Tag: declineandfall

Peter Turchin explains that the US elite is working off of inaccurate and misleading social models:

Last year I had an interesting conversation with someone I’ll call the Washington Insider. She asked me why my structural-demographic model predicted rising instability in the USA, probably peaking with a major outbreak of political violence in the 2020s. I started giving the explanation based on the three main forces: popular immiseration, intra-elite competition, and state fragility. But I didn’t get far because she asked me, what immiseration? What are you talking about? We’ve never lived better than today. Global poverty is declining, child mortality is declining, violence is declining. We have access to the level of technology that is miraculous compared to what previous generations had. Just look at the massive data gathered together by Max Rosen, or read Steven Pinker’s books to be impressed with how good things are.

There are three biases that help sustain this rosy view. First, the focus on global issues. But the decrease of poverty in China (which is what drives declining global poverty, because Chinese population is so huge), or the drop in child mortality in Africa, is irrelevant to the working America. People everywhere compare themselves not to some distant places, but to the standard of living they experienced in their parents home. And the majority of American population sees that in many important ways they are worse off than their parents (as we will see below).

Second, the Washington Insider talks to other members of the 1 percent, and to some in the top 10 percent. The top-income segments of the American population have done fabulously in the last decades, thank you very much.

Third, many economic statistics have to be taken with a grain of salt. Government agencies are often under substantial political pressure to put a positive spin on the statistics they publish. Many economists work hard to please the economic elites and other powers-that-be, because that’s how you get ahead in that profession. Fortunately, there are enough “heterodox” economists who provide us with alternative views. This all doesn’t mean that statistics are worse than “damn lies”; on the contrary, one cannot make sense about where we are headed without statistics. The point here is that one needs to understand why different statistics may give us different answers.

This is more than a little reminiscent of the Boomer cluelessness that simply can’t grasp the significance of a rise in tuition from 500/semester to 15,000/semester when wages have not risen. Not a single American cares about the rising Chinese standard of living when his own has declined, and declined significantly in comparison with his parents.

What we’ve witnessed over the last 50 years is the mass transfer of American wealth and property title from the middle classes to the elite of the US elite. These indicates that revolution is coming, sooner or later, in one way or another. Right now, the average citizen is content with Taco Bell and Netflix… but Netflix is becoming less entertaining with every season that passes.

The problem, of course, is one of labor oversupply.

The American economy has been operating under the conditions of labor oversupply since roughly the 1970s. The main causes were immigration, the entry of massive numbers of baby boomers and women into the labor force, the export of jobs overseas.
– Peter Turchin

After the wall across the southern border is built, a second one needs to be built on the California border:

Just over half of California’s registered voters have considered leaving the state, with soaring housing costs cited as the most common reason for wanting to move, according to a new poll. Young voters were especially likely to cite unaffordable housing as a reason for leaving, according to the latest latest UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll conducted for the Los Angeles Times. But a different group, conservatives, also frequently suggested they wanted to leave — and for a very different reason: They feel alienated from the state’s political culture.

They defecated all over their collective bed. Better they be sentenced to enjoy the hellhole they created rather than be permitted to travel elsewhere and recreate it.

This is why no city, state, or country should ever permit any immigrant, or his children, or his children’s children, to vote. People are very bad at understanding causality and they tend to prefer the familiar, so despite the apparent senselessness of this behavior, it is not difficult to understand why emigrants reliably attempt to recreate the very conditions they sought to escape.

The demoralization of Europe is complete with a declaration by the President of France concerning the end of Western hegemony.

The international order is being shaken in an unprecedented manner, above all with, if I may say so, by the great upheaval that is undoubtedly taking place for the first time in our history, in almost every field and with a profoundly historic magnitude. The first thing we observe is a major transformation, a geopolitical and strategic re-composition. We are undoubtedly experiencing the end of Western hegemony over the world.

We were accustomed to an international order which, since the 18th century, rested on a Western hegemony, mostly French in the 18th century, by the inspiration of the Enlightenment; then mostly British in the 19th century thanks to the Industrial Revolution and, finally, mostly American in the 20th century thanks to the two great conflicts and the economic and political domination of this power. Things change. And they are now deeply shaken by the mistakes of Westerners in certain crises, by the choices that have been made by Americans for several years which did not start with this administration, but which lead to revisiting certain implications in conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and to rethinking a deep, diplomatic and military strategy, and sometimes elements of solidarity that we thought were intangible for eternity, even if we had constituted together in geopolitical moments that have changed.

And then there is the emergence of new powers whose impact we have probably underestimated for a long time. China is at the forefront, but also the Russian strategy, which has, it must be said, been pursued more successfully in recent years. I will come back to that. India that is emerging, these new economies that are also becoming powers not only economic but political and that think themselves, as some have written, as real “civilizational states” which now come not only to shake up our international order but who also come to weigh in on the economic order and to rethink the political order and the political imagination that goes with it, with much dynamism and much more inspiration than we have.

Look at India, Russia and China. They have a much stronger political inspiration than Europeans today. They think about our planet with a true logic, a true philosophy, an imagination that we’ve lost a little bit.

This is the result of the so-called Enlightenment gradually eroding the foundations of civilization. Western civilization ebbs and flows with Christianity because Christianity is the spiritual and intellectual barrier that separates truth from untruth. It should be no surprise that a post-Christian West has not only divorced itself from truth and reality, but in doing so, has lost its historical power and influence.

Because you’re going to be defined as one sooner or later.

Earlier this month, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution declaring the National Rifle Association (NRA) to be a “domestic terrorist organization.” Some of us laughed at the absurd move and simply wrote it off by thinking “It’s San Francisco, they’re all nuts over there,” but the sentiment is actually more popular in the Democratic Party than you might expect. In fact, nearly a third of Democrats believe that the National Rifle Association (NRA), the largest gun rights organization in the country, should be declared a terrorist organization, and that it should be against the law for Americans to become members.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that nearly one-out-of-three Likely Democratic Voters (32{9576e478f725cceae1d2658658ad3e64422d2ca740094a2fb07c0611fe338f11}) favor declaring the gun rights group a terrorist organization in the community where they live. Fourteen percent (14{9576e478f725cceae1d2658658ad3e64422d2ca740094a2fb07c0611fe338f11}) of Republicans and 20{9576e478f725cceae1d2658658ad3e64422d2ca740094a2fb07c0611fe338f11} of voters not affiliated with either major party agree. Twenty-eight percent (28{9576e478f725cceae1d2658658ad3e64422d2ca740094a2fb07c0611fe338f11}) of Democrats say Americans should be prohibited by law from belonging to pro-gun rights organizations like the NRA, a view shared by 15{9576e478f725cceae1d2658658ad3e64422d2ca740094a2fb07c0611fe338f11} of Republicans and 10{9576e478f725cceae1d2658658ad3e64422d2ca740094a2fb07c0611fe338f11} of uanffiliateds.

Among all likely voters, 23{9576e478f725cceae1d2658658ad3e64422d2ca740094a2fb07c0611fe338f11} favor declaring the NRA a terrorist organization in their home community, while 18{9576e478f725cceae1d2658658ad3e64422d2ca740094a2fb07c0611fe338f11} think it should be against the law to belong to pro-gun rights groups like the NRA.

When nearly a third of a political party believes that an organization supporting gun rights is a “terrorist organization” and should be illegal to join, it makes you wonder what percentage also oppose free speech, freedom of religion, and other rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution.

They have to go back. And if they have nowhere to go back to, the states, once united, must divide.

Just how far back do the haters of Western civilization want to turn back the clock? Even farther back than you think.

Though accusations of cannibalism have often been falsely made to demonize groups, it isn’t absent from human history. The Fore people of Papua New Guinea were reported to have participated in funerary cannibalism, believing it better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased than by worms and maggots. Parts of mummies were eaten for medicinal purposes in post-Renaissance Europe.

We suspect that we could adapt to human flesh if need be. Many people develop disgust for all kinds of meat, while morticians and surgeons quickly adapt to the initially difficult experience of handling dead bodies. Our ongoing research with butchers in England suggests that they easily adapt to working with animal parts that the average consumer finds quite disgusting.

Thankfully for most of us, there is no need to overcome our repulsion for the foreseeable future.

They reject Jesus Christ, they believe we are animals, and they want us to live like animals. There is literally no depth to which they will not sink, which is why we have to stand firmly against the entire project on behalf of our faith, our families, our nations, and our Christian civilization.

Mark this well: if you are on the side of equality, tolerance, inclusivity, and diversity, then you are on the side of the satanists, the cannibals, and the pedophiles… among others.

Damac quotes a 1973 book that featured some ominous observations concerning societal decline and fall.

The book “The Tenth Generation” George E Mendenhall (1973) is well worth studying in the light of the present historical circumstances. It is an analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations and kingdoms based on the history of the nation of Israel in the Bible. The thesis is that on average, nations only have a life of about 300 years, ten generations, and then they are destroyed from within. This conclusion was based on a study of I think 21 ancient civilizations, some of which, like the Hittites, vanished from the pages of history until exhumed by archaeologists like Mendenhall. He summarizes his findings as follows:

“The Tenth Generation witnessed and took part in the destruction of civilization. It seems possible — both from direct historical evidence and by analogy with later periods of crisis which seem to be similar in other respects – to make some generalizations about that Tenth Generation.”

1. it is not characterized by poverty.
2. it is characterized by a relatively high density of population…
3. a breakdown in confidence in the existing social and political organization.
4. a rejection of past ideologies and a desire for something new.
5. there is a loss of sense of direction.
6. an increasing resort to illegitimate force and violence, which is almost inevitable following the loss of confidence in the political organization which by definition is the “monopoly of force.”
7. the increased insecurity of everyone in the areas is deeply felt, and there may be a sense of foreboding, of impending doom.
8. Doom comes: by whatever agency is perhaps by now irrelevant. The political, social, and economic structures of society are destroyed or enormously weakened – usually by violence, either from within, or without. Society simply disintegrates.
9. deurbanization takes place. Cities are abandoned…a high percentage of the population lose their lives and what we call civilization – writing, art …wealth, literature,…institutionalized religion – either cease to exist, or disappear…”

I find the deurbanization element to be particularly significant, as the almost-instinctive desire to get out of the cities I’ve been observing among savvier people all over the world for the last ten years tend to fly in the face of the economic and social impulses that continue to draw young people into the cities like sacrifices to Moloch.

America can’t be broken apart, but the USA can be, and will be.

The question comes down to this: Is the fragile American experiment in republicanism begun in Philadelphia in 1787, which required a commonly-shared understanding of basic principles, now over, or at the very least is it entering its agonizing death throes?

One can certainly trace a progressively destructive trajectory in American history since the overthrow of the American constitutional system in 1865. And the results of that history are now reaching almost an unimaginable breaking point.

Increasingly, we live in a country that has become de facto little more than a mere geographical entity. True, it is still formally a nation, but a nation where there are in fact at least two very distinct Americas, with radically differing visions of what is real and what is not real, radically differing conceptions of what is moral and what is not, radically differing views about truth and error, and radically differing ideas about using whatever means are available to reach a desired and posited end. For all the talk of equality and racism, the revolutionary side in actuality seeks to replace one oligarchy—which it calls “white supremacist”—with another oligarchy of its own making, in fact, a brutal, vicious and soulless “utopia’’ that would make Joseph Stalin’s Communist state seem like a Sandals Retreat in the Bahamas.

At the base of this revolutionary movement is the critical use of language. Ideologically-tinged words—“devil terms”—now occur with amazing regularity and frequency: racism, white privilege, sexism, toxic masculinity, equality, democracy, and so on. These terms have been weaponized and are now employed by those on the Left—but also adopted by many elitist movement conservatives (“conservatism inc.”)—to disauthorize, condemn, and damn anyone who would offer effective opposition to the rapid Leftward perversion of what remains of this nation.

It is not only the frenzied talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, but such “respectable” conservative voices as Bill Kristol, Hew Hewitt, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, Ben Shapiro, the National Review crowd and various Republican types , who have joined in to legitimize each new progressivist conquest (e.g., same sex marriage) and attack any real opposition to the Leftist “long march” through our institutions. Like the hard Left, the establishment conservatives betray a hardly-concealed contempt for Middle America, for those hard-working, gun-owning, church-going, underpaid folks who still try to raise a family morally on a shrinking salary. They see the rest of us as mere rubes, a servile class who are not supposed to have a voice—this, you see, is now “American democracy.”

The “two Americas” to which the author refers are not, in fact, two Americas. There is a white Christian America and there is a not-white not-Christian not-America which are now locked into an existential struggle. The USA is now divided into a New World remnant of Christendom and the stronghold of Satandom. The latter wishes to conquer and destroy the former because it is a separate nation that worships the god of this world rather than God the Father of Jesus Christ.

Belloc was not entirely correct. It isn’t just the national element that matters, as both the national and the religious elements are significant with regards to how the end of the USA will play out.

A conceptual model is only as good as its predictive utility. And, as you will note, there is very little predictive value in the liberal-conservative divide, the black-white racial divide, or the Democrat-Republican divide. But the Christian Nationalist vs Judeo-Christian Globalist model is almost perfectly predictive, not only of future events, but even individual behaviors, everywhere across the West.

The USA is presently facing its own October Revolution right now, one that has been decades in the making. And many of those seeking to complete the destruction of Christian America and rule over a USSA are the literal descendants, intellectually, ideologically, and genetically, of the very Bolsheviks who subjected Christian Russia and Christian Ukraine to 70 years of persecution and suffering.

The author sees three possibilities:

(1) Either there must be some large mass conversion of one side or the other (a ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion?), probably occasioned by some immense and earth-shaking event, war, depression, disaster; or (2) there must be a separation into independent jurisdictions of large portions of what is presently geographically the United States, including possible massive population exchanges—this separation/secession could be peaceable, although increasingly I think it would not be; or lastly, and worst, (3) the devolution of this country would continue into open and vicious civil and guerrilla war, followed by a harsh dictatorship. 

Scenario (3) is a near-certainty simply because virtually no one who is even potentially on the side of the Christian Nationalists is currently capable of recognizing the situation, much less doing anything about it. And as Sun Tzu observes, those who know neither themselves nor their enemies almost always lose.

I don’t see any reason alien enthusiasts shouldn’t storm Area 51. Since the US military doesn’t shoot foreign invaders actually invading the country by crossing the border, it isn’t going to shoot US citizens exercising their rights to life, liberty, and happiness inside the country either.

With the number of UFO enthusiasts volunteering to raid Area 51 growing uncontrollably amid an avalanche of memes on Twitter, the Pentagon seems to be worried that some might actually show up to try and break ‘them aliens’ free.

The #Area51memes hashtag has gone viral on Twitter, indicating that the majority of the 750,000+ ‘going to’ and 700,000 ‘interested’ in staging a mass raid on the secretive US government base probably understand that the event planned for September 20 is just a joke.

However, the US Air Force apparently took the potential threat to the Nevada base seriously, with spokeswoman Laura McAndrews saying she would like to “discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces.”

Seriously, they should just do it and underline what a complete paper tiger the US military is.

If anyone starts babbling about equality of any kind at your church, excommunicate them without hesitation. Because this is where it always – always – leads:

The Rev. Dr. Amy Butler, the first woman to lead Manhattan’s famed Riverside Church, lost her lofty post amid complaints that she brought ministers and a congregant on a sex toy shopping spree and then gave one of them an unwanted vibrator as a birthday gift, The Post has learned.

On May 15, Butler allegedly took two Riverside assistant ministers and a female congregant to a sex shop in Minneapolis called the Smitten Kitten, during a religious conference, according to sources familiar with the out-of-town shopping excursion.

At the store, the pastor bought a $200 bunny-shaped blue vibrator called a Beaded Rabbit for one minister — a single mom of two who was celebrating her 40th birthday — as well as more pleasure gadgets for the congregant and herself, sources said.

The female minister didn’t want the sex toy, but accepted it because she was scared not to, sources said. Butler also offered to buy a toy for the second minister — a gay man in a committed relationship — but he declined, sources said.

In a New York Times article published online Thursday — after The Post began making calls for this story — her supporters claimed she was let go because she spoke up against harassment and sexism. But a source familiar with the investigation said Butler and the church mutually parted ways when her position became untenable amid accusations of misconduct — adding that the sex-toy incident was one of “several concerns that the Riverside Church Council had about Amy’s judgement.”

This is what comes of inclusivity. One silver lining in the coming collapse of the USA is that it will no longer be illegal to burn witches at the stake.

It’s not going to stop until they all go.

According to the Wall Street Journal, former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick has persuaded Nike to scrap plans to sell a shoe featuring the 13-star version of the American flag, known as the Betsy Ross flag. Kaepernick informed Nike that the 13-star version of the flag constitutes an “offensive symbol” due to its connection to an age of slavery. Nike agreed, and the shoe has been pulled.

It’s amazing that some people still think the USA is a single nation. Whatever Kaepernick and Nike belong to, it isn’t America.