Category: Uncategorized

The fakers

This rings true of my experience of the Ivy League and its uptight denizens.

A young woman from another school wrote me this about her boyfriend at Yale:

Before he started college, he spent most of his time reading and writing short stories. Three years later, he’s painfully insecure, worrying about things my public-educated friends don’t give a second thought to, like the stigma of eating lunch alone and whether he’s “networking” enough. No one but me knows he fakes being well-read by thumbing through the first and last chapters of any book he hears about and obsessively devouring reviews in lieu of the real thing. He does this not because he’s incurious, but because there’s a bigger social reward for being able to talk about books than for actually reading them.

I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.

My freshman year, I spent a few days at Harvard and Dartmouth with a Bucknell girl whose two best friends were at those superior learning establishments. Dartmouth was exactly like Bucknell, only the girls were shorter and uglier and the temperature was colder. But Harvard… I have never, in my entire life, been around a bigger group of hapless posers.

The description of the Yale guy who reads the first and last chapters of a book rings very true. It’s become a common phenomenon online, but Harvard was the first place I encountered people who regarded having heard of something as being synonymous with knowing it. That’s why I developed the habit of asking a question or two about the contents of a book someone has mentioned because I’ve learned that many people will pretend to have read things they have not.

Seriously, if you haven’t read something, it’s no big deal. There are a lot of books out there. There are hundreds that I think I should read that I haven’t and probably never will. It’s no big deal not to have read a book… unless, of course, you’re writing a review of it.

I’ve mentioned this part before, but the most egregious example I’ve encountered was the big guy who kept telling girls about how he “played hockey for Harvard”. Unfortunately for him, I happen to be from Minnesota and I also happened to know that the Harvard hockey team was in Minneapolis that night, playing the Gophers. I think one of my friends back home was going to the game or something. I asked him if he was hurt, which he denied in a puzzled manner, and promptly fell into the trap. When pressed, he finally admitted that he played INTRAMURAL hockey. Right.

Not everyone I’ve met from an Ivy League school that isn’t Dartmouth or Brown is a lying, pretentious poser, but a surprisingly high percentage of them are. And while it may be a character flaw, I’ve discovered that there are few things more entertaining than intellectually bitchslapping the unsuspecting, insecure little bastards.

Even if I was going to send my children to an American university, and I can’t imagine I would, I wouldn’t send them to any Ivy League school.

Speaking of preferential treatment

A longtime member of the Dread Ilk has a job opportunity in Ohio:

I have a Dread Ilk job opportunity. My local sales firm in the Ohio region is hiring two sales people, one experienced and one entry-level. They plan to make decisions in the next month. If anyone is interested, could they communicate through you? This is a golden opportunity for an entry-level sales person to break into the oil and gas industry.

The successful person will be working for my rep firm, and indirectly working for me so I would only pass on quality people, obviously. Would love to see one of the Ilk get hired so whatever you can do I would appreciate it.

If you’re interested shoot me an email with Ilk Job in the subject and I’ll pass it on.

How do you say “taqiyya” in Hebrew?

In the comments, Steve offered the excuse of superior motivation and “training” to explain the inordinate amount of Jewish success, first in Germany, now in the USA:

Whenever I read complaints about Jewish success, I wonder if people really want the totalitarian control which would be necessary to stop a high IQ, highly motivated, creative, hard working people from achieving it, because that is what is necessary to stop it. You have to give up your freedom to repress the successful and promote the mediocre and that is quite a price to pay, just because you don’t like Jewish billionaires or bankers or whatever. But as America has already travelled a way down that road (promotion of mediocre anyway), it probably won’t be too much of a stretch. In any event, a little secret for your readers. When Jews succeed they do not look around and say to themselves: “so many Jews have succeeded before me, I had better stop now, because the Gentiles around here are going to get mad.” There is no “group strategy” like that, – isn’t that what McDonald calls it? No they are trained to think: “if that Jew made it, I can make it – only faster and better.” Yes, that is the “secret” of the Jews. I myself don’t think lazy and stupid and resentful would be better, but from the looks of things, I may be in the distinct minority…  I just
think [ethnic nepotism] is complete BS. Wanting to believe someone else succeeded
because someone else got the break.

I pointed out that the real “secret” of Jewish success is that Jews “relentlessly and
ruthlessly promote other Jews at the expense of non-Jews while furiously
fighting to prevent any efforts of the majority to do the same.” Steve offers zero evidence in support of his assertions, raising numerous questions such as this one: do Jews actually work more hours in six days per week than every other group does in seven?

Now, there isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with favoring one’s own. It is normal human behavior. You see it in the NFL all the time; when Denny Green was hired as the Vikings head coach, the coaching staff suddenly went from being all-white to nearly half-black. Was that wrong? One could hardly criticize Green for bringing in the likes of Tony Dungy (later Super Bowl-winning head coach), Tyrone Willingham (later head coach at Stanford and Notre Dame), and Willie Shaw (Hall of Fame cornerback, father of current Stanford head coach David Shaw). And small groups will tend to stick together more successfully than large groups. But to simultaneously attempt to deny other groups the ability to do the same, and moreover, to deny doing what is observably being done, is both wrong and mendacious.

I’ve personally witnessed this in-group promotion in several different industries. To give one example, I have seen how the Littlest Chickenhawk was handed multiple opportunities to fail upward; he was nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate as a teenager despite the fact that his WND column was banal and one of the least-read; my weekly readership there was 4.1 times larger than his. Now, at 30, he is editor-at-large of Breitbart News, guest hosts regularly for major talk show hosts, and appears regularly on news channels including CNN, Fox News, and Sun News Network in Canada. Is Ben Shapiro THAT much more talented or intelligent or insightful than I am? Than every other contributor at WND is? I doubt Shapiro himself would make such a claim?

And there is considerable evidence of that relentless in-group promotion described, both anecdotal and statistical. Ron Unz exposed the corruption in Ivy League admissions offices in an article entitled “The Myth of American Meritocracy”:

Consider the case of Tiffany Wang, a Chinese immigrant student raised in the Silicon Valley area, where her father worked as an engineer. Although English was not her first language, her SAT scores were over 100 points above the Wesleyan average, and she ranked as a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist, putting her in the top 0.5 percent of high school students (not the top 2 percent as Steinberg mistakenly claims). Nevertheless, the admissions officer rated her just so-so in academics, and seemed far more positively impressed by her ethnic activism in the local school’s Asian-American club. Ultimately, he stamped her with a “Reject,” but later admitted to Steinberg that she might have been admitted if he had been aware of the enormous time and effort she had spent campaigning against the death penalty, a political cause near and dear to his own heart. Somehow I suspect that a student who boasted of leadership in pro-death penalty activism among his extracurriculars might have fared rather worse in this process. And presumably for similar reasons, Tiffany was also rejected by all her other prestigious college choices, including Yale, Penn, Duke, and Wellesley, an outcome which greatly surprised and disappointed her immigrant father….

Finally, there was the case of Becca Jannol, a girl from a very affluent Jewish family near Beverly Hills, who attended the same elite prep school as Julianna, but with her parents paying the full annual tuition. Despite her every possible advantage, including test-prep courses and retaking the exam, her SAT scores were some 240 points lower on the 1600 point scale, placing her toward the bottom of the Wesleyan range, while her application essay focused on the philosophical challenges she encountered when she was suspended for illegal drug use. But she was a great favorite of her prep school counselor, who was an old college friend of the Wesleyan admissions officer, and using his discretion, he stamped her “Admit.” Her dismal academic record then caused this initial decision to be overturned by a unanimous vote of the other members of the full admissions committee, but he refused to give up, and moved heaven and earth to gain her a spot, even offering to rescind the admissions of one or more already selected applicants to create a place for her. Eventually he got her shifted from the Reject category to wait-list status, after which he secretly moved her folder to the very top of the large waiting list pile.

In the end “connections” triumphed, and she received admission to Wesleyan, although she turned it down in favor of an offer from more prestigious Cornell, which she had obtained through similar means. But at Cornell, she found herself “miserable,” hating the classes and saying she “didn’t see the usefulness of [her] being there.” However, her poor academic ability proved no hindrance, since the same administrator who had arranged her admission also wrangled her a quick entrance into a special “honors program” he personally ran, containing just 40 of the 3500 students in her year. This exempted her from all academic graduation requirements, apparently including classes or tests, thereby allowing her to spend her four college years mostly traveling around the world while working on a so-called “special project.” After graduation, she eventually took a job at her father’s successful law firm, thereby realizing her obvious potential as a member of America’s ruling Ivy League elite, or in her own words, as being one of “the best of the best.”

Steinberg’s description of the remaining handful of Wesleyan applicants seems to fall into a very similar pattern, indicating that our elite admissions process operates under the principle of “Ideology and Diversity tempered by Corruption.” 

One wonders how many of the “honors” students shared her background. Steve and Miss Jannol may believe her “success” is the result of her innate Jewish superiority, but the facts demonstrate otherwise. And even the familiar appeals to intelligence are increasingly outdated; as the demographic math would indicate was bound to happen, Jews have been completely surpassed by elite Asians in the National Merit Scholarship program and have therefore resorted to using the very sort of quotas they once complained WASPs used to keep them out of the Ivy League.

As Unz observed: “The last 20 years have brought a huge rise in the number of Asians
winning top academic awards in our high schools or being named National
Merit Scholarship semifinalists. It seems quite suspicious that none of
trends have been reflected in their increased enrollment at Harvard and
other top Ivy League universities.”

These are the facts. Facts are not anti-semitic, they are merely the truth of the world as it is. And the truth, however uncomfortable, will be sought after and observed here: the more any commenter attempts to obscure the truth, the more I will take the time and effort required to expose whatever it is he is trying to hide. I had actually moved on from the subject until commenters like Steve started showing up and attempting to pass off transparent deceit as truth. And before Steve attempts to dig himself in any deeper, it may be helpful to keep in mind that I am one of those National Merit semifinalists and I am not easily baffled with bullshit. Every assertion made will require evidential support. Every statement made will be dissected, and every retreat into rhetoric will be noted as such.

For whatever reason, Steve is attempting to hide the observable fact that the inordinate success presently enjoyed by Jews in America is not the inevitable result of working harder, being more intelligent, or innate ethnic superiority, but is primarily due to a laudable dedication to in-group promotion being expressed in a variety of means, some legitimate, and some not. I assume he is doing so in an attempt to prevent an anti-semitic reaction, but whatever his motivation may be, I will point out that deception and misinformation do not work for long on those with open eyes and functional memories.

People are certainly free to ignore my warnings. Most have in the past and I assume most will in the future. But if Steve thinks Americans are going to meekly accept the financial pillaging of their nation any more tamely than the European nations historically have, especially when they have also suffered the demographic demolition of their country, I think he is woefully mistaken. And, I note, there are more than a few Jewish leaders who more or less agree with my concerns.

It’s not a real problem yet. The difference between Israel’s disapproval rating in the USA and in France, (which is a reasonable proxy) is nearly 50 percent; 27 percent vs 65 percent. If that percentage begins to rise in the next five years, it will be an initial indication that my read of the situation is correct.

Of Apple and NSA

This is not exactly shocking news, but it is disappointing all the same to learn that Apple is making it even easier for governments to spy on its users.

Apple has endowed iPhones with undocumented functions that allow unauthorized people in privileged positions to wirelessly connect and harvest pictures, text messages, and other sensitive data without entering a password or PIN, a forensic scientist warned over the weekend.

Jonathan Zdziarski, an iOS jailbreaker and forensic expert, told attendees of the Hope X conference that he can’t be sure Apple engineers enabled the mechanisms with the intention of accommodating surveillance by the National Security Agency and law enforcement groups. Still, he said some of the services serve little or no purpose other than to make huge amounts of data available to anyone who has access to a computer, alarm clock, or other device that has ever been paired with a targeted device.

Zdziarski said the service that raises the most concern is known as com.apple.mobile.file_relay. It dishes out a staggering amount of data—including account data for e-mail, Twitter, iCloud, and other services, a full copy of the address book including deleted entries, the user cache folder, logs of geographic positions, and a complete dump of the user photo album—all without requiring a backup password to be entered.

So much for that whole liberal countercultural vibe Apple has been riding for decades. It was one thing to construct a walled garden. It’s another to hand Big Brother a secret key to it.

Smells like Lusitanian spirit

The more hysterical the charges we see directed at Putin, and the more strident the demands, the more I suspect that the Russian leader had nothing to do with the downed Malaysian airliner. Mish has been increasingly dubious about the proposed scenario as well:

As I suspected would happen, the exclusive Reuters interview in which “Commander Alexander Khodakovsky acknowledges rebel fighters had BUK missiles” has been challenged.

In my analysis of the Reuters article (see Ukraine Rebel Commander Admits Having BUK Missiles; Damning Contradictions?),  I point out considerable discrepancies in what Reuters author Anton Zverev wrote and actual quotes Reuters presented.

The discrepancies were so big I stated “It appears to me Reuters may have stretched this interview quite a bit.”

Thus I am not surprised to discover Khodakovsky challenged huge aspects of that interview, in terms of things he stated, did not state, and even timing of events….

Khodakovsky neither admitted nor denied the rebels had Buks. Once again, here is the damning contradiction as I presented earlier.

    “Khodakovsky said his unit had never possessed BUKs, but they may have been used by rebels from other units.”

    Now look back at the opening Reuters lead-in: “Alexander Khodakovsky, commander of the Vostok Battalion, acknowledged … the rebels did possess the BUK missile system and said it could have been sent back subsequently to remove proof of its presence.”

    Here is the major contradiction: “What resources our partners have, we cannot be entirely certain. Was there (a BUK)? Wasn’t there? If there was proof that there was, then there can be no question.”

Zerohedge is reporting that the US State Department has not been able to find any signs of Russian involvement. And the Russians themselves are pointing out some awkward facts that may be indicative of Ukrainian responsibility for shooting down the passenger plane.

Remember, many, if not most, wars involve some level of deception, false flags, and deceitful finger-pointing. So it’s always wise to reserve judgment in such matters as long as possible. And it’s also worth pointing out that the Ukrainian puppet government just collapsed and the US-installed prime minister has resigned:

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has announced his resignation following turmoil in government. Yatsenyuk made the announcement from the dais of the parliament after two parties said they would pull out of the governing coalition. “I am announcing my resignation [in connection] with the collapse of the coalition,” Yatsenyuk said.

This is not the action of a nation prepared to fight a war with Russia.

Out of the frying pan

The Learned Elders of Wye have suggested China as a possible destination for the Jews once a sufficient number of Americans realize what has been done to their country by Emanuel Celler and a number of his elite co-religionists. Contra to Spengler’s insistence that common traits bind the Chinese and Jewish people and his claims that the Chinese deeply admire and respect the Jews, it would appear that China is not a particularly viable option:

A 2013 Pew poll found vastly more unfavorable feelings toward Israel outside than within the United States, which registered a 27 percent unfavorable view of Israel and a 57 percent favorable view. In contrast, 44 percent of people in Britain had an unfavorable view of Israel. Unfavorable views of Israel were held by 62 percent in Germany, 65 percent in France, 66 percent in China and in the 80 percent to 90 percent range in Arab and Muslim countries.

If one considers the anti-Israel demonstrations in Paris and the fact that the Israeli Ambassador to Germany said last week: “They pursue the Jews in the streets of Berlin… as if we were in 1938”, it is remarkable to see that the Chinese view of Israel is even less favorable.

Lest one conclude that my view of vastly growing anti-semitism on the US horizon is some form of wishful thinking rather than a warning from a friendly acquaintance, it may be helpful to note that I am hardly the first to make the observation.

The fear expressed that “a real decline of the West, particularly the United States, would have dramatic consequences for the Jewish people,” also led to controversy. Brandeis University president Jehuda Reinharz agreed that this type of decline can be expected “in the coming two decades”.

As I have been predicting a catastrophic decline of the USA by 2033 for ten years, it should hardly be surprising that I don’t believe it will be a neutral event where American Jews are concerned. The Jews at the central bank, the Jews at the heart of the financial system, and the Jews whose literally usurious economic theories were used as a justification for constructing the $60 trillion credit ponzi will rightly be blamed when it collapses. The Jews who battled to change the USA’s demographics by opening its borders will rightly be blamed for the ethnic strife dividing the country.

And it is their blameless coreligionists who will likely bear the brunt of the public’s fury at the all-too-predictable consequences of those actions, as has repeatedly been the case in the past.

The British Foreign Minister said yesterday: “As this campaign goes on and the civilian casualties in Gaza mount, western opinion is becoming more and more concerned and less and less sympathetic to Israel. That’s simply a fact and I have to tell that to my Israeli counterparts.”

To put another simple fact in terms they should be able to understand, destroying a country’s demographics and denigrating its dominant religion while securing highly visible statistical overepresentations in various areas of wealth and power is not good for the Jews. And no amount of appeals to genetic or cultural superiority, or to the Holocaust, will obviate that fact.

Wishful thinking

To say nothing of projection. It’s always interesting to see how people who write about me, of whom I’ve only heard because they are writing about me, almost invariably claim that if I respond to them in any way, this indicates I am obsessed with them. It’s less interesting how they frequently imagine that I must be sock-puppeting in order to pretend that fewer people visit here than, in fact, do read the blog.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Gorblimey guv’, the sad old men who read Vox Day’s blog are literally obsessed with me. It’s like every day is Damofest over there.

Michael Grey ‏@Mikes005
@damiengwalter Not to rain on your parade, but I’m pretty certain it’s just Beale posting under aliases. Too much syntax repetition.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@Mikes005 That’s a waaaay less creepy thought! I think about 50% of the comments are Beale, and they’re obvious, yes.

As it happens, I post under two, and only two names. VD in black text most of the time, Vox in blue text when I am logged in and forget to use Name/URL. But most critics like this don’t genuinely believe what they’re saying; they’re not so stupid that they can’t click on Sitemeter and see the panoply of different IP addresses from all over the world appearing seconds apart. For example, in the same minute there were visitors from: New York (USA), Bourgogne (France), Trabzon (Turkey), Reading (UK), Oregon (USA), Washington (USA), and Israel, in addition to the majority of IP addresses that were not location marked.

This is just the usual left-wing performance art, where one person publicly strikes a pose and the others pretend to believe what he’s saying. The purpose seems to be an attempt to render small a prospective threat to the warren. However, it appears some of them are either stupid or self-absorbed to such an extent that they truly  have no idea about the reality of the situation. Being able to tweet this in response to one clueless wonder’s tweet rather amused me:

“Who listens to Vox Day? I mean – is there any real following?” That same day: 52,447 Google pageviews.

Keep in mind that is someone from the very community that believed John Scalzi was one of the most significant figures in SF because he was claiming UP TO 45,000 daily readers per day at a time when he was actually averaging 13,604 Google pageviews per day. Set aside VP. Alpha Game alone is now averaging more daily pageviews than that: 15,179 every day this week.

I realize I am extremely fortunate to have such an enthusiastic and high-quality readership. Just this morning, I received a Chinese translation of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted from Tiger. Last week, Emilio sent me Spanish translations of that and of QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills, which will be forthcoming as soon as I finish the corrections to two other books. Two brave souls are even taking on the translation of the 850-page A Throne of Bones. Very few authors are so fortunate to have readers who are willing to do so much, and I am deeply appreciative of the community here for its ongoing support and active involvement.

And do you know, it occurs to me that my writing has now been translated into nine languages. Do they also feign to think I’m doing all of that myself when I’m not busy sock-puppeting my own blog? Anyhow, it’s nothing new. People have been trying the same thing since my WND column first began attracting attention back in 2001. It didn’t matter then. It doesn’t matter now. As for the “sad old men” comment, I don’t think they have any idea how many younger readers there are. For example, I received this email from a college student yesterday:

My philosophy professor wrote your blog down as one of the four blogs we
need to pay attention to, and I’ve been reading regularly for a couple
of years now.

I emailed him back to learn the names of the other blogs, and was rather pleased that my surmise concerning one of them was correct: Edward Feser.

All you can read

People have been asking me for my take on Amazon’s new digital subscription service, Kindle Unlimited:

After months of speculation, Amazon on Friday introduced a digital subscription service that allows subscribers unlimited access to a library of e-books and audiobooks for $10 a month.

The service, Kindle Unlimited, offers a Netflix-style, all-you-can-read approach to more than 600,000 e-books, including blockbuster series like “The Hunger Games” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” nonfiction titles like “Flash Boys” by Michael Lewis, as well as literary fiction and classics.

So far, however, none of the five biggest publishers appear to be making their books available through the service. HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster, for example, are not participating, representatives from the three companies confirmed. Penguin Random House and Macmillan declined to comment, but a search on Amazon suggests that they are not making their books available….

In offering the service, Amazon is entering an increasingly crowded marketplace. It will be competing with publishing start-ups offering similar services, like Scribd and Oyster, which charge a comparable subscription fee and have comparable digital libraries.

My initial impression is that this is excellent for serious readers. At $120 per year, and an average price per ebook of around $7, one only has to read 17 books per year to make it worth one’s while. Books are considerably more fungible than the average writer or publisher would like to admit, but at the end of the day, it is the act of reading that the reader enjoys more than the average title he reads. And the sort of people who will benefit most from the subscription model are the sort of readers who will make do with reading the back of a cereal box if nothing else is available.

Casual readers, book collectors, and fans of particular authors aren’t likely to be too fussed about it. The casual readers don’t read enough to spend the money subscribing, collectors don’t want to borrow books (the subscription model is more akin to paying for the loan of a library book than purchasing a book), and fans of particular authors are going to buy the author’s book whether it is available through Kindle Unlimited or not.

How will it effect writers and publishers? It depends. It is horrific for the Big Five publishers and their writers, as their unwillingness to participate indicates. The Big Five’s model depends upon the fungibility of authors within their ecosystem, and is increasingly dysfunctional as yet another channel outside their quasi-monopoly over the bookstores drains more book buyers from that ecosystem. As with the coming in-game retail channel I’ve spoken about for the past year, Kindle Unlimited is just one more way to free additional readers from the traditional publishing channel. Marketing and branding, two things that the Big Five have shown themselves to be remarkably incompetent at, are of increasing importance as the ability to buy shelf space becomes unimportant.

It’s neutral to modestly positive for independent publishers, their writers, and self-publishers. Neutral because they’re essentially already operating in the system via Kindle Select; this month Castalia’s books that are participating in the Select program vary from 5 percent to 30 percent loans as a percentage of their sales. Modestly positive because that drainage from the Big Five ecosystem will be flowing disproportionately to the indies and the selfies to whom that new channel is flowing. The challenge facing them remains exactly the same as before, namely, how to get people to notice they exist. It’s not going to get any easier for them, but unlike the Big Five, it’s not getting any harder either.

The reason the big authorial names are screeching is because they know that their predominance is, at least in part, the result of their favored position in the ecosystem. And, unlike the first step in the digital revolution which was within the traditional ecosystem, this second one will tend to lock them out to the extent they are contractually trapped by their publishers.

I expect the Big Five to eventually offer a competing subscription service, as that would be much easier than a joint bookstore. I also expect it to be clunky, poorly designed, and destined for a more complete failure than Nook. If they’re smart, they’ll simply buy Oyster and rebrand it. But I think events have proven that they are not particularly smart.

Sabotaging marriage

Male white knights and feminists should think twice before defending Spreadsheet Wife, as Troy Francis observes at The Return of Kings that her actions are nothing less than a public advertisement for anti-marriage:

The best creative agency in the world would have been hard-pressed to come up with a more effective advertisement against marriage. Rollo points out that getting hitched is no insulation from the sexual marketplace, and it is a common trope that men need to game their wives. But that’s a hell of a lot of work, and with the sexual rewards potentially so low, and with women being a depreciating asset over time, many guys could be forgiven for choosing not to bother and to remain single, learn game and spin plates instead.

You can read my take on it at Alpha Game:

The first thing is that this spreadsheet didn’t come out of the blue. It is almost surely a quintessential male response to a very typical female tactic: the demand for proof. Women often try to put men in a false “heads I win, tails you lose” position, in which they demand proof of the assertion, but if called on this demand, then try to argue that the anticipation of the need for proof somehow disqualifies its relevance. That is exactly what the wife is attempting to do here. She’s trying to use that the fact he made the spreadsheet and sent it to her on the road to retroactively justify her previous actions.

The worst response is arguably that of self-admitted white knight Dave Swindle, who is adroitly taken apart by Dr. Helen:

This response is classic white knighting where the spreadsheet guy is a
failure and this is why he can’t get sex. Note the word loser that is
used in Dave’s first paragraph. Of course it’s important to white knight
and call the guy a loser because that means that a man that doesn’t get
upset if his wife won’t have sex with him is a winner! A convenient
excuse to tell oneself on yet another sexless night. And of course, as
Dave notes, it is always up to the man to take responsibility for any
problems in the couple’s sex life. Wife doesn’t put out? It’s your
fault, man. You lack self-control.

The similarity between the normal female response and the gamma male’s does border on the creepy at times, doesn’t it? Anyhow, this should demonstrate how the instinctive and/or solipsistic reflex to defend Team Woman at all costs is observably detrimental to female interests in the long-term.

Next year in Jerusalem

It’s interesting to observe how this Jew living in England is so terrified to be living amongst the Gentiles, and yet she refuses to go to Zion:

The truth is that up and down this island, Jews are arguing, debating, crying and worrying about what’s going on in an even smaller country across the ocean. Some British Jews are fasting for peace; some are angry at one or both sides; but many are just scared – scared not just about events in Gaza, but events in Europe. These include reports about gangs of Muslims chanting “death to Jews” on the streets of France, and attacking synagogues and setting fire to Jewish-owned stores. Eighteen people were subsequently arrested in the suburb of Sarcelles, just outside Paris, where this particular outpouring of violence happened. The stunned local mayor says the Jewish community is now living in fear.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Germany, too. In Essen, 14 people have just been arrested, accused of plotting an attack on a synagogue. Protesters at a rally in Berlin turned on two Israeli tourists (identifiable by the man’s skull-cap) so viciously that they had to be protected by the police. The city’s authorities have also had to ban pro-Gaza protesters from chanting anti-Semitic slogans and are investigating a sermon last week by Abu Bilal Ismail calling on worshippers at Berlin’s Al-Nur mosque to murder Jews. Jews, not Israelis.

The situation is so bad that the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Italy have issued a joint statement condemning the rise in anti-Semitic protests and violence in response to the Gaza conflict – and saying they will do everything possible to combat it. “Anti-Semitic rhetoric and hostility against Jews, attacks on people of Jewish belief and synagogues have no place in our societies,” they felt compelled publicly to state.

Yet since the start of the latest conflict between Hamas and Israel, protesters marching in anti-Israel demonstrations have regularly held up anti-Semitic slogans, shouting for Jews to be gassed, invoking the Holocaust’s chambers of doom. The situation in Britain hasn’t been much better. Last week’s major pro-Palestine rally, which stopped London’s traffic, was littered with placards comparing Israel’s – and Jews’ – actions to the Nazis (“Well done Israel – Hitler would be proud”, read one such sign, accompanied by a swastika). This casual interchange of “Israel” for “Jews” is not just ignorant but often terrifying, especially when linked to references to past atrocities. Indeed, what other group of people get the worst experience in their – or anyone’s – history launched at them like a hand grenade? 

So stop living in fear. England is not the Jewish homeland. It is the English homeland. France is not the Jewish homeland. It is the French homeland. Germany is not the Jewish homeland. It is the German homeland. Israel is the Jewish homeland and it is where the Jewish people belong. The Jewish people have a right to their homeland… and so does everyone else. Dispute the latter and lose your claim on the former.

I staunchly support Israel, both in terms of its existence and its right to wipe out Hamas and colonize Gaza under the legitimate casus belli of having been repeatedly attacked by rockets after generously permitting a thrice-conquered people the opportunity to be left in peace in their reservations. And I have zero sympathy for Jews living in Europe who are afraid of the hatred of Europeans and other immigrants to Europe; everyone has an absolute right to hate whomever they please. Die Gedanken sind frei.

There are no shortage of people who hate me, and yet if I tearfully insisted that laws should be passed banning anti-Vox rhetoric by science fiction writers, and pointed to the thousands of tweets and blog posts aimed at me over the years, people would rightly consider me to be mad. The futile Jewish insistence on trying to outlaw anti-Semitic rhetoric is every bit as insane.

People have a free speech right to anti-Semitic rhetoric, they have a right to be hostile if that is how they feel, and if any Jew seriously wants to try to play thought and speech police in someone else’s country, then he fully merits all the hatred his people have subsequently engendered. When you are a guest in someone else’s home, you don’t make the rules. Either you abide by their rules – such as the ban on circumcision in some European countries, for example – or you leave. You don’t cry Holocaust and then claim that the homeowner doesn’t have the right to make his own rules in his own house.

It’s rather funny to see a Jew complaining about having the worst experience in Jewish history (and their history alone, not everyone’s history, as the Amalekites and the Canaanites, both wiped out by the Israelites, would point out if they were still around to do so) thrown in her face when Jews have been crying Holocaust as long as I can remember. As any child being teased knows, expose a vulnerability to your enemies and that’s precisely the point they will pick at. And the interchange of “Jew” for “Israeli” is hardly ignorant: why are British Jews “arguing, debating, crying and worrying about what’s going on in an even smaller country across the ocean”? The British Scots aren’t. The British Swiss aren’t. The British Russians aren’t. The British Nigerians aren’t. Whatever could the mysterious reason to explain this difference be?

The IDF doesn’t cry Holocaust. It has moved on and become the proud and militarily effective defenders of the Jewish homeland. The remaining Jews of Europe should move on too, because the politicians proclaiming that there is “no place in their societies” for anti-Semitism are soon going to find out that there is “no elected office in their societies” for them. And I don’t know how much longer it is going to be better in the USA; I don’t blame American Jews for the actions of Emanuel Cellar and Arthur Sulzberger and Paul Samuelson and Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and Jane Yellen and Eric Cantor that have decimated American demographics and the American economy alike. But historically, an angry public has tended to prove unable to make such fine distinctions between the culpable and the innocent.

More and more Americans are becoming aware of the destruction of their national demographics, and when they learn that this destruction was the direct and intentional result of a small group of immigrants who openly sought to weaken the American people’s sense of being a European nation, they are not going to be happy about it. If you read the history of how the Holocaust came to be, it is not at all difficult to understand why the German people so loathed the Jews. That doesn’t justify the Endlosung, but it’s impossible for any sufficiently intelligent and informed individual to fail to recognize that a very similar pattern has developed over the last sixty years in the USA.

History is a harsh and unforgiving bitch and one ignores her lessons at one’s peril. The economy is not going to improve. The demographic time-bomb is not going to self-defuse. Gen X and the Millennials are impervious, at best, to crying Holocaust. There are now more Muslims than Jews in Europe and the USA. Nationalism is growing rapidly in reaction to the abuses and injustices of globalization and transnationalism. The debt limits are being stretched perilously thin everywhere from the USA to China.

I strongly suspect Israel’s chief strategists already know what Israel will eventually be forced to do with regards to Gaza, the West Bank, and the remaining Jews of Europe. They really don’t want to bite the bullet, understandably enough, considering the gargantuan hailstorm of outrage it will provoke. The current invasion of Gaza is nothing more than a delaying measure. And yet, the sooner they address the Gordian Knot, the sooner they will be in a position to deal with the potentially bigger US problem.

There are several Jews who are regular readers here who have moved to Israel, and others who have not. It might be informative to get their perspective on events in Gaza and Europe as well as their reasons for moving or not moving.