Tag: society

What’s next, glory holes?

Peep shows are now art:

National Gallery invites ‘voyeurs’ to peek through keyhole at naked woman in bath

Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger took to Twitter to find six women, all called Diana, willing to take turns to be spied upon by the public while they sit naked in a mocked-up bathroom. The work, also called Diana, is inspired by three paintings by Titian which form the centrepiece of the exhibition and features scenes from Greek mythology.

This is obviously an indication that one of the prizes for winning the Turner Prize should be an immediate death sentence. And any artist who voluntarily applies for public funding should be taken out and shot. I’m sure someone can figure out a way to do it artistically and thereby justify federal involvement in the arts.

Seriously, even bankers and pedophiles contribute more constructively to society.

The futures of America

The argument that race and culture do not matter with regards to the construction and maintenance of civilization is not only historically dubious, but is deeply and profoundly anti-scientific:

The stench of sewage permeates the run-down streets, which have the second highest crime rates of anywhere across the country. Of its 70,390 residents, a staggering 40 per cent are out of work, with many having been ‘on the scrapheap’ from the ‘formal economy’ for generations.

The population has plummeted by more than 40 per cent from its 1950 level of 120,000, but there is little hope for those who remain. City budgets are being slashed, nearly half of the police force has been axed in recent years and the public library system is now almost non-existent.

Seventy thousand people and they not only can’t manage to build anything or prosper, they can’t even maintain the basic order and infrastructure they inherited from their grandfathers. What is the difference between a thriving metropolis of 124,000 thousand people and a dying one of little more than half that?

There are a number of factors, of course, but it would dishonest to fail to note that one of the significant ones appears to be the decline in the white percentage of the Camden population to only 17 percent. Stagnation and moderate decline are already apparent in the USA with whites now accounting for 72.4 percent of the population, down from 89.8 percent in 1940; if we hypothesize a link between between race and civilization, we can use that as a basis for predicting a significant decline in the standard of American civilization on the basis of “minority” births now outnumbering the number of births to the white majority.

Now, whites have no monopoly on civilization and there are obviously a number of great non-White civilizations. But they are almost uniformly Asian. So, it is also possible that the recent influx of Asian immigrants, who now outnumber Hispanic immigrants, could eventually permit the maintenance of a functioning civilization, albeit one that is likely to be a blend of Eastern and Western civilizations rather than a Western one. This would tend to indicate a reasonable amount of societal prosperity, but significantly reduced individual rights, an emphasis on bureaucracy, an end to the pretense of democracy, and technological stagnation.

There are worse fates. An Asio-America post-Aztlan secession may, in fact, represent the optimal non-violent outcome, presuming present trends prevail. Civilization is subject to entropy, which must be actively combated by each successive generation; any failure to do so assures that civilization will eventually return to Man’s natural state of barbarism. As Camden shows, a mere two 30-year generations is sufficient to reduce it to that natural state.

Another day, another whitewash

It doesn’t seem to matter how much the banks steal or how much fraud they commit, no one ever goes to jail:

Regulators delivered the first blow in a major investigation into whether big banks had improperly set key interest rates that affected how consumers and companies borrowed money around the world.

On Wednesday, Barclays agreed to pay $450 million to resolve accusations that it had tried to manipulate rates to benefit the bank’s own bottom line. At the height of the financial crisis, regulators say, the big British bank reported bogus figures that in some cases had influenced a benchmark for student loans, credit cards and mortgages.

The Barclays deal, struck with regulators in Washington and London and the Justice Department, caps a multiyear investigation that yielded one of the largest regulatory penalties tied to the financial crisis. The settlement is the first in a series of potential cases against other financial firms, including HSBC, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase….

Some of the most troubling actions, regulators say, occurred between 2007 and 2009. As bank financing costs rose to new highs after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, regulators worried that firms might have submitted low interest rate figures that underpin Libor, making their financial positions look stronger. Amid speculation that the bank was struggling to raise money, Barclays’ senior management asked employees to lower the rates submitted to the Libor committee, according to the regulatory filings. Management wanted the bank’s rates in line with rivals.

The way these things are reported is always in a manner suggesting that there were some complex financial details that are hard to understand or report accurately, but the LIBOR-fixing was pretty simple. Barclays and the other banks simply reported false prices, claiming to have loaned money at higher rates and borrowed money at lower rates than they did, depending upon what served their interest at the time. Since the interest rate is determined by this activity, that activity was fraudulent and affected anyone borrowing money at that time.

An assistant attorney general says: ““For this illegal conduct, Barclays is paying a significant price.” But once more, no criminal charges. So, the message is clear. Commit all the fraud you like. Commit all the crime you want. Steal without hesitation or remorse. If you’re caught, you’ll merely be fined pennies on the dollars you stole. So when you read about the corruption in Rome and other historical societies, don’t deceive yourself into thinking that Man has progressed in any way beyond the technological. It’s no different, and in fact, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau once pointed out, the Romans abided by their own laws better than any other historical society, and far more than Americans do.

WND column

Title IX Goes to the Movies

They may as well have named the movie “Strong Independent Girl.” Apparently because Disney hasn’t done enough damage to the intellectual development of three generations of American women, Pixar is introducing its much-ballyhooed first female lead, the princess Merinda, whom we are reliably informed is “more interested in archery and independence than in marrying and fulfilling royal traditions as dictated by her mother.” How innovative, how subversive, how not exactly the same as every other movie and television commercial produced in the last 20 years.

The value of predictive models

Thomas Friedman fails to understand why not only the Europe Union and the Arab states, but the United States as well, are in the process of breaking up:

Europeans failed to build Europe, and that is now a big problem because, as its common currency comes under pressure and the E.U. goes deeper into recession, the whole world feels the effects. The Syrians failed to build Syria, the Egyptians failed to build Egypt, the Libyans failed to build Libya, the Yemenis failed to build Yemen. Those are even bigger problems because, as their states have been stressed or fractured, no one knows how they’ll be put back together again.

To put it another way: In Europe, the supranational project did not work, and now, to a degree, Europe is falling back into individual states. In the Arab world, the national project did not work, so some of the Arab states are falling back onto sects, tribes, regions and clans.

In Europe, the supranational project did not work because the European states were never ready to cede control over their budgets to a central authority that would ensure a common fiscal policy to back up a common currency. In the Arab world, the national project did not work — in many, but not all cases — because the tribes, sects, clans and regional groups that make up these Arab states, whose borders were drawn up by colonial powers, were unwilling or unable to meld genuine national communities….

One question historians will puzzle over is why both great geopolitical systems fractured at once? The answer, I believe, is the intensifying merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, which made the world dramatically flatter in the last five years, as we went from connected to hyperconnected. In the Arab world, this hyper-connectivity simultaneously left youths better able to see how far behind they were — with all the anxiety that induced — and enabled them to communicate and collaborate to do something about it, cracking open their ossified states. In Europe, hyperconnectedness both exposed just how uncompetitive some of their economies were, but also how interdependent they had become. It was a deadly combination.

Friedman is wrong. Historians will not puzzle, as we know the answer already, which does not originate in communications technology, but economics. Robert Prechter not only provided the answer, but repeatedly predicted these political events, beginning with his landmark Pioneering Studies in Socionomics. Peace and political unity are strongly correlated with periods of economic growth. That’s why history has always tended to skate over those boring periods where nothing happened, no one went to war, and people gradually got wealthier. The six-decade post-WWII period has been one of the longest periods of economic growth in the West since the fall of the Roman empire, so it should not be surprising that there was relative peace and partially successful attempts to build supranational organizations during that time.

However, the prosperity brought about by the post-war rebuilding of a world shattered by global war ended in 1970s and was artificially extended by the large scale substitution of credit for economic growth and wealth production. With the end of the perceived prosperity, the centrifugal force bringing people together has also ended and now the political inertia is moving in the opposite direction. Given the negative economic prospects for the next decade or two, it will be much more surprising if the various political unions do not break apart as the people brought into the various countries, drawn by the economic prosperity, will tend to become the focus of the divisive forces that will break apart the states on their various fault lines.

The demolition proceeds

Homogamy has never been about the imitation of marriage. The vast majority of gays don’t even want the public pretense of monogamy that “gay marriage” typically entails. The entire political effort has never been much more than an attempt to force the organized Church to sacrifice Christian values and submit to the mores of the secular state. While the American aspect of the movement is vowing up and down that no church will be forced to perform such “marriages”, the spearhead Danish aspect has already made it clear that no resistance of the state-imposed morality will be permitted.

The country’s parliament voted through the new law on same-sex marriage by a large majority, making it mandatory for all churches to conduct gay marriages. Denmark’s church minister, Manu Sareen, called the vote “historic”. “I think it’s very important to give all members of the church the possibility to get married. Today, it’s only heterosexual couples.”

Denmark has been a pioneer in gay rights since 1989, when it became the first country in the world to offer civil unions for gay couples.

This sort of thing is why I am completely relaxed about the coming decline and devastation of the secular West. Seldom has a civilization more fully merited its fate. The secular hypothesis is that a society built upon a foundation of Christian morality can not only survive, but thrive, after systematically demolishing its foundation. Seculars believe they have already proved the validity of the hypothesis by the fact that the societies of the West have not completely crumbled yet, but they forget that they have only removed a portion of the foundation to date and the demolition process continues. The empirical test is not over, indeed, it is barely underway.

The dilemma of a dynamic perspective

It would appear I’m hardly the only one to see the similarities between the rhetoric of the Israeli government and the behavior of the Jewish mob and the past rhetoric and behavior of other nations:

Last Thursday morning I woke up feeling more embarrassed for the state of Israel than almost ever before. Considering pogroms, racism (known in Israel almost exclusively as Anti-Semitism) and refugees are such central topics in Jewish history, collective memory and the Israeli education system, one would think that we would be the first to recognize such acts happening in our own backyard.

Apparently not.

Rather, it seems that the recent influx of migrants from Africa and their “taking over” of “our” cities has created a blind spot in our national conscious. Sadly, the riots in south Tel Aviv have demonstrated that nearly a century later, some of us are no better than our former European and Russian hosts who wanted nothing more than for us to leave their country.

Is it a blind spot or is it a newly clarified vision? Ironically, it would appear that I have less problem with Israelis who wish to maintain a Jewish state than some Jews. I do, however, take exception to those who actively oppose the idea of Israel or any other country being permitted to preserve its primary national identity by closing itself off to migrational waves, and American Jews are only a small, if vocal, percentage of a broad range of globalist multiculturalists who oppose that right. I have to give some credit to Feldman and others who would have Israel abide by the same principles that they insist other countries should obey, even though I think they are mistaken and that both the current Israelis are, and the historical non-Jewish nations were, operating fully within their rights to refuse to permit foreign nationals to dwell among them. That doesn’t justify pogroms or violence, of course, merely the peaceful deportation of foreigners to their former country or nation of origin.

On a related note, Chelm Wiseman has begun to respond to my first point, first with what he terms a primer on Jewish immigration views, followed by a post contemplating the four different types of residents and his perspective on a country’s responsibility to them. I don’t fully agree with his perspective, but it is far closer to mine than one might imagine, as he asserts “I believe that a sovereign state has the right to determine who resides within its borders, although that comes with some limitations.”

The devil, of course, being in the details of those limitations, which we shall no doubt discuss in future posts. However, I think the issue of the observed Jewish hypocrisy on the issue of immigration is quite easily explained, and without resorting to any bizarre collectivist theories. The fact of the matter is that until very recently, the Jewish perspective on immigration was entirely shaped by their 2,000-year experience as migrants, with no sense of ownership in a geographically established location or even a viable, self-sustaining society to call their own. Now finally they’ve got one again, so naturally, their perspective has begun changing in precisely the same way that a worker promoted into management has no choice but to begin to understand that the past decisions of management are not necessarily based in pure evil, avarice, and hatred for the working class, but are much more often the necessary consequences of events.

Of course, this process of promotion-based perspective-broadening is often intellectually painful, as it usually involves giving up long cherished myths, some of which have sustained the worker and perhaps even driven him to the success that led to his promotion. One would hope that the Jews of Israel can learn from the mistakes of those who historically sought to defend their nations from the influence of unwanted foreigners even as they begin to understand the reasoning of those who deported their ancestors long ago. There will always be some who hate Jews for one reason or another, but I suspect many Israelis, especially those in positions of responsibility for the continued survival of their country, will soon understand, assuming they do not already, that most of the nations that expelled their ancestors harbored no more intrinsic hate for the Jews than modern Israelis harbor intrinsic hate for the Sudanese now in their midst. A desire to live among one’s own kind and protect one’s own people from dissolution and eventual destruction by foreign influences is not hate, but rather love. It is love for one’s people, and love for their culture, language, and traditions. This is a concept that Jews should understand and respect as well as anyone.

WND column

De Facto Marriage

It is no secret that marriage has been on the decline in the United States even as illegitimacy is on the rise. The problem is obvious: No-fault divorce combined with abusive child support and post-marital support laws has increased the incentive for women to end marriages while simultaneously driving up the cost of ending them to men. As economics would predict, providing incentives for ending marriages to women has increased the percentage of women ending them, while increasing the potential cost of marriage has decreased the number of men willing to take the risk. As is the case with so many government actions, the laws intended to revise marriage, beginning with the California Family Law Act of 1969, were predicated on static human behavior and failed to take into account their own influence on how men and women would subsequently behave

The anti-abortion trend

One of the informative things about those who draw conclusions from purely linear poll-based trends is that they do so on a very selective basis. For some inexplicable reason, we’re supposed to believe that legal gay “marriage” is inevitable because more people – though still less than half based on most polls – support it than before, and yet an abortion ban is impossible even though the anti-abortion trend is not only every bit as clear, but is also supported by demographic logic.

About four in 10 Americans said they support abortion rights in a new Gallup poll — the lowest figure recorded by the organization since it began asking the question in 1995. Fully half of Americans, meanwhile, told Gallup they were against abortion rights.

Of course, the more stories like this one of murdered little girls being literally thrown to the dogs leak out into the press, and the more third-worlders enter the country and begin to exercise their feminist “right to choose” by aborting baby girls, the stronger the anti-abortion movement will grow.

A failure in condescension

In which SFWA President-for-Life John Scalzi’s misguided attempt to curry favor with the non-white, non-male portion of the population is shown to be conclusively wrong by his very own selected metrics:

I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies.

So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it?

Being a white guy who likes women, here’s how I would do it:

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

Now, let me first point out that John is not a bad guy. He’s actually remarkably low on the obnoxious left-liberal scale for a science fiction writer, much less a successful one, and there is no question that he means well. That being said, he’s about as socio-sexually Gamma as it is possible to be and still be straight, and for someone whose communication skills are quite high, he’s uncharacteristically oblivious to what a condescending little fuck this post makes him appear to be. But it’s only an illusion, as the reality is that Scalzi is actually engaging in a brilliant subversion.

This will, of course, escape most readers. I suspect the average straight white man who actually works for a living rather than sitting around making up stories primarily for the benefit of obese middle-aged women aren’t terribly inclined to be lectured by an overweight, educated, soft-handed little man about how easy they have it. Let’s look at his metaphor of the difficulty setting, which as a gamer, game producer, and game designer I am rather well suited to examine.

First, I note that he is clearly referring to a snapshot in time. Straight white men didn’t have it any easier than, for example, straight brown men back in the age of the Pharoahs, nor will they have it easier should China defeat the USA in 2050. So, the metrics have to refer to today, now, not what life was like in 500 BC, 1850, or 2050. Having established that, let’s look at the measures he specifically notes and see how many of them are true:

1. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower.
2. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly.
3. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for.
4. The game is easier to play, automatically
5. When you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

1. This is clearly false. There is copious evidence showing that Scalzi has it completely wrong here. Who is permitted to graduate from high school or college while doing sub-standard work, a black individual or a white one? Who is permitted to skate in the workplace more often, men or women? For whom are the standards reduced more often, white men or non-white men?

2. This is also generally false; Scalzi’s perspective here is likely skewed from his professional involvement in the literary and Hollywood worlds, where connections matter far more than experience or achievement. But unless your father owns the cleaning company, the average white male janitor or white male sales guy is not going to level up any more quickly than anyone else, in fact, there is considerable statistical evidence that proves women are promoted much more quickly than men in corporate America. One need only look at news broadcasts to see an example of this; one never sees a twenty-two year old man reading the news. Note that the median age of female newscasters is 26, six years younger than male newscasters.

3. This is true, but irrelevant and misleading. Scalzi simply ignores that white men created the desirable parts of the map where everyone wants to go. There is no straight white male privilege in Zimbabwe because their existence is strongly frowned upon… and what was once the wealthy colony of Rhodesia is now a third-world hellhole. Scalzi has his causation backwards here, it would be more relevant and historically correct to say that white men create more desirable parts of the map than others. If he seriously wishes to dispute this, I suggest he move away from his lily-white Midwestern exurbia into a more vibrant community such as South-Central Los Angeles, downtown Detroit, or post-Apartheid Yeoville. It should come as no surprise that straight white men happen to be better at playing the game of Western Civilization than anyone else. They’re probably less naturally accomplished at the Grass Hut Game, the Aesthetic Stasis Game, or the Naked Savage Orgy Game.

4. Is the game easier to play or are the players intrinsically more skilled? Scalzi simply makes a naked assertion without offering any support for it. Since the game is the same and the rules are the same, logic favors the idea that any quantitative advantage to the straight white male in this regard stems from the way in which the characters points are distributed more efficiently rather than the game setting.

5. This is obviously untrue. The research on the male inclination to ask for, and accept, help clearly demonstrates that it is women who find help much easier to get. The ease with which women and minorities are permitted to exercise free association while white men are not proves that help is much harder for them to get than for others.

So, ironically enough, subversively enough, Scalzi not only fails to make his case, but by his own chosen metrics, winds up demonstrating that it is women who are playing on the lowest difficulty setting, not men. One would think that was obvious, given how they live longer, work less, and have far more options open to them. As for the straight question, that’s not even relevant, since homosexuality is not the equivalent of a difficulty setting, but rather, being left-handed and choosing to play with your left hand on a right-handed controller. It’s understandable why someone might make that decision, but the controller is what it is and it works a lot better if you simply use your non-dominant hand.