Tag: decline and fall

The country left him

Fred Reed observes that what passes for the United States of America today is not the country he knew:

Mail arrives in my inbox all the time, telling me that by going to Mexico I have sold out, fled, abandoned the United States. I’m a coward and a traitor, just like Lord Haw Haw, and Kim Philby, and probably hate America more than Barack Obama does.

It is is irrational. They think that just because I went to Mexico, I left the US. They don’t understand. I didn’t leave the United States. It left me. It was a bait-and-switch operation. I signed on to one country, and they slipped another in under me….

Now, I used to be fond of the United States. Granted, I wasn’t much
of a patriot. The word nowadays seems to mean one who doesn’t so much
love his country as to dislike other people’s. I figured live and let
live. A lot of other countries struck me as fine places. But America was
my favorite. It just suited me. I liked the people in their wild
variety and the countryside and the music and the brash independence. It
wasn’t perfect. Still, given the sorry baseline for comportment in
human agglomerations, it was about as good as you could get.

I’m still fond of the United States. I just can’t find it.

Change the people, change the nation. That’s the real proposition. The irony, of course, is that the addition of all those people “yearning to breathe free” have turned the USA into a place that is considerably less free than many other countries. The extent to which this has taken place, and the way it was accomplished, is documented in some detail here.

The United States of America is now a triple misnomer. It is not united, the Several States are no longer sovereign states, and genuine Americans are now a minority. It should be no surprise that the country – it cannot be reasonably described as a nation – is no longer recognizable to an oldtimer like Fred.

I seldom get harassed in this way, probably because my story is pretty straightforward. I warned nearly everyone around me for nearly a decade about what was happening to no avail, and was frequently told that if I didn’t like it, I should just leave. So I did.

And nothing I have seen in the 20 years since has made me regret that decision.

Immigration, feminism, and dyscivilization

Stefan Molyneux mentioned some telling statistics concerning the timing of the rapid increase in illegitimate births. This chart shows the percentage of illegitimate births, which have risen by an order of magnitude, from 4 percent in the 1940s and 1950s to 41 percent in 2010.

Notice the giant leap between 1960 and 1970. This cannot be entirely the result of feminism, but is likely a combination of a) the War on Poverty, b) the 1965 Immigration reform act, and c) feminism. The rise in illegitimacy is closely correlated with the changing racial demographics.

 
It is worth noting that the great brown hope of the equalitarians, mixed-race children, tend to be illegitimate and grow up without fathers. That isn’t exactly a sound set of building blocks on which to base a stable society. There hasn’t been a lot of research in this regard, but it is has been reported that 92 percent of biracial children with black fathers are illegitimate; 97 percent when the mothers are white. Even worse, only two percent of black fathers financially support biracial children or their white mothers, whether or not they marry them.
While it is merely anecdotal support for this study, you may recall how I noticed at Paris Disneyland that virtually no mixed-race children had a father with them. I saw many white children with white mothers and fathers, I saw several black children with black mothers and fathers, but with one exception, the mixed-race children were only accompanied by their mothers.

The situation is clearly not sustainable. Society will never be a functional brown equalitarian version of historical white American society. The concept is not even remotely credible given the observable evidence. This multiracial illegitimacy alone is sufficient to indicate why racial segregation is inevitable regardless of how anyone feels about it.

Homogeneous socities arise from heterogeneous societies because the latter are structurally inclined towards collapse. US society simply cannot survive in its current form; the stagnation and decline the USA has experienced to date is only beginning, as the effects of this 50-year destruction of the family are not even close to fully realized yet.

A message for the conservative establishment

Milo thunders like the prophets of yore:

I have a message for the conservative establishment: you fucked up big time… The assorted, well-fed, burbling lunatics, idiots and losers of the conservative media establishment and in conservative circles in general… These useless, fat blubbering losers!

“You conservatives made all the right noises but you have no appetite whatsoever to fix anything. You allowed the Left to continue to gain ground and gain ground and gain ground until a point at which — and I don’t think this is an exaggeration to say — the fabric of western culture is now at risk. From immigration, from multiculturalism, from the lies the Left tells.

Trump and I represent something that scares the Left — the utter, wholesale rejection of political correctness. Total defiance. The idea you don’t back down, you double down. When somebody comes to my event and says they’re offended by a joke, I rack my brain for a more offensive one… Trump does the same thing.

He has shown the one thing that no conservative politician or pundit or anybody really on the political Right in American public life has done for some 30 years. He has shown fearlessness, he’s not afraid of the Left. And that inspires terror in their hearts and I’m the same, I like to think.

Regardless of what you think of Milo, he is absolutely and utterly correct to condemn the craven conservative establishment in this manner. Their spirit of fear is not God-given, and their vaunted ideological principles have proven to be entirely nonexistent.

As my co-author, Red Eagle, conclusively demonstrated in Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America, conservatism is not even an ideology per se, but rather, an attitude, or to be less kind, a pose.

The early new rightists were interested in discerning the deeper roots of historical American political thought, and in turning its various strains into a viable, coherent political tradition. Some of them looked so deeply that they found inspiration from decidedly non-American sources, such as British conservative political thought. The latter was a generally elitist tradition, openly contemptuous of American-style independent citizenry and the freewheeling style of American political discourse. Among the leaders of this Anglophile camp was Russell Kirk, who is generally credited with coining the American use of the term conservative as a distinct political label. His most famous work, The Conservative Mind, proved to be quickly and profoundly influential soon after its publication in 1953. Kirk’s book synthesized various ideas from diverse 18th- and 19th-century thinkers, most prominently Edmund Burke, into six canons, or principles, of this new conservatism:

  1. Belief in a transcendent order, or body, of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.
  2. Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.
  3. Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a “classless society.”
  4. Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked.
  5. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power.
  6. Recognition that change may not be salutory reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations.

Whatever the left may say about them, Kirk’s principles are hardly the stuff of SS rallies. As a set of ideas, they’re not particularly systematic, particularly when compared with more radical philosophies like Marxism and its innumerable offshoots, or at the other extreme, the Objectivism of Ayn Rand. They are arguably more a set of generalized assertions and attitudes rather than principles per se. Even so, they do represent a particular worldview, though it is not the worldview of the Founding Fathers or of the early American political generations. Notice as well that several of these principles are primarily defined by that which they opposed: the dominant left-liberal worldview of the mid-20th century. From their very beginning the principles of conservatism were subordinate and defensive in nature, or less charitably, they were submissive and passive-aggressive in their relation to the left.

Conservatism cannot win. It cannot even conserve. If the West is to survive, it needs to abandon its consistent failures of the past and confidently embrace the pillars of its foundation: Christianity, the European nations, science, and capitalism. Any other strategy will fail. Any man who considers himself a Man of the West would do well to abandon the conservative establishment; it has already abandoned you.

Diversity kills community

The same negative effect of diversity on community discovered – and initially buried – by Robert Putnam in the United States is replicated in the United Kingdom by a study entitled Does Ethnic Diversity Have a Negative Effect on Attitudes towards the Community? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Causal Claims within the Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion Debate:

We observe that as a community becomes more diverse around an individual, they are likely to become less attached to their community. This is a strict test of the causal impact of diversity, minimizing unobserved heterogeneity and eliminating selection bias. Importantly, neither indicator of disadvantage is significantly associated with attachment.

Model 2 shows the same analysis among movers. Diversity is again significant and negative, suggesting that individuals who move from more diverse to less diverse communities are likely to become more attached (and vice versa).

Like calls to like. Most people prefer to live among their own. Segregation is not only the right of free association in action, it is a community imperative. This is further evidence that the increasingly diverse United States will not survive because it cannot survive. It is not a nation.

The death of liberalism

Roger Cohen fails to understand what it was, or why it is dead:

Liberalism is dead. Or at least it is on the ropes. Triumphant a quarter-century ago, when liberal democracy appeared to have prevailed definitively over the totalitarian utopias that exacted such a toll in blood, it is now under siege from without and within.

Nationalism and authoritarianism, reinforced by technology, have come together to exercise new forms of control and manipulation over human beings whose susceptibility to greed, prejudice, ignorance, domination, subservience and fear was not, after all, swept away by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

As Communism fell, and closed societies were forced open, and an age of rapid globalization dawned, and the United States earned the moniker of “hyperpower,” it seemed reasonable to believe, as Francis Fukuyama argued in 1989, that, “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” Therefore, per Fukuyama, the end point of history had been reached with “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

This was a rational argument. It made sense. Hundreds of millions of people enslaved within the Soviet imperium had just been freed. They knew — everyone knew — which system worked better. The problem is that the hold of reason in human affairs is always tenuous.

Looking back at human history, the liberal democratic experiment – with its Enlightenment-derived belief in the capacity of individuals possessed of certain inalienable rights to shape their destinies in liberty through the exercise of their will — is but a brief interlude. Far more lasting have been the eras of infallible sovereignty, absolute power derived from God, domination and serfdom, and subjection to what Isaiah Berlin called “the forces of anti-rational mystical bigotry.”

What Cohen thinks is “liberalism” is nothing of the sort. Liberalism wasn’t rational. It wasn’t immune to greed, prejudice, domination, subservience, or fear. Western liberal democracy was, from the very start, a con job; as we have seen everywhere from Colorado to Dublin, from Amsterdam to Wyoming, there is nothing even remotely democratic about it.

Liberalism is dead because liberalism is, and always was, a lie. And across the West, people have learned to stop falling for it simply because their so-called leaders push it on them.

America is the world

A Broadway producer agrees to pretend to consider white people:

The hit musical “Hamilton” has drawn widespread praise for its use of a diverse cast to explore American history. But a casting call seeking “nonwhite men and women” to audition for the show drew criticism from the union representing theater actors, prompting “Hamilton” to say Wednesday that it will amend its language to make clear that anyone is welcome to try out for the show.

The dispute is in some ways semantic — audition descriptions of many of the characters in “Hamilton,” as for other Broadway shows, often specify the race, gender and age range of the characters, and that is standard practice in the theater industry. But Actors’ Equity said that auditions should be open to anyone.

At the end of the day, the producers of “Hamilton” said that they would change the posting that had drawn criticism, to make it clear that people of all ethnicities are welcome to audition, but would not back away from the show’s commitment to hire a diverse cast.

I don’t see a problem here. As we all know, Americans can be born anywhere in the world. George Washington may well have been Chinese and Thomas Jefferson from Papua New Guinea, for all we know.

America is the world. Posterity is not the children. Diversity is our strength. Islam is the religion of peace.

No wonder they hate the truth-tellers. There is no room for the truth in their consciousness.

Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times that “‘Hamilton’ is, among
other things, about who owns history, who gets to be in charge of the
narrative.”

You don’t say….

Clutter and Clean Cycles

Thanks to all those Americans born everywhere from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, even those who are enamored of diversity are beginning to notice that ethnically heterogeneous societies don’t tend to survive economic crashes very well:

While it is difficult for anybody who knows the Pentagon well to
imagine American generals and admirals getting together to overthrow the
civilian government — that would require obscene amounts of PowerPoint
and might endanger top brass golden parachutes with Beltway Bandits —
the notion of a Civil War 2.0, however terrifying it may be, needs to be
faced squarely, if we wish to avoid that awful fate.

America in the 21st century runs little risk of becoming Honduras Grande,
but if current politico-economic trends continue much longer, we might
well wind up a lot like Yugoslavia. That statement is sure to be
controversial, since few Americans, citizens of the global hegemon and
to many of them a most exceptional country, like to be compared with a
relatively small Balkan federation that collapsed into wars and genocide
a generation ago.

Yet the collapse of Yugoslavia offers several cautionary tales to
Americans today, and if they are wise they will heed them and set the
United States on a correction course before it is too late. As one who
witnessed the dreadful collapse of Yugoslavia and its terrible
aftermaths — including the seemingly permanent impoverishment of
Southeastern Europe, mired in crime, corruption, and extremism — I would
very much like America to discover a far happier fate. However, some of the parallels are eerie and troubling….

Managing this increasingly fissiparous country as economic prospects diminish will challenge the most gifted politicians. Indulging in ethnic resentments as a substitute for solutions to vexing politico-economic problems only makes things go from bad to worse, sometimes rapidly and painfully. With both our parties increasingly beholden to Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, average Americans of all backgrounds will not be happy that they are bequeathing a life of less affluence and opportunity to their children. In such a time of troubles, playing ethno-racial political games as a substitute for reform is deeply irresponsible.

It would be nice if Democrats and Republicans played better together, particularly on the budget and borrowing money. It would be especially nice if they seriously addressed issues of rising economic inequality and diminishing opportunities for average Americans.  But it is imperative that they not fan the flames of ethnic and racial resentments if they wish to avoid a terrible outcome for our country.

The nation is already broken and divided. What is now being done to the nations of Europe was already done to the USA back in 1965. There is no longer an Anglo-American nation with a moderate admixture of other European nations, now it is a merely a political entity with dozens of rival ethnic and religious interest groups jockeying for power and a share of the income redistribution.

As with Yugoslavia, the structure will hold so long as it doesn’t come under excessive financial stress. This is why I have long predicted the 2033 timeframe, as I thought that’s about when the US dollar will fail as the global reserve currency. Considering the current state of China, it’s possible that timeframe is too optimistic, but regardless, there is still time to prepare for the Yugoslavication and dissolution of the USA.

Choose your location carefully, and with an eye to the future, as who and what you are is likely to matter with regards to your ability to remain there. I can assure you that the idea of ethnic cleansing and forced relocations on the North American continent is neither a new nor an unthinkable idea. Just ask any American Indian.

Just as there are economic boom and bust cycles, there are longer-term demographic clutter and clean cycles. We are at the peak of the greatest demographic clutter cycle in human history, one that has lasted nearly 200 years. This tends to suggest that we are in for the mother of all clean cycles.

Civilization or immigration

A society can only choose one. And Germany opts for the latter.

A central German regional railway is launching a special women and children only area for their trains, a move which has triggered controversy.

The announcement from the central German Regiobahn line came earlier this week, with the network stating the new compartment on their Leipzig and Chemnitz would admit women and young children only.

To ensure maximum peace for those choosing to travel in that compartment not only would it be sandwiched between the service’s two quiet coaches, but it would also be next to the on-board office of the “customer service representative. Traditionally known as a train guard or ticket inspector, the company said “the local proximity to the customer service representative is chosen deliberately”.

Yet despite the recent mass sex-attacks in Germany, and the official advice to young women that the best thing to do is to keep groping migrant men “at arms length” to prevent rape, the railway denies the segregated trains has anything to do with sexual harassment.

This denial has caused lively debate and controversy on German social media, reports Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The launch of women’s only compartments puts Germany in a club of other nations who need to segregate the sexes on journeys including India, Mexico, Brazil, Egypt and Indonesia.

It’s fascinating, is it not, that a society which will not permit the rejection of the modern equality mandate on the grounds of demographics or economic growth or religion or the national interest or even simple reality will so readily throw it out in the interests of foreign invaders. Apparently fear of being accused of racism trumps everything now.

What we are witnessing is literal de-civilization. It is astonishing that so many people across the West are not only fine with this, they are downright proud of it.

Mailvox: idiocratic rule

A reader learns that the idiocracy extends to the highest levels of government:

I thought you would enjoy this, given your recent post on our current state of idiocracy.  The following is an outline of actual remarks to be delivered by an actual high-level USG official, redacted to protect identity. 

Draft Remarks
[High-Level USG Official] Participation in the [EVENT REDACTED]

•    First of all, wow.  Just, wow. 

•    As [High Level USG] for the last five years, I have had the chance to travel far and wide across the Americas.  I have crossed borders between many countries, and have had the chance to see firsthand the professionalism, the challenges, and sometimes the difficulty of national relationships.  And one of the best ways you can determine the relationship between two countries is to look at how it structures, manages, or doesn’t, its shared border.

Wow, just wow, indeed. How far is the West fallen from the days of diplomats such as Talleyrand, Goethe and Don Giovanni de Medici.

Idolocracy and idiocracy

I saw part of an episode of American Idol last night, and what struck me immediately was that it, and the commercials run for its viewers, was entertainment for retards and children. There was an Angry Birds skit/commercial that was very nearly as embarrassing as it was insulting to the intelligence of the audience. As near as I could tell in the 10 minutes or so that I managed to endure it, it looked as if it was aiming for an audience with an IQ of around 85-90. This makes commercial sense, of course, given the fact that I’ve calculated the average US IQ has fallen at least four points based on demographic change alone.

I thought my calculation was pessimistic for the long-term fate of the USA, but it turns out that the situation may well be considerably worse. If Bruce Charlton and Michael Woodley are correct, idiocracy is already here and there appears to be no way to reverse the course of the intellectual decline short of either a) a cataclysmic collapse and rebuilding of Western society or b) totalitarian scientific eugenicism on steroids.

It has been a fascinating, and I must admit horrifying, three-and-a-bit years since Michael Woodley and I first discovered the first objective evidence that there has been a very substantial decline in general intelligence (‘g’) over the past two hundred years – the evidence was posted on this blog just a few hours after we discovered it:

Since then, Michael has taken the lead in replicating this finding in multiple other forms of data, and in a variety of paradigms; and learning more about the magnitude of change and its timescale. His industry has been astonishing! 

We currently believe that general intelligence has declined by approximately two standard deviations (which is approximately 30 IQ points) since 1800 – that is, over about 8 generations.

Such a decline is astonishing – at first sight. But its magnitude has been obscured by social and medical changes so that we underestimate intelligence in 1800 and over-estimate intelligence now.

On the other hand, magnitude and rapidity of decline in world class geniuses in the West (and of major innovations) does imply a decline of intelligence of at least 2 SDs – so from that perspective the rate and size of decline is pretty much as-expected.

So much for the quaint notions of a shiny, sexy, seculatopia where reason and logic would reign over all. If they are right, we’ll be fortunate if our great-great-grandchildren don’t return to the trees and seas, a-grunting as they go.

To a certain extent, the crisis facing the species is similar to that of Nigeria, only writ large. Whereas the Nigerian population used to be limited by high child mortality and was able to feed itself, the importation of Western science and medical care reduced the child mortality rate, caused the population to explode, and has rendered the nation both unable to feed itself, and less intelligent on average as well.

In the West, one need only compare the difference between the popular books of fifty, one hundred, and two hundred years ago with today’s bestsellers to observe that there has been a prodigious decline in reader’s tastes, despite the fact that the less-intelligent half of the population doesn’t read at all.

These changes are not merely dysgenic and dyscivic, they are dyscivilizational. Which causes me to suspect that the future trend is not merely going to be nationalistic, but highly eugenicist as well. The first nation to ensure its homogenuity and solve the declining intelligence challenge will have a significant advantage over all the rest. The only upside that I see is that there should be no desire whatsoever to attack and rule over other nations and populations, although that carries some potentially ominous implications too.

I certainly hope they’re wrong, because it’s enough to make even a hard-core atheist science-fetishist want to say: “Come, Lord Jesus, and soon!”