Monthly Archives: June 2015

The Birthplace of Multiculturalism is Dying

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The word “why” is one of the more abused words in the English language. Today, the primary abuse comes via over caffeinated twinks from the millennial generation demanding the rest of us explain reality to them. Over the last half century, the word has been used as an excuse to overturn large chunks of Western Civilization in pursuit of an earthly utopia.

The real pity, it seems to me, of our era is no one seems willing to use the word “why” in the attempt to learn anything about human affairs. What I mean by that is right here in this story on German’s demographic collapse. The article details the drop in fertility and how that is playing out over multiple generations. The writer also covers the problems with regards to a custodial state suddenly overwhelmed with geezers.

What you will not find in that article is why, after a 1,000 generations or more in the middle of Europe, these Germanic tribes decided to stop having kids. It is a conscious decision as there’s no evidence that women are suddenly infertile. Contraception sales are better than ever. Men and women of these tribes have simply decided to not have children. If reports like this one are correct, Germans are not even willing to have sex, despite the mountains of free contraceptives.

It is telling, I think, that no one thinks about this in the same way we look at fertility of other species. Armies of humans are involved in understanding why the giant panda stopped reproducing. If the population of the long-nosed fly gorilla ant drops even by one percent, the full force of the federal state swings into action to find out why. People across Europe have stopped reproducing and no one is the least bit curious.

The closest we get to an answer is the old trope about educated people having fewer children, as if self-extinction was the height of genius. Never mind that the smart fraction used to have loads of kids by custom. Then you have the hooting lunatics claiming that what worked just fine for thousands of years is suddenly killing off the species. Otherwise, no one thinks it is important to know what is causing Europeans to die out.

David Goldman, also known as Spengler, wrote a book called How Civilizations Die in which he tried to answer the question. His main argument is that the West has lost faith in itself by losing faith entirely. People who truly believe that there is a reward in the next life for living well in this life will inevitably be optimistic about the future and willing to bring children into the world.

The West, in Goldman’s formulation, sees nothing but a pointless dance to the grave and therefore sees no purpose to life. Not having children is the same as saying you wish you had never been born. I doubt anyone thinks of it in those terms, but the old Greek saying is true. Societies grow great when old men plants trees in whose shade they will never sit.

At the same time, Islam’s violent response to encroaching modernity is a reaction to the spiritual nullity that is modern Western consumerism and materialism. Muslim leaders talk about this very fact. They see their own sudden downturn in fertility as a consequence of Western materialism destroying their traditional societies.

The book is well worth reading, even though I’m not entirely convinced. The biological imperative is what makes life possible. Men will not suddenly decide to overrule their most basic desires just because their churches have fallen to rubble. Even in the darkest days of humanity, people still got it on and made new people. There’s a reason why September is the most common birth month in the northern hemisphere.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if Goldman is not mostly right about what’s driving this trend. The inspiration has died so the aspiration has died too, replaced with the cold, transactional ethos of the modern technological state. Orwell may have been wrong about the brutal austerity of the future, but the custodial state imagined by Huxley is just as sterile.

There’s also the central tenet of multiculturalism which has infected the West. That’s the argument that no society is better than another and to think so, much less say so, is about the worst thing you can do. Pride in your people is a big part of that biological urge. Men risk their lives for their people because to do so means their essence will carry on through others.

If “your people” are no better or worse than any other people, there’s no reason for you to sacrifice in anyway for “your people.” At the same time, if you cannot count on your people to look after your descendents or even associate with your descendents, why bother having descendents? The egalitarian, multicultural society is one where no one has any regard for anyone, beyond the material transactions of daily existence.

In politics, the electorate always has the option to not vote. Often, it is the next to last resort. Millions of white people have stopped voting in America because no party represents the interests of traditional core Americans. That scales up to people declining to show up for the future when the direction of their cultures is headed to a dead, sterile end. The future belongs to those who show up and the West has decided the future is not for them.

The Church of Climate Change

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One of my themes is how belief warps how people process information. The old line about how the fanatic only sees that which confirms his fanaticism is obviously true. Fans of Manchester United will believe anything horrible about fans of Liverpool. At the same time, they will never believe anything bad about the boys on their team. Fans of Tom Brady think he is innocent, while fans of the New Jersey teams think he is in some way responsible for killing Kennedy.

In public affairs, it works the same. Republicans think Democrats are secretly plotting to make Karl Marx our new god and Democrats think Republicans want to bring back slavery. This week the MYTimes went after Marco Rubio and every conservative is rushing to his defense. A week ago many of them thought he was  bum due to his open borders fanaticism.

It also has another manifestation. If you are convinced some event is inevitable, then all signs point to that inevitability. Read Zero Hedge for a week or two and you see what I mean. They are convinced the apocalypse is upon us and every news event is spun into the sign that the end is near. Some variation of “the coming zombie apocalypse in three charts” is a daily staple.

I think that’s at the heart of the Global Warming cult. “Cult” is the right word at this point, since the people passionate about it have deranged themselves to the point where those outside suspect sinister things about the movement. I have liberal friends who send me thousand word e-mails filled with links and graphs claiming that any day now the tipping point will be reached and we’re doomed. They are so sure that Gaia is angry and ready to punish us, it is axiomatic.

What this means is the looming disaster is a certainty in the minds of the adherents, beyond dispute in the same way no sane person disputes gravity or the laws of motion. It is a fixed thing now and forever, like arithmetic. If the data  shows that maybe Gaia is not all that angry, it is assumed to be wrong. It has to be. So they go back and refine the data and massage it so that it is “corrected” to comport with what they know must be true.

NOAA faking their data is not deception in the way in which we normally think of it. They’re simply correcting what they believe must be a mistake. Imagine measuring a stone falling to earth and the results show it falls at rates well outside standard gravity. We know objects near earth accelerate toward the earth at 9.80665 m/s. That’s axiomatic. Any measure outside that must be due to human error.

That’s what’s happening with the constant fiddling with temperature data. Everyone knows that the earth’s climate is warming. The data coming in from various instruments must fit into the the accepted model or those instruments are defective. It has to be, otherwise the very foundation of reality is in doubt. More important, the very identity of the people in the field is in doubt.

The assumption is that data disproving the belief will somehow shake them out of their faith, but it does not work like that for most people. Look at the number of people who can walk into a natural history museum and still believe in young earth creationism. Glaciers could cover North America and the AGW people will say the planet is overheating. It’s why they have started saying climate change rather than global warming. It’s not a conscious effort to deceive; they are simply adapting to dis-confirmation.

Think of it this way. If you are a climate researcher today, you not only have the pressure to produce proof of global warming, you are surrounded by colleagues who believe deeply in the issue. Even if you know the data contradicts the prevailing “consensus” on the issue, it would take herculean will to publish it and face the wrath of your friends and colleagues. When you already are inclined to agree with them, the default assumption will be to dismiss the contradictory data and “correct” it.

There is an old idea called Social Comparison Theory that tries to explain why we tend to emulate those around us. The short version is that humans constantly compare themselves to others around them as a form of self-evaluation. If everyone else thinks pink flamingos on the lawn is gauche, then you are unlikely to install them on your lawn. This applies to opinions, styles, religion, etc.

It’s not hard to see how this is a great evolutionary adaptation. Cooperation scales very well. Two people working in tandem will beat two people working independently. Ten people working as a team will beat two people working in tandem. There are no examples of high status males, for example, whose lives prove the customs of their society nugatory. Rather, status is based on confirming that which society holds dear.

One of the things I find fascinating about third century Rome is how the Empire lost transcendent purpose. Everything was aimed at keeping the band together, so to speak. It’s argued that the Empire bankrupted itself trying to preserve the empire. In this period is when all sorts of odd cults and mystics popped up throughout the Empire. Sol Invictus and, of course, Christianity got going strong during this period as well.

In this post-Christian Era in the West, I think we’re seeing something similar. Oddball mass movements like climate change and its implicit millenarianism are only possible when no dominant ideology exists. The field is clear for people who no longer believe in anything to fall for everything. The Romans carried on a long time after they no longer had a reason to carry on, but eventually something replaced the old gods. Something will come along to be the dominant faith of the West, but I doubt it is climate change.

US Women Led By A Lesbian And A Lunatic

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Imagine if the US men’s soccer team went into the World Cup led by a wife beater and a flamboyant homosexual. The news, of course, would be all about the wonderfulness of the homosexual, because they are our gods. We would know nothing about the other players, other than than the degree of wonderfulness they display while embracing the sodomite.

We know this because we have two good examples. In the NBA, Jason Collins, a bench player at the end of his career, announced he was gay. For the next twelve months ESPN was unwatchable because it was a 24×7 marathon of stories about the homosexual basketball player. Similarly, the college football player, Michael Sam, got hundreds of hours of air time, simply because he acted gay on TV. He even got a shot in the NFL.

The US Women’s soccer team is led by Megan Rapinoe. If you put her name into a Google machine you see the usual stuff about an athlete. This despite her best efforts to make money off of being a lesbian. Before the Olympics she all but went door to door telling people she liked muff. Yet, the news has no stories on the poor girl, other than the fact she is trying to win her first World Cup.

Of course, if anyone dares mention that Mx. Rapinoe is a dyke, they will be fired so you can’t blame the airheads in the media for leaving it alone. They are not terribly bright, but they know how the game is played. Mention Rapinoe is a lesbian and the SJW’s pounce on you demanding to know why you care about her sex life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with the silence on this women’s private life. I think this is proper. In fact, there should be a penalty on those who keep putting their business in the street. The absolute worst thing to happen in modern times is people sharing their private lives with strangers. Mx. Rapinoe’s private life is none of our business and she should keep it that way.

The point is, a homosexual male athlete means everyone all the time must talk about how wonderful it is that he likes the penis sampler at the club, while a female homosexual athlete means everyone better not notice – or else. I can’t help but feel sorry for the dykes. It seems that liking muff in modern America is the one unforgivable sin, whether you are a man or a woman.

Now, let’s look at the lunatic on the team, Hope Solo. Her biography reads like a cautionary tale told to parents about the dangers of letting your daughter play sports. “If she plays soccer, there is a 70% chance she will turn out to be white trash on a reality show.”

Solo has been arrested multiple times for things like beating up a minor, disorderly conduct and public drunkenness. If I were being charitable, I’d describe her as a handful and every man reading this would know exactly what I meant. In addition to being a handful, she is not the most gifted liar, despite working hard at it.

Every week, male athletes involved in drunken brawls, grand theft and domestic violence lose their careers. Ray Rice lost his career in the NFL and a multimillion dollar contract because he slapped his old lady in an elevator. Greg Hardy, another NFL player, remains out of work because of a domestic violence beef.

The ESPN article is the only thing you see about Solo from the media. They have decided that it is old news and there’s no reason for you chauvinistic cave dwellers to talk about it. Instead, her story will be a tale of redemption. Since we can’t talk about the lesbians and no one watches women’s soccer, the narrative will be Solo’s triumph over adversity!

This is where American women find themselves after a century of feminism. The role models for their daughters are lesbians and lunatics, but no one is allowed to mention that these women are lesbians and lunatics. They traded in one set of double standards for another set, the former being based in biology and the latter at odds with it.

Post-Democracy In Action

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I tried to make the point the other day that the primary role of elected governments is to fool the public into going along with that which is against their interests. Increasingly, the management of national affairs is in the hands of extra-national organizations like the EU. The people can vote themselves silly, but public policy will be determined by the unelected elites of the global managerial class.

It’s not just the global elite dodging the will of local populations with the aid of national governments. There’s a degree of spite in much of what we see going on these days. The EU could probably make some concessions in Greece to smooth things over, but they really want to rub the Greeks nose in that turd sandwich they are making them eat.

Pat Buchanan said thirty years ago that America is the first country where the elite openly despise the people and culture that puts them into the elite. He was wrong in that the Euros have reached that point first, but America is trying hard to catch them. That’s blazingly obvious as you see in this story breaking from Breitbart.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA)
67% is pressuring House GOP leadership, particularly Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)
47%, to delay plans to muscle Obamatrade through the House of Representatives quickly. In in a letter to McCarthy obtained exclusively by Breitbart News, he’s asking leadership to slow down and consider the ramifications of what it is doing.

“I write to you today to request that you delay any vote on fast-track authority for the Executive until the President has made public all text and information pertaining to the new economic union known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission, as well the ‘Living Agreement’ authority,” Hunter wrote to McCarthy, his fellow California Republican. “My concern is that this allows the President and the members of the union to change the agreement and its membership following adoption.”

Hunter’s concern is well founded.

Despite claims from some Obamatrade proponents to the contrary, if Congress approves Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) which would fast-track and all but ensure the approval of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Pacific Rim trade deal, the “Living Agreement” inside the TPP would allow President Obama and the other TPP nations to add China or any other country for that matter to the deal without seeking approval from Congress.

I’m a pro-trade sort as are most people in America. Most of the GOP are rabidly pro-trade. This is not a trade deal, however. It is way to circumvent the voters and obscure future evasions from them. You can feel the sneering contempt for the voters in the reaction of leadership to attempts to make the details of this bill public. It’s as if the GOP is deliberating spiting their own voters.

Do they hold the people in contempt? Many of them surely do. Nancy Pelosi would hold random beheadings of commoners on the mall if she could get away with it. Most simply have decided that representative government no longer works for them and their paymasters. The men and women in Congress serve the people who pay them and it is not the guys reading this wondering who to vote for in the primaries.

Speaking in Tongues

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You can’t help but notice that the New Religion is developing its own language. It sounds like English and much of it is understandable to English speakers. Much of it is a weird jumble of sounds that have magical properties for the faithful, but sound like nonsense to normal people. Check out this letter to the editor in the NYTimes.

To the Editor:

We are militant about justice, but the justice we seek and enact looks like healing, reparation and care. We do have demands, but not that you submit to our “etiquette,” rather that you join a culture of compassion and acknowledge vulnerability.

College students are volatile, and if our “safe spaces” seem more for hiding from ideas than for shelter from oppression, it is because we occasionally confound structural injustice (which hurts, badly) with being-in-the-world (also hurts). We are obliged as social individuals to fight the first and weather the second, and also to help others do the same.

We do have a settled philosophy. It combines an understanding of power structures with the golden rule. Do unto others as you would if you wanted to heal the pain of injustice. We ask no more than David Brooks does: to defer to the complexity of reality, and to find in our deference the kindness to care for one another’s vulnerabilities and to be honest about our own. HANNAH McSHEA

Durham, N.C.

The writer is a student at Harvard.

I understand that I’m just an unfrozen caveman lawyer, but this confuses and frightens me. I do like the implied threat in this bit:

“We do have demands, but not that you submit to our “etiquette,” rather that you join a culture of compassion and acknowledge vulnerability.”

How can that be read as anything but “join us or die”??

That’s the thing with new religions. When they can’t convert the heathens, they settle for killing them. Fortunately the little princess who wrote that letter and her coevals lack the stones to do it, but that will not always be so.

Altered Reality

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If you want to know a society, study their money. I no longer remember who told me that, but I always circle back to it when noodling through the issues of our day. We think of money as the bits of paper in our wallets, but money is simply a store of value that is easily transferred. For most of us, money is electronic bits of data these days. Almost all of my transactions are done electronically.

We live in the information age and that means information has become a form of currency. It always has been, but it has not always been very portable. Fifty years ago the guy who knew something big about a publicly traded company could trade that with a small circle of people, mostly in person. Today he can sell it to the world in seconds. Just as sound societies have sound money, sane, well run societies have sound information.

In the Cold War, the Soviets routinely told lies to their people. They did this to devalue information, to make it useless. If the people cannot trust their currency, they don’t use it. If they can’t trust information changing hands, they won’t act on it. We don’t think of information as currency, but it is probably our chief currency today. Most of our labor is put to the task of creating information.

It’s why I’m surprised governments have not become much tougher on this sort of stuff we see going on with public companies.

Those record profits that companies are reporting may not be all they’re cracked up to be.

As the stock market climbs ever higher, professional investors are warning that companies are presenting misleading versions of their results that ignore a wide variety of normal costs of running a business to make it seem like they’re doing better than they really are.

What’s worse, the financial analysts who are supposed to fight corporate spin are often playing along. Instead of challenging the companies, they’re largely passing along the rosy numbers in reports recommending stocks to investors.

“Companies are tilting the results,” says fund manager Tom Brown of Second Curve Capital, “and the analysts are buying it.”

An analysis of results from 500 major companies by The Associated Press, based on data provided by S&P Capital IQ, a research firm, found that the gap between the “adjusted” profits that analysts cite and bottom-line earnings figures that companies are legally obliged to report, or net income, has widened dramatically over the past five years.

At one of every five companies, these “adjusted” profits were higher than net income by 50 percent or more. Many more companies are in that category now than there were five years ago. And some companies that seem profitable on an adjusted basis are actually losing money.

The stock market is vitally important to modern societies. In fact, it is the tent pole holding everything up now. It used to be said that Main Street is not Wall Street, but no one says that anymore. Everything counts on the equity markets, often in ways no one understands. The mortgage bubble is a great example. Even the pros did not fully understand what was happening. As soon as it faltered, however, everyone knew it had to be fixed no matter the cost.

That may be why the Feds are turning a blind eye to this. When they can no longer keep the plates spinning, maybe they put someone in jail for faking their numbers. As long as the lying works to keep the markets levitating, there’s no reason to clamp down on this stuff. Like it or not, the business of America is to keep the plates spinning.

Of course, the Feds could very well be faking their numbers too. Every month they tell us that unemployment is low, but that record numbers are not working. The BLS does this thing where they report numbers that seem good compared to last month, but then adjust those numbers down so that the next month’s figures look good in comparison. It’s a maddening game of whack-a-mole.

Regardless of the motivations, it is increasingly difficult to accept the official data at face value. Is inflation really averaging 1.9% since the crash? Is the unemployment rate really just 5.5%? Has the economy really been growing by 2% a year since the crash? I have no idea and I don’t know many people who would take those numbers at face value and most of the people I know are Progressives, who worship the state.

I think that’s what is at the heart of these record low public trust figures. It is assumed that the low trust ratings reflect dissatisfaction with public policy. Maybe it simply reflects the fact no one can trust the information we’re supposed to rely on as a society. Everything is a con where disinformation is peddled to the public so some sharp insider can profit. We are becoming a low trust society buried in bullshit data.

The L Word

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No, this is not a post about lesbians. I’m talking about Liberals. Well, that’s the term the Wall Street Journal still uses for the people of the New Religion. According to this post on their site, Liberals are enjoying a renaissance of late.

There are signs that liberals are making a comeback — and not just because a socialist is running for president, gay marriage is spreading like wildfire and pot legalization is gaining acceptance.

A new analysis of Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll data finds a marked  increase in the share of registered voters identifying themselves as liberals, and an even bigger drop in the share saying they are conservatives.

In three national polls conducted so far in 2015, the analysis found that 26% of registered voters identified themselves as liberals — up from 23% in 2014. At the same time, the share of voters identifying as conservatives dropped to 33% from 37% in 2014.

The defect in this sort of thing is that no one bothers to define the terms. To the people of the WSJ editorial board, conservative means global capitalism, open borders and permanent war on the periphery of the empire. To old guys who were once regarded as typical conservatives in America, none of this makes the least bit of sense. Today’s conservatism looks a lot like what was called liberalism 35 years ago when Reagan ran for president.

That would, in part, explain why more people are inclined to say they are liberal. If the people calling themselves conservative are embracing most of the liberal causes, the only way to remain on the trendy left is to race further into the extremes. On the other hand, people like me no longer describe ourselves as conservative because we are at odds with everything the modern conservative supports.

That’s what never gets picked up on these sorts of surveys. Using a two-dimensional scale for describing ideological inclination is fine, but ours was defined for the purpose of reinforcing Progressive identity. At one of their spectrum is Hitler and at the other is Stalin. The former is a typical person outside the hive, while the latter is a well intentioned, but horribly maligned member of the one true faith.

The result of this bizarre left-right axis is that the folks at Reason Magazine are on the same side as Hitler, a socialist and nationalist. It places Mussolini and FDR at extreme opposites ends, when both men greatly admired one another until you know who came along. The fact that modern Progressives fully embrace the corporatism of European fascists is another paradox of this way of thinking.

I suspect there’s something else going on now. This Great Progressive Awakening has not followed others. There’s no sense that we are about to see a return to normalcy and a snap back toward traditional American patterns. Christianity has collapsed in America and is no longer an anchor of the culture. In 1968 Nixon could count on the silent majority. In the 70’s the Evangelical movement joined politics, leading to the Moral Majority that helped elect Reagan.

Today, nothing like that exists. Evangelicals are spent as a political force. The Catholic Church is in tatters with most of its members either worshiping the NFL on Sunday or ready for the grave. The mainline Protestant faiths are dead, for all practical purposes. The culture has been turned over to homosexuals and blacks, whose extreme intolerance of normalcy makes even the cartoon villains of the Civil Rights Movement look tame.

If you pay any attention, no one could blame you for thinking that it is all over. The lunatics have won and it is now an uninterrupted slide into the abyss. Young people could not be blamed for joining the winning team and making the best of it. They have lives to live. This is, after all, how Christianity spread in Europe.

Shrieking at Nature

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First wave feminism was about giving women legal rights to reflect the changing nature of social life in the industrial era. Obviously, giving women the vote was a tragic mistake, but it is an understandable one. In the industrial age, there were a lot of unattached adult women that had to work and participate in the economy. They needed the same rights and privileges as men in order to do that.

In some respects, second wave feminism was just a mopping up action to address things not adequately addressed in the first wave. But, it was mostly focused on crotch issues like birth control and abortion. This is where feminism began to lurch into madness, claiming that biology was just a social construct. For example, women could be as sexually profligate as men, as long as men invented and provided adequate birth control and abortion services.

Third wave feminism, what is behind the social justice warrior phenomenon, arose partially as a response to the perceived failures of 1960’s feminist causes. It turned out that biology was not a social construct after all. Freeing males from the responsibility of fatherhood and the proper treatment of women, women suddenly found themselves living with cats and wondering why that guy in the office never asked them out for a beer.

The result is a movement that has been reduced to a temper tantrum, where feminist womyn scream at anyone that foolishly notices boys and girls are not the same. Here is an example a friend sent me the other day.

Czech Republic-based bike manufacturer Superior has incurred the wrath of cyclists worldwide after making a host of seriously sexist remarks in its blurb for its new women’s mountain bike.

Superior claim that female cyclists ‘do not generally need to push their limits’ and that they ‘just want to enjoy the time spent in nature’ when they ride downhill trails.

The blurb reads: “Female cyclists do not generally need to push their limits, race against time and increase their adrenaline when riding rough downhill trails.

“They just want to enjoy the time spent in nature on the bike, and their expectations from the bike are completely diff erent than men’s. They look mainly for safe, easy and, of course, stylish bikes that have good and natural handling.”

Unsurprisingly, and justifiably, this hasn’t gone down too well, with cyclists taking to Twitter to share their surprise and distaste for the context of the blurb.

The only thing unsurprising here is that the pussified editors of Cycling Weekly would turn themselves into pretzels condemning what they and everyone knows is true. Women are just not that into physical competitions, nor are they very interested in pushing themselves to extremes. That’s much more of a male thing. Companies that sell athletic gear know this and they make their products accordingly.

There are exceptions, of course, as there are exceptions to most rules of human behavior. I know plenty of men who were soft and afraid of competition in their prime years. I know a few gals I ride with on occasion who love pushing themselves physically. Most men my age are fat slobs sitting on the couch waiting for grim death. I’m an exception. The rules, however, still stand and cover most people.

I think that’s what is at the core of the histrionic response to nature by the social justice warriors. These are women marinated in feminism from the cradle through college, just like many of their mothers. Unlike their mothers, third wave feminists truly believed what they were told. They got into the world only to find that reality is not going to yield to their 32-page senior thesis on gender as a tool of the patriarchy.

The novel element in all of this is feminism, like most Progressive causes, used to rely on the turtlenecked liberal arts types in the social science departments to call their thing science! Real science has moved the field into the lab, in the hands the numerate. The result is a staggering volume of data contradicting most of what feminism has been arguing for the last fifty years.

Faced with disconfirmation, the true believer will seek the comfort of coreligionists for support in the face of what they cannot possibly accept. The group then responds to the disconfirmatory evidence by proselytizing against it. The social justice warrior business is just the age old response of religious cults, updated to use the tools of modern communications. If Dorothy Martin were alive today, she would be all over twitter.

Post-Democracy

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Theories of history are fun in the same way speculative science is fun. Because there’s no need for proof in the strict sense of the word, you are free from the narrow pedants who now dominate the empirical fields. I’m a numbers guy, by nature, but the narrow-minded ninnies with their freshman-level understanding of statistics now fill up the comment sections of social science stories. As a result I find myself more drawn to big picture stuff these days.

One way of reading history, a quasi-Marxist theory of history, is that it is the dynamic between the internal jostling of skimmer classes and the external jostling of those skimmer classes with one another. For Instance, The Hundred Year War can be read as the skimmer classes of England and France competing with one another for rights to skim the proceeds from the Continental landowners and merchants. It was driven by the lack of opportunities for English elites to skim from their own people.

It’s a pretty cynical way of viewing human society, but feudalism was a system for the elites to raid and plunder their own people. That can only scale up to the point where the peasants are starving. That would inevitably put pressure on large landowners to prey on the smaller landowners. This is a dynamic that turned the Roman Republic into an oligarchy and then dictatorship. The big landowners used slaves to bankrupt the small landowners, much in the same way Silicon Valley uses indentured servants today.

We like to think we are past all that stuff. With democracy and market capitalism, the rulers are now beholden to the people and no longer prey on them like the aristocracies of old. Most Americans really think that our elections are critical for deciding the direction of the nation. The winners will respect the wishes of those who put them in office and follow through on their promises. It’s why we have ritualized the public freak-out when a politician inevitably does the opposite of what he said he would do once in office.

Anyway, I’m reading about the current phase of the Greek drama and it occurs to me that our ruling classes are exclusively concerned with deceiving the public. If you noodle through the options facing Greece and Europe, it is pretty clear that both sides are trying to come up with a way to pull one over on the Greek people. Tsipras and the Troika agree on one thing and that is the Greeks need to eat the turd sandwich. The question is how to make them do it.

In another age, national governments could use the people’s sense of duty against them to inflict sacrifices. America got into WWI because Wilson said it was about making the world safe for democracy. FDR pushed through his economic policies on the lie that they were necessary to save the nation from depression. The Civil Rights movement was sold as a moral cause. Whites had to make these sacrifices to get right with God.

Further back, the preferred option was force. The landowners under the prince had to provide food, labor and fighters for the lord or face the sword. The smaller landowner would pay his crop tax and maybe provide a son or two to the service of the military. That was the price for peace and protection. Coercion is still a part of governance, obviously, but it is not as overt.

The global ruling elite has a problem in that they lack the legitimacy to demand sacrifices from their people since they no longer have people. At the same time they lack the will and stomach to use force. In another age, Tsipras could beseech his people to eat their turd sandwich. A reduced standard of living for the people could be pitched as a duty to the people. Failing that, he could make them eat it, by killing the appropriate number of trouble makers. Today, he has to fool them into it.

That’s what’s going on with these long “negotiations” between Syriza and Europe. Both sides are teasing out how they can fool the Greek people, who voted for Syriza believing it would be the end of the turd sandwich program. Instead, we see developing a game where Tsipras games his own party so that he gets to stay in power, without having to do any of the things he promised.

The post-Democracy game is on full display on the UK. The “conservative” party used public discontent with Europe as a way to win big in the UK elections. Part of their campaign was the promise of letting the people decide on their role in Europe through a referendum. Clearly, the public is not all that happy with erasing their country and becoming a province of Brussels.

Now that he is safely in charge, Cameron is now working with Europe to game the people into doing that which he promised not to do. There’s simply no way Europe can make the reforms Cameron has demanded. That would require a new treaty and new referenda around Europe. But, this is complicated stuff that even experts struggle to understand so that means fooling the public is the easier path and that’s what they are working to do.

What will happen here is a load of promises from Merkel and Hollande about making reforms. Cameron will ride around England braying like an ass about how he has got all the good stuff patriotic English demand, without having to leave Europe. That will fool enough of the public into voting against leaving Europe. Immediately after the vote, none of the promised reforms will happen and the march to integrating the UK as an island province of Brussels will continue again.

Representative democracy was a solution to the problem of coercion. Forcing the people to do give up their property to the skimmers is bloody and messy. If the skimming class takes too much, the people revolt. That means a bloody response to put down the revolt. Self-government means the skimming class has to win the approval of the people to take their skim. That can’t work when the people in charge are a global elite detached from their host countries.

In the post-Democracy world, the ruling elite conspires with and manipulates local elected officials into gaming the public, foiling them into being looted by the global elite. We think our elections are about arbitrating disputes between the ruling class over public policy. In reality they are festivals to keep the public busy so they don’t revolt against their leaders. The Greeks can have as many elections as they like, the results will not change. The turd sandwich is what they get. The English can vote Tory or Labour. The results will be the same.

If there is any doubt about this just look at American politics. The GOP ran against ObamaCare in 2010 and won a huge majority in the House. They spent the next two years trying to enfeeble the Tea Party movement, rather than halt ObamaCare. They won big again in 2014, capturing the Senate and a bigger majority in the House. So far they have managed to pass more of Obama’s agenda in six months than Reid and Pelosi did in six years.

In the authoritarian age, violent revolt was the check on the skimming class. The ruling families could only loot so much of the people’s wealth before they ran into dangerous resistance. In the democratic age, the ballot box forced the skimming class to compete for the public’s affection. Get on the wrong side of the voters and you ability to skim was diminished. In the global age, what will be the check on the skimming class?

The Mind of the Maniac

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Whenever controversy breaks out over some new Progressive lunacy, a daily occurrence of late, the normal community struggles to explain what is happening, without writing it off to insanity. Usually, the old tropes are deployed as a way of labeling it as nuts so everyone can move on. “Marxism!” “They just want power!” “It’s the radical Progressive agenda!” “The Chicago way!”

Frankly, I think the next person who mentions Saul Alinsky should be pushed up against the wall and shot. But, that’s why I refrain from watching Fox News or listening to talk radio. I know those people are, for the most part, on my side of the fight, but I just can’t take the repetition of catch phrases that has become what passes for Conservatism these days.

That aside, the more thoughtful outside the fever swamps struggle to come to grips with what’s going on. After all, the people hooting and bellowing about the use of pronouns with regards to Bruce Jenner seem like sensible people. They went to college. They have respectable jobs in the media. They function in their day-to-day lives without a custodian. How can they not see the madness of our age?

Take for example this story about Ranger School. The short version is, in the name of fairness, girls were allowed to enter Ranger School and all twenty washed out the first time. Eight were invited back and they washed out again. Three were invited to give it a third shot. Strongly hinted, but not explicitly said, is the plan to maybe lower the standards so the girls can pass and become Rangers.

The Rangers are the best of the best, and being a Ranger means passing a physical test that pushes body and mind to the breaking point. If women can’t do it, the argument goes, then they shouldn’t be Rangers.

But there is another opinion quietly being voiced as well: that Ranger School is more akin to a rite of passage – an opportunity for men to “thump their chest,” as one Ranger puts it – than a realistic preparation for leading in war. That women can actually make Ranger units more effective. And that the standards that keep them out are outdated.

This, of course, is an attempt to move the goal posts. Ranger school was designed to cull the weak from the strong, both physically and mentally, so the remainder is an elite corp of fighters. This is not unique to the US military or to modern militarizes. Germanic tribes utilized a form of special forces against the Roman Legions. The Spartans organized their society around segregating their elite warriors into special units.

The question, therefore, is why in the world would the military want to risk degrading these units in an effort to include women. You’ll note that it is just assumed that inclusion of women would make the units more effective. Nowhere will you find anyone providing a reason why that is so. It is just a given like the laws of thermodynamics or gravity.

The question remains. Why?

Normal people would look at this and conclude the obvious. That is, point of the spear soldiering is the most physically and mentally demanding thing a human can do. Men are larger, stronger and possess greater cardiovascular capacity so men will dominate women in the physical aspects. Men are also more aggressive and violent, characteristics that come in handy when trying to kill people.

The members of the New Religion, however, believe biology is an illusion and that sexes are an artifact from a bygone era. There are no “men” or “women” in a strict sense. People are “assigned” a sex at birth and that colors their development into what we think of as men and women. That’s why the “women” are failing Ranger School.

Further, perfect equality is the optimal result of humanity, the true nature of man. Therefore unequal results must mean we’re doing something wrong. Our society is arranged in an immoral or unjust way causing these variations in results. That’s key to understanding the worldview of these people. They have a mystical vision of the perfect human society, which drives them to keep rearranging things in order to achieve it.

That’s why Ranger School will eventually be turned into diversity seminar. It’s effectiveness as a fighting unit is of no concern to the New Religion. What is of ultimate concern, the all consuming concern, is that the unit is perfectly equal and there is no difference between the members, regardless of what “sex” they were assigned at birth. If it is impossible to achieve such a thing, then it must be destroyed. An offense to the great spirit cannot be tolerated.

That’s the other part of the New Religion. Their destruction of social institutions without the slightest idea of how to replace them is not nihilism. Much like fanatical Muslims, fanatical Progressives see the elimination of that which offends their beliefs as part of the march to perfection. The Mohammedan thinks that end is to dwell with Allah for eternity. Progressives see the end as the eschaton, which can only come about when the imperfections are removed.