Monthly Archives: April 2015

The Greatest Taboo

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In my post on Greece yesterday, I came in for withering fire over my statement about elections. OK, that’s an exaggeration. I’m often surprised at what gets the attention of readers in my posts, but also in stuff I read on various sites. The comments sections have become the place where you can take the temperature of that portion of the reading public with similar interest to your own.

Anyway, the objection is that elections are not about problem solving and I can see the point. Often elections are nothing more than beauty contests. When writing that post I was looking at elections as an ongoing process. Individually they may be meaningless, but string a few together and you have a meaningful series that reflects the attempts by a society to solve a problem.

Still, that leaves the other objection, which is that current elections are not addressing the important problems. The country is being overrun by foreigners and the pols debate trivial changes to the tax code or how they look better in a blue suit than the other guys. In America, the 2016 election will have little to say about immigration, even though the public is concerned about it. In the UK, the only guy talking immigration is dismissed as a racist.

That last bit really did not resonate with me until I looked up some polling on immigration in the UK. In the US, the numbers have been creeping up, but immigration is still low on the list of issue important to voters. Americans are still far more concerned with the economy and the general chaos in Washington, than immigration issues.In the UK, immigration is the top issue. It’s not just the top worry, it is the top worry of most people.

The people in charge of Britain, however, are doing everything they can to keep the topic out of the election. So much so that the BBC stacked the audience during the last debate in an attempt to discredit Nigel Farage.

He will take audience questions in a 30-minute programme called Election 2015: Ask Nigel Farage.

The discussion, held in Birmingham, will air after the News at 10 and will be chaired by journalist Jo Coburn.

It will be held at the same time as a Question Time special featuring the Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders who will take turns answering questions from the same audience in Leeds.

A Ukip insider raised questions over the timing of the announcement from the BBC amid a growing bias storm engulfing the broadcaster.

It earlier emerged that Thursday’s debate featuring the leaders of “challenger” parties had an audience where just ONE THIRD leaned towards the political right.

The Ukip leader was booed on the programme when he suggested the make-up of the BBC election debate audience was left wing “even by the left-wing standards of the BBC”.

Host David Dimbleby even insisted the audience had been “carefully chosen” by independent polling organisation ICM to represent the balance between all parties.

But when the make-up of audience members was finally revealed it showed that nearly 70 per cent were left wing.

Think about the people who would risk a scandal in order to get a few more jeers at the UKIP candidate. There’s a level of fanaticism here that goes beyond the normal partisanship. UKIP is not going to win the election. They are taking a bigger bite out of the Tories than the even more leftist parties. Strategically, UKIP is serving the interests of the BBC types. Yet, they cannot stop themselves from attacking UKIP.

The question, of course, is why? Immigration should be no more emotionally fraught than zoning ordinances or garbage collection budgets. It is just another policy that free people must administer. But it isn’t to the people in the charge. Flooding their nations with foreigners has become a holy mission and those who oppose them deserving of the worst they can throw at them.

Immigration, of course, is tied to citizenship. Limits on immigration mean there are benefits to citizenship, which means there is such a thing called a citizen and that’s become the greatest taboo in Western societies. The idea that people are citizens and their government is obligated to protect their interests is a heresy amongst the ruling classes. They no longer see themselves bound to their host countries and the people of those countries.

That’s why immigration may be our greatest taboo now. In the UK, the people in charge desperately want to fold the country into the amorphous blob of Europe. The far less sophisticated rulers of America imagine themselves ruling over it all. The fact that the people may not be willing to go along with it makes the need to sacralize the immigrant and demonize the nativist.

The Quest for the Chocolate Savior

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Way back in the mists of time, Obama was running for president and the lunatics were fainting in the aisles at the mere mention of his name. I recall being in a party store prior to the election and people were buying all sorts of Obama gear for their Obama election party. I was wondering what sort of nut decides to have a party for Obama’s election and then I thought about my liberal friends. The reason this was all news to me was due to not being invited to the parties. Such is the life of the outsider.

Back then, a big part of the attraction was the otherness. Obama was an exotic weirdo from a distant land with a Muslim name. He was the antithesis of the great evil plaguing the land, the great evil of the Pale Penis People.  I’m pretty sure that Obama is the perfect opposite of the typical white American male and that’s why the Left fell in love. He was their chocolate savior.

It is a strange form of cuckoldry that has gripped the nation. The lunatics went first, but that’s always the case. Conservative Inc followed on, which is also the norm. Just recall how they gushed over JC Watts from Oklahoma. Nice guy, but he did nothing important other than be a black guy in the GOP. Colin Powell played the race card to a spectacular career in the GOP, finally stabbing everyone in the back on the way to retirement.

After eight years of Obama, the GOP is convinced they must have a non-white at the top of their ticket. So much so Jeb Bush is ready to change his name to Juan Eduardo Arbusto. Since that’s not likely to fly, the GOP has Marco Rubio warming in the bullpen, ready to step in as their man for the nomination. Rubio has the added benefit of the immigrant’s back story. He’s a meat head, but charming with a good narrative to sell.

That’s the thing with Rubio. He’s basically a Cuban Sarah Palin. He’s not stupid, but he is not sitting around working physics problems in his free time either. He’s also a man of pedestrian tastes and sensibilities. Unlike Palin, he has the brown force field around him so no one dare call him stupid or even hint at it, for fear of being called a racist.

While Rubio has a blank resume, at least he has won an election. That says he has some idea how the game is played. That cannot be said of Dr. Ben Carson who is famous in political circles for reasons that elude me. I think he gave a speech somewhere that sounded good. That and he is black and not just black, but a black surgeon! As far as I can tell, that is his only reason to be running for president – he’s black.

Now, I have nothing against any of these people. I don’t think they should be president, but we’re a country that has had a vulgar degenerate, a blockhead and a dimwit in the White House. The last 25 years seem to prove that we could just do away with the office entirely. After all, if the last three idiots could not bring down the nation, the office must hold no power at all, relative to the rest of the country.

What I don’t get is the weird obsession with the foreign, exotic and unconventional. What’s the attraction? Sure, its good to see minorities succeed. The hope is they will be an example for their people to follow. Whether or not that has any impact on their people is open to debate, but the sentiment is at least understandable. If it does work, a successful black guy will drag his people up.

That’s not what we’re seeing. There’s a sacramental quality to the worship of non-whites and foreigners. I hear this from otherwise sensible people regarding Hispanics in California. They believe the state will turn around when a suitably conservative Hispanic wins the governorship. To my ears, this sounds a lot like  ancients believing the right sacrifices could result in a good harvest. It’s magical thinking.

In the case of Americans, my sense is many white people think that their sins can only be scrubbed from their soul if they fully and complete submit to those who their ancestors harmed. Racism has taken up the place of original sin. Christians believe you must completely submit to God. The anti-racists think they can only be cleansed by submitting completely to non-whites.

This madness has a Dorothy Martin vibe to it. Electing Obama was supposed to usher in the perfect era of race relations. Instead, things are worse. Sensible people would look at this experiment and suspect the prophesies may not have been right. To the true believers, the response is to become even more fanatical.

It’s tempting to think that the futile search for the chocolate savior will eventually be overwhelmed by reality. Charles Murray has argued that this impulse will turn 180 degrees and in a generation Progressives will be embracing tribalism. I have no way of knowing if that is true and I will not be around to see it. I do know that this spiritual impulse to right the wrongs of racism has only grown stronger in my life. Failure to please the gods of race is the fuel that drives the quest to please those gods

The Greek Complexity Problem

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Watching the Greeks cast about for a way to make math go away has been fascinating to me. Everyone knows the Greeks can never repay their debts. Everyone knows they will never make the reforms required to keep receiving aid from the rest of Europe. Yet, everyone keeps pretending otherwise and not just for appearances. It seems they really believe that mathematics will yield to wishful thinking.

Anthropologists assume that in modern times, complex societies cannot collapse. They can weaken and go through a process of reform, but they cannot collapse. The reason is every society is adjacent to another complex society. Collapse would lead to being taken over by a neighbor. Even a screwed up society like Greece will suck it up and do what is necessary to fix their walls and rebuild their core rather than become a province of Turkey or Bulgaria.

But, we don’t know that. It is just assumed to be true because it has always been true.  Things are true until they are not. Not so long ago, it was inconceivable that a member state would face financial collapse and now the Greeks are now preparing for bankruptcy.

Greece is preparing to take the dramatic step of declaring a debt default unless it can reach a deal with its international creditors by the end of April, according to people briefed on the radical leftist government’s thinking.

The government, which is rapidly running out of funds to pay public sector salaries and state pensions, has decided to withhold €2.5bn of payments due to the International Monetary Fund in May and June if no agreement is struck, they said.

“We have come to the end of the road . . . If the Europeans won’t release bailout cash, there is no alternative [to a default],” one government official said.

A Greek default would represent an unprecedented shock to Europe’s 16-year-old monetary union only five years after Greece received the first of two EU-IMF bailouts that amounted to a combined €245bn.

The warning of an imminent default could be a negotiating tactic, reflecting the government’s aim of extracting the easiest possible conditions from Greece’s creditors, but it nevertheless underlined the reality of fast-emptying state coffers.

Default is a prospect for which other European governments, irritated at what they see as the unprofessional negotiating tactics and confrontational rhetoric of the Greek government, have also begun to make contingency plans.

In the short term, a default would almost certainly lead to the suspension of emergency European Central Bank liquidity assistance for the Greek financial sector, the closure of Greek banks, capital controls and wider economic instability.

Although it would not automatically force Greece to drop out of the eurozone, a default would make it much harder for Alexis Tsipras, prime minister, to keep his country in the 19-nation area, a goal that was part of the platform on which he and his leftist Syriza party won election in January.

No one really knows what will happen if the Greeks default. There will be lots of hooting and hollering. Capital will rush out of the country as Greeks try to stash their savings abroad, but that’s most happened anyway. The banks will fail and close down. The economy, for a short period will seize up. Civil unrest will be inevitable. A military coup is not out of the question, as in times of turmoil, the guys with the guns tend to have an edge.

To the average Greek, this could feel like the end to the world, but it does not qualify as a collapse by the standards of anthropology. Greece is in no risk of dissolving. A coup would just mean new leaders in charge of the same society. Similarly, Tsipras crowning himself king would simply be a modification of the organizational chart and small one at that. Reform would simply be handed to an authoritarian.

It’s tempting to pin the reason for all of this on democracy. Critics of democracy have always pointed to the quote allegedly from Alexander Fraser Tyler, “A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.” In short, democracy becomes organized looting that accelerates into chaos.

That’s pithy and useful, I suppose, but not accurate. It’s easy to pin the blame on the freeloaders and loafers. Democracy may increase their influence, but it also strengthens more responsible elements in society too. Modern elections are always over some problem that needs solving and the winner is almost always the one promising a solution.

Even in Greece, the main parties representing the ruling elite tried to force through changes in the face of their fiscal crisis. When all of your options on the ballot are calling for the same things, democracy has been suspended. It was only when the main parties failed to come up with a way to address the crisis that the lunatic parties moved to the fore, offering nothing of substance, just a catharsis.

It seems to me that what is happening in Greece is a part of a longer process that is happening in the West. The Greeks joined the Euro for a reason. The Euro, of course, was not created to give bureaucrats something to do during the day. The whole project, including the addition of Greece, was an attempt to solve a problem.

Publicly, the problem they claim to be addressing is the long history of conflict in Europe. Economic cooperation, then a single currency and eventually, political unity. That’s the part above the waves. The part below the waves is the diminishing returns of the organizational model developed over the last two centuries. They are grasping about for some way to make work the mathematics of social democracy.

The math of social democracy is all about diminishing marginal returns. The first big programs like public education and aid to the poor had big returns, far more than the costs. Subsequent investments in complex social management netted smaller returns, but still more than the costs. Over time, the inertia of progress forced greater investment in complexity, aimed at mitigated or ameliorating the human condition, well past the point of diminishing returns.

In this regard, the Greeks are an example of what lies ahead for all of Europe and the West. They joined the Euro because it looked like a solution to their problem, but it only delayed the inevitable. Now they desperately try to kick the can further down the road, but there’s not much road left. What comes next is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it will simply be a disorganized dismantling of decades of social complexity, a national version of a reorganization through bankruptcy.

Nixon in a Pantsuit

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When Nixon decided to run for president in 1968, he was a long shot. After all, he had failed in his bid eight years prior and he had lost the California governors race. After that last defeat he uttered the famous line, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” He then left public life and joined a law firm in New York.

By the time he was running again, the country was a different place than in 1960. The media, dominated by the Left, still hated him over Alger Hiss. His brand of politics seemed painfully old fashioned. His appeal to normal people struck the chattering classes as absurd. More important, Nixon had a bad brand, as the cool kids today are fond of saying. There was simply no way to sell old Tricky Dick to the public.

Five years later a young woman named Hillary Rodham was working as a low-level staffer on one of the House committees investigating Watergate. Jerry Zeifman, a counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, later wrote that she was a liar and a fanatical Nixon hater. He claims to have fired her. This claim is hotly disputed by Clinton supporters, because it looks bad for Clinton and it could possibly be true. Even so, Mrs. Clinton is strangely linked to old Tricky Dick.

I say that because here we are 40 years later and a well past ripe Hillary Clinton is trying one last shot at winning the presidency. Like Nixon, she is doing this as the latest Great Liberal Awakening reaches a denouement. As was true then, the current Democratic coalition is falling to pieces. The internal contradictions are ripping it apart. Similarly, there are looming economic and international problems facing the country.

The biggest point of comparison, of course, is personality. Like Nixon, Hillary has a well defined brand. That brand is not a flattering one. Even the most stalwart of Clinton supporters acknowledges that she is physically incapable of telling the truth. They laugh about it and treated as a quirk, but it says something when your best friends think you are a sociopath. Nixon people used to joke about their boss’s reputation for skullduggery, but it was never a compliment.

The differences are there too. Nixon was a very smart man, maybe one of the smartest presidents in the modern era. Nixon was also a foe of liberalism at a cultural level. This was as much personal as anything else, but he really hated the hippies. He could plausibly run as an antidote to the excesses of the Progressives. Clinton is in a very different position as sort of an old school lefty throwback and a member of the Democrat Party.

Even so, you can see how she intends to run as sort of an antidote to the last eight years. She will be Obama without the hatred for whitey. Her initial roll-out features nothing but white people. It is heavy on the homosexuals, young women and mothers. Hillary wants to position herself as a the wise old granny who could possibly be a lesbian, but is not making a big deal out of it.

Long term, the plan is to follow the Nixon model and be the champion of the downtrodden. Her trip to Chipotle is just one of many stunts intended to picture her as a regular person. Politicians often do this, but it is in contrast to Obama’s unrestrained elitism. Obama would show up at an ice cream shop to be flattered by his subject. Hillary shows up at a taco shop to mix with her people.

Whether it will work is hard to know. The Progressives hold all the high ground in American culture. Liberalism is the one true faith and Hillary is a member. If the choice is between her and some raging heretic, all the resources of the political class will swing her way. If the alternative is some accommodating trimmer like Jeb Bush, then I suspect Clinton 2016 looks like a parody of Dole 1996. Perhaps she will take a header of a stage as well.

Another departure from Nixon is that Tricky Dick went into his race fully aware of his reputation. Clinton, so far, appears to believe the bullshit being fed to her by the consultants. That goofy looking logo and campaign video has been the butt of jokes on social media all week. A lot of people hated Nixon, but no one laughed at him.

I think the biggest thing with Nixon is he could plausibly argue that he was right all along. In 1964 Goldwater ran on the slogan, “In your heart you know he right.” By 1968 most people had figured that out and could see it on their TV. Nixon did not have to make the same pitch because it was manifest. Voting for Nixon was, to a small degree, about normal people regaining control of their country.

Hillary, in contrast, has always been wrong. The one and only thing she has gotten right in 40 years is that Obama was not ready for the job. That’s the one thing she can’t say in this campaign. If anything, she is a reminder that the last 25 years have been a disaster and the country went down the wrong path when electing the vulgarians known as The Clintons. Symbolically, a vote against Hillary is a vote for closing the books on a run of very bad choices.

Penal Colonies

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I’ve long been an advocate of bringing back penal colonies. At any one time American has about 1.5 million people in prison and about 150,000 of those are serving life sentences. Then you have a greater number serving long sentences of 15 years on more. There’s probably about a third of our prison population who will spend most of their lives in jail. Many will be released eventually, but as old men.

At the same time, the vast majority of prisoners are doing short stints on minor crimes. Drugs probably make up the bulk of it, but many of these cons pleaded down to the drug charge so it is not a good assumption to make. Libertarians always get this wrong. The guy doing time for weed is often there as result of a plea, where the more serious charge was dropped.

Anyway, having a million low-level offenders in with a population of hard core criminals in for serious violent offenses is crazy. States and the feds try to segregate the prisons, but it is not always practical. Of course, the expense of maintaining cages for violent lunatics is higher when you choose to put those cages close to population centers. The result is a terrible prison system that costs a lot of money.

There’s another piece. Many of these people will never be able to live as normal people. Call it evil. Call it bad wiring. They are just incapable of living a civilized existence. Former football star Lawrence Phillips is a great example. This guy was given every chance to avoid a life of crime, but he just liked hurting people too much. In prison serving 30-plus years, he is a menace to his fellow prisoners now. Why put him near people you intend to release one day?

We have lots of small islands we could use for penal colonies. Guys like Phillips could be shipped off to these places with other violent lunatics. Yeah, they will probably kill each other, but so what? Why spend billions stopping nature from taking its course? Stick them on the island and let them sort it out on their own. That way, they cause no more harm to decent people.

I’m not suggesting we maroon them on an island without supplies or medical care. A facility to distribute food and basic health care would be necessary. Shelters would be provided, but if they destroy their housing then that’s on them. This is not supposed to be Club Med, just a place for them to live out their lives in the degree of peace they choose, away from civilized society

Similarly, an island for sex offenders makes sense. These people are never going to be cured. Stick them on an island to themselves. You drop in food and supplies, but otherwise they are on their own to make their structures, organizes themselves and so on. Maybe a government run medical facility can be maintained on the island to handle the basics.

It sounds cruel, but is it more or less cruel than putting them into these sadistic hell holes we call prisons where more men are raped than women in the whole country. That’s right. More men are raped in prison than women are raped outside of prison.  At least on the island, you have some chance to save yourself from that horror.

That’s the other part of it. Libertarians bitch about the cops, but there are no worse humans than prison guards. If your dream job involves looking up another man’s ass for contraband, you’re a man with problems. Stories like this are far more common than people probably realize.

We’ll have to have jails. Locking up drunks and thieves is a necessary part of society. Maintaining cages for hyper-violent lunatics we never intend to let free only makes sense if there are no other options. Hanging them used to be the solution, but that’s no longer possible. Putting them in a penal colony is possible and more humane. This is basically what Russia has always done, sending prisoners to Siberia.

The one other change that would have to be made is in sentencing. Sending a  weed dealer off to jail for 15 years is crazy. At the same time, giving a violent repeat offender 15 years is just as crazy. Penal colonies have to be forever punishments so giving out terms of 15 – 30 years would have to end. Punishments would be two tracks. One for those who can rejoin society and one for those who cannot.

IQ Science Versus The Left

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Steve Sailer has a post up on IQ that hits on a favorite theme. One of the things I have always found amusing about the HBD world is their naivete about the people in charge. This is a common problem on the Right and is found a little with the handful of thoughtful Progressives. They think that being right is enough. That eventually, the rightness of their science has to prevail over the oogily-boogily of the Standard Social Science Model.

Unless and until IQ science, HBD or even plain old evolution, becomes useful to the prevailing ideology, it will remain in an intellectual backwater. That’s too hard to accept so they often fall back on the myth of Galileo. That is, Galileo triumphed over the Catholic Church because his science was irrefutable.

The trouble with that, in addition to being untrue, is that the prevailing ideology of today is not as generous in spirit as the Catholic Church.The Church leaders in the Middle Ages were not anti-science. They were responsible for rescuing much of the knowledge from antiquity so that science could blossom. No, they were concerned about the orderly working of society, the faith of the people being a big part, the part concerning the Church. Fumbling through it was their responsibility and their burden.

The reigning ideology of today is a different animal. Cultural Marxism shares much more in common with Islam, in this regard. It’s Islam without an afterlife. The faithful, instead of living in bliss after death, can live happily in this life. Similarly, the unfaithful, the heretics and the blasphemers, will suffer in this life. What completes the circle are the ideological enforcers, sorting the chosen from the damned. Guess who fills that role.

Science really does not fit into this ideology. Egalitarianism, however, fits quite nicely. Everyone is equal and therefore unequal outcomes means someone is benefiting at the expense of another. That can be proof that the one is pious while the other a heretic. That also keeps everyone doubling down on the one true faith in an effort to reach the utopian end point, where all that is left are those in perfect equality.

It also is a never ending source of dragons to slay. Inequality is caused by someone. If it is not the impiety of the less, then it must be the impiety of the superior. Attacking that inequity becomes a holy cause. Egalitarianism, therefore, takes up the slack that the super natural used to handle in the olden thymes.

The other problem is that the people will never accept the implicit determinism of HBD and IQ science. No one wants to believe they were decanted as a ‘Gamma’, ‘Delta’ or ‘Epsilon’ so they will never believe it. If we started using IQ tests to sort school children into appropriate tracks, there would be riots. SWPL-ville mothers would demand some way to game the system so their little flower can be at least a beta.

The narcotic of egalitarianism is more potent than science. It’s not so strong down here at the bottom of the social order. Here. reality is simply too vibrant to deny. In the plusher suburbs of the middle-class, that’s not the case. They get to ape the mannerisms and ideas of the managerial elite and believe that one day their little angel will something better than them.

In fairness, believing nonsense has not been a deterrent to material progress. Perhaps one day the people in charge will be of another ideological persuasion that embraces IQ science and biological realism. I will not see it in my lifetime. Instead, crime thinkers like Steve Sailer will be forced to slave away in the mines at the edges of society.

That’s probably the natural order.

The Left Turns on the Tribe

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Way back in the olden thymes, Democrats loved trotting out liberal Catholics as proof they were down with the folks. It was a common rouse in areas with an immigrant past like Chicago and Boston. They would show up somewhere with the local Bishop and talk about their faith. Some of them were even pro-life, but many finessed it to avoid having to choose, but all of them eventually had to choose and they chose to be pro-abortion.

The last guy to face the choice between his liberal faith and his Christian faith was Bart Stupak. Nancy Pelosi was so mad about his doubts that she made him walk the plank. He was forced to recant at a press conference, promising to never doubt the Progressive faith again. This ended his political career. Today, there are no pro-life Democrats and few who even bother mentioning membership in a Christian church.

That’s how religions work. You can’t be in two of them for long before one or both force you to decide. American Jews are about to learn that truth as their party tilts in favor of the Arabs as opposed to the Israelis. The boys at Vox are scrambling to come up with some way to be anti-Israel and still a member of the tribe in good standing. That means Talmudic hairsplitting about what it means to be Zionist, versus a secular ethnocentric.

Israel has always been more than just a place on a map. From the beginning, it has existed as a series of promises as well as a geographical location: a promise of being a place where Jews can live, a promise of being a place that will keep Jews safe, and a place that secures the Jewish people’s democratic ideals. Implicit in those promises has always been a threat: that if any of them were ever broken, Israel would no longer truly be Israel. It would just be a place on a map that happened to be labeled with that name.

Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of modern Zionism, once told a gathering of Zionist leaders that “those of us who are today prepared to hazard our lives for the cause would regret having raised a finger if we were able to organize only a new social system, and not a more righteous one.” As the American Zionist leader Louis Lipsky wrote in the 1946 forward to Herzl’s 1896 treatise “The Jewish State,” Zionism “had to become a movement of democracy.”

You can see the difficulty. Israel is not just another country. It can never be just another country to Jews or anyone else for that matter. Israel is an ethno-state. If is explicitly for Jews and only Jews. That leaves American Jews in a tough spot, because when it comes time to choose, liberals will demand that Jews embrace the low-IQ violent nitwits in the territories over Israel. In the abstract that’s possible, but not a matter of fact.

Quietly, gradually, an internal crisis has grown so great that it threatens the survival of Israel as we know it today: Jewish, democratic, and an accepted member of the community of nations. If something does not change, then that Israel cannot survive. An Israel that is authoritarian, that is isolated in the world, and that betrays the ideals of its founders will take its place. It will retain the Israeli flag and national anthem, it will stamp “Israel” on its passports, but it will not be Israel as Zionists like Herzl and Lipsky — and millions of Jews who believed and still believe in their vision — hoped and intended.

It’s a fascinating bit of jujitsu. Israel is a functioning democracy. No one has any doubts about the integrity of their elections. For the Left, democracy means something entirely different than it does for normal people. For them, it unity. An election that goes against them is due to divisiveness, so the Left claims it is a threat to democracy. In this case it means claiming Netanyahu as a despot and therefore against democracy.

That, of course, justifies the South Africa treatment Israel is about to get from the American Left. They claim their concern is based on their hope for Israel to thrive as an enlightened democracy, by which they mean a borderless nothing, which is impossible in the Levant. None of makes any sense, but there is no way to make sense of the Progressive concept of democracy and support Israel as an ethno-state.

I’m sure the Vox boys are confident they can make this work, but that’s not the way to bet, given what has happened to Christian churches. The Episcopal Church tried to compromise with Progressives and were devoured by them. It’s now a homosexual freak show. The Catholic Church is going through similar process and may be facing a schism, as the traditionalist recoil in horror at the direction of the Church.

Civic religions always end up having a problem with the Jews. The reason is you can leave the Catholic Church and become a Lutheran. You can be a Lutheran and have loyalty to your countrymen. There’s nothing in your nature that makes you a Lutheran or a Catholic. Jews can’t do the same. You’re born a Jew. It’s literally in your bones and your Jewish identity comes before all else. It’s literally what makes you a Jew.

Steve Sailer thinks that the smarter Jews are figuring out that the Left is coming for them next. I’m less optimistic about it. Civic religions eventually demand absolute loyalty to the state. They also come to doubt anyone that has a history of not professing loyalty to the state. Let’s face it, Jews are always assumed to have dual loyalty. Fair or not, that’s reality and the new Left emerging in America will come to distrust them.

The University of Monty Python

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This is not a put on:

Elle Mallon, who was the external vice presidential candidate on the Ducks F.I.R.S.T. slate, filed a second grievance against We Are Oregon regarding its response to her original grievance from April 3.

Here’s how it played out:

March 29

We Are Oregon holds its kickoff event in PLC 180.

April 3

Mallon submits grievance against We Are Oregon for holding its kickoff event in a building with no gender-inclusive bathrooms.

April 4

The ASUO Elections Board rules that We Are Oregon broke the rules and as a result, it couldn’t campaign for 36 hours.

April 5:

2:54 – We Are Oregon campaign manager Taylor Allison asks the Constitution Court to overturn the Elections Board’s decision, and We Are Oregon gets to keep campaigning while the Constitution Court makes that decision.

Allison’s appeal says that part of Mallon’s evidence was taken out of context.

6:21 – Mallon files a response accusing Allison of sexual harassment because she referred to Mallon as “Ms.” when Mallon identifies with the use of “Mx.”

7:30 – Allison apologizes in an email, saying:

“In every situation I’ve been in with Elle, Elle has said Elle’s pronouns were “She, Her, Hers,” including on the Ducks F.I.R.S.T website. With that information, I used “Ms.” when addressing Elle.”

April 8:

Mallon submits a second grievance saying Allison chose to misgender her.

She cites the apology email from Allison as evidence saying that:

“Allison found a place where my pronouns were listed and then chose to misgender me anyway (My pronouns also include xe xem hyr and they them their).”

In a later email, Mallon calls for the removal of all We Are Oregon candidates from the ballot.

April 9

The Constitution Court sends an email to its mailing list with the decision addressing the bathroom grievance.

“While this Court is empathetic towards Respondent’s original grievance, and advises all future campaigns to remember their cultural competency trainings in order to promote as inclusive a community as possible, access to a bathroom is not a campaign related purpose.”

The court reversed the Election Board’s decision and removed the sanctions.

The decision did not address the misgendering claim. Associate Justices Chaney and Huegel agreed with the Court’s position on the bathroom grievance, but dissented in part that the decision did not address the additional complaint and makes the accusations part of the court’s public records.

“Sexual harassment is a very great evil, but the record supports the conclusion that only a single unintentional gender-based microagression occurred. To conflate the two may serve to salve the sense of anger Respondent may feel at Petitioner’s mistake. However it may serve Respondent, it is unnecessarily inflammatory and risks damaging the reputation of Petitioner, an ASUO member who the record shows made a mistake, and then took the first opportunity to apologize. At no time was any of this relevant to the matter before the Court, which is a dispute over whether the Elections Rules require campaigns to provide gender-neutral restrooms.”

Assembling a coalition of disgruntled and dispossessed can be a viable short term strategy to gain political power. Lucius Sicinius Vellutus is a good example, since I like to sprinkle in Roman history with my bog posts. The trouble is that many of the disgruntled are nuts. Handing these people even a little power can be disastrous.

We are seeing this all over and increasingly people are getting sick of having nutjobs throw sand in the gears. Otherwise cautious people vent in public at having to navigate around social justice warriors. They are learning that life is trade-offs. A sane and stable society is mildly intolerant of the weirdos. A society that embraces its weirdos grinds to a halt and begins to collapse.

The Church of TED has a Competitor

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I’ve often made sport of TED Talks as nothing more than revival meetings for upper middle class suckers. Sitting in an arena listening to Joel Osteen or Rick Warren is like going to Walmart for these people. It’s yucky and gross. Instead, they get the exact same sort of pat on the head, without all the Jesus stuff and definitely without the riff-raff.

Well, it looks like TED has a competitor. Tyler Cowen is now pimping Voice & Exit, which kicks off this week in Austin TX, the phoniest city in America. This is what has Cowen hyperventilating:

We assemble those who ask: What are the systems and ways of life that are holding us back? What can we create to make those old ways obsolete? What innovations enable us to find wellbeing, life meaning and stronger connection to others? How can we live intentionally today so as to create that better future? Voice & Exit is an environment of exploration where we “criticize by creating” a better world.

I have this theory that is more of an observation than a real theory. Religion has been so marginalized, many people have simply lost the ability to recognize it. Humans are wired to believe so we will believe in something. There has to be an answer to the eternal question and a religion, ideology of theodicy will fill any void that exists. These techno-mega churches are just the latest attempt to answer the great question.

Strangely, to me anyways, is that these look pretty much like EST from the late 70’s and early 80’s. Beautiful people were running off to those just as they are running off to these weird revivals today. The fact that no one ever mentions the similarities says something, I suspect, about our increasingly hostile relationship with the past.

Maybe Cowen falls for this bullshit, maybe not. It is hard to know. He’s getting paid to decorate their roster and thus fleece more people out of their money. It’s possible he pretends to go along with it just for the money. But, Paul Krugman writes batshit crazy stuff all the time because he believes it. The answer is not always obvious.

The Homintern

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I was reading some Roman history the other day, specifically about the short reign of Elagabalus, the first truly foreign emperor. He showed up in Rome from Syria wearing eyeliner and silk robes. Before long he was dressed as a women and having people call him queen. As Gibbon put it, “Elagabalus abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures and ungoverned fury.”

Elagabalus was not the first queer emperor, but he was probably the most flamboyantly queer. Romans were indifferent to homosexuality as long as it remained private and the respectable public man was in the dominant position. The submissive role was for slaves and lower class boys used by the elite. Pillow biters had no place in the Roman elite. Elagabalus was assassinated, his corpse dragged naked through the streets and then thrown into the Tiber

The ancients were slightly more tolerant of homosexuality than modern Europeans, but not by a whole lot. That is, until the Homintern got control of the culture. We have suddenly lurched from mildly intolerant to, well, complete intolerant. Intolerant of traditional views of human sexuality. Everywhere you look, it seems that the gay mafia is waging the finger at us, warning that we are violating some taboo.

A friend sent this to me the other day.

The Turing test detects if a machine can truly think like a human. The Bechdel Test detects gender bias in fiction. If you were to mash the two together to create a particularly messy Venn diagram, the overlap shall henceforth be known as the Ex Machina Zone.

In writer/director Alex Garland’s thought-provoking new film—out Friday—we meet Ava (Alicia Vikander), an artificially-intelligent robot. Ava’s creator, genius tech billionaire Nathan (Oscar Isaac), has asked his employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to determine whether Ava’s thinking is indistinguishable from a human’s. Until she meets Caleb, Ava has only ever met her maker and one other woman. (Hence the failing of the Bechdel Test, which stipulates that a movie must feature two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.) Her existence, and her ability to learn how to interact, is a fascinating study of what makes us human.

It’s also a compelling, if problematic, look at the interactions between men and women—or at least that’s what I thought.

The word “problematic” is always a clue that you are dealing with a lunatic. Fanatics love that word. It has that Torquemada vibe they like so much. On the one hand it is banal, but on the other is the threat that you better fall in line or else. A quick look up of the authoress conforms that she is, at the minimum, a minor figure in the Homintern.

This story from the NYTimes explains how homosexual pressure groups are gnawing through the fiber of the culture.

The stacks of Supreme Court briefs filed on both sides of the same-sex marriage cases to be heard this month are roughly the same height. But they are nonetheless lopsided: There are no major law firms urging the justices to rule against gay marriage.

Leading law firms are willing to represent tobacco companies accused of lying about their deadly products, factories that spew pollution, and corporations said to be complicit in torture and murder abroad. But standing up for traditional marriage has turned out to be too much for the elite bar. The arguments have been left to members of lower-profile firms.

In dozens of interviews, lawyers and law professors said the imbalance in legal firepower in the same-sex marriage cases resulted from a conviction among many lawyers that opposition to such unions is bigotry akin to racism. But there were economic calculations, too. Law firms that defend traditional marriage may lose clients and find themselves at a disadvantage in hiring new lawyers.

Now, the nuts at the Times think this is just swell, but it used to be called a culture of fear. The sort of thing that went on in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia. People are altering their behavior, foregoing their rights and privileges as citizens, out of fear.

This is not a conspiracy, of course. I just like the analogy because it is useful. The fact is we are seeing a mass conversion, forced upon the people by their rulers. The people in charge want to stamp out traditional customs and beliefs. Unleashing mentally disturbed deviants to harass respectable people that fall afoul of the new ways is a time tested way of converting the people.

Elagabalus was not assassinated because he was a homosexual or even that he was a degenerate homosexual. In addition to his sexual peculiarities, he also thought he was a deity and was a devotee of the cult of Elagabal. He created a new god to rule over the pantheon of Roman gods and started turning all of the Roman temples into temple to Elegabal. How long before the Homintern starts forcing Christian churches to marry homosexuals?

This will not end well.