Idle Hands

The old expression, “idle hands do the Devil’s work” is one of those phrases that has lost much of its meaning in the modern age. One reason, of course, is the steady removal of Christianity from daily life. Few people attend church and Christianity has been removed from the public square by the ruling class. People look up for cultural cues, so a society run by secularists will be stripped of religious references. Still, the expression offers some insight into what currently vexes western societies.

Look around the typical large enterprise and what you will find is a lot of people engaged in what is best described as busy work. In the private sector, there are hundreds of job titles that have been invented for tasks that have very little, if anything, to do with the mission of the enterprise. These roles have either been created to meet a demand from government or they have been created to inoculate the firm against current cultural fads like diversity.

Of course, record numbers of people are employed by the state. Not all of them work directly for government. Many work in “private firms” but those private firms exist for only one customer, the government. The imperial capital is festooned with consultants who advise on things like the proper arrangement office furniture. There are thousands of firms owned by special people that exist just so vendors can meet their special people quota in government contracts.

When you factor in education and health care, probably a third of the workforce is engaged in work that is unnecessary. If not for the endless cultural pogroms and government mandates, these jobs would not exist. It’s just busy work for people who tick a box that needs to be ticked. Some significant portion of these people actually cause harm while performing their work. Human resource departments are fountains of trouble making at most companies.

A good example of how people engaged in pointless work create trouble for society is the Antifa professor Megan Squire. She is called a computer science professor at Elon University, but in reality, she is just a busy body with too much free time. When not teaching Python to South Asians, she spends her days listening to podcasts Antifa has deemed unacceptable. She writes down the names of people who appear on these shows and then publishes these lists in left-wing publications.

Now, Elon could fill the teaching role with a grad student or a contract instructor looking to make some extra money. Instead, her role is expanded to include “data science, cyber security, online extremism.” These days, anytime you see the phrases “data science” and “cyber security” in a job description it means the person is not engaged in meaningful work. Of course, “online extremism” is a nonsense phrase that has moral significance to the far-left, but is otherwise meaningless.

On her resume, Mx. Squire describes her work this way. “My main research focus is at the intersection of data mining, cybersecurity, and online communities. I actively develop data storage and measurement techniques for studying networks of toxicity, hate speech, racism, and extremism in online social spaces.” Currently she has a grant for the purpose of “Documenting, Disrupting, and Dismantling the “Alt-Tech” Streaming Funding Pipeline. This is what she does all day.

When you look at her profile at the university, the first sections look like the list of hobbies and interests from a middle aged woman on a dating site. These are not legitimate research areas and none of them qualify as computer science. An aging actress with a supply of box wine can do those things. The biggest section of her profile page is the media section. That’s the point of the position. Her job is to get attention by validating myths and legends popular on the far-left.

Mx. Squire is probably a nice person, who knows, but she is a good example of idle hands being the Devil’s workshop. In a better age, she would be the accounts receivable manager at a mid-sized company. Maybe an office manager with an associate’s degree in accounting. Because we have an excess of middling people, especially women, make-work is created for them in government, the academy, the media and the private sector. The Devil is spoiled for choice.

To make matters worse, this army of idle hands now has access to the rest of through mass media. Someone with the ridiculous title “data scientist” can inflict themselves on the rest of us by adding authority to other worthless people engaged in busy work that reinforces current fads. If the internet was shutdown tomorrow, millions would be thrown out of work, but the overwhelming majority of those people are now doing work that is either pointless or harmful to the well-being of society.

In an even better age, when women performed the role for which they evolved, this natural desire to nose around in the business of others would be put to use in maintaining the social capital of the community. Instead of studying “on-line extremism” our oversupply of data scientists would be supervising the children in their community and working with other women to maintain cultural norms. Instead, our oversupply of childless, middle-aged women is a plague upon society.

It is popular to forecast how automation will change society, but we have a pretty good idea about that now. Instead of a world of Eloi overindulging in recreation and pointless leisure activities, while the robots tend to our needs, the robot future will be waves of credentialed scolds lecturing everyone about nonsensical moral codes. Everywhere you turn will be a data scientist lecturing you about your speech. Instead of a world without work, it will be a world of idle hands doing the Devil’s work.

Media Note: I will be on tonight with Paul Gottfried and Joseph Cotto to celebrate the life of Ruth Buzzy Ginsberg and talk about the supreme court stuff. They are trying to drive up their YouTube subscriptions, so if you like the show please hit the subscribe button today. The more they get the subbed the higher they turn up in search results and other stuff that is important to YouTubers. Once there is a live link for the show I’ll post it here, Gab and on my Telegram.

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264 thoughts on “Idle Hands

    • Yes. They have to edit out all the stuff I said that violates YouTube rules, but it will be posted next week.

  1. i think i have a workable solution to the single hag problem (SHP), and in doing so, solving another problem vexing modern society. Let’s call it the McHungus Plan. the women such as the one discussed by zman, are unattractive in almost every way. but they do — for the most part — have serviceable vaginas. i am assuming that last point, BTW; if you have contradictory experiences please reply below, so the plan can be adapted to the biological reality these women present. i am also assuming they are in fact, interested in dick (and not too fussy about what/who is attached). but normal guys won’t get near them.

    but incels will. i know we have plenty of those, here at Salon du Zman, so what do you think MWV, think you could be happy with one of these horned up mamas? virtually unlimited fetish indulgence potential for all involved.

  2. Mx. Squires is off her game. She forgot to include “white supremacy” in her list of dragons she fights. If she is collecting names and providing them for Lefty media, I say all the better, if it promotes our people and our views. It’s rare in any human, even more so in a Hive Mind, but always exists the maverick who might get a spark of interest and check out these maligned sites, taking a dip in that river of toxicity as it were.

  3. Data science as practiced by those of us who do it, is most certainly work. Work that is in high demand by the private sector.

    Look to those engaged in finance as far as people who do no real work, insofar as running a shellgame con can be considered work

    • it’s actually a great career path, but you would have to work in an R&D environment to know that. not too many here with that background, despite their professed expertise…

  4. “Rudeness on Linux” is by far the best topic, though. It perfectly embodies the ethos of our secular church ladies.

  5. ”Ruth Buzzy Ginsburg” gave me a good laugh, Z-man. Is that a meme yet? With suitable illustration, of course.

  6. Probably the most delightful example of the contrast between the shrinking pool of useful people and the vast Oort cloud of useless pretenders like Mx. Squire is on her profile page under the heading “Rudeness on Linux”. There’s a graph there showing some “metric of rudeness” in emails from various core Linux kernel developers including Linus Torvalds himself. So yes, Linus Torvalds creates something astoundingly useful and founds an industry worth probably a trillion today. His fate? To become the subject of a graph showing just how naughty his emails are in “research” conducted by this old fraud. Every diamond of genius in our society seems fated to become the core of a giant ball of shit plastered on it by mediocrities and philistines.

  7. There are entire industries built up around women like this and their cuck enablers. I recently posted about how I have become privy to the inner world of leftist community organizing?

    Well, they’re hosting a two-day virtual conference Oct. 1-2 “Building Bridges of Opportunity Community Experience.” It’s ostensibly about job and housing opportunities for former inmates.

    There were more than 422 attendees registered since I got the invite this morning, plus a whole raft of speakers. all the attendees are registered on this app that includes “Organizational Affiliation.” They’re all grifters and/or government employees (but I repeat myself). So many institutions that raise money based upon their involvement with crap like this.

    None of these people produce anything useful at all.

  8. That is what happens when you got a global reserve currency and military to back it up” you can support a lot of worthless jobs by useless people.. all part of the post-ww2 explosion of the left-wing govt./cultural/educational complex.

    • We do this so people have work of some kind. Automation much less outsourcing has reduced the value of labor and the amount of it available and as it continues, sooner than later the society won’t survive.
      The option would be to cut the work week to 30 and push wages up but the lopsided nature of the economy (a lot of cheap labor jobs, few good ones) makes that hard to do.
      Also US business has to be forced to change most of the time , the most recent example the meat industry preferred a meat shortage to adjusting the way slaughter is done.
      I’d understand asking for compensation for the hassle but these people have no interest in anything but profit and are dyscivic to say the least.
      This isn’t new. A lot if US companies went on selling to Nazi Germany even though we were lawfully at war. That is outright treason under the US definition.
      There were plenty of other people refusing lawful orders, Montgomery Ward had to have its management removed by force over not obeying a labor agreement.
      They were lucky that President for life Roosevelt was One of Them as he did nothing much. An man from another class like me might have had them hanged or shot without trial.

  9. On her resume, Mx. Squire describes her work this way. “My main research focus is at the intersection of data mining, cybersecurity, and online communities. I actively develop data storage and measurement techniques for studying networks of toxicity, hate speech, racism, and extremism in online social spaces.” 

    Let’s see how many pseudo-academic cant phrases Madame Squire-Defarge manages to squeeze into one paragraph of her claim to fame.

    “Intersection.” Essential, of course.

    “Communities.” A community used to be people who got together in real space and time because of a shared neighborhood or common interests. Now a community, at least in Leftspeak, is a bunch of keyboard jockeys.

    “Actively” (develop). You’ll never catch her passively developing techniques.

    “Online social spaces.” Which differs how from “online”?

    And the standard mass-produced anti-white spells: “toxicity, hate speech, racism, and extremism.”

    • It’s ironically a stronger definition of the word “community” than in times’ past – where the word referred to any sufficiently diffuse groups of people whose only commonality was professional or academic interest. The “scientific community”, the “medical community”, the “educational community”, whatever.
      You are right though, unless your “community” is in meat space where you physically have to roll your ass over to it to participate, it ain’t a community.

    • We can thank Dewey’s “progressive” disciples and the Frankfurt School founders and most of their indoctrinated parrots for this newspeak blatherskite.
      Prof. Eliseo Vivas wrote a scathing criticism titled Contra Marcuse and gave numerous examples of how this pseudo intellect embroidered his texts. A very simple example: “societal” instead of “social.”
      But more generally, these brainwashed acolytes “are not people concerned with close-woven thinking, with tight arguments, explicit definitions,and rigorous categorical schemes. … They do not stop to ask for the indispensably thorough analysis that would be required ….”
      The founders and disciples spoke ex cathedra, without a chair or cathedral, and their neophytes are prisoners of an ignorance intentionally created by the “education” establishment.
      It is not ending good.

  10. The problem as I see it isn’t the fact that you have to create busy work for people but the people doing the busy work have gained control. As a society you always need to keep the vast majority of people employed in some fashion, those idle hands and all, but the decision making has to remain away from people who aren’t intimately involved in the productive work.

    Mx Squire is an excellent example. She can sprint in her squirrel cage to her heart’s content but the mistake comes in letting her run anything, or teach anyone about anything.

  11. “These days, anytime you see the phrases “data science” and “cyber security” in a job description it means the person is not engaged in meaningful work.”

    I regularly attend local IT security meetings and conferences and maybe a little more than ten years ago the groups were small, almost entirely male, and technically oriented (though female risk managers would often how up as well). As the field became more and more about checking boxes, and filing the correct paperwork, well, it’s pretty much as Z says.
    Now it’s not unusual for a group to be majority women, and they’re more than ready to pass along their hot tips for bureaucratic management. The “process” is now much more important than the goals the process is supposed to achieve (if there even are any).

    • Just look at the entry-level pay for data mining (under whatever nomenclature: analyst, etc., should tell you it’s big buisiness.)

  12. would like to point out in olde days, most of these women would have died in childbirth (eventually). problem solved.

    i always see allusions to a “certain kind/class” of woman supporting hitler early on; but no clear explanation for just who these women were (i.e. what part of society, what level, etc). anyone know about this?

    • Hitler’s women support came from elderly pensioners, later women who wanted better wages for men so they could be Trad stay at home Hausfraus. Hitler was a good politician.

      • And Gen. Patton was one of our most brilliant Generals who (in 1945) said: “We defeated the wrong enemy.”

        One important characteristic about Uncle Adolf: he did not HATE his own nation, his own people, his own culture.
        Can we say that about our own elites?

  13. The book “Bullshit Jobs” talks about this phenomenon, but does not explicitly point out that the reason these jobs exist is to give women and minorities work. Still, it’s an eye-opening read, especially for you parents out there who want to help your sons avoid this kind of work and pursue a career path that is meaningful and worthwhile.

      • Profits become secondary once a company grows past certain size. It starts getting filled by midwits and psychopaths in middle and higher management, who then hire more people like them to create more levels of management and opportunities for “growth”.

    • “…parents out there who want to help your sons avoid this kind of work and pursue a career path that is meaningful and worthwhile.”

      With all four of my children raised, out on their own and productive, I can sit back and give my feedback. My approach, supported by my wife. My one and only wife. Still my wife.

      Was to start with the tasks very young. No pay, no rewards. No treat. No parade. Just this is what we are doing. This is what you are doing. God made mankind for work, that’s why healthy humans feel good when they work. After they work. Let God flow into your children via this natural phenomenon.

      Sunday morning you get off YOUR ass. They get off their asses. You go to church.

      Yes, at some point they may notice that they work, but their friends do not “have to.” If you are like me, while your kids work, chores and play organized sports — you may end up have one or more of these public school rats, I mean coaches (aka teachers soaking in extra money while phoning it in) come along and “talk to you” about how “the kids should not have to work and play sports, since practice is like work…”

      That bullshit. Enjoy growling back, from three inches away, with some reality. Me and my young adult kids still enjoy laughing about the clown world “coaches” we all had to suffer through during their journeys.

      Splitting wood. Raking leaves. Cutting the lawn. Roofing the house. Taking the dogs out to roam. Buiilding PCs. Gutting and re-doing the bathroom. The list is endless.

      Once kids acquire a work ethic, along with SKILLS — you will enjoy as they choose their own productive work. Join fire houses. Become volunteer EMTs. Religious Ed. teachers. Team captains.

      Want to help? Man has to have a PLAN. Execute the plan. Then if you are fortunate sit back and enjoy the fruits. It is not rocket science…

      • I continue. Sons do brake jobs at 11. Daughters can change their own oil. Bake. Wash and groom the pets. Trim their nails.

        As I said, the list goes on.

      • Good insight!

        I might add that in all likelihood, if you get them young, THEY WILL WANT TO WORK WITH YOU, that’s an innate behavior. Yes, they will tire and wander at a young age and are more trouble than help, but you need to remember they want to imitate you!

        That’s Nature. That’s how we are genetically programmed. I remember son at 5 sitting on a felled tree stump watching me on a ladder dropping more branches to the ground. Patiently waiting for me to come down and *both* of us putting branches into the trash.

        As I think of those days as a mature person in my autumn years, I see that perhaps too many folk are literally training their children to be indolent. Folks themselves as adults often have little “work”—as in manual labor and chores—to do. Children are therefore lacking examples in the everyday tasks of living and seem too often to be seated in front of a TV to be “occupied”, kept “quiet”, and “out from underfoot”.

        If I could summarize—stop entertaining your children and start working with them. You are not their “friend”, you are their role model and the adult in the room. Act accordingly.

  14. How do you pronounce “Mx.”?
    I see it and and hear “Minks”. Is that how Z says it in the podcasts? Am i taking (more) crazy pills (than usual)?

  15. as someone who leans left, I feel that there were less Megan Squires of the world 30-40 years ago. But the democrats downballot numbers were way better then. So at what point is that reflected in voting numbers? It’s a paradox to me.

  16. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Idle Hands

  17. I have only been a visitor to this website for just a few months, but I will have to say this particular entry of Zman is one of if not the best I have read. This details where this culture and society have gone to and become!
    To example what I am referring to, I will describe a recent experience of mine. In full disclosure, I am a retired physician and have been retired for some 25 years.
    I recently underwent eye surgery for lens implants. Not detailing the paperwork that I had to enter into at the physician’s office, the experience began in a new phenomenon called a “surgery center”. Upon entering, I of course underwent the required questioning and temperature monitoring at the front desk. Once clearing that hurdle, I was then placed in front of a clerk who presented me one after another sheet of paper, on which, I initialed, signed in answer to what seemed an unending litany of absurd questions—“did I understand this or that, if so initial in these six places and sign at the bottom and date”. I was confronted with “Has anybody been mad at you in the last six months, if so, what was your reaction?” At this point, I asked, “what in the hell did that have to do with my eyes?” After proceeding through 20 some pages of this, I was ushered into the pre-op cubicle where the nurse went through the same litany of questions (thankfully, without needing my signature). The parade finished with the anesthetist, nurse anesthetist, and doctor in many ways asking some of the same questions. I questioned him about all of this nonsense, and he admitted that on a given operative day he may sign his name several hundred times. I might add all asked me which eye was going to operate on and they would each mark on my forehead and the operative side. I have since wondered what would have happened had I given the wrong answer!
    If this is not example enough of what Zman is alluding to in his article, I don’t know what is.
    All of this that is being discussed is a direct growth from this gigantic entity called government, as well, I might add as this gigantic group in our culture of lawyers who have attempted through one means or another (legislatures, bureaucracy, and judicial hierarchy) to codify and control reality.

    • All of this that is being discussed is a direct growth from this gigantic entity called government

      All of the things that I am seeing decline seem to be linked, most obviously, to scaling problems. It appears that after a certain size, an entity – be it public or private – just cannot handle, in a personalized way, the interactions with it’s many customers. The most effective thing to do then, is to create a centralized system that offers ‘one size fits all’ questionnaires and assessments – much as you experienced.

      The problem of scale is cropping up everywhere now, and has it’s most rigorous study in the field of Computer Science. Here, it is often suggested that smaller, distributed systems perform certain tasks, so that as the number of clients increases the performance never falls below a certain level. It is not a magic bullet, but it works in many cases. I suspect a return (if it can ever come about) to smaller, more numerous and locally controlled entities for all manner services would be a very good thing for the traditionally minded. Of course, it requires a good balancing act between government and private industry to make sure no one gets too big.

      I’d be interested to hear how your experiences practicing medicine contrast to what you have to deal with today.

      • In governance distributed systems is called subsidiarity and was figured out millennia ago, subsidiarity is the Catholic term for problems of rule being fixed at the lowest possible level. The Founders called it Federalism.

        Of course in those days incompetent government meant you were removed, possibly killed.

        The Romans figured out the Laws do not concern themselves with trifles.

        All of this was before females having political power of course.
        Women having power means the tyranny of the trifling.

    • In a similar vein, I watched as competency was replaced with credentials. I was an E&I technician/planner/supervisor in heavy industry for 30 years, in the beginning, it seemed like everyone knew what they were doing. All of a sudden, a diploma of some sort was required to apply for many jobs, “for insurance reasons”. At the time, it didn’t seem like that terrible of an idea…until we had to work with the output of these “educated” replacements.
      The smarter of the new lot soon caught on that it was best to just let us do our job and they would come afterwards and document all that had been done, and stamp it. Over the last 20 years, I think we had 1 engineer that was actually useful.
      The lack of knowledgeable leadership has let to apathy wherever I have worked since. Corporations are hard-pressed to give out any authority but offload responsibility at the same time. Is it any wonder nobody steps up anymore? Well, except for the psychopaths…and like the sixth sense, I see them everywhere.

    • I see it as an extension of school when girls all loved taking notes, filling out papers and organizing them, using post-its and highlighter markers, etc.

      They love that crap, and now business has changed itself to accommodate the female need for lots of busy clerical type work even in the medical fields.

      Seems their natural inclination is to be a secretary — no matter the field, the task.

      It’s crazy

    • Yep. The vast majority of us are pencil-pushing functionaries. That is why meaning in one’s life must be generated outside of the workplace.

      • It would certainly explain why so many young Americans are rioting in the streets. They seem desperate for what they’re doing to mean something or have some value. Because they know their jobs (if they have one) or what ever “career” they have has no real value at all.
        Even the self-aggrandized, self-important Starbucks barista knows at the end of the day, all they do is pour liquid into a cup for mega corporation that would fire them in a heart-beat if the quarterly report dips below expectations.

        • Yes. And it’s a recapitulation of the convulsions of the 60s. The Boomers looked at their parents’ sacrifices to defeat the archdemon Hitler, and saw they had no similar opportunity to do a great historical deed. So, they latched onto the so-called “Civil Rights Movement” and the Vietnam war as their great causes. America has never been the same.

      • With few exceptions, I will have to admit the best parts of much of my working career were the bike rides to and, especially home from, the office weather permitting.

        • I miss the camaraderie and the Friday night get togethers. I worked corporate years ago in Century City and there was a bar with a huge open deck for seating and every Friday we’ get drunk and have a blast. And have drunken conversations with the occasional drunken actor, because many of their lawyers and agents were in our same building. I remember having a great chat with Gary Oldman. Awesome guy. And getting stoned with John Hawkes. Used to be a lot of fun living here. City has changed for the worse.

  18. Most of my time in corporate America was getting paid a bunch of money to do “work” that had absolutely no value. It left lots of time for getting coffee and managing my fantasy baseball team but working in financial services is mostly performing meaningless tasks to comply with asinine rules that exist for no reason other than employing people like me.

  19. Put out the saucer of milk and the cats come to the door. Put out the grant money and the useless eaters line up for it. My area has quite a homeless industry were homelessness is being validated and perpetuated by grant laden “non profits.” A non-profit meaning that there is no profit after all six figure salaries and wages are paid. What this is really about is governments in need of a budget crisis. Sure, many local and state ones had one in 2010, but not enough for any meaningful structural change, and went right back to business when the economy picked back up.

    • My area has quite a homeless industry were homelessness is being validated and perpetuated by grant laden “non profits.”

      Is there any problem that ‘social reformers’ cannot make worse?

      • Parkinson’s law of social work. “It’s well known that social problems increase to occupy the total number of social workers available to deal with them.”

  20. Even welfare is preferable to these made up jobs that do nothing but impose costs on everyone. They literally add negative value.

    • That’s the confusion this discussion leaves me with. Very hard to believe my *work* had zero meaning or value, however quite easy to believe a goodly percentage was pure BS—usually because of the burocratic obstacles thrown across my path. This led eventually to a sense of “a good day’s job well done” when in reality nothing of value was produced.

      If one digs a hole in the morning, then in the afternoon fills it back up, can that person be said to have done a good day’s work, or any work at all?

      • If you dig ditches in the morning and fill them in the afternoon, at the end of the day you have done nothing, a net contribution of zero. But you also haven’t made things worse. But if you spend your day breaking stuff that worked fine, you have contributed negatively. All of these diversity people spend their days imposing costs on everyone.

  21. And idle people.

    When I saw the title of today’s post, my first thought was a return to a recent line of thinking of my own: the younger people and a good portion of the middle-aged people I come across are ‘nothing people’. Especially since the younger ones had their minds captured by tiny screens, and their necks perpetually bent in service to the shiny objects.

    The nothingness I refer to is literally little to no activity, intellectual curiosity, and thus, skills. The middle-aged men, they have some cubicle job, and recreate by staring at sports (they do not participate in) on a screen. They “can’t” hang sheetrock, do plumbing, are anti-gun, send their cars to the dealership for service …. yes, I live in a blue state so there’s that.

    The young ones? They do nothing whatsoever. Even the few that take guitar lessons soon get bored and quit.

    Back to the idle hands. Making comparisons to the ‘muh fellow Amur-i-cans’ is a waste of time BUT seriously. As a teen, it was build and fly control line airplanes, finish longstanding model RR, cut lawns for cash, paint houses for cash. Play best of 5 tennis matches, pickup basketball, various levels of baseball from low Little League to Senior League, pre high school. Later, various car projects – yank the straight 6’s and put in the junkyard v8’s, fix them on the side of the road as needed.

    Paint houses, still making control line planes, military models (as in, ‘you do all the waterline USN and I will do the Japanese). Car projects as in ‘come over for beer and help me put in my new exhaust’ — then favor returned. Drink/meet women (usually same activity). Ride dirt bike, ride street bike. Bodywork and paint.

    Work various jobs. Didn’t get your car fixed, you hitch to work. Learn to have more than one vehicle from 18 on and keep it that way. Graduate college and still go to tech school after. And so it goes.

    Yes, as teens we read the latest Steven King books back then and swapped the paperbacks around. Same with Michener books, like Hawaii, were epic.

    So these things that are up for discussion as “males”, or even “men”, waddling around in their snout covers, flabby belly hanging over …. or lazy ass kids ….. the lights are not on and there is nobody home. Boring does not even begin to describe it.

    What’s new?
    “Nothing.”
    Reading anything interesting?
    “Uh, no.”
    It goes on. And we are surprised these empty vessels are easily filled with lies?
    Rant over!

    • Ok Boomer.
      But seriously, a lot of what you mentioned is cultural practices that differ across both societies and generations.
      I’m an early ‘millennial’. Some of what you describe here is a result of massive changes to the things themselves.
      Cars: I own the Haynes Manuals for both of my vehicles. Much of anything related to problems with the engine and the electrical systems requires you get stuff hooked up to the computer. Even replacing the battery in some cars now requires tearing out a bunch of stuff to just get to the damn thing – I shouldn’t have to take the wiper blades off to replace the battery! Even the older model year cars are getting worse and worse to work on.
      Hobbies: Model RR/Plane have been replaced with things on the PC like Minecraft. Don’t try to sell me that the Model Railroad hobby is somehow superior to any other hobby.
      Drink/Meet Women: This still happens aplenty.
      Work: Some of what you say is true. But much of the problem is also because so many of the jobs that teenagers with few skills used to do are now being done by adult illegals. 16 year olds still can find employment in fast food (my local Chick-Fil-A staffs them) but even there it’s being taken over.
      Hitchhiking: Nobody picks up hitchhikers. “I might be murdered!”
      Reading: Most people don’t read, and have not read, since the advent of the Television set. Reading always has been a small subset of people.

      • Well, despite your lame Ok Boomer put down, I won the Up votes and you sound like you can’t start a mower. And you definitely are not meeting women IRL

        Maybe some reading would not hurt you. Owl won this round, sonny.

        • Perhaps it’s not simply starting a mower (as a specific example), but rather being closer to doing those things directly responsible for “living”. Living as those things necessary for survival as when we were hunter gatherers, or at least farmers. The examples BT brings up, sound more like hobbies, entertainment, pleasure, and the like. And as such empty of existential meaning.

          • In Compsci we have a winner. Let’s harken back to a time when you either felled and split enough wood by hand for the winter ….. or your family perished.

            There would be no equivalent, say as in the ‘detailed rebuttal’ of playing vidya games.

            Or marrying up a good woman, and continuing your bloodline, not to mention sons as hands around the farm. Instead of staring at some ‘female’ equivalent on a screen — as there is no way the ‘detailed rebuttal’ was convincing that the only human flesh said rebutter’s hands ever touched was not connected to said rebutter’s torso.

            Sadly, the ‘detailed rebuttal’ simply confirms certain generalities about the stated generation, while said rebutter was derisive about another generation that at least could claim skills like starting a lawn mower.

          • Those were the examples the Owlman used to complain about “kids these days”. I was simply refuting his asshole attitude and belief in his own amazing “skills” as somehow completely responsible for his position in life. And the personal attacks on my character and ability to attract women further demonstrates my point (married with kids, and most certainly “can start a mower”). Boomers cannot die soon enough.

  22. It’s interesting how in South Africa, Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) was imposed by the government, but here it was the much-fetishized “free market” and the universities that did most of the heavy lifting.

    While our government has dabbled in BEE for decades (MBE and WBE contracting), it really took parasitical millennials graduating from college and migrating into all the Banks of America, Googles, JP Morgans, Goldman Sachs, Facebooks, Nikes, Amazons and Targets to get BEE—critical race theory and BLM money laundering—ramped up. In just five years the “free market” has expanded BEE to a scale the public sector never dreamed of.

  23. Cancer ended my wife’s motherhood prospects when she was my fiancé. My sweetie worked her way up to the apex of a 1,000+lawyer firm most consider prestigious. By smarts and hard work, not on her back and not by complaining, she just focused on competence and delivery and perhaps a little bit of positive office politics (praise and can-do spirit mostly; never backbiting; good image and female status).
     
    Whereas, I started out at a similar law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, as a patent/ITC trial lawyer and, candidly, I am simply not cut out for the large firm environment despite delivering good work in terms of competence. Early on I adopted a “no a–hole tolerance” rule which I strictly enforce today. I have my own dinky boutique full service IP firm and we will not be going big, aka a—hole, ever.
     
    We’re both on the side of Our Thing, and we support strong nuclear yet patriarchal families. You’ll just never hear about this from my wife until after she is retired. My belated point being not all outwardly alpha males are ambitious and not all professional women can be mothers. What I would say to Mx. Squires is: like you, I read for a terminal computer science degree but unlike you I worked for it and at a good school while playing quality rugby, you poseur-hag-busybody-failure biotch. Now I feel better and it’s back to the patent mines.

    • I have a female relation that is an honest to goodness engineer and takes an active interest in the field (not just phoning it in). It happens, kind of the reverse of NAXALT, but general rules do still apply.

    • People can be so unkind. Nobody knows why any given person isn’t married or doesn’t have kids. (Part of it is there are more women than men. And a larger % of men are dedicated homosexuals than women are lesbians. With regard to the normal curve for “g” there are more men in the genius and impaired tails than there are women, and more women clustered aroud the norm.) There’s a built-in imbalance, and that seems to be a problem in a technological society.

      • I have read that when people began to farm and abandon their hunter gatherer existence, there was great evolutionary change as the new society attempted to adapt to such an agrarian lifestyle. Lots of folk didn’t survive the change and those that did passed down their better suited genes (Darwin 101).

        This Industrial Age started when, a little over 2 centuries ago? High tech, half a century? Short time for fixation. Perhaps all that we decry is simply a natural and inevitable change that only some of us will adapt to in the next few millennium.

  24. The problem was apparent in the early 80’s:
    Well, I’m so tired of losing, I got nothing to do and all day to do it
    Well I’d go out cruising, but I’ve no place to go and all night to get there
    Is it any wonder I’m not a criminal
    Is it any wonder I’m not in jail
    Is it any wonder I’ve got too much time on my hands
    It’s ticking away with my sanity
    I’ve got too much time on my hands

      • No homo, but Tommy Shaw is one of the ugliest dudes walking the earth. If he wasn’t a rock star, he’d be taking out his sexual frustrations on the city of Portland.

  25. Those rings are sharp, but pricey. Z has a telegram? What is the address? I’ve noted a couple of female academics that are making the dissident right their area of study. Strange phenomenon. Probably reflects the fact that the left is so bereft of ideas and sterile intellectually. They even bore themselves. I have also noted that watch dog sites that monitor the right, such as the splc, produce weirdly flattering biosketchs of alt-right figures. They use teh best pictures and the descriptions of ideology are not terrible or insulting. My guess that there is a tendency to build up and make formidable ones enemies to make oneself appear more heroic, or something.

  26. It is popular to forecast how automation will change society, but we have a pretty good idea about that now. The robot future will be waves of credentialed scolds lecturing everyone about nonsensical moral codes.

    Despite the surplus of unnecessary people we already have, and the fact that automation will create even more, the GOP keeps pushing for more “LEGAL!” immigration. Kind of like how in Europe they tell white people to stop having kids “for the environment” but then tell those same white people they have to import Africans to keep the social programs afloat.

    We know exactly what their game is. Genocide. Our rulers revealed as much when they complained about population replacement as a form of slow genocide in Xinjiang Province, yet our rulers do the very same thing in the western world and criminalize any criticism.

    • I wish White women were not so gullible as to fall for the have no kids for the environment, all while saying import Africans. Are Black people carbon neutral?? Why can White feminists not see this double talk?

      • Free access to abortion for 3 generations has conclusively proven that when women are given unfettered choice and zero social shaming….women choose NOT to have children.

        • Maybe ProZ, but maybe not. Western women have been convinced not to have children (and thus convinced to live barren and unhappy lives that will end in solitary, unlamented deaths). The overwhelming societal and cultural powers convincing them to destroy their lives in this way are also effectively destroying our civilization.

        • The vast majority of women want sex, but many have never WANTED children. They just didn’t have any choice in the matter until effective widespread birth control, so there was no selection against the anti-natal. Now they do, so we are at the beginning of a MASSIVE natural selection process that will week anti-natal and anatal women out of the gene pool.

        • Neither you nor I are entitled to the fruit of someone else’s womb. If they do not wish to have children, its on them and you have no more right to that than any of their property. Assuming people must have children is essentially baby socialism and has no place in a free market society.
          You can change that but don’t whine to me when your wealth gets redistributed.
          You are also not entitled to cheap or free religious capital. if people stop believing, they stop believing. This has happened before and will happen again . You or whoever you send up there will have to make policy in accordance to what is, not what was or what you want.
          Feel free to preach but accept being laughed at or having doors slammed in your face.

          Three generations is 60 years. The US TFR has been below replacement since 1972 which is 2 generations and change.
          Abortion isn’t the cause though nor is birth control.
          As societies grow more urban, children become a liability instead of an asset and as societies grow more prosperous and other opportunities to do things become available, people men and women will take them.
          Its not just women who don’t want large families at that point but men as well.
          Besides that, there is an upper bound on how many people we can support . Part of the reason that goods have grown more shabby is material scarcity. No way in hell can this planet under this management support many billions of people at our high standard of living.
          Logically population must come down and so long as immigration can be stopped lower fertility is a good thing. A US with half our current population a stable system that was not nearly as wasteful would be sustainable.
          Otherwise no.

          • A TFR of less than 2 is not a “stable” population. It’s a dying one.

            If all the women of the world were to cross their legs tomorrow and say “No, we shall never again bear any children”, do men have no say at all? Ever?

            I’ve no answers to this. Eastern Europe, Nordic countries, and Singapore have tried various financial incentives; they don’t seem to matter.

            Western Civ would rather die forever than demand women provide the one thing that men cannot do alone. Neither men NOR women, will shame, cajole, encourage or praise the fairer sex into doing what they, and they alone, must do.
            The world will belong to those who take the effort to actually make future generations who’ll inherit it.

          • The earth is doomed no matter what we do as mankind lacks the capacity to stop the next doomsday rock. We nearly got clipped twice this year and sooner or later SMOD will get us. And no we aren’t going to space. The alternate planets are many orders of magnitude more fragile than this one
            All we can do is prolong our stay for a time which is noble and just.
            What no one wants to face on the Right is that humanity is near its carrying capacity. With our current technology and social architecture we simply can’t support more human beings on this Earth.
            And yes its the Earth.
            Eastern civilization is also in the same boat including China and Japan. India is still fertile for the while but it is at or near replacement.
            So is much of Latin America
            Even Africa is starting to slow as are the MENA regions and the Middle East.
            Iran a literal theocracy and its less fertile the the US White population with a massive opiate problem,
            Its not complicated, there are too many of us and the smarter peoples compensate as they grow more urban.
            So long as the psychos who are obsessed with growth, the people who want a billion people here in the US are checked, it will self correct.
            Enough people will age out that we achieve the population level we can support and it will grow stable.

          • If they do not wish to have children, its on them and you have no more right to that than any of their property.
            or you can throw them in the jungle, let them build their own civilization like the amazons they think they are, which they won’t do cause they’re useless
            they’ll start wanting babies the moment they realize men will abandon them
            Assuming people must have children is essentially baby socialism and has no place in a free market society.
            about that, women invade male spaces, they demand hiring, they get male’s wealth after divorce raping them, men pay more taxes than they do so…
            until they do what men do then they better start making babies or lose all privileges
            also, building morality around the concept of free market is dumb

          • I agree that building morals around the market is dumb but right now you have a waning Christianity, huge amounts of it rife cuckoldry, Market as morals or Antifa.
            Now if you can find some way to take power and go White Sharia on women feel free.
            There doesn’t appear to be much of male constituency for that as many of us do not want the thankless responsibility of being patrician just so we can support a society we no longer care about.

          • if you agree then why did you write
            Neither you nor I are entitled to the fruit of someone else’s womb. 

          • I said that I agreed with building morals around a market was dumb.
            That does not mean that you are than entitled to someone else’s offspring.
            The core of my belief is reciprocal obligation to one’s tribe, family , religion if you have it or to a degree one’s nation.
            This means if one’s nation wants it citizens to have children, it is obligated to make the best conditions for it.
            I know of no developed societies extant that do that and all that every happens is the elite extract. Therefore obligations are no longer mutual on those grounds at least.
            Western Civilization or Race are far too abstract to hold or demand anything.
            Family is an issue but I don’t have a wife or any family members who care which is shared by a lot of people, thus no obligations.
            I hate to misuse the word Frith but you and I do not have Frith and thus neither owes the either anything other than the expected courtesies of the culture.
            Given that there is almost no one who has an obligation over anyone that would require them to have children to fill it , no children are required and no one has the right to complain about others choices in that matter beyond anyone’s right to carp.

          • Having children is more of a duty than a lifestyle choice

            We got way from that line of thinking. We need society to impose these pressures on people or else we die off. No bueno.

          • How? Thus far not a single developed nation other than Israel has managed to keep fertility above replacement or once it declines get it up to that level.
            Keep in mind that you do not have religious pressure, People are for the most part no longer observant Christians and there isn’t any evidence of a revival of civic or older forms of that faith anywhere.
            In a long time frame, a century or two this will correct after a fashion as the main population will be highly religious do to differential fertility and society at large will have de-modernized.

        • Hyperbole… the white fertility rate stands at 1.5 children per woman on average – higher in the USA, lower in Germany but 75% of white women have at least one child in their life.

          I think the fact that we have *any* kids at all given the brainwashing is a testament to our people.

          However, the anti natal agenda has been in full force the past 5 years. I’m sure we’ll see childbearing decrease in the future. Yet it affects non white women equally or more than white women.

          • Agreed. Fertility in most parts of the world is WAY down. No one really knows why; men enjoy sex in stupid amounts, but women are saying “no” to kids.

            Ross Douthat presents a good analysis of the issue in “The Decadent Society.” He has no answers either.

            I’d posit that just as women must hold men to standards, men must do the same for women. This may be impossible in a liberal society with huge safety nets, and a total breakdown in community.

          • More people in cities means less babies. How fast this happens depends on local conditions (IQ, Time Preference and Religiosity) and is predicated on reaching a sufficient prosperity (enough to eat) and tech level that people can see that less children mean a higher standard of living. This roughly requires ubiquitous television and as Brazil learned can be implemented easily.
            However no program of any kind can create significant increases or above replacement fertility.
            This has to happen organically which it will over some decades.

          • It’s mainly affluent white women and couples who are avoiding or postponing parenthood. Others don’t wait around for white boojie stuff like marriage or financial capability.

            I am clearly in the minority here by insisting that we don’t need a higher population, of any race, which only degrades the quality of life.

            Regardless of anyone’s opinion on the subject, having children or not is a valid choice. Demanding that women follow a womb productivity quota means being one of the Right’s moral busybodies. I thought individual liberty was the goal.

          • Individual Liberty vs Obligation to the West is a core point of divergence between Dissident Right factions.
            Also its not just White women with fertility decline its everyone. Latino, and this means Mestizo here , fertility is in very rapid decline and near parity with White TFR both in the USA (its 1.9 all categories as of 2018) and in Mexico, Brazil and other nations.
            Black TFR is about on par.
            Asian Fertility is lower than White too.
            Pacific Islanders including native Hawaiians at are replacement roughly.
            The only thing pushing up fertility is immigration.

          • Individual liberty is not the goal. A community dedicated to itself and its members is the goal. The endless pursuit of individual liberty goes against reality. Most people do not have it in them to both be responsible and pursue their own liberty. Doesn’t work and never will. Most people have to be coerced or guided to do what is right and beneficial to both themselves and their community. This idea of individual liberty is poisoned fruit. Look around and see what it has done to us.

          • Half the guys on the dissident right would be happy to shoot you as Constitutional Conservatives, Militia Types and Liberty people make up half the movement and probably most of the shooters.
            All of them will gladly let you live to your standards and some will let States do what they will so there is that.

          • Religion is the best vehicle for getting people to breed. It worked forever. As went religion, so went the baby making. Government can help with taxes and so forth but you need a belief in a higher power if you want people to go through the trials and tribulations of parenting. Why I always think our only way out of this is spiritual and hence religious.

          • Easier said than done. Christianity is in freefall and with a few exceptions of the ultra religious, there i s zero evidence of a revival.
            Even the vaunted Evangelical movement is hemorrhaging people.

          • Celibacy is far more common than you might think. It appears that about 20% of men get most of the sex and the rest of unevenly distributed with the 80% of the bottom males getting occasional or none.
            Also some surveys show that half of people are uncoupled and of those, half have no interest in coupling or apparently sex at all.
            This is a quick trip to ape land or civic destruction but our leaders if not utterly evil are stupid.

      • You mean, why can’t women refuse a contradictory situation that strokes their ego and feeds their solipsism and entitlement? Why can’t a fat kid resist cake, or a Devil Mouse middle manager resist child porn?

      • Did White women fall for some wacko tree hugger claim that the earth is overpopulated, or were they simply using such claim as a face saving rationalization for their hedonist choice to remain barren? In other words, turning a selfish act into virtue signal.

        • The birth rate was already well below replacement by the 1970s. People pull out all kinds of reasons but the simple fact is that in our modern society, some people choose to do other things than procreate.

          However as I said, its hyperbole, the vast majority of white women still have children with awhite man.

        • There was an article by of all things Reason magazine years ago that went roughly “maybe people don’t like having kids”
          It was a bit snide but its perfectly possible that in a developed nation most people want maybe 2 kids no matter what they tell pollsters.
          Its been that way after all for nearly 5 decades and the US was still decently Christian, moral and not beclowned nearly as much well into the 80’s .

    • The problem goes even deeper than too many idle hands for too little work. Perversely, people are being turned away from the productive work of fixing and building things to serve as idle scolds and agents of anarcho-tyranny instead. There is no shortage of bridges, roads, power grids, water and sewer systems and similar infrastructure that needs to be fixed, yet everyone is sidetracked into managerialism instead.

      The skilled trades are also aging and are desperate for young blood—if young white people go into Antifa Studies instead of those trades, the trades will be picked up by south-of-the-border illegals who will gain the skills for a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle while white guys in student loan debt grow obese on video games and white gals grow even more bitter under the lack of male direction.

      In the same way that Israel unwittingly shackles itself to Palestinians by having Palestinians do all the hard labor (like construction) that Israelis consider beneath them, America is in a weird predicament where white people are distracting themselves with digital managerialism when there’s plenty of highly-paid skilled work out there that needs to be done. Over the course of fifty years female managerialism has bloated while male labor has shrunk, and we actually desperately need more of the latter, even after automation.

      For just one tiny example, police departments have no shortage of black murderers, terrorists, looters, arsonists, vandals and rioters they could be arresting and locking up. But they choose to ignore all that and go after petty BS instead:
      https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2020/09/22/pittsburgh-police-black-lives-matter-mural-paintball-suspects/

      • Young white men avoid the trades because white women see tradesmen as beneath them for not having gone to college. You could marry an aging tattooed hambeast with a couple of mulatto kids and support them on the $80,000 a year you earn as a plumber, but most guys would rather play video games.

        Only a man with a young, fertile, obedient wife, or a sporting chance of getting one, has any reason to get out of bed in the morning. Feminism turns women into whores, men into bums, and whole countries into giant welfare slums.

        • “Young white men avoid the trades because white women see tradesmen as beneath them for not having gone to college.”

          There’s some truth to that; my oldest son was shunned by a couple of white, college-educated wymyn. They were cute gals but I had to explain to my boy that if they’re a cute PIA now, imagine the pain and suffering when they’re no longer cute. He ended up marrying a gal that wanted to rear a family; she’s a winner, he’s a winner.

          We need young white men to seize the opportunities in the trades, and then fathers who will mentor them into good marriages. Matter of fact, I was just yesterday talking to a guy whose son is a diesel mechanic; the son learned the trade from his dad (he started at 16 while in homeschool); now he’s 23 and making $80K while turning away work … the young man is covered up. Dad stopped by to chat and see if I was interested in having his boy meet my unmarried daughter. Who knows where that will go, but these are the kinds of community networking we need to be doing for our white kids. NOT sending them to University of Foolishness Studies so they can mate with other highly educated idiots.

          • There is a place for trades, there is a place for tertiary education, such as college. The big problem has been noted—we disparage the trades, or more specifically, manual labor.

            To that effect we steer way too many folk into college. Mom and dad insist their darling is college material and brook no denial. Prior to WWII I’ve read less than 6% of the population went to the University, now we’ve got 40%+ attending 4 or 2 year institutions.

            Colleges are little more than remedial HS these days for the majority of attendees. Reduce student loans to “nothing”, insist on entry exams to weed out non college material, kill AA, increase standards, and get the balance back into play.

            Of course that won’t happen because college attendance fills too many folk’s rice bowls.

        • “Feminism turns women into whores, men into bums, and whole countries into giant welfare slums.”

          This just went onto my short list of bon mots with which to tease the monkeys. Thank you.
          some others:
          “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.” -Enoch Powell
          “ideology is a luxury afforded by tribes that have secured their lands against other tribes” -? probably someone here

        • AYFKM? I’m trying to think of an engineer in my aquaintance that isn’t married to a General Contractor or Health Professional that has the option for shift work so someone can care for the kids and still pay the bills.

      • As to the trades, I’ve but one word:

        Unions.

        Yes, they can be corrupt, but strong labor laws have traditionally been the only thing in this country that have given the blue collar worker any shot at serious equity in their trades.

        Then again, if the robot apocalypse is truly nigh, we’re all mostly fooked.

        • Might that depend on locale? I know more than a few unlicensed, non-union, independent tradesmen who are killing it here in rural TN.
          And before unions there were the rural grange and artisan guilds. One could arguably follow those models at the community level and be far better off without centralized union bureaucracy. Unions became necessary when men left home and community-based production for the industrial corporate factory. Modern tradesmen are reversing this trend, working out of home-based shops and mobile trucks. Something to think about.

        • We don’t need a robot apocalypse, only enough automation.
          We are already seeing that and I’d argue that only make work has kept fertility as high as it is already.
          If we went full efficiency and could suppress riots , say by paying people off we probably would get the TFR down to maybe 1 or a bit less.
          As far as I could find out , the global low number excluding Vatican City was in Shanghai China where it hit .7 that is 1/3 the required number to replace for a period of time.

          • AB, I’ve been lurking, but just have to step in. Reduction in numbers of people is not the answer—or the ultimate answer. We need smarter people, not just fewer people. A country with half the population, but the same proportion of room temp IQ types will still sink.

          • The main reason smart people in the past had many kids is that it was an asset that improved the standard of living.
            Past a certain developmental level this stops being the case and most smart people live not much better than anyone else.
            The very rich are exampted here but most of us aren’t Bill Gates who note married rather late in life and will pass none of his wealth to his children.
            Very smart people , three standard IQ deviations or so are essentially disabled in terms of social functioning and mating even when they aren’t weird or autistic.

            Building smarts comes at a hefty opportunity cost in terms of time , resources and focus. This means less time for mating and family stuff.
            Pick two of have a personal life, have a family, be smart
            Also quite a few smart people, me included would rather do a host of other things than bump uglies or raise kids.
            Thus its probably not possible to convince smart people even moderately smart people to have more children in a developed society at least for any length of time.
            Caveat here religion. The problem there is we are entering a new Axial age in the West and possibly elsewhere where old religions may simply stop working .This means other than for some fringe groups like the Amish until this settles either with new religions (Woke being an early try at a new religion) or old ones regain footing, its not an available social tool.
            You have no ammo for that gun.
            As far as society sinking, you are right but like a selfish Boomer (I’m Gen X BTW I just share that attitude) I don’t care if it happens after my time.
            Society is going to sink no matter what when the catabolic collapse comes one or of the tech driven nightmare scenarios goes off.
            The Amish and the like will probably inherit and a new society will trundle on likely at a far lower tech and that is OK with me.

  27. Actually this gives a little bit of a biography on Heidi Beirich.
    https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2019/11/13/heidi-beirich-splcs-origin-story-family-early-life-clues-to-political-origins/

     2000s and 2010s: Heidi is frequently at work behind the scenes attempting to ‘deplatform’ political opponents and/or get them fired, etc.; Heidi Beirich thus transitions into a kind of US political commissar, the kind of position the US government cannot directly set up but to which it can effectively outsource; in her ‘commissar’ capacity she begins to frequently appear quoted in the media attacking conservatives, immigration restrictionists, Christian patriots, all kinds of nationalists (if white), and other right-winger oppositionists, with defacto support from the state;”

  28. Fetal microchimerism is part of the evolutionary process of the human race. Mx Squire has opted out and will one day vanish without the trace of a shadow. Godspeed, Mx Squire.

  29. This was one of those things I got discouraged about is how this White extremism the Media and the Left is so dying to pull out of the closet is like a 24/7 job to them. Antifa and BLM burn everything down now as we speak, and yet Charlottesville is still brought up by these people as if it happened yesterday. Zman did you know Heidi Beirich and her physical appearance? She looks exactly like that kind of overweight could never get a date tattle tale who moved on from the SPLC and now does similar work for some other god awful organization. We have paid tattle tales for a living it is sad.

  30. Your discussion tonight with Gottfried to celebrate the life of Ginsberg is too soon for many of us. Can you postpone this a while and let us grieve for a period?

  31. This is one reason I like working from home – these people have lost alot of power.

    I know the scowling Karen on the zoom meeting would love to come give me a lecture on diversity, but she has little to no power in the current situation.

  32. Based on the Pareto principle and experience it seems that 20% of civilian jobs are make-work – essentially welfare dressed up as employment. Automation is tilting these numbers ever-higher. And then there’s government, where 80% of them are absolutely non-essential. Academia? Probably about the same. Of course this isn’t just natural bloat … research any useless position and you will find that it all began with a set-aside for a militant feminist or illiterate black.

    I don’t talk to many supervisors who don’t bring their stories up, about how 80% of their time gets sucked into the vortex of their company’s job welfare system. As Z-man frequently brings up – the incompetent and slothful tax productive people every day.

    The only solution isn’t really a solution, just a natural consequence of human nature. Either the parasite is jettisoned or the host dies. We’ll never be rid of the parasites completely, but healthful independence means individual secession: getting off the seemingly lucrative corporate/military/government merry-go-round and living life as a tradesman/entrepreneur. And rearing our kids for the same.

    • I’m in the defense industry. The joke around here (among the few self-aware and honest men) is that it’s “welfare for the upper middle class.”

      • And just imagine … if it weren’t for those few self-aware and honest men, absolutely nothing would get accomplished. When I was a simple sailor on the sidelines observing military acquisitions and project management, I recognized there were a handful of engineers, techs wizards, and finance guys who were making it all happen … and then there was everybody else – the gaggle of dunderf*cks, goat-ropers, straphangers, all of whom made some big bucks.

        No offense, but the defense industry is similar to the appliance industry: fifty years ago their robust and low-tech products were good for fifty years; today it’s all wi-fi enabled and green-friendly, and falling apart within a decade.

      • That’s a perfect description, even for people like me who can’t quite claim upper-middle. When people accuse me of being spoiled, I say true to some degree, but that I was born with a silver-plated spoon in my mouth.

  33. On the subject of Squire’s research interests, here is the first paragraph of her landmark paper The Pushshift Telegram Dataset:

    Messaging platforms, especially those with a mobile focus,have become increasingly ubiquitous in society. These mobile messaging platforms can have deceivingly large user bases,and in addition to being a way for people to stay in touch, are often used to organize social movements, as well as a place for extremists and other ne’er-do-well to congregate.

    Unless I am mistaken, one must say ‘and other ne’er-do-wells’… An uncaught blooper like this, early on, may indicate that no one in fact cares about this type of thing at all.

    • Look at the number of hoax/parody papers that have been published in academic journals. The more transparently ludicrous ones easily get past the staffers, who are functionally morons.

      • The one that most readily springs to mind was that Sokel business. But I trust all other public entities to instruct me in my day-to-day doings, I eagerly await the next edict done in the name of ‘saving the planet’, ‘public safety’, ‘anti-racism’ that will make me a better person, with a lighter wallet.

        • Recyling remains a thing although it has been demonstrated time and time again that at best it does nothing, and at worst has environmentally negative consequences.

          • I think you’re too hard on recycling. I’ll agree that many, indeed perhaps most, commonly “recycled” materials are economically not worth do so. However, I put out aluminum cans only for my recycling because, at least from many articles I read, metal is one of the very few things that financially makes sense to recycle.

      • Career advancement in academic environment is driven by fulfilling various mandatory quotas – number of “research” papers published in peer-reviewed journals, number of papers published internationally, number of citations of your work by other authors, number of conference papers accepted at “reputable” conferences etc. The quotas are both, annual, and total.
        The obvious conflict of interest is that if you cite my paper, I will cite yours some other time, if you invite me to your conference, I’ll get you invitation to mine etc., etc. Peer-review has similar dynamic.
        It’s all about quantity, not quality. If you don’t have any friends or people who “owe you”, you’ll have a difficult time fulfilling the quotas and getting ahead.

        • I dabbled just at the edges of this getting my MA Spanish Lit degree for “fun.” I for one would never make it in the academic world even if I were competent 😀 Seriously, I was at best a mediocre grad student, but even I could’ve been published. As for the incestuous world, you have to keep in mind that in many disciplines they fracture into so many specialties that, for some arcane groups, you could easily fit all the world’s experts into a large living room.

  34. When I was young, I thought that Plenty For All would bring about a world where everybody pursues “higher things” like literature and art.

    Instead it just seems to bring degeneracy. The real top of Maslow’s hierarchy is a flabby, pierced, purple-haired tranny doxxer.

    That’s a tough redpill to swallow. The two extremes of existence are starvation and degeneracy, with a narrow band of dignity somewhere in the middle.

    • dignity implies self sufficiency, it’s a manly ideal

      modern corporate liberal society is feminine, it filled with social norms and dependency(welfare, affirmative action)
      because leftists reject masculinity, they also reject dignity

    • Possibly the number one lament that I hear from people who are about to retire is ‘I just don’t know what I would do with all that free time’. This lament is twinned with those clinging to employment with the refrain ‘I feel I have a purpose in life’. It does indeed turn out that the vast majority of people have no will to put in any effort unless someone is paying them.

      We have all had to deal with the sorts of people who say that they would ‘love to learn a new language’, ‘love to understand physics’, or ‘love to compete in a marathon’ – but never do anything about it. Your point about breeding degeneracy is spot on. The prevalence of plenty requires a strong will to survive. I see evidence of this onslaught every time someone asks ‘why do you study X? You can just read it on Wikipedia.’. Few people just like learning for the sake of it; in my opinion, learning a new skill off your own back is one of the most beautiful things about life.

      The books of J.G. Ballard are interesting inasmuch that they deal with the issues faced by societies that have ‘too much leisure time’.

      • When I was about to retire to a farm most of my peers were heading for big-money corporate or government jobs. They needed to do this “to help the kids through college.” And they wondered what I was going to do with all my “free time.” I explained a bit about gardening, raising cattle, welding and woodworking, fencing and cross-fencing 100 acres, and heating a house with firewood. Their eyes glazed over … going to work for Raytheon seemed much more glamorous.

        Fast forward 10 years and those guys are grayer, flabbier, and more miserable than ever. They drive a nicer car than me, and have beautiful homes squeezed on to 1/4 acre lots. Their kids have expensive college degrees, and now run on the same hamster wheel as their parents. They’ve moved up the corporate ladder, which means most of their unproductive day is invested in taking care of their diversity quotient. And they still have the nerve to ask me what I do with all my free time. They exist … because they don’t know how to live.

        • Their eyes glazed over … going to work for Raytheon seemed much more glamorous.

          These people are neither interesting nor interested. I have met bucket loads of people in my life like this, many old friends. It becomes sad with old acquaintances, because aside from talking about college memories, you realize you’re worlds apart. Good on you for getting out early.

          As an aside on corporate culture, it is a great shame because many of your power house enterprises would have been great places to work on truly pioneering engineering projects, way back when. This guys exploits always amused me:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)

          • I recently dealt with a Skunk Works team on a project.

            They’ll never build anything close to the SR-71 again.

        • Their eyes glazed over … going to work for Raytheon seemed much more glamorous.

          I’m not surprised at all.

          Raytheon’s recruiting process is completely sloppy and unprofessional. You can read plenty of horror stories about their old boys’ network and office politics on Glassdoor.

        • Interesting … my former CO from my DH tour just gave me the same advice. Defense KTR/corporate job = more money, but more expenses and same stress, so it’s not worth it. He’s now a HS teacher and has a plan to fully retire in a few years. And I don’t think it takes more than a few minutes walking around SNA conference to get the impression that the Defense ktr guys ain’t living glamorous lives. “Let me tell you about the advantages of the AQS-20 towed sonar!” How terrible.

      • I figure I have about 25 years left in me to work on the classics, history, a few languages, and orbital mechanics, H.A.M. radio, MMA, firearms, and I dream of Jeannie, lots of I dream of Jeannie.

        • Loosely related to the subject of orbital mechanics is the ‘lost’ subject of spherical trigonometry. The book Heavenly Mathematics by Glen van Brummelen is a great historical survey as well as readable text book on this subject. It is one of my personal favourites.

        • “The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics—why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until is it is time to learn to plough.”
          The Once and Future King

    • I think part of the problem is that there are very very few people who are self motivated. In a world of plenty for all – I would spend my days renovating homes, restoring old cars, building motorcycles, digging holes with my tractor – or maybe reading history if I was being lazy.
      But these are all things I would rather be doing with my time than doing the things that I have had to do for “work” that has paid me a salary. The “work” I have done – is because it paid higher $$ than those things I would prefer doing with my time.
      I know a lot of people in this position. But I don’t know too many people who are self-motivated to keep themselves busy absent a “job”.

    • That’s an excellent insight. It vibes with Aristotle’s ethics, where habits of virtue are found in the moderate behavior that threads between vicious extremes, and suggests a prescription for thriving: to achieve Aristotelian arete (excellence), strive for the middle way.

      • Classical Greece gave us Aristotle and his Golden Mean (a middle way).
        Modern Literature gave us Harry Potter and his Golden Snitch.

  35. These childless women not only make the rest of us miserable, they are themselves miserable. Both my sisters are/were childless, both deeply unhappy. One drank herself Into an early grave.

    • My mother had eight children. She said for many years she didn’t have time for a nap. I’m sure it was hard but far better than now in her old age with nothing but time for neurotic thinking. Yeah, the Covid BS sure didn’t help.

  36. In our modern era of debt-driven affluence, society’s carrying capacity for deadweight is enormously dangerous and ultimately suicidal. Eventually the debt bubble bursts and real hardship returns, but now a huge cohort of the population is incapable of fending for themselves. So they whine into existence a tyrannical government that will enslave the productive to feed the useless. We have already passed the tipping point. Next stop . . . The Twilight Zone.

    • Your first sentence is why I think Islam wins long term.

      Wokeism only exists due to the material abundance of the West.

      Islam has spent centuries thriving in and reinforcing conditions of poverty, malnutrition, ignorance, and filth around the globe.

      I know who my money is on long-term.

      • No need for pessimism or defeatism. Yes, most peoples of the Mideast evolved in desert regions and had to adapt accordingly, but that simply means that they are a fish out of water here in the mid-latitudes. Their evolutionary heritage is not well suited to persist in a temperate climate.

        • Indeed.
          Their cousin-loving habits tend to keep the IQ low, as well.
          That, plus the fatalistic waiting around for allah to will things keeps the wood pile from being stocked in time for the cold winter.

      • A big chunk of the world population is fed by US topsoil farmed by recalcitrant white people. When they’re gone the show will definitely be over.

      • A normie center-right show I used to listen to more frequently would always pause during segments about “transition” surgeries, particularly when it came to children, and would say “Maybe the jihadists have a point after all.”

  37. The academic Torquemadas of Idle Hands probably aren’t long for it due to economics and the bursting education bubble. The Faux Flu lockdowns have thrown even respected, or perhaps “respected,” colleges and universities into economic crisis. Forbes has estimated 500 for-profit (i.e., private) universities and colleges will close due to coronavirus; others suggest far larger numbers. From 2016-2018, obviously prior to coronavirus, 1,000 private colleges and universities closed. Even state colleges and universities will feel the heel of CV with massive cuts and layoffs due to reduced tax revenues.
    Look at Elon’s website, to use the example given. Slightly more than 6,000 are enrolled at an annual tuition rate of slightly less than $40k, which by today’s standards is cheap. It is in the top ten of North Carolina schools (eighth) but how long will people pay $40,000 per annum to remotely watch guest lecturer Ibrahim X. Keendi do his highly paid rendition of L. Ron Hubbard from the hallowed halls of Elon? Prediction: until they can’t or won’t, with the edge to the latter.
    Will unemployed diversity and inclusion officers from academia, along with university-sanctioned censors and tattletales, be able to snag gigs in the private sector? Some actually will until the money dries up there as well, as you write here:
    Instead of a world of Eloi overindulging in recreation and pointless leisure activities, while the robots tend to our needs, the robot future will be waves of credentialed scolds lecturing everyone about nonsensical moral codes. Everywhere you turn will be a data scientist lecturing you about your speech. Instead of a world without work, it will be a world of idle hands doing the Devil’s work.
    True enough, until it is unsustainable. Even then, as we see in other contexts such as collapsing media empires, many professional virtue signalers will ride the rocket down yelping like Slim Pickins until the mushroom cloud billows over what remains of a once-profitable concern. Even Uncle Sugar may not be able to mitigate the fall-out due to Trump’s recent EO’s, some of the most important work he has done to date.
    Idle Hands are expensive hands. Eventually enough money can’t be printed.

    • I believe this is what is called an own goal. They are so intent on getting the Orange Man that may have inadvertently destroyed the infrastructure that makes their fraudulent lives possible.

      • They have damaged themselves a lot, some of which–torching their own cities chief among them–have no ready explanation.

  38. A good essay. Sometimes Z Man hits the nail on the head better than other times. Too many women doing things they weren’t evolved to do well creating havoc in society is a big problem and a canary in the coal mine for our continued demise as a society.

    • There are also abundant, repeated warnings in the Bible against the evil of gossipy, malicious, busybody women; Zman’s observations today warn about the encouragement and institutionalization of power for them.

  39. Quality rant, thanks.
    The busy work phenomenon goes a long way to explain why the covid lockdown had such a surprisingly small effect on the economy, at least in the early stages, most of the people either furloughed or working from home were presumably part of this. RBG will be deeply missed by all of us here at Gringotts, so give us a shout out tonight please.

  40. Look up the book “Bullshit Jobs.”
    It’s true that many (most?) jobs are non-essential, directly government, government contractor, created by laws/government regulation. I work in the defense industry. Defense is necessary but it’s massively inflated  – a never ending series of contracts/projects that go nowhere – my job is a Bullshit job. These bullshit projects provide both customer (government) and industry (contractor) jobs.
    Women brag about economic independence but they disproportionately hold bullshit jobs. Tons of female bullshit jobs around here. If they downsized the defense industry to what’s necessary (and chose employees based on merit) it would be almost all men (engineers + some people to support them).

    • my job is a Bullshit job.

      I suspect mine is, too.

      Tons of female bullshit jobs around here.

      Yes, all medium to large size companies I have worked for have the same array of women, desperate to ‘make their mark’ on the industry. The job titles of these people are usually highly original, which perhaps makes up for the lack of originality of the occupant of said position.

      This is perhaps the problem with large government at scale, particularly one that most people believe its fair: how on earth do you keep people ‘feeling valuable’ – make work, of course.

      • The old saw that government has to create make-work because it finances the education of so many otherwise unemployable women and minorities is true. As the printing press ink dwindles to pump out more currency, who will have the upper hand, the military/industrial complex and welfare recipients or Shanika with the Black Studies degree pulling down six figures to lecture White men about their evil? My money is on the Pentagon and food stamps, which Shanika will receive immediately upon her severance.

      • Bullshit Jobs was a great book. But self-awareness has a price. I’m reminded of Upton Sinclair’s observation that “[i]t is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” My last job in the private sector, for a non-profit with solely government clients, was a true bullshit job. I was promoted laterally (oxymoron) to the role of Director of Special Projects so that one of my subordinates could be rewarded with my previous directorship, whose seat I’d kept warm for years despite my (unrelated) responsibilities having been almost entirely to serve as the ghost writer for the Executive Director and chief lobbyist. His successor apparently did not need those authorial skills. In my new billet as Director of Special Projects, my sole responsibility was the creation of a whitepaper in opposition to a California ballot initiative with overwhelming support. It was at that point that I could no longer deny my work would continue to be as useless as tits on a boar; so I quit, poorer but wiser.

      • Speaking of Bat Soup jobs, glad you axed: I have seen several ads for “Contact Tracer” offered by a local university and a local hospital — a perfect job for Covidiots and a training ground for community organizing spying. The job currently starts at $12.50 – $15.00 per hour.

    • I was going to post the same thing. The author and lecturer (recently deceased) is David Graeber. A lefty, I’m sure but some of the overall analysis is spot on. Seen a lot of this in my life from inside and mostly outside. Small businesses couldn’t survive employing people or having positions like this.

      • Take note: the state-sponsored riots have targeted small businesses. Their inability to provide make-work made them expendable.

          • Three customers in the neighborhood barbershop is a threat that could wipe humanity off of the face of the earth but 1000 people at Home Depot on a Saturday afternoon is no concern at all.

      • “Small businesses couldn’t survive employing people or having positions like this.” After working for several large companies, this is why I have only worked at small businesses for the last decade. Once a company gets large enough that its HR department branches out from processing payroll and setting up job interviews into training of any type, it is time for me to leave.

    • My last company didn’t have a lot of women in technical roles. It managed to be pretty based under the radar. So one day at an annual meeting when I sat down at an after-hours cocktail party with a very attractive Asian-American woman (I say Asian-American because in my company you were likely to encounter an Asian who actually lived in or was recently from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., whereas she was born in the US and spoke unaccented English.) and she introduced herself as the new Product Manager for [Product X] I actually expected her to have some technical chops, as that was normal for my company.

      Five minutes into the conversation and a barrage of marketing buzzwords later, I realized that she knew nothing. Not only didn’t she have any general technical knowledge of the product or the industry, she barely knew what the product actually did. I knew then the product was doomed (it was canceled less than a year later).

      But she sure was hot (which I suspect was her only qualification).

      • I knew one of these Asian women. She’s like a SWPL wet dream.

        She stole an engineering paycheck for three years, then skated to a cushy product management role.

        Then she jumped to a cloud startup and an even cushier role. Lately she’s been wishing her newly laid off Whyte colleagues well on LinkedIn.

        On top of that she’s married to a Talented Tenth type and just spawned with him.

        Talk about life on easy mode in the Current Year.

      • Her qualification was not looks. She’s a “twofer” in the minority check box. She was Asian and a woman. Simple as that. As a twofer, she was on sale at half price.

        • “A twofer; she was on sale at half price”. Lost my coffee out of my nose with that one. Reminds me of Juan Williams, who checks two token boxes on “The Five”. When I watch, if his mug appears, I change the channel. I simply can’t get past his ranting and raving about the Republican Party being the party of “old white men”, while his son,(who I’m assuming is colored), was working for the same group.

    • Defense is necessary but it’s massively inflated

      Been in the MIC nearly 20 years, can confirm.

      We do low-volume, small batch production. Our designs and processes are so inefficient that each batch is its own custom entity.

      The amount of handholding, pointless meetings, and exceptions made for each batch is excruciating.

    • My last “real” job would have qualified. I was a computer geek on a sub-sub-contracted Federal project. The job was very easy, light work, in air conditioning. The product I was supporting was an evaluation project. The system was only rarely used so my needing to do anything was a novelty. Fortunately they had Internet and much time was spent surfing. But also I took IT related classes they paid for, etc. I did try to “better” myself.

  41. When you look at her profile at the university, the first sections look like the list of hobbies and interests from a middle aged woman on a dating site.

    Crikey, Z Man! You weren’t wrong! I was expecting perhaps some minor achievements in algorithmic analysis – perhaps related to her ‘passion’ of data science, but no.

    One of her pet projects appears to be documenting the rudeness of contributors to the Linux kernel. Poor Kroah-Hartman, he wrote an excellent book on device drivers and now will come under the PC cosh. Of course, old Linus has been getting hammered for years…

    This is a really good example of the typical ‘female academic’; they go ‘into research’, and that ‘research’ consists of upturning the social dynamic. I shall have to bookmark the page and send it around, it is a good laugh but worrying at the same time.

    • > One of her pet projects appears to be documenting the rudeness of contributors to the Linux kernel. 
      Twenty years in development has taught me that you need a critical mass of smart assholes on a programming project to be successful.

      • Good point. You also need smart assholes for foreign policy. See Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in Charlie Wilson’s War. He didn’t dress right, talked back, and didn’t play golf. But he knew what was going on.

    • This explains why it is so easy to hoax academic journals with papers on rape in dog parks, for example. The journal staffs are comprised of these types.

    • About ten years ago, I took on a college intern for the summer. I needed someone to clean up a database, make some small changes and fix some broken queries. I decided to get a student, figuring it would be something they could put on their resume and they would not cost me a lot of money. The university sent over this nice black girl who was supposedly a computer science major.

      I was not wise to the way they were expanding the definition of computer science. I quickly discovered that she knew very little about computer science. She did not know anything about databases. More troubling, it appeared to me that she lacked the aptitude to learn these things. She was nice and eager, but lacked basic math and reasoning skills.

      Eventually, I learned that she was really just a liberal arts major, but they had created a track in the computer science department for them where they would take classes on “information and society” and “race and gender in technology.” They would get some remedial training in using desktop applications for business.

      • More troubling, it appeared to me that she lacked the aptitude to learn these things. She was nice and eager, but lacked basic math and reasoning skills.

        I had an old colleague who was a very good mentor to many youngsters. He used to say it was all about ‘attitude and not aptitude’. It appears that may not be the case…

        • It’s all about attitude when your contact pool all had the minimum aptitude, which was true 40 years ago. People in systems like computer science degree programs who didn’t have the chops to think got weeded out. Biology is real so leftists solved the ‘problem’ of the inevitable graduation rate disparity by lowering standards. One of the fundamental dynamics of leftism is to lower standards until everyone is equal on paper.

          • Capitalism, diversity and democracy lead inexorably to the eradication of merit-based standards. And that is why “America” is ruled by incompetent dolts and possesses a culture that is coarse, vulgar and ugly.

          • Only thing I can say positive about RBG, she apparently believed in meritocracy…one black clerk in 40 years on the bench. Probably a generational thing.

          • Law schools are highly segregated wrt known/perceived quality. Try to get a job—or even an interview—at any of the better law firms if you’ve not graduated from one of the top tier schools.

            RBG could easily have self-selected simply by accepting only from such schools and only through letters of recommendation by folks she knew who held positions in such schools.

            But I suspect she got away with such “discrimination” because she was on the “right” side of many Leftist issues. Wonder if any “Conservative” Justices have gotten away with one Black clerk.

          • Statistical inquiry: how many clerks were of her own demographic? That too can be a “generational thing.”

        • That’s because he had a baseline minimum standard of intelligence of young people he would get. If everyone who comes is well above average in IQ, then obviously attitude can be a defining factor. But when the standards for intelligence collapses, a good attitude is useless.

        • There’s a sweet spot where determination can make up for a lack of innate ability. A buddy of mine who had to deal with all types in an education environment said that he’d take those types over prima donnas any day of the week, so that may have been what your colleague was referencing. I’m sure none of them would like a crowd of no-nothings who want to sit around and check Facebook all day.

      • Was computer science ever anything but a way for someone to get a degree with the word “computer” in it? True business types would get an accounting degree and true tech types would get some flavor of engineering degree. At least as far back as I was familiar (early nineties) the computer science degree seemed like an amalgamation of only the very easiest classes from both fields of study.

        • This. In the eighties computer guys (it was almost entirely a male field) got electrical engineering degrees, even if they preferred software to hardware. In the Bay Area, plenty of guys who just wanted to program dropped out of university and started making serious coin. With the rise of personal computers, UX began driving the focus and the “science” began to give way to design. If the finance and accounting sorts had any interest in computers, it was limited to spreadsheets (Lotus) and databases (SQL).

        • Your description is largely accurate. I got a BS Comp Sci in late 1990s, in my mid-30s. Years of part time clases finally paid off 🙂 Not having taken “real” engineering, I cannot speak to it, but I’d say my program had a respectable amount of basic engineering, electronics and entirely too much math. “Easiest from both fields?” Yes, in the sense that a hybrid degree would probably just use the basics from other disciplines. A computer scientist should know some electronics basics, but he probably doesn’t need to know VLSI chip masking tecniques. Similarly the EE probably won’t need to know what a recursive-descent parser is, and I don’t think I remember very well either.

      • The university sent over this nice black girl who was supposedly a computer science major.

        I had one of these as a lab partner my junior year on the way to an EE degree in the late ’90s.

        She couldn’t show up for our group project sessions or understand a resistive voltage divider, but she was sure Microsoft owed her $55k/yr and 1000 shares, rather than $52k/yr and 500 shares to hire on.

      • Yep, becoming more common in STEM. Two bad choices here in order to degree one’s “quota” of AA folk: 1) lower standards in courses such that most everyone can pass, regardless of achievement of such individuals in the science, or 2) create a degree program sans anything remotely hard—read sciencey—and call it something STEM sounding, e.g., Engineering Management.

        Choice #1, destroys the program’s reputation such that no one will hire graduates from you, and sharp students will avoid enrolling in your degree program. Total loss.

        Choice #2, allows you to bifurcate the program somewhat such that weaker students major in nonsense areas, while the better students continue traditionally and curriculum standards may be allowed to remain high. Faculty prefer this as well, albeit they’ll probably steadfastly deny the department has weak program areas specifically to up minority enrollment.

  42. In a better age, she would be the accounts receivable manager at a mid-sized company.

    In a better age she would be the wife of an accounts receivable manager at a mid-sized company.

    • She would be in charge of making sure the food was prepped and the displays were ready for the reception after Bill Smith’s Funeral.
      And she would be 100x more useful in that role.

    • Amen! A while back – I can’t recall if it was a commercial or something about some company online that was bragging about their diversity employees. Anyway, some jogger “engineer” was highlighted. Well, it turns out he was a personnel engineer – wtf. Talk about some stupid a** make work job. But, I suppose society is better off with him there rather than the street corner with his bros & hos – maybe.

    • How many more generations of women must be lost to the stupidity of “College, job, marriage at 30, sickly kid at 35+ (if you can)?”
      “Whatever you do, don’t trust a man to take care of you and your kids!”

      Seeing the 3rd generation of my own family doing this. Women (and men) vastly underestimate how quickly their 20’s and early 30’s disappear.

    • But Z is right. These women should be filling a valuable role in society. The nosy, middle-age women of the past were indispensable to forming that community and social capital that we often speak of. Sure, they were a bit annoying, but they did a job that men wouldn’t – really, couldn’t – do: enforcing social mores day in and day out.

      Obviously, she’s attempting to fill that same role now. She’s just enforcing the social mores of the current tribe in charge. The fact that the tribe in charge hates her and her actual people doesn’t cross her mind. Nor would it.

      Women aren’t biologically built to “fight the power”; they’re built to go along with whoever’s in power. For tens of thousands of years, women knew that in order for them and their children to survive, they needed not just their man but the tribe. (What if their man was killed in a hunt or fight with another tribe.)

      As a result, woman constantly have their radar out for clues about what the dominant members of their tribe consider acceptable and not acceptable. It’s perfectly natural. Well, this woman is simply picking up those clues and running with them.

      This is why separation is our only path. Force women to choose their tribe. If they choose multi-culti tribe, that’s fine, but it means that you can’t live in our tribe’s neighborhood or hang out at our tribe’s parties or have your children (if you have them) play with the kids from our tribe.

      White Progressives, Jews and POC are getting a free ride on our social capital and community, something they can’t make on their own. We need to cut them off.

      • In the past, a women’s primary role was hearth and home. Her secondary function, almost as important, was to keep other women in check. Starting with her own sibs and daughters, and extending out to the wanton women of their society.

      • “This is why separation is our only path”

        Yep. I’d rather not wait around for the coming apocalypse of the USSA for the half of Whites who hate themselves to finally “wake up.” Conservative republican women are much closer to Z’s ideal. We should separate, form our own country based on republican political and core American ethnic identity (both are heritable), then start over with our side in control of the institutions.

        That’s much more appealing than hoping for a rebellion that will never happen or telling people to have more kids, but in the mean time suffer under a totalitarian state for the rest of their lives. If part of Russia had broken away when the Bolsheviks came to power, they might have ended up better off than simply waiting around and suffering through 80 years of dictatorship.

        It’s also more appealing than waiting around for an economic collapse (which is really just an excuse to do nothing, and a cope).

        And it’s more likely to succeed than elections or the wishful hope that you can take back the institutions, which is a pipe dream — millions of overwhelmingly democrat, left-wing and indoctrinated government employees aren’t switching side and our side doesn’t control enough of the education apparatus to create a competing group that can one day take over.

        Separate. Control our own institutions, including our media. Police our borders. Reform our education system. Enshrine our primacy and rights in a new and better constitution. Deport the left. Block their outside propaganda. Import only a select number of right-wing republicans. Live forever in a free and prosperous nation devoid of political correctness, white guilt, and the far-left and filled with culture, history and superior aesthetics. What’s not to like about that? Isn’t that what our ancestors fought for? And like I said, political persuasion is heritable. That means the left is removed under this paradigm, probably forever, and our country is safe and secure forever because there are no leftists around to undermine it.

      • Citizen, that last sentence should be engraved in titanium* and bolted to the Statue of Liberty, overtop of the Lazarus doggerel.

        (See Z-man? That promotion worked.)

    • Rackets don’t last forever. In the long run, that is exactly where she (or women like her) will be.
      Everyone can’t be on the take. At a minimum, we are at the beginning of the end. Government spending is more than a 1/3 of GDP. Some significant portion of the GDP is just flat out made up like homeowner’s rent and free “services.” Some is just inflation (the cumulative effect of using too small a deflator) and a significant portion is compliance with government regulations.
      The actual productive economy, minus consumptive parts like healthcare is probably the smallest as a percentage it has ever been.

  43. “Mx. Squire is probably a nice person”

    Nice etymology Middle English (in the sense ‘stupid’): from Old French, from Latin nescius ‘ignorant’, from nescire ‘not know’

    Another saying that drives me crazy because it’s so meaningless now is ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’. That expression existed when all books were covered in plain cloth or leather. Now there’s a whole industry around making sure you can judge a book by its cover and you know exactly what’s in that book before you buy it. And of course people do the exact same thing now also

    • Nice etymology Middle English (in the sense ‘stupid’): from Old French, from Latin nescius ‘ignorant’, from nescire ‘not know’

      I will not be surprised when, several centuries from now, some derivation of the word “enlightened” is used as a synonym for “bat-shit insane”.

      • Responding to your last sentence. I’ve been reading up on Buddhism for months. For the past two years I’ve been getting stoned off my ass using medical marijuana to treat a valid condition. I’m not quite qualified to be a “Bodhisattva”, a seeker after enlightenment. But I thought I might be able to call myself a Bohisativa, a seeker who got sidetracked by the weed.

    • “That’s a nice point” used to mean meaningless, inconsequentially trivial rather than approval.
      Z-man- punctuation lapses normally don’t matter but the
      “Mx. Squire is probably a nice person, who knows,” really requires a terminal question mark otherwise one wonders just what it is that she knows.

      • I disagree. There are times when the phrase “who knows” without a question mark expresses the implied indifference more clearly.

    • Anybody really think corpulent, unwashed women with tatts, piercings and dreads are likely to make good wives and mothers?

      • Heartiste (pbuh) used to do a “before and after mind virus” collage, which sheds some light on that. Women conform, or now deform, their appearance to meet the social norm as best they can. We have hambeasts with shitintheirfaces because that is what gets them attention and approval from their social group (mostly female attention).

        • There’s doubtless some truth to that. However, I think in most cases what we’re seeing is hateful and self-hating women who seek to inflict aesthetic harm on society by making themselves as physically repellent as possible.

          • As I age and read about history, although such eras are long before any of us here were even alive, I am coming to understand why not only minorities but women were banned from many official and non-official gatherings.

      • Of course not. A health society makes sure things like Mx. never happen and that disgusting women and childless harridans are punished with loss of status at the very least.
        This requires a healthy moral foundation though and ours lacks one. More importantly, a heathy moral foundation is incompatible with consumerism and modernity.
        Something had to give, the moral foundation was it. Of course the effects of that take the rest down too.

        Sow -Reap.

        • Our “moral foundation” seems to be the lowest possible denominator in the name of diversity, inclusion and equity–DIE.

    • I published a book (well, was published for me) with a title and cover designed by me, and when republished, with a title and cover designed by the publisher, sales skyrocketed (relatively). As the publisher pointed out, people do in fact judge books by their covers.

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