Tag: declineandfall

Identity politics are reshaping the Democratic Party, more or less as I predicted. Though apparently the nature of that reshaping is coming as an unpleasant surprise to the (((white))) progressives who rose to power largely on the basis of their self-serving, self-appointed championing of the New Americans:

In a sharp rebuke of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democratic Party has declined to endorse the state’s own senior senator in her bid for reelection. Riven by conflict between progressive and more moderate forces at the state party’s annual convention here, delegates favored Feinstein’s progressive rival, state Senate leader Kevin de León, over Feinstein by a 54 percent to 37 percent margin, according to results announced Sunday.

Neither candidate reached the 60 percent threshold required to receive the party endorsement for 2018. But the snubbing of Feinstein led de León to claim a victory for his struggling campaign.

“The outcome of today’s endorsement vote is an astounding rejection of politics as usual, and it boosts our campaign’s momentum as we all stand shoulder-to-shoulder against a complacent status quo,” de León said in a prepared statement. “California Democrats are hungry for new leadership that will fight for California values from the front lines, not equivocate on the sidelines.”

A centrist Democrat, Feinstein has long maintained an uneasy relationship with activists who dominate state party conventions, and the vote this weekend — while embarrassing — was not unexpected. The result followed two days of lobbying by the candidates in convention speeches and throughout the convention halls.

Just as Minnesota’s (((Democrats))) are already being replaced by Somalis, California’s (((Democrats))) will be replaced by Asians and Hispanics. Or, in the case of Mr. de León, both at the same time. After all, how can one minor interest group successfully represent the interests of a rival interest group, even if they happen to share an ideology?

What should prove mildly amusing for the cynical observer is watching the shift from a “hello, fellow white people” strategy to “hello, fellow bronze people”. That will likely prove moderately successful, given both the low average Hispanic IQ as well as the way in which the Mexican elite has historically been genetically distinct from the masses of la raza cosmica, but I tend to doubt the inevitable attempt to adopt a “hello, fellow yellow people” strategy will similarly succeed, Amy Chua’s Mandarin-speaking Jewish tiger cubs notwithstanding.

The God-Emperor is considering pulling Immigration and Customs Enforcement out of California:

President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he’s considering pulling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers out of California.

Why? Because he feels the state is giving his administration “no help” in targeting the violent MS-13 gang, especially in Los Angeles.

“We’re getting no help from the state of California,” Trump said from the White House. “Frankly, if I wanted to pull our people from California you would have a crime nest like you’ve never seen in California. All I’d have to do is say ‘ICE and border patrol, let California learn.’”

Trump made those remarks during a meeting at the White House where he also spent a few minutes scolding California.

“You would see crime like nobody’s ever seen crime in this country,” he said of California without federal immigration agents. “And yet we get no help from the state of California.”

He also took a shot at leadership in the state.

“They are doing a lousy management job,” Trump said. “They have the highest taxes in the nation and they don’t know what’s happening out there. Frankly, it’s a disgrace, the sanctuary city situation, the protection of these horrible criminals in California and other places. If we ever pulled our ICE out and we ever said, ‘hey, let California learn and let them figure it out for themselves,’ in two months, they’d be begging for us to come back. They would be begging.”

Would the president really do such a thing?

“You know what, I’m thinking about it,” Trump said.

He absolutely should do it. Abandon California to the Left and let the Mexicans wipe out Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Sacramento, and the rest of the Left Coast lunacy. But ignore their begging. Ignore their screams for help. Send in camera drones to record the inevitable atrocities. Then round up everyone who still advocates immigration, magic dirt, and diversity, and ship them to the Golden State to enjoy the consequences of their favored policies.

That would be true justice. Because they aren’t going to learn any other way, and better to let them learn from the collapse of a single state than from the collapse of the entire United States. They really won’t. Quoth one SJW:

He should do it. The imaginary crime wave will never materialize and I bet California would be a better place without innocent people being ripped from their families. 

Who are the indigenous French to complain about the dietary customs of the new French? After all, the customs of the New France are just as legitimate as the frog-eating, cheese-mongering, wine-drinking customs of the old one, right?

Three men have been arrested in the heavily migrant-populated Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois for attacking a man by biting at his face and then eating the pieces of flesh they had bitten off.

The men, who all originally came from the African island nation of Cape Verde, were arrested on Sunday after they attacked a man who was walking in the Hector-Berlioz alley at around 6 pm and bit off pieces his ear and lower lip, Le Parisien reports.

The victim was able to fight off the attackers, wounding one of them in the ankle, before police arrived a short time later and arrested the three Africans.

Both the victim and the injured man were then taken to Montfermeil hospital.

Meanwhile, archeologists remind us that the land is yours only as long as you are willing to defend it against immigrants.

Stonehenge has a proud place in Britain’s history as one of the wonders of the world and the best-known prehistoric monument in Europe. But, according to a major new study, modern-day Britons are barely related to the ingenious Neolithic farmers who built the monument 5,000 years ago.

Instead the British are related to the ‘Beaker people’ who travelled from modern-day Holland and all but wiped out Stonehenge’s creators. Many experts believed it was just Beaker pottery-making and culture which was exported to Britain between 4,400 and 4,700 years ago – not the people themselves. But the new evidence comes from DNA analysis of 400 prehistoric skeletons, some from after Stonehenge and others born before it was created…. The genes of these ancient people provide enough clues to determine that Beakers travelled here from Holland and took over in a few centuries. They replaced 90 per cent of the Neolithic farmers who built the monument and had lived here for 1,500 years.

The average American can’t imagine that he and his culture will ever go the way of the Stonehengens and the American Indians. And yet, it is already half-gone and the land is already more than half-occupied by Not Americans. Frankly, given the propensities of his replacements, white Americans aren’t even going to end up with reservations or casinos.

The end of the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain has not yet arrived. But it is now in sight:

I’ve been chronicling the slow demise of B&N for years now, watching the company bleed out, drop by drop, until it has become a shell of its former value. B&N was a cultural center in places without cultural centers. It was a stopover on rainy days in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland and it was a place you could go to get your kids’ first books.

That’s mostly over now. On Monday the company laid off 1,800 people. This offered a cost savings of $40 million. But that’s particularly interesting. That means each of those people made an average of $22,000 or so per year and minimum wage workers – hourly folks who are usually hit hardest during post-holiday downturns – would be making $15,000. In fact, what B&N did was fire all full time employees at 781 632 stores. From a former employee:

On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the people responsible for handling the money), the receiving managers (the people responsible for bringing in product and making sure it goes where it should), the digital leads (the people responsible for solving Nook problems), the newsstand leads (the people responsible for distributing the magazines), and the bargain leads (the people responsible for keeping up the massive discount sections). A few of the larger stores were able to spare their head cashiers and their receiving managers, but not many.

Further, the company laid off many shipping receivers around the holidays, resulting in bare shelves and a customer escape to Amazon. In December 2017, usually B&N’s key month, sales dropped 6 percent to $953 million. Online sales fell 4.5 percent.

It is important to note that when other big box retailers, namely Circuit City, went the route of firing all highly paid employees and bringing in minimum wage cashiers, stockers, and salespeople it signaled the beginning of the end.

It’s actually worse than was originally reported, because Barnes & Noble had already shut down 149 of those 781 stores.

The decline of Barnes & Noble is both sad and exciting, as far as I’m concerned. Sad, because the bookstore was an important part of my early adulthood. I used to go to the original Roseville store after work on payday to spend most of my monthly $50 book budget on what gradually became an impressive collection of SF/F paperbacks, augmented by an eclectic assortment of hardcovers picked up on remainder. That’s why I still have all the Dorset Press books, like The Kingdom of Armenia by M. Chahin and The Mabinogion, translated and introduced by Jeffrey Gantz, on the bookshelves in my office.

A few years later, Spacebunny and I used to spend almost every Friday night at the Har Mar Barnes & Noble after working out and having dinner with the guys at Khan’s Mongolian BBQ. That was also where, as a newly published SF author, I participated in the store’s biggest-ever book-signing with David Arneson, Gordon R. Dickson, Joel Rosenberg, and David Feintuch, all of whom have since left us. For more than a decade, Barnes & Noble was a touchstone for me.

But the incipient failure of the chain also means that new opportunities are in store. It means that Amazon’s influence over the book world will grow stronger and the power of the Big Five will be further weakened. It means chaos and excitement and danger, and an environment in which the most nimble and adroit can profit most.

So, it’s going to be an interesting ride ahead. I hope you will join us on it. And since I’m often asked how our readers can most effectively support us when you buy our books, the answer is buying our print edition books through the Castalia Direct Store. The interface absolutely sucks and the prices are not always as good as Amazon, but we are working with our partners are Aerio on improving both. The alternative is to be completely dependent upon Amazon, which strikes me, for one, as a risky idea.

Because gender equality is more important than winning wars. And why not? Seriously. It’s not as if the US Armed Forces have been defending the nation or its borders for the last 60 years anyhow.

The Marine Corps has made a major change to its Infantry Officer Course. The first big challenge for many was a test of physical fitness. If you passed, you moved on. If you didn’t, you washed out. The test was especially difficult for women who had to meet the same standard as the men. Not anymore.

The Infantry Officer Course now uses the physical fitness test as an exercise, and not a pass/fail requirement.

Officials with Marine Corps Training and Education Command told Military.com “that Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller had made a decision in November to transform the test from a high-stakes hurdle to an assessment from which students can drop without risking their place in the course.”

“[Neller] approved modifications to the IOC [program of instruction] to better tie student evaluation and graduation requirements to published infantry training and readiness manual, military occupational specialty specific performance standards, and operating force requirements,” TECOM officials said in a statement.

As the student evaluation and graduation requirements gravitate towards female-friendly subjective homework and classroom attendance standards rather than objective physical standards, we can expect women to increasingly not only complete the Infantry Officer Course, but excel in it. Which, over time, will lead to the consequences explained by Martin Van Creveld and quoted in SJWs Always Double Down:

As Martin van Creveld, the Israeli military historian has noted, the more women enter any professional field, the more men leave it. And as the men depart, so to do the prestige and the economic rewards provided by the field. This creates a vicious cycle that both expels existing men from the field while repelling new men from entering it.

If the universities can be considered a reliable model, we’re about three decades away from a majority female Marine Corps. No wonder China is content to patiently wait for its opportunity. This marks the second step in the end of the USMC’s historical prestige. Even current female Marine officers understand this.

“Changing this rite of passage will be doing female Marines no favors in trying to be infantry officers,” Marine 2nd Lt. Emma Stokien, a Marine Corps intelligence officer, wrote. “Female Marines often have to work much harder than their peers to earn the same respect, and entering the infantry under the dark cloud of even perceived lowered standards will make this a practically impossible challenge and potentially cause real harm to unit cohesion and the faith between leader and led.”

Permitting women to join the Marine Corps was the first mistake. Unqualified female officers are the second one. But the empire is in decline, and so these events are not even remotely surprising. There will be more unnecessary mistakes in the future and they will be more and more disastrous, until the empire “unexpectedly” crumbles for “no reason at all.”

This is the sort of thing you’re missing if you’re not signed up for the Daily Meme Wars. Think of it as a fifth daily blog post of sorts. It’s also a good way to get a regular update on the latest little stuff from Castalia House that doesn’t justify a full Book Club mailing.

Anyhow, this is the future of which the equalitarians, liberals, and progressives have dreamed for decades. It is the future they demanded. And yet, somehow, they don’t seem to be quite as happy about it as one might have thought.

Oh, that’s right. They thought they were going to be in charge, and that all those very equal minorities were going to gratefully follow their lead. It turns out that if you tell people that they are your equal, they might well believe you and decide that you have no business telling them what to do.

The Weekly Standard wants to repair the failing institution of marriage. But not at the price of giving up feminism:

To restore marriage, people must again observe the two main conventions that used to support the institution. First, adults should not form intimate ties for very long without committing themselves in some formal way to remain together for life. That implies not having affairs and not divorcing except in unusual circumstances. Second, children should be born and brought up within marriage, meaning with parents in a committed relationship, rather than with single parents.

The problem, of course, is that these conventions run afoul of our modern fetish for “tolerance.” Marriage and the family are now seen as a private realm where nothing—government, the community, even the private opinions of fellow citizens—should be allowed to pass judgment, let alone intervene.

But marriage isn’t only a private concern. One reason lower-income society is falling apart is that the decline of marriage leaves too few adults who are willing and able to help each other. Spouses who cannot get along within the family also cannot contribute much to the wider society. They have little to offer others in the joint work of building strong communities. Government and nonprofit bodies attempt to fill the void, but even they cannot substitute for families based on strong adult commitments.

Because of the social costs of nonmarriage, “tolerance,” while laudable, should not be society’s only goal. Instead, we should be working to strike a balance between free choice and the promotion of the stable, supportive environments that create the best outcomes for both children and adults.

Any return to marriage norms, however, must take into account the feminist critique. Two generations ago, wives were often subordinate to their husbands or blindly deferred to them. Most advocates of marriage today recognize that the institution can be rebuilt only if it is done so on more egalitarian lines. Husbands and wives must be partners, without either ruling over the other. This does assume, however, that the spouses can work out differences more openly than they often did in the past.

It’s really rather striking the way that so many observers are concerned about the symptoms while determinedly clinging to the disease. It’s like watching a doctor trying to make the patient feel as comfortable as possible while refusing to give him the medicine that will cure him.

Any return to marriage norms will require rejecting feminism entirely. Destroying marriage was, and is, one of the primary goals of feminism. Destroying society and Western civilization is merely a fortuitous bonus as far as feminists are concerned.

Are you placing your faith in scientistry or scientody? Because if you believe in the reliability of the latter, you need to understand that the former, on average, no longer practices it:

More than 70{f34b2ed14022567e3962d98ceb517f14c2acb643b80147bdb11c1357fe49acc6} of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature‘s survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research. The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproducibility. Although 52{f34b2ed14022567e3962d98ceb517f14c2acb643b80147bdb11c1357fe49acc6} of those surveyed agree that there is a significant ‘crisis’ of reproducibility, less than 31{f34b2ed14022567e3962d98ceb517f14c2acb643b80147bdb11c1357fe49acc6} think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature.

This is absolutely incredible. Even Hollywood accounting is not this slipshod! In how many other fields does the failure of the numbers to add up correctly not mean that the result is wrong?

What this means is that nearly 7 in 10 so-called scientists are not utilizing the scientific method at all. What now passes for “science” is now little more than a modern spin on the logical fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam, the appeal to credentialed authority.

Also, Episcopals will no longer be referred to as a “church”.

God will no longer be referred to as He or Him in the Episcopal Church Diocese of Washington, D.C., which passed a resolution last week barring all use of masculine pronouns when referring to the Almighty. They will be updating their Book of Common Prayer as a result. According to LifeSiteNews, the resolution called for an end to “gendered language for God” and was passed quickly by delegates to the Diocese’s 123rd Convention.

“If revision of the Book of Common Prayer is authorized, to utilize expansive language for God from the rich sources of feminine, masculine, and non-binary imagery for God found in Scripture and tradition and, when possible, to avoid the use of gendered pronouns for God,” the resolution stated.

“Over the centuries our language and our understanding of God has continued to change and adapt,” the drafters of the resolution stated, emphasizing that masculine pronouns “limit our understanding of God.”

“By expanding our language for God, we will expand our image of God and the nature of God,” they stated.

The correct term is the Episcopal Coven. Which is why one can’t properly categorize this under “Christianity”.