Tag: decline and fall

An informative police lesson

It should be educational to discover if it is now deemed more acceptable for the police to murder unarmed civilians than to refuse to work at a gay pride parade:

A Salt Lake City police officer has been placed on leave after refusing an assignment to work at a gay pride parade. The officer was among about 30 officers assigned to provide traffic control and security for the annual Utah Pride Parade on Sunday in Salt Lake City, said department spokeswoman Lara Jones.

“We don’t tolerate bias and bigotry in the department, and assignments are assignments … To allow personal opinion to enter into whether an officer will take a post is not something that can be tolerated in a police department,” Jones told KSL.

Now, in fairness, most police officers who shoot and kill grandmothers, puppies, and people living at the wrong address are placed on leave too. But they are subsequently found not guilty of any wrongdoing and eventually return to their jobs without any fanfare. It will therefore be interesting to learn if this Salt Lake City officer is eventually fired or not.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the police would have been arresting all of the exhibitionists flaunting their sexual abnormality. Some call this progress. But not, I think, for very much longer.

Millennial marriage, or the lack thereof

Bryan Preston points out what appears to be a very ominous statistic concerning the Millennials:

Millennials are slower to marry than previous generations. They have moved the median marriage age up to 29 for men and 27 for women. They are largely delaying marriage because they are loaded down with massive student debt, and because there are few jobs available to them upon which they can build their lives. The current Democratic administration’s anti-jobs policies are largely to blame for the latter. The lack of accountability in university practices and tuition is largely to blame for the former. Millennials are being squeezed by the Obama economy. Yet they remain more likely to vote for Democrats, if they vote.

I’m not here to slam single parenthood, but single parenthood has proven to be a very strong predictor of one’s economic outcome and one’s politics, meaning, one’s relationship to the government and the policies one tends to vote for. Simply put, single adults tend to vote in a certain way, and children of single adults tend to have poorer economic outcomes, which leads to a certain voting pattern. Marriage is a strong predictor of political behavior.

Currently just 26% of millennials — those between age 18 and 33 — are married. At the same age, 36% of GenX and 48% of the Baby Boomers were married. And 69% of millennials say they want to get married, but the lack of jobs is holding them back.

However, one thing that is often left out of the equation is that the racial demographics of the Millennials is very different than those of GenX and the Baby Boomers. It is risky to base too many conclusions on the generational data without first breaking out the various racial sub-groups. For example, I have seen data that suggests white Millennials don’t actually vote very differently than white GenX voters, which, based on the historical age-shift, would tend to indicate that white Millennials are trending to the right of white GenXers.

A call for permawar

David Brooks openly calls for “constant garden-tending”, or in other words, an ongoing state of aggressively militaristic global policing by the United States:

As Robert Kagan shows in a brilliant essay in The New Republic, for the past 70 years, American policy makers have understood that underreach can lead to catastrophe, too. Presidents assertively tended the international garden so that small problems didn’t turn into big ones, even when core national interests were not at stake. In the 1990s, for example, President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton took military action roughly every 17 months to restrain dictators, spread democracy and preserve international norms.

This sort of forward-leaning interventionist garden-tending will be even more necessary in an age of assertive autocracies. If the U.S. restricts intervention to “core interests,” as Obama suggests, if it neglects constant garden-tending, the thugs will grab and grab and eventually there will be horrendous conflagrations. America’s assertive responses will not need to be military; they rarely will be. But they’ll need to be simple, strong acts of deterrence to preserve order.

This is insane and this is wrong. The reason that “the number of countries that moved in an autocratic direction has outnumbered those that moved in a democratic one” has been because the supposedly democratic countries have demonstrated to all and sundry that they are not democratic at all. The United States, Italy, Greece, Ukraine, Ireland, France, the UK, and above all, the European Union, have proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that their “democracy” is a sham.

Switzerland is the only genuinely democratic country in Europe. It is the only country where the will of the people can actually, at times, override the will of the government elite. The government there has voted twice to join the EU. The people voted it down twice and that is why Switzerland is not in the EU. Contrast that with, for example, the UK, where the people have never voted to join the EU and the government has repeatedly lied to them and denied them the opportunity to decide for themselves if they wish to belong to it. Or Ireland, where they voted down the Lisbon Treaty, then were forced to vote again until the will of the Irish elite had been accomplished. Or the USA, where one of the largest invasions in human history – 50 million strong – was aided and abetted by the three branches of government.

The concept of representative democracy has failed abysmally. It is no wonder that people are now trying other options. It’s hard to believe that Brooks is crazy enough to demand the US engage in national sovereignty-violating military action twice every three years. This is the madness of the neocons reaching terminal velocity.

Mailvox: the sterile wasteland

A foreign author observes the pinkshirts running amok in other literary genres than SF/F:

I found your blog yesterday and I just wanted to thank you for what you have done there. I’m a published author in an Anglosphere country, who has really been struggling with the prevailing SJW culture in my local literary community. What is going on here is actually horrifying, to the point where I have indulged in self-exile and given up ever publishing in this market again.

The entire literary community here has been transformed into a horde of politically correct zombies hellbent on sniffing out and crushing the merest hint of intellectual insurgency.

The types of writers arising from this mess are increasingly foisting upon the local and international public derivative works of insipid speculative fiction which amount to remixes of ideas from other better authors.

However, they all seem to be geniuses at networking amongst our small, left leaning liberal elites, and a small, well-networked coterie of these people occupies positions in the mainstream reviewing press, publishing journals and publishers. The result is that unanimous praise is heaped upon everything that is published by anyone attached to this network, and prepared to turn their novels into conduits for speaking power to truth.

One of these authors recently won a major international literary prize for a second novel which was so bad that I actually blushed when I read the first chapter. I have been completely unable to make sense of this, or the way that some big names in fiction have put their weight behind this person, while crowd-sourced reviewing sites have largely given the work the stick it deserves.

Reading through some of your blogs I now have a sense of the behind-the-scenes political maneuvering that must accompany literary awards, and it has helped to develop a sense of what really goes on. I have always suspected that some rather dark Machiavellian maneuvering happens in the backrooms of Big Lit.

At any rate, this whole process is gradually turning our locally literary landscape into a sterile wasteland. Literary forums where writers used to interact have turned into barren wastelands because of the vigour with which any dissent is persecuted.

The people in the community seem oblivious to this fact, and now seem to interact mainly on Twitter where they retweet each others’ blind observations and compete to come up with interpretations of the world that are as thoroughly inverse to observable reality as possible.

I stopped engaging with these people over two years ago and now just observe them, as they make for an interesting study of the decay of Western civilization and values. I find myself coming up with theories in an attempt to make sense of and accept what I see.

One thing I have considered is that many not terribly bright people hold the art of novel writing in incredibly high esteem and consider it the ultimate status position in society.

This gives these people a very strong motivation to write books, and if these books are bereft of quality, those who possess suitable social skills have a strong motivation to use these skills to bring their work to prominence by hook or by crook. The result is that we’re seeing the survival of the cynical, while actual writing ability is coming uncoupled from literary success and renown.

It was a huge relief to find your blog, and to see that not every writer fits this mold. I’ve subscribed to your blog and look forward to participating in discussions on it. Thanks, you’re doing God’s work and beaming a light into the darkness.

It increasingly appears that we are the monks of the Grimdark Age. It is vital that we continue to read, continue to write, and continue to support those who are keeping the traditional literary forms alive, despite the mainstream’s descent into the literary equivalent of Ow! My Balls! and Ass.

Let’s face it, Redshirts, “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” and “All That Fairy Tale Crap” are considerably closer to Ow! My Balls! than to Dune, Foundation, or The Lord of the Rings.

I’m clearly not the only one who has picked up a book that has won awards or been given a quantity of rave reviews, then wondered what on Earth the readers were dropping to reach such obviously absurd conclusions. It only takes a few times experiencing this to realize that most reviewers these days are actually worse than useless. Which is why precisely we are in the process of turning the CH blog into the leading site for the review of independently published books.

Sedition in the USA

Washington, we may have a problem:

“The causes and motives of seditions are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons; strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and what soever, in offending people, joineth and knitteth them in a common cause….

“Above all things, good policy is to be used, that the treasure and moneys, in a state, be not gathered into few hands. For otherwise a state may have a great stock, and yet starve. And money is like muck, not good except it be spread. This is done, chiefly by suppressing, or at least keeping a strait hand, upon the devouring trades of usury, ingrossing great pasturages, and the like.”
– Francis Bacon,  “Of Seditions And Troubles”

  • Innovation in religion, check.
  • Taxes, check.
  • Alteration of laws and customs, check.
  • Breaking of privileges, check.
  • General oppression, check.
  • Advancement of unworthy persons, check.
  • Strangers, check.
  • Dearths, check.
  • Disbanded soldiers, check.
  • Factions grown desperate, not yet.

And as for suppressing the devouring trade of usury, well, the economy may be in the doldrums and the employment/population ratio is down, but at least the stock market and the big banks are doing well.

Sic semper tyrannis

Instapundit on “the proper response” to deal with criminal government thugs:

 If I lived in Venezuela, I’d find out where the guardsmen lived, and shoot them when they walked out the door in the morning. That is, of course, the proper response to dictators and their minions of every stripe, even Hollywood-backed socialists.

These are the sort of moments when you realize that the “A” in “fuckin-A” stans for “Amen”.

It also makes me wonder if those infamous FEMA camps aren’t intended to imprison revolutionary Americans, but rather, to protect the families of the government thugs.

Postchristianity and pagan meat

It’s remarkable how fast Britain is sliding down the tube in its postchristian era.

Supermarkets were facing a backlash last night after claiming it was ‘unnecessary’ to spell out on labels whether meat comes from animals killed by religious slaughter. Religious groups from all faiths, vets and animal welfare groups joined calls for new labels to identify halal or kosher meat. But retailers claimed that shoppers do not care – and even argued that there is not enough room on packs for new labels.

Demands for improved labels follow widespread outrage over the disclosure in yesterday’s Daily Mail that millions of people are being sold halal and kosher meat without being told.

All the major supermarkets are selling New Zealand lamb killed according to halal ritual without providing labels. Separately, many restaurants such as Pizza Express, KFC and Subway are selling halal meat – mainly chicken – without printing the information on menus.

The retailers are full of it, of course. The reason they didn’t tell anyone in the first place is because most shoppers will not buy halal or kosher meat for one reason or another.

The anti-racists are reeling in shock and denial before the revelations of genetic science that have completely demolished their “blank slate” concept of race and culture. It won’t be long before the secularists will join them, as postchristianity underlines the fact that Western civilization depends entirely upon Christianity combined with the Graeco-Roman inheritance and not “Enlightenment values”, whatever they are supposed to be.

I’d be curious to know how many non-Christians here would genuinely prefer the collapse of Western civilization if that is the price that will have to be paid for ending the dominance of Christianity throughout Europe and America.

Post-constitutional America

So much for the theory that transforming the racial and cultural demographics of America was not tantamount to turning America into not-America:

Pulitzer prize winning reporter Chris Hedges – along with journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, activist Tangerine Bolen and others – sued the government to join the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans.

The trial judge in the case asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys. The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge.

The trial judge ruled that the indefinite detention bill was unconstitutional, holding:

    This Court rejects the government’s suggestion that American citizens can be placed in military detention indefinitely, for acts they could not predict might subject them to detention.

But the court of appeal overturned that decision, based upon the assumption that limited the NDAA to non-U.S. citizens:

    We thus conclude, consistent with the text and buttressed in part by the legislative history, that Section 1021 [of the 2012 NDAA] means this: With respect to individuals who are not citizens, are not lawful resident aliens, and are not captured or arrested within the United States, the President’s [Authorization for Use of Military Force] authority includes the authority to detain those responsible for 9/11 as well as those who were a part of, or substantially supported, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners—a detention authority that Section 1021 concludes was granted by the original AUMF. But with respect to citizens, lawful resident aliens, or individuals captured or arrested in the United States, Section 1021 simply says nothing at all.

The court of appeal ignored the fact that the co-sponsors of the indefinite detention law said it does apply to American citizens, and that top legal scholars agree. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the case, thus blessing and letting stand the indefinite detention law stand unchanged.

 Now, do you really think it is an accident that a post-Christian and multiracial America just happens to also be post-constitutional? Do you really think it is nothing more than pure coincidence that those who reject the strictures of the Natural Law also reject the limits imposed by Constitutional Law?

The men who wrote and signed the Constitution were, for the most part, straight white male Protestants of English descent. There is not a single straight, white, male Protestant of English descent on the U.S. Supreme Court that just granted the military and the executive branch agencies extra-judicial powers over the American citizenry. If you do not believe that the differing population demographics that distinguish European culture from aboriginal culture are irrelevant, why do you assume that the different population demographics between the authors of the Constitution and the current Supreme Court must be irrelevant?

Subway goes Muslim

You may wish to reconsider your fast food options in light of this decision by the Subway chain in the UK and Ireland to submit to Sharia:

Around 200 branches of Subway have cut ham and bacon from their menus, serving halal meat in response to calls from their Muslim customers. The sandwich chain said ‘following a strong demand from our Muslim customers’, 185 stores in the UK and Ireland have introduced the meat, which is prepared under strict Islamic rules.

I don’t know about you, but no restaurant or restaurant chain that bans ham and bacon is one that I am willing to support with my business. The clash of civilizations proceeds apace, and it is becoming every more apparent that the secular West is not the strong horse.

Faith and trust and pixie dust

David Brooks asks a grand strategic expert to help him make sense of his impression that the international system is collapsing:

All around, the fabric of peace and order is fraying. The leaders of Russia and Ukraine escalate their apocalyptic rhetoric. The Sunni-Shiite split worsens as Syria and Iraq slide into chaos. China pushes its weight around in the Pacific. I help teach a grand strategy course at Yale, and I asked my colleagues to make sense of what’s going on. Charles Hill, who was a legendary State Department officer before going to Yale, wrote back:

“The ‘category error’ of our experts is to tell us that our system is doing just fine and proceeding on its eternal course toward ever-greater progress and global goodness. This is whistling past the graveyard.

“The lesson-category within grand strategic history is that when an established international system enters its phase of deterioration, many leaders nonetheless respond with insouciance, obliviousness, and self-congratulation. When the wolves of the world sense this, they, of course, will begin to make their moves to probe the ambiguities of the aging system and pick off choice pieces to devour at their leisure.

“This is what Putin is doing; this is what China has been moving toward doing in the maritime waters of Asia; this is what in the largest sense the upheavals of the Middle East are all about: i.e., who and what politico-ideological force will emerge as hegemon over the region in the new order to come. The old order, once known as ‘the American Century’ has been situated within ‘the modern era,’ an era which appears to be stalling out after some 300-plus years. The replacement era will not be modern and will not be a nice one.”

This is correct. Notice in particular the phrase “when an established international system enters its phase of deterioration”. Emphasis on “its phase” rather than “a phase”. The phase is terminal. It is not part of a gentle cycle. And it usually ends in a considerable amount of war before its successor system is established.

Brooks more or less accurately describes the establishment of modern nationalist civilization, although he neglects to observe that this was a Christian civilization that imposed the modern order. The combination of religious homogeneity and technogical dominance is what made the establishment of the order both desirable and possible.

When Hill talks about the modern order he is referring to a state system that restrained the two great vices of foreign affairs: the desire for regional dominance and the desire to eliminate diversity. Throughout recorded history, large regional powers have generally gobbled up little nations. Powerful people have generally tried to impose their version of the Truth on less powerful people.

But, over these centuries, civilized leaders have banded together to restrain these vices. As far back as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, dominant powers tried to establish procedures and norms to secure national borders and protect diversity. Hegemons like the Nazis or the Communists tried to challenge this system, but the other powers fought back.

However, Brooks goes awry and leaves out two of the primary threats to the system when he considers the opponents of what he calls “liberal pluralism”:

Today that system is under assault not by a single empire but by a hundred big and little foes. As Walter Russell Mead argues in a superb article in Foreign Affairs, geopolitics is back with a vengeance. Whether it’s Russia seizing Crimea or China asserting itself, old-fashioned power plays are back in vogue. Meanwhile, pre-modern movements and people try to eliminate ethnic and religious diversity in Egypt, Ukraine and beyond.

China, Russia and Iran have different values, but all oppose this system of liberal pluralism. The U.S. faces a death by a thousand cuts dilemma. No individual problem is worth devoting giant resources to. It’s not worth it to spend huge amounts of treasure to establish stability in Syria or defend a Western-oriented Ukraine. But, collectively, all the little problems can undermine the modern system. No individual ailment is worth the expense of treating it, but, collectively, they can kill you.

These two additional threats are globalism and multiculturalism. Both are also attempts to eliminate ethnic and religious diversity at the national level. But nations exist for a very important reason: to provide sufficient homogeneity within a political entity to prevent tribal power struggles by reducing violent conflict to mere political conflict. Attempting to spread the nations externally (globalism) while mixing them internally (multiculturalism), puts even more pressure on liberal pluralism than pre-modern movements. Indeed, it is mass immigration, which is the bastard child of globalism and multiculturalism, that has injected these poisonous pre-modern movements into Western civilization.

John Gaddis, another grand strategy professor, directs us to George Kennan’s insights from the early Cold War, which he feels are still relevant as a corrective to the death-by-a-thousand-cuts mentality. He argues that we should contain these menaces until they collapse internally. The Moscow regime requires a hostile outside world to maintain its own internal stability. That’s a weakness. By not behaving stupidly, by not overextending ourselves for example, we can, Gaddis argues, “make sure Putin’s seeds of self-destruction are more deeply rooted than our own.”

That’s smart, but I think I’m less sure that time is on our side. The weakness with any democratic foreign policy is the problem of motivation. How do you get the electorate to support the constant burden of defending the liberal system?

It was barely possible when we were facing an obviously menacing foe like the Soviet Union. But it’s harder when the system is being gouged by a hundred sub-threshold threats.

Gaddis’s answer is a complete non-starter, which Brooks would have realized if he had properly taken the two additional threats I have mentioned into account. How can the West “contain these menaces until they collapse internally” when the West has taken those menaces into itself? The Moscow regime and the Muslim world may both require their Dar al-Harbs to maintain their internal stability, but at least they have an internal stability. The West has little more than termites in its foundations, clogged arteries in its heart, and parasitic cysts in its brain.

The
Republicans seem to have given up global agreements that form the
fabric of that system, while Democrats are slashing the defense budget
that undergirds it. Moreover,
people will die for Mother Russia or Allah. But it is harder to get
people to die for a set of pluralistic procedures to protect faraway
places. It’s been pulling teeth to get people to accept commercial pain
and impose sanctions.
The
liberal pluralistic system is not a spontaneous natural thing.
Preserving that hard-earned ecosystem requires an ever-advancing fabric
of alliances, clear lines about what behavior is unacceptably
system-disrupting, and the credible threat of political, financial and
hard power enforcement.

It is true that liberal pluralism is not a spontaneous natural thing. The rest is meaningless gobbledy-gook. The globalist, multiculturalist West is no longer liberal or pluralistic, so it should be no surprise that the system of liberal pluralism is on the verge of collapse and that its rivals are increasingly confident that they need neither fear nor respect it. There will be no “saving the system”, not when its self-appointed defenders neither understand the extent of the problem and are more than a little sympathetic towards some of the threats posed.