Author: VD

Immigration and feminism

Full credit to JudgyBitch, as she highlights the logical connection between the feminist push for more educated white middle-class women in the workforce and feminist support for mass immigration that I had not previously noticed:

Let me state up front that I don’t believe feminism engaged in any kind of mass conspiracy to essentially enslave black women – but the effect has been exactly that.  It’s a nice coincidence that feminists seem deeply unwilling to address. There are two things working in concert:  women in the paid labor force and single motherhood.

In order for (mostly) white women to enter the paid labor force with their fancy college degrees in reading and feeling, they need an exploitable class of individuals to provide domestic services at wages that won’t eat up their own wages.  Maids, nannies, child care workers, housekeepers – these are some of the shittiest, most underpaid jobs a woman can get.  And those are jobs that are disproportionately performed by women of color.  In order to incentive women of color to accept these shitty jobs with crappy wages and no benefits, they need to have no plausible alternatives.

Enter the single mother.  By creating a culture that is welcoming of single motherhood – de-stigmatizing it and treating it as a “lifestyle choice”,and then adding the widespread of incarceration of men of color and black men in particular, that incentive is in place.  Daddy in jail and Mommy a single mother is a perfect recipe for creating an exploitable class of women who can pick up all the white lady’s shit work.

Her alternative does not compute, as we already know that the working class being used here is even less capable of productive professional work than the “reading and feeling” crowd. But it does explain nicely why the feminists, and more importantly, the globalists who have long been pushing feminism in order to weaken national sovereignty, are so relentlessly pro-immigration in this regard.

She focuses on the black population, but it is actually the newly imported Hispanic and Asian populations that are more relied upon in this regard.  And so, once more we see that feminism is a societally destructive institution. It is more lethal than National Socialism and less economically coherent than Communism.

The Return of Nations

The end of the Imperial Europe project is in sight as minor anti-EU parties grow into major parties, in some cases, the nation’s most popular party. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. And it looks as if there is a very good chance that Britain will be the first nation to leave the EU’s evil and anti-democratic empire:

Nigel Farage tonight hailed Ukip’s victory in the European elections as the most ‘extraordinary result in British politics for 100 years’. Support for Ukip has surged by more than 12 per cent, outstripping a more modest boost in votes for Labour, while the Lib Dems faced near-wipeout, with some calling for Nick Clegg to resign.

Mr Farage said he was ‘proud’ of the campaign which has seen him humiliate the Westminster parties, pushing Labour and the Tories into second and third.

As Ukip was triumphing in the UK, across the Channel France’s far-right National Front was on course for a massive victory in European elections tonight as the country swung behind its anti-immigration, anti-EU agenda.

Early estimates suggested the number of Eurosceptic MEPs in Brussels could double. In Denmark, the anti-immigration far-right People’s Party is on course to win with 23 per cent while in Hungary, the extreme-right Jobbik – accused of racism and anti-Semitism – was running second

Elsewhere, in Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats were expected to secure victory with 36 per cent of the vote. In Greece, the poll was topped by the radical left anti-austerity Syriza movement, beating the governing New Democracy into second place.

In the UK, immigration dominated much of the campaign, with UKIP arguing proper border controls were not possible while in the EU.

Everywhere but Germany, which runs the EU to its liking, the political tide is flowing strongly against the EU. And the tide is only going to grow stronger, because the commissars of the EU have never listened to the people, which means eventually some sort of crisis is coming when the EU will be forced to choose between following its own rules or showing its true totalitarian face.

And the corrupt political leaders don’t have the power to impose their will on the people. Which is why the entire project has been built on lies, smoke, and mirrors.

The Tea Party is over

The Tea Party is rapidly losing support:

Support for the tea party has dropped to an all-time low, said a new CBS News poll released Wednesday. Just 15 percent of Americans told the pollsters that they are supporters of the tea party movement today, which is less than half the level of support at its peak of 31 percent in November 2010 shortly after the midterm election when the movement fueled a landslide Republican win to take majority control of the House.

That’s also the lowest level of support gauged by the poll since it began asking about the tea party in February 2010. The polls findings were released the day after primary elections in which Republican establishment candidates beat tea party-backed opponents in key races, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell trouncing tea party-backed Matt Bevin in Kentucky.

The poll found that the tea party had lost significant support among its core constituency: Republicans.

Unlike many right-wing commentators, I didn’t jump on the Tea Party bandwagon because I was always dubious about the genuine nature of its commitment to get American finances in order. The Tea Party became overtly pointless after most of its elected members promptly rolled over on the issue of the debt ceiling, which was its only credible weapon. And what is the point of a political party that demonstrates it is willing to surrender on its sole purpose for existence without even putting up a fight?

The ever-moving goalposts

The US Supreme Court has long made a habit of post-opinion editing:

The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice. The revisions include “truly substantive changes in factual statements and legal reasoning,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard and the author of a new study examining the phenomenon.

The court can act quickly, as when Justice Antonin Scalia last month corrected an embarrassing error in a dissent in a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency.

But most changes are neither prompt nor publicized, and the court’s secretive editing process has led judges and law professors astray, causing them to rely on passages that were later scrubbed from the official record. The widening public access to online versions of the court’s decisions, some of which do not reflect the final wording, has made the longstanding problem more pronounced.

Unannounced changes have not reversed decisions outright, but they have withdrawn conclusions on significant points of law. They have also retreated from descriptions of common ground with other justices, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor did in a major gay rights case….

After-the-fact editing is not a new phenomenon. “The current court did not begin this practice, which finds its origins in the court’s earliest days and has extended to all justices over the years, liberal and conservative, but the court today can take the steps to correct it,” Professor Lazarus said. “Easy to do, and long overdue.”

The court seems to have been even more freewheeling in the past. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney added approximately 18 pages to his 1857 majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision after it was announced.

My police friends told me long ago that there is no such thing as a “law-abiding citizen”, that the traffic laws were explicitly written to permit them to exercise their judgment and pull over anyone, at any time. But it’s interesting to see that virtually no one has even a theoretical chance of knowing what the law is, given the way that interpretive case law not only trumps black-letter written law, but is susceptible to behind-the-scenes editing at any time.

Disnearations of civilization

And to think some have said that a society of women such as this are incapable of building, or maintaining, an advanced civilization. Here is a selection of quotes from two African women who won the U.S. national debate championship with an argument nominally concerning the War Powers Resolution:

They say the niggers always already queer, that’s exactly the point! It means the impact is that the that the is the impact term, uh, to the afraid, uh, the, that it is a case term to the affirmative because, we, uh, we’re saying that queer bodies are not able to survive the necessarily means of the body. Uh, uh, the niggers is not able to survive….

Uh, man’s sole “jabringing” object disfigure religion trauma and nubs, uh, the, inside the trauma of representation that turns into the black child devouring and identifying with the stories and into the white culture brought up, uh, de de de de de, dink, and add subjectively like a white man, the black man!

When the nigger, uh, sees these pains and suffering that he can only, uh, envision himself that he, uh, does not see another nigger that he, uh, can feel sympathy for or embrace, but rather, uh, that, a-bluh, that that otherness gets obliterated….

Uh, says that the the the way status co works is through, uh, whiteness allowing, uh, forcing other bodies to tell, uh, nearations of whiteness in, uh, the violences that whiteness does me, uh, say that that is the link that we will go for!

Convincing though it no doubt may be, this is not, I would submit, representative of a nearation of Western civilization. It’s the audio version of Mandela’s sign language guy or the pinkshirts’ SF/F: the poor cargo cultists have some idea what the magical thing is supposed to sound or look or read like, but they don’t fundamentally grasp its object.

It tends to remind one of McRacist reading from her latest novel.  Here is a fun new game: Debate Champion or Award-winning Writer?

  1. “The average American is bigoted as fuck.”
  2. “The niggers is not able to survive.”
  3. “The way status co works is through whiteness.”
  4. “Heinlein was racist as fuck…. Yeah, trust me, he was a full-blown racist.”
  5. “This is not a safe country for people of color.”
  6. “Otherness gets obliterated.”

The source of misogyny

Socio-sexual delusions can kill when the “perfect gentleman” finally realizes that women don’t actually give a damn about all the things he was told they valued:

On the day of retribution, I am going to enter the hottest sorority house at UCSB and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut I see inside there. All those girls I’ve desired so much. They have all rejected me and looked down on me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance toward them, while they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes.

I take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one, the true alpha male. [laughs] Yes, after I have annihilated every single girl in the sorority house, I’ll take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every single person I see there. All those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasure while I’ve had to rot in loneliness all these years. They all look down upon me every time I tried to join them, they’ve all treated me like a mouse.

Well, now I will be a god compared to you, you will all be animals, you are animals and I will slaughter you like animals. I’ll be a god exacting my retribution on all those who deserve it and you do deserve it just for the crime of living a better life than me.

The popular kids, you never accepted me and now you will all pay for it. Girls, all I ever wanted was to love you, be loved by you. I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted sex, love, affection, adoration.

You think I’m unworthy of you. That’s I crime I can never get over. If I can’t have you girls, I will destroy you. [laughs] You denied me a happy life and in turn I will deny all of you life, it’s only fair. I hate all of you.

Humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species. If I had it in my power I would stop at nothing to reduce every single one of you to mountains of skulls and rivers of blood and rightfully so. You deserve to be annihilated and I will give that to you. You never showed me any mercy so I will show you none.

You forced me to suffer all my life, now I will make you all suffer. I waited a long time for this. I’ll give you exactly what you deserve, all of you. All you girls who rejected me, looked down upon me, you know, treated me like scum while you gave yourselves to other men. And all of you men for living a better life than me, all of you sexually active men. I hate you. I hate all of you. I can’t wait to give you exactly what you deserve, annihilation.

The irony is that sexually successful men who generally hold women in contempt and are so often labeled “misogynous” neither hate nor harm women. It is the romantic, but sexually rejected young men who erroneously place women on pedestals they do not deserve that eventually come to hate women, once they finally realize that everything they were taught about the opposite sex was nothing but a pack of pretty gargantuan lies.

It’s not the men who laugh at women and disrespect them that are dangerous, it is the men who consider them to be pure and virtuous beings and romantically pine for them. Because, sooner or later, they are going to notice the dichotomy between what they believe of women and how women actually behave in an unrestricted environment.

Notice the equalitarianism too. Who, but a believer in the myth of equality, can conceive of “the crime of living a better life than me”?

Women and productivity

Don’t laugh, paternity leave sounded just as ridiculous at one point:

Slate had already tackled the issue, with writer Katy Waldman dismissing it by saying, “… don’t offer us paid period leave. We’ll just spend it all taking self-pitying Buzzfeed quizzes.” But when HuffPost Live interviewed Skepchick.org founder Rebecca Watson and Mikki Kendall, editor at Hood feminism.com, the women got positively cranky.

“Just by asking the question, ‘Should women get paid menstruation leave?’ biases the listener into saying, ‘Oh, of course not,’ because you’re talking about special treatment,” said Watson. “But if you were to say, should men get paid time off if they were kicked in the testicles, yes, like if you have a medical problem, you should get to take time off,” she added.

Of course, men typically don’t get kicked in the testicles every month, but who’s counting?

Watson continued: “And again, what we’re talking about, really, is just simple workers’ rights. Studies show that when you give a worker unlimited sick days, compared to a restricted number of sick days, they actually take fewer sick days and they’re happier and more productive.”

Ask employers trying to make a profit about unlimited sick days, Rebecca.

Kendall was just as sure as Watson that menstrual leave was necessary, saying: “Just give us all more paid leave. Most people, for one reason or another, probably need a couple days off in a given month because of illness, because of family emergencies, because they woke up that day and they don’t feel great and they’re just overwrought and overtired, whatever. And so if we increase the amount of PTO available to all employees, you’d see a healthier workplace, among other things. People would stop coming to work with the flu and spreading their disease and germs to everyone else.”

Because, as we all know, menstruation is contagious.

Have you ever noticed that the chief areas of interest to women in the media with regards to employment are a) sexual harassment, b) paid leave, and c) sick days? It’s remarkable, and potentially informative, that the actual topic of work itself never seems to be of much interest to them.

If paid menstrual leave did actually result in net productivity gains, this would raise some serious questions about the overall effect of women in the work force.

Tears of the major publishers

Amazon is cracking down on the ability of major publishers to rip off authors:

The battle is being waged largely over physical books. In the United States, Amazon has been discouraging customers from buying titles from Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher by market share. Late Thursday, it escalated the dispute by making it impossible to order Hachette titles being issued this summer and fall. It is using some of the same tactics against the Bonnier Media Group in Germany.

But the real prize is control of e-books, the future of publishing.

Publishers tried to rein in Amazon once, and got slapped with a federal antitrust suit for their efforts. Amazon was not directly a party to the case but has reaped the rewards in increased market power. Now it wants to increase its share of the digital proceeds. The publishers, weighing a slide into irrelevance if not nonexistence, are trying to hold the line.

Late Friday afternoon, Hachette made by far its strongest comment on the conflict: “We are determined to protect the value of
our authors’ books and our own work in editing, distributing and
marketing them,” said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette senior vice president.
“We hope this difficult situation will not last a long time, but we are
sparing no effort and exploring all options.”

What is hilarious is the authors and publishers crying about how Amazon is “raising the prices” of their books. It’s an absolutely ridiculous charge. What Amazon is actually doing is refusing to continue its extreme discounting on the artificially high retail price of books.

Castalia House has no issue with Amazon, and Amazon doesn’t discount its prices on our ebooks much because they are already in the price range that Amazon expects: 2.99 to 4.99. But publishers that price their ebooks at $15.99 are in trouble, because no one wants to pay actual retail price for them on Amazon. Compare the price of two John C. Wright books. We sell AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND for a digital list price of $4.99. Tor sells JUDGE OF AGES for a digital list price of $26.99. Tor is counting on Amazon being willing to offer the customer a 45 percent discount, thus allowing Tor to collect $12.15 (assuming the standard 55 percent distribution discount) on an ebook compared to the $3.50 that Castalia receives. But Amazon only makes one dollar more from the 5x more expensive Tor book than it does from the Castalia book, which means a 17 percent operating margin instead of a 30 percent margin.

And Amazon sells more copies of the lower-priced books. At $4.99 AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is #18,816 on Kindle. At $27.99 reduced to $12.99, JUDGE OF AGES is #41,075. Ebook prices are elastic, so if Amazon can sell 2 low-price ebooks for every 1 high price ebook, it not only makes a) about twice the margin, but also b) about fifty cents more.

No wonder Amazon is unwilling to continue the conventional arrangement. Amazon can only successfully sell its books up to a certain price, depending upon the format and length. Due to the distribution discount system, a higher retail price means a higher distribution price, so Amazon makes half the margin on the more expensive, more steeply discounted books from the major publishers. Amazon is not only perfectly within its rights, but logically needs to stop discounting the book from what is, after all, the publisher’s suggested retail price; Hatchette’s complaint is rooted in the fact that Amazon is now selling its books for the price that Hatchette itself suggests!

By the way, this showdown between Amazon and the major publishers is a development that I predicted would be taking place soon during my campaign for SFWA President. The possibility was pooh-poohed by the business geniuses there, including the eventual winner. Nevertheless, the outcome will likely have a huge effect on authors with major publishers because the reason the publishers are fighting this uphill battle is their inability to support their current overhead structure without the additional revenue they receive from their inflated retail prices on ebooks. If either Amazon or the author were to receive a more equitable share, no major publisher could survive in its current form.

What the publishers should do – what they should have done a long time ago – is to set up a joint online store and then stop distributing books through Amazon. But they didn’t have either the nerve or the foresight, so now they’re faced with trying to develop some sort of alternative as Amazon begins to dip its toes into its own publishing line. Their best bet, in my opinion, would be to buy the Nook Store from Barnes&Noble, embrace a truly open standard, and go into competition.

However, they won’t embrace the open standard, and in doing so, they are giving up one of their two advantages over Amazon.

No water for oil

An article from Oilprice is interesting in light of what looks like a serious revision to the prospects for shale gas production in California:

The California Shale Bubble Just Burst

The great hype surrounding the advent of a shale gas bonanza in California may turn out to be just that: hype. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) – the statistical arm of the Department of Energy – has downgraded its estimate of the total amount of recoverable oil in the Monterey Shale by a whopping 96 percent. Its previous estimate pegged the recoverable resource in California’s shale formation at 13.7 billion barrels but it now only thinks that there are 600 million barrels available.

The estimate is expected to be made public in June.

The sharply downgraded numbers come amid a heated debate in California over whether or not the state should permit oil and gas companies to use hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) – the process in which a combination of water, chemicals and sand are injected underground at high pressure in order to break apart shale rock and access trapped natural gas.

Fracking involves enormous quantities of water; an average of 127,127 gallons of water were required to frack a single California well in 2013, according to the Western States Petroleum Association. That’s equivalent to 87 percent of the water a family of four uses in an entire year.

California is home to an enormous agricultural industry, and with the Monterey Shale located beneath the fertile Central Valley, fracking is going to compete with agriculture, ranching and other commercial and residential users for water use. With 100 percent of California now in a state of “severe” drought, critics of fracking have gained traction in the debate over the extent to which the government should allow oil and gas companies to move in.

Fracking makes sense in some scenarios and makes no sense in others. In light of California’s chronic water shortages, I can’t see that fracking is a good idea there even if the revision is wrong (or fraudulently concocted for political reasons) and the original estimates of recoverable oil turn out to be correct. More energy doesn’t do much good if you can’t grow crops or transport your sewage.

So education isn’t the answer?

Interesting that the economic performance of the USA appears to have slowed down dramatically in the last 40 years despite the much more educated state of the workforce:

Eight percent of the population now holds Master’s degrees, the same percentage that held bachelor’s degrees (or higher) in the 1960s, reports Vox. Master’s degrees in education were by far the most popular, holding at around a third to a quarter of all such degrees from 1971 to 2012, though MBAs had taken the top spot by 2010. In fact, the increase in the number of MBA degrees is astonishing: Only 11.2 percent of master’s degrees were in business in 1971, but in 2012, they were a whopping 25.4 percent.

The rise of the master’s degree is likely a product of credential inflation. As more and more people acquire bachelor’s degrees, those who wish to make themselves stand out go on to get the MA. And as Vox points out, while a Master’s degree does have a positive impact on earnings, the overall debt of people with undergraduate and Master’s degrees has grown markedly in the past decade. In fact, as we recently noted, graduate student debt is in large part driving the student loan crisis.

I was always dubious about the idea that formal education did most people any good. I mean, how many of your fellow students in high school and college would you say appeared to learn anything at all from the experience?