Author: VD

Homogamy and civilizational decline

Ross Douthat writes a pretty good column in the New York Times explaining how the anti-homogamy side has made a mistake relying upon irrelevant arguments. He also reiterates the one they should have been making from the start:

The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

Again, this is not how many cultures approach marriage. It’s a particularly Western understanding, derived from Jewish and Christian beliefs about the order of creation, and supplemented by later ideas about romantic love, the rights of children, and the equality of the sexes. Or at least, it was the Western understanding. Lately, it has come to co-exist with a less idealistic, more accommodating approach, defined by no-fault divorce, frequent out-of-wedlock births, and serial monogamy.

Douthat also inadvertantly mentions the source of the problem, as the supplementation of those later ideas, especially the fictional “equality” of the sexes has been far more destructive to Western civilization than homogamy will if the judicial activists are successful in imposing their antidemocratic will upon the people. In fact, I tend to see homogamy and its assorted ills as being much more a late-stage symptom than a causal factor when it comes to societal collapse.

But that doesn’t change the easily observable fact that the forces pushing homogamy and open homosexuality are actively engaged in attempting to destroy one of the more successful civilizations in human history. As I showed in yesterday’s WND column, there is no genuine “progress” being made here, social or moral, this is simply a return to the pagan decadence of a society that was in decline 18 centuries ago. The observations of one of the first historians of women, Alfred Brittain, made at the turn of the 20th century about Roman women, was an insightful harbinger of the subsequent success of the suffrage movement.

“Julia represented the prevalent social conditions of her time. Licentiousness, like a cancer, was eating into the heart of Roman society; and this was to grow still worse. It must be admitted also that female degeneracy kept pace with the increase of woman’s influence in the political world. Livia and Agrippina the Elder were exceptions; but the rule was, and has been in all history, that the activity of women in State affairs was accompanied by an abundance of meretricious amatory intrigues. It is a remarkable fact that in the history of the Roman woman–and possibly this statement might be given a much wider application–there is no instance where any individual woman designedly helped to bring about the enactment of a law for the public weal. Female politics always had for their object the advancement of the female politician’s own personal interests or those of some male favorite.”

To be fair, there have been the occasional exceptions over the last 100 years, such as Margaret Thatcher, but then of course she was declared to be “not of the gender woman” by fellow members of her sex for her sin of deviating from the female political pattern.* What is ironic is that so many individuals who greatly cherish certain fruits of Western civilization, such as the science fetishists to give one example, completely fail to recognize that the societal decline they are lauding as “social progress” is much more likely to destroy the aspects of Western civilization that they enjoy, such as wealth, technology, science, free speech and relative political freedom, than it is to eliminate the moral and cultural aspects that they despise. To repeat my comment from yesterday, ignorant pagans rutting in filth and poverty are not capable of funding either the development of new technologies or the expansion of the scientific knowledge base. There are no science labs in grass huts.

*This was a direct quote from a female professor at my university.

Science gets it wrong… again

So much for “the biggest thing in the history of biological sciences” and “the scientific breakthrough of the century, perhaps of all time”.

“We Have Learned Nothing from the Genome”

SPIEGEL: So the Human Genome Project has had very little medical benefits so far?

Venter: Close to zero to put it precisely. . . . [W]e have, in truth, learned nothing from the genome other than probabilities.

SPIEGEL: Did it at least provide us with some new knowledge?

Venter: It certainly has. Eleven years ago, we didn’t even know how many genes humans have. Many estimated that number at 100,000, and some went as high as 300,000. We made a lot of enemies when we claimed that there appeared to be considerably fewer — probably closer to the neighborhood of 40,000! And then we found out that there are only half as many. I was just in Stockholm for the 200th anniversary of the Karolinska Institute. The first presentation was about the many achievements the decoding of the genome has brought. Then I spoke and said that this century will be remembered for how little, and not how much, happened in this field.

One needn’t insist that the Human Genome Project was entirely useless – it wasn’t – to learn the very important lesson that asking scientists how government money should be spent is a terrible idea. Let’s face it, “a cure for cancer” is the scientific translation of that old politician’s standby: “for the children”. Science would appear to be our best bet for curing cancer prior to the Eschaton, but that doesn’t mean handing over blank checks to every flim-flam artist with a PhD and a white coat is a sensible investment that justifies the opportunity cost.

And, of course, like the Neo-Keynesians, the Darwinians will never admit that this expensive and cataclysmic failure of so many scientific predictions and expectations casts a degree of doubt upon the reliability of their pseudo-scientific model. The historical and scientific fact is that the world of genetics isn’t anywhere nearly as simple as their evolutionary model had led them to believe it was.

Anticipating the excuse

Paul Krugman finally produces what was always a totally predictable excuse for the failure of the Obama stimulus package:

It’s crucial to keep state and local government in mind when you hear people ranting about runaway government spending under President Obama. Yes, the federal government is spending more, although not as much as you might think. But state and local governments are cutting back. And if you add them together, it turns out that the only big spending increases have been in safety-net programs like unemployment insurance, which have soared in cost thanks to the severity of the slump. That is, for all the talk of a failed stimulus, if you look at government spending as a whole you see hardly any stimulus at all. And with federal spending now trailing off, while big state and local cutbacks continue, we’re going into reverse.

Krugman’s excuse for the failure of the Bush (2008) and Obama (2009) stimuli isn’t even new. Consider the following passage from a brilliant book written by an astonishingly handsome author more than one year ago:

Ironically, there is no shortage of historical examples to support the idea that even those who nominally subscribe to an empirical approach don’t hesitate to abandon their empiricism when the data doesn’t support their theories. Consider, for example, how two decades of failing mainstream economic policies in Japan have no more caused mainstream economists to conclude that their theories are incorrect than 70 years of economic failure in the Soviet Union caused socialist economists to abandon Marxism. Some excuse is always found to explain away the theory’s failure and rationalize its continued application; if the fiscal stimulus was not too small or too late, then the interest rate hikes were too large or too early. If the federal government’s expansionary efforts were unsuccessful during the New Deal, then it must have been due to their being overwhelmed by the contractionary policies of the state and local governments.
– The Return of the Great Depression, 134

There’s really no reason to read Paul Krugman’s columns when you can read this blog and anticipate what he’s going to be writing one year later. Because Neo-Keynesians never learn from the inevitable failures of their economic models. In the Telegraph today, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes: “In Japan itself core CPI deflation has reached -1.5pc, the lowest since the great fiasco began 20 years ago. 10-year yields fell briefly below 1pc last week. Premier Naoto Kan has begun to talk of yet another stimulus package. “The time has come to examine whether it is necessary for us take some kind of action,” he said.”

WND column

Social Conservatives on Steroids

It is a basic principle of socionomics that economic boom times are strongly correlated with social liberalism, while economic contractions tend to be accompanied by social conservatism. This has been observed over thousands of years; the Lex Oppia of 215 B.C. was the most famous of the sumptuary laws that were passed by the Roman republic in response to the recession that took place during the second Punic war. Twenty years later, with Carthage defeated and the launch of a huge investment boom based on conquest and colonization, the Lex Oppia was repealed after the women of Rome rioted for days over the right to display their wealth in the same manner as non-Roman women.

Past as prologue

The New York Times embraces the myth of “the new normal” in an attempt to evade the obvious:

The new normal challenges the optimism that’s been at the root of American success for decades, if not centuries. And if it is here, the new normal could force Democrats and Republicans to rethink their traditional approach to unemployment and other social problems.

Some unusual suspects, like Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Business and an economic adviser to George W. Bush, are talking about a new, expanded role for the government in addressing the problem. In particular, Mr. Hubbard favors investing more in education to retrain workers whose jobs are never coming back. “If there is a new normal, it’s more about the labor market than G.D.P.,” he said. “We have to help people face a new world.”

For his part, Mr. Gross, also a free-market advocate, believes that it’s time for the government to spend tens of billions on new infrastructure projects to put people to work and stimulate demand.

First, if you believe it is time for the government to spend billions of dollars to put people to work and stimulate demand, you are not a free market advocate. Second, how is spending government money to “stimulate” the economy anything but a traditional approach to unemployment? The problem is debt and adding more public debt to the equation is only going to make matters worse. You would think this would be obvious, given that both Hoover and FDR tried spending billions of dollars to put people to work and what they got was the Great Depression. It is intriguing, but not surprising, to see all of the politicians and media figures so intent on taking the very actions that will cause the outcome they hope to avoid. What is remarkable is that they are doing this with the benefit of hindsight.

Get over yourself already

First, “psychiatric therapy” is complete, utter, and total BS. It’s not therapy of any kind, it’s nothing more than paying someone to listen to you talk about your favorite subject under the guise of a pseudo-scientific veneer. A pastor (religion) or a pill (science) would do anyone more good. Some of us see this right away, it takes others 40 years of incessant “therapy” from a multitude of “therapists” to realize it. Second, it’s obvious that what is wrong with the author is nothing more than an extreme case of conventional female narcissism. That being said, reading this endless solipsism of the self-centered mind does nicely illustrate how a focus on yourself is ultimately crippling and provides women with a warning of the peril presented by constant snowflaking.

The truth of the matter was that in more than 40 years of therapy (the only person I knew who may have been at it longer than me was Woody Allen, who once offered me his own analyst), I never developed a set of criteria by which to assess the skill of a given therapist, the way you would assess a dentist or a plumber. Other than a presentable degree of intelligence and an office that didn’t set off aesthetic alarms — I tended to prefer genteelly shabby interiors to overly well-appointed ones, although I was wary of therapists who exhibited a Collyer Brothers-like inability to throw anything away — I wasn’t sure what made for a good one. I never felt entitled to look at them as members of a service profession, which is what, underneath all the crisscrossing of need and wishfulness, they essentially were…. Just as some people believe in the idea of soul mates, I held fast to the conviction that my perfect therapeutic match was out there. If only I looked hard enough I would find this person, and then the demons that haunted me — my love/hate relationship with my difficult mother (who has been dead now for four years), my self-torturing and intransigently avoidant attitude toward my work, my abiding sense of aloneness and seeming inability to sustain a romantic relationship and, above all, my lapses into severe depression — would become, with my therapist’s help, easier to manage.

The byline says: “Daphne Merkin is a contributing writer. She is working on a book based on an article she wrote for the magazine about her struggle with chronic depression.” Of course she is. It’s eminently clear that she couldn’t possibly write about anything other than her own precious little snowflake self.

Quote of the Day: “Neurotics are a rabble, good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless.”
– Sandor Ferenczi, President of the International Psychoanalytical AssociationSigmund Freud

However, I’m not saying that all therapists are con artists. The ones who actually help people are those who provide a service politely telling people to stop acting like self-destructive morons. But that’s not “therapy”, that’s just being paid to cushion the obvious blow.

On conservative bikini “scandals”

The Other McCain points and laughs at liberals attempting to create scandals out of very little fabric:

Conservatives are not only smarter and more patriotic than liberals, we’re also better-looking. It’s high time we stopped letting liberals get inside our heads and tell us that it’s some kind of “hypocrisy” for conservatives even to acknowledge the existence of sex.

It is true. Even when liberal girls start out pretty, they rapidly end up making hags of themselves. There’s something about being angry and self-righteous all the time that seems to warp a woman’s face as well as her soul. Meanwhile, Cassy Fiano explains the liberal thinking, such as it is, behind these “scandals”.

They like to paint conservatives as frigid, dried up, ugly old prudes, and of course, that couldn’t be further from the truth. And they hope that showing pictures of a conservative — or their family members — in bikinis will mean that other conservatives will be outrageously outraged. They’re always shocked when bikini photos do not, in fact, derail conservative candidates’ campaigns.

It seems that more than a few left-liberals have failed to understand that the American Taliban metaphor was, in fact, a metaphor. So, chalk me up a supporter of pretty conservative women in bikinis. However, I find libertarian women to be the most attractive. They’re smarter, more interesting, and much more fun than their pretty conservative counterparts.

Blowing more futility

For once, I agree with Megan McArdle:

If you want to know why us libertarian types are skeptical of the government’s ability to prevent housing market bubbles, well, I give you Exhibit 9,824: the government’s new $1000 down housing program. No, really. The government has apparently decided, in its infinite wisdom, that what the American economy really needs is more homebuyers with no equity.

While McArdle wouldn’t know what a real libertarian was if Murray Rothbard’s zombie bit her on her bony ass – she actually voted for Soebarkah – she is correct to point out the madness of this homebuying incentive program. It does not help the economy to encourage more poor people to buy homes they cannot afford to buy and take out mortgages on which they will almost surely default.

Glenn Reynold’s succinct summary is more astute: “These people are idiots. Idiots who’ve been entrusted with nuclear weapons, and their economic equivalents.” Of course, this insane program might not exist if “libertarians” like Megan McArdle hadn’t voted the people who created it into office.

Men work more

Although I very much doubt this “news” is going to suddenly bring about an end to feminist whining, much less feminism itself:

The long night of modern feminism might be about to end. A glimmer of light is flickering in the encircling gloom. A study published this week by Dr Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics has found that men do slightly more work than the women they live with when employment and domestic work are measured together.

This is the first time I can remember in 40 years that an authoritative study on a key issue of so-called gender politics has come out with a self-evident truth that runs directly contrary to orthodox feminist ideology. The fact that it has been written and published by a woman makes it even more delightful.

Clearly Dr. Hakim doesn’t understand how social studies involving gender work. If the data shows that men work more in total, then quite clearly paid work outside the home shouldn’t count. The rule is always that whatever permits women to pose as the victims of patriarchal male oppression must be the relevant metric. If a man travels via ox-drawn cart on a business trip to train coal miners in Minsk the proper way to break rocks with a pick while the woman stays home watching their 23 year-old daughter, the correct interpretation is that he has enjoyed a paid European vacation while she has slaved away caring for the children at home.

If, on the other hand, a woman flies to Miami to lie on a beach with her old friends from college while the man stays home to care for their five children under the age of two, the correct interpretation is that he’s been having a grand old time sitting at home drinking beer and watching television while the poor woman is absolutely worn out from an exhausting week of being dragged to all sorts of social activities in which she most certainly did not want to participate. (Roissy, of course, would put a different spin on why she’s so worn out, but that’s beside the point here.)

The lesson is this: solipsism is best avoided, because it makes you look insanely stupid to anyone who isn’t equally solipsistic. But that somehow never stops the feminists.