trusted sources on the issues of the day, but I find most of it boring. The history of the Khorasani Arabs seems interesting, but I have no interest in why we may or may not be bombing them.

This column by Kevin Williamson brought that home to me as I read the comments section. I have opinions about our foreign adventures. I have some assumptions about what we should and should not do. I have some opinions on the people and nations of the world. But, I have no philosophy of foreign policy. I’m not even sure if I fall into any of the convenient buckets. Some of the comments in that NRO column strike me as insane. Others seem sort of reasonable. The last bit of his post is what strikes me as the most sensible starting place for my post.

If I thought that the United States could be Switzerland, I’d be tempted to import that foreign policy: Trade with everybody, get rich, and be armed to the teeth in case you have to keep the global riff-raff at bay. But the United States is not a tiny, landlocked, Alpine country noted for its excellence in banking and watch-making. But I am in the market for some creative thinking about how to use our economic weapons — from trade to our newly abundant energy supply to the fact that the elites of every country, including our bitterest rivals, want to send their children to college here — to supplement what we’re all calling “boots on the ground” now. I would not object to dispatching some serious green-eyeshade types to the Pentagon to figure out how it has come to pass that we’re still spending far too much money on defense while seemingly cutting all the wrong spending.

And while I sympathize with Jonah Goldberg’s view that “National Honor Matters,” I am very open to the prospect of simply buying off those who can be bought. While the prospect may rankle, if doing so means lower expenditures in treasure and blood both, consider Sun Tzu’s advice to those in his time who resisted the use of spies, considering the proposition either too expensive or dishonorable: Failing to make use of available advantages, “simply because one grudges the outlay of a hundred ounces of silver in honors and emoluments, is the height of inhumanity.”

What I am most in the market for is a foreign policy that marries a humane and prudent vision of our national interest to the operational competence necessary to ensure that we do not spend decade after decade scrambling to react to the mistakes of the immediate past. So far, I’m not buying what anybody’s selling.

It seems to me that before you can start shopping for a foreign policy, you might want to start thinking about the reality of the world, that foreign world for which we need a policy. “Humane and prudent vision of our national interest” sounds great, but you have to figure out what it means to have a humane policy while you’re figuring out the national interest. I think I could sum up my criticism of the ruling class approach to the world as ignorant, naïve and devoid of a sense of self. In other words, the reason the rulers have failed is their understanding of the world is wrong and their understanding of themselves is delusional.

So, where to start?

Celebrate Diversity: For a very long time now the Left has been chirping about the glories of diversity. It seems to be waning now, but that’s not because the world has suddenly become homogenous. The world is a big diverse place with all sorts of local weirdness. Most people are not like us. They don’t live like us and they don’t think like us. As much as it hurts modern America feelings, big chunks of the world don’t like us. Their reasons may be justified or just plain crazy, but there’s not much we can do about it. In all probability, trying to do something about is why they hate us.

Recognizing it is half the battle. The other half is the why. Despite what the Left has been preaching, science and observation tells us the people of the world are not all the same after all. Africa is as it is because it is full of Africans. It’s full of Africans because the humans there evolved in that place for 50,000 years. As crazy as this may sound, Africans are built for Africa, not Iceland. That means they are good at being Africans, but not very good at being an Icelander or a Texan. The same is true of China, Japan, Turkey, Iran, etc.

What we consider weird, these people consider normal. It is what they know. A thousand generations of Bantus have been nothing but Bantus. Thinking they will suddenly become Minnesotans just because we showed up is a good way to make enemies. Respecting people for what they are is not “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” It’s the reality of the world. It is also the foundation for a “humane and prudent” understanding of the world.

We have a past: Anytime I participate in a debate over foreign policy, I get the sense that my fellow citizens have amnesia. I mentioned in that thread on NRO that we have been bombing the Fertile Crescent for two decades and people seem surprised by it. Desert Storm was launched in 1991. We actually started flying combat missions in 1990. That’s a long time to have been dropping ordinance on people. We try hard to only kill the bad people, but we have killed a lot of people who did not think they were all that bad. Maybe they were, maybe not.

It really does not matter if we think they got what they deserved. The people of the world have judged us on out deeds, good and bad. Our system of government means we get a change in leadership every eight years and that means we have reneged on a lot of deals, in addition to killing a lot of people. The Kurds know we are an unreliable partner, just as we know the French are duplicitous backstabbers. The point is we have a history and we have a reputation. Our national interest is served best when we can see ourselves through the eyes of the people on whom we doing the foreign policy.

Most of us just want to have normal lives: Back in the Bush years, the neoconservatives used to go on at length about national greatness and the new nationalism. The stripped down version is that a nation must act like we expect a good citizen to act in his community. It is a mix of moral obligation and self-regard. Tromping around the world doing good works will invigorate the populace to do even greater things at home and abroad. Foreign policy is not just another public policy. It is the basis for a moral philosophy that will define the nation and the citizens.

The trouble with this, in addition to be completely wrong, is that almost all people just want to live their lives. They don’t look to their rulers for a sense of identity. Americans, still mostly Anglo-Saxon, prefer it if their rulers leave them alone. Even the more hive minded around the world tend not to care very much for greatness, unless it puts money in their pocket. Since the national interest of any nation is those things that benefit the people of that nation, going around the world inviting trouble can never be part of a prudent and humane foreign policy.

I don’t know how you build a unified foreign policy off these three pillars, but I think it is a good place to start. Maybe there are other or better principles. I don’t know. The point is you can’t shop for a foreign policy unless you have some idea why one is better than the other. You have to have a starting point in order to make the necessary comparisons.

Why The GOP Is Toast

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I saw this on NRO this morning. The other day, I went around and around with some sheeple that I suspected were campaign volunteers for Ed Gillespie, the Liberal Republican running for Senate in Virginia. My argument is a simple one. If you don’t see a choice on the ballot that represents your interests, not voting is always a choice and often the right one. If you’re choice is a child molester and a rapist, no one would fault you for refusing to endorse either option with your vote.

That’s the thing flaks like Jim Geraghty either don’t understand or would like you not to understand. The latter is a strong possibility as this has been explained to him dozens of times. A self-governing people not only selects amongst the options available, they decide on the options. One block offers up their preferred choice. Another block offers up their choice. The people unsure of which block is right ultimately decide. Some will reject all of the options and seek out an alternative.

The grifters of the GOP insist the dissenters are being unreasonable. After all, staying home means the other side wins. They always claim the dissenters are looking for perfection and that the dissenters are being childish. That’s obnoxiously stupid, which reinforces the sense amongst the dissenters that the flaks simply don’t respect the opinions of the dissenters. If every time you raise an objection you’re told to shut up and sit down, what other conclusion can you draw?

What’s irritating about the “perfection” claims is they are easily disproved by recent elections. Conservatives of all stripes, even paleos, came out in force for the GOP is 1994, 2000, 2004 and 2010. The latter election was fueled by the populist uprising called the Tea Party. Their aim was to reform the GOP, not embrace it. Ever since, the GOP has made war on these people. Telling these people that perfection is the enemy of the good enough, when they have been living that life and got nothing but abuse for it, is a kick in the teeth.

The problem for the GOP is that no one believes them. The Bush years were a disaster for the Right and the GOP. A lot of Tea Party types would run back to them if the GOP leadership was at least willing to admit they bungled things in the Bush years. Guys like Jim Geraghty, no one’s idea of a deep thinker, would do the most good popularizing these confessions, not defending the privileges of an increasingly alien party establishment. But, offering up profiteers like Ed Gillespie in a winnable Senate race, however, says the GOP is more concerned with purging their party of voters than fighting the Liberal Democrats.

This can’t last. It is why UKIP is about to drive a beer truck through the Tories. The large number of Euro-skeptic in England need a party. The large number of diversity and immigration skeptics need a party. If the main parties refuse to speak to the issues important to the people, the people will inevitably find someone who will. In the fullness of time, the GOP’s decision to make war on the Tea Party will be seen as the turning point similar to what the Compromise of 1850 was to the Whig Party.

People on the Right are the most likely to accept half a loaf. It is their greatest flaw, one that the Left has expertly exploited since the birth of the American Left. The reasonableness and politeness of the Right is its broken window, through which all of the Rousseau-ist rats have entered. The party that pretends to represent the Right can no longer demand their voters reach into the bowl and select a turd for their turd sandwich.  Half a loaf is one thing. Half a turd is beyond the pale.