Tag: society

Nicholas Kristof is correct to say that men should not be written off, but for the wrong reasons:

With women making far-reaching gains, there’s a larger question. Are women simply better-suited than men to today’s jobs? The Atlantic raised this issue provocatively in this month’s issue with a cover story by Hanna Rosin bluntly entitled, “The End of Men.”

“What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” Ms. Rosin asked. She adds: “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today — social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not predominately male. In fact, the opposite may be true.”

It’s a fair question, and others also have been wondering aloud if a new age of femininity is dawning. After all, Ms. Rosin notes that Americans who use high-tech biology to try to pick a baby’s sex seek a girl more often than a boy. And women now make up 51 percent of professional and managerial positions in America, up from 26 percent in 1980.

This demonstrates the problem with the linear thinker. Those who see the transformation of the workforce and academia into female-majority populations are assuming that the present post-industrial system is sustainable. But it isn’t. It’s true that women will continue to collect more and more worthless degrees than men and fill more and more needless paper-shifting jobs than men right up until the point at which a debt-laden society can no longer afford to pay for people to learn nothing and do nothing.

A private sector job which exists solely to comply with government-dictated paperwork is every bit as government-manufactured and unproductive as a public sector job. And that is precisely the type of job which is going to disappear entirely once the debt edifice collapses and the extent of the dollar-denominated imaginary economy is revealed. Just as stripping out the debt-funded component of GDP reveals that there has been no actual economic growth for decades, stripping out the paperwork jobs will demonstrate that the real labor force is still roughly 2/3rd male, just as it was in 1950.

Note for the historically illiterate. Women have ALWAYS worked. One-third of the labor force has ALWAYS been female. A more accurate description of “women in the workplace” is “middle-class mothers in the workplace”. The idea of the American stay-at-home mother was always a fundamentally middle-class one, and now, thanks to the increase in the labor supply combined with increasing taxes, most middle-class couples require two incomes in order to stay middle-class.

And the idea that the few Americans (300 million) who use sex selection technology to choose girls are going to counterbalance the millions of Chinese and Indians (2.3 billion) who use it to select boys is obviously absurd.

The non-linear thinker is forced to contemplate very different questions. Rather than occupy himself with asking if men are at an end or will be employable in a world of government-dictated make-work, he is forced to ask when the inevitable employment and academic collapse will take place in America and when the war between China and India, never officially ended, will resume. In other words, is it the end of men or the end of a societal trend?

If you want to know why there is no hope for America, it is because “conservatives” like Roger Simon have successfully managed to put themselves forward as the Right when in fact they are, and have always been, nothing more than the right side of the Left:

When I was young, early twenties, I felt tremendous guilt about what happened to black people in this country, even though my family arrived here fifty years after the freeing of the slaves and were themselves escaping the pogroms of Europe. Those feelings — and a sense of what was right, of course — propelled me into the civil rights movement and I am very proud to have participated. When I moved to Los Angeles and began making money in Hollywood, I still wanted to do something and started to help finance the Black Panther Breakfast Program. The Panthers did seem a bit on the tough side, but somehow I thought it was the right thing to do. Those kids in Watts were hungry, weren’t they? The “black supremacy thing” was just a “phase.”

Well, soon enough it became obvious that I was wrong. The supremacy thing was the least of it. Or a charade. The Panthers were thugs. Even worse, they were murderers and drug dealers. Worst of all, they were a horrible example to their community, a straight line ticket to oblivion.

And when I look at the videos of the New Black Panthers menacing voters in front of the polling place, I see the same thing, the same guys. Any African-American who really cared about his people would want those thugs prosecuted. He wouldn’t want them on the street as am example to the children of the community.

Mr. Simon, you are as wrong today as you were wrong then. You clearly haven’t learned anything about tribal loyalties since you were so magnanimously attempting to structurally alter the very place that offered your family a place of refuge. The easily verifiable fact is that despite your totally irrelevant opinion about what African-Americans should care about or think, no African-American wants to see a few Black Panthers prosecuted for voter intimidation any more than he wanted to see OJ found guilty of murder.

Mr. Simon’s personal history offers a very clear case against the immigration he supports. Notice that he is actually proud of having worked to increase Federal power while successfully weakening individual property rights and the Constitutional right to free association. As Hayek pointed out regarding “social justice”, “civil rights” are not and cannot be unalienable rights endowed by a Creator. They are nothing more than politically inspired, government-granted privileges. While a small amount of immigration can certainly strengthen a society, mass immigration does nothing but alter, weaken, and eventually destroy it. There is no “strength through diversity”, only “conquest through division” a fact that most of history’s great conquerors have known and utilized. You will note that the diversity and immigration advocates never cite any historical examples for the obvious reason that migration, as mass immigration is more accurately labled, has long been the death knell of the societies inundated by it.

For those who missed it before, I note that “the melting pot” is ahistorical fiction written by a hypocritical Zionist and no one who cites it as some sort of societal ideal should be taken any more seriously than a guy wearing a red Star Trek uniform and calling for the establishment of the United Federation of Planets. Moreover, the melting pot ideal is at its core nothing more than the usual utopian Marxist transnationalism: “Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man.”

It is always heroic to rescue a child. But to “rescue” a woman from “violence against women”? Sometimes, but by no means always. Even the police know that intervening in a domestic situation is dangerously stupid given the roughly 50/50 chance that the woman initiated the violence:

A Good Samaritan who tried to help a stranger being hit by her husband was badly beaten after the man turned on him. Matthew Leone has a broken jaw and one third of his skull has been removed because his brain is swollen after he was beaten earlier this week.

I am totally opposed to the “chivalrous” notions that “you should never hit a woman” and “violence against women is absolutely disgusting”. What does that make violence against men, peachy keen? Either violence is acceptable or it isn’t, and I firmly believe that the Dragon motto of “start nothing, finish everything” applies universally. If a woman is dumb enough to escalate conflict to a physical level with a larger, stronger, and faster opponent, then she absolutely merits any subsequent beating that she takes. People always focus on the “finish everything” half, but the more important one is “start nothing”. Now, if I am attacked, I may choose not to retaliate on the basis of my Christian principles, but that has nothing to do with the sex of the attacker. A decision to let a physical assault pass is my choice and that choice doesn’t negate my absolute self-defense right to respond to the initiation of violence with incapacitating violence.

This doesn’t mean that one should never intervene in a violent situation, but that if one is going to intervene, one must do so in precisely the same manner that one would intervene if two men were fighting. That’s precisely why the police usually handcuff both parties involved first, then attempt to sort the matter out once everyone has been incapacitated. As I have mentioned before, you should never intervene in any violent situation unless you are absolutely certain that an even greater level of violence is justified in stopping it. If one man is stabbing another, then go ahead and blow his head off. If one woman is smashing another woman’s face against the floor, then go ahead and break her wrists. But if all you’re going to do is demand the bigger party – which isn’t necessarily the guilty party – relax while you strike a moral pose at them, you shouldn’t be terribly surprised when you wind up in the hospital.

And given the fact that the woman wasn’t injured and the husband was only charged with a misdemeanor, it’s pretty obvious that the white knight’s intervention not only wasn’t necessary in this case, but actually made a bad situation worse. I tend to doubt that the woman is going to appreciate her husband being needlessly put away in prison for 3-5 years.

This is the greatest song about the police since NWA’s epic anthem and actually serves to justify Kesha’s existence on the planet. There has never been a police state without police.

The pace of American decline and fall picks up:

An analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center, being released Friday, documents the changes in fertility rates that are driving government projections that U.S. minorities will become the majority by midcentury. The figures show that among all women ages 40-44, about 18 percent, or 1.9 million, were childless in 2008. That’s up from 10 percent, or nearly 580,000 in 1976. Broken down by race, roughly 20 percent of white women are childless, compared with 17 percent of blacks and of Hispanics and 16 percent of Asians.

20 percent of white American women are childless, and 28 percent of the children who are born to them are illegitimate. Assuming an equal distribution of childbirths among women who have children for simplicity’s sake, this suggests that white American women have around a 42% probability of being either childless or a single mother. And since both the childless and illegitimacy rates are rising rapidly, it’s probably more like a one-in-two chance for the average young woman today.

Needless to say, that is not the hallmark of a self-sustaining society. Unfortunately, there have been no winners in the long-running American war against men, and it is children who have been the biggest losers. And from the economic perspective, these demographic patterns strengthen the probability of debt-default, as children who were never born, fatherless criminals, and immigrants of non-Western heritage are not likely to be willing to pay for the massive debts incurred by aging white people.

Fred goes somewhat astray in diagnosing Commentator’s Disease:

Liberal commentators want everyone to go to college, when about a fifth of people have the brains. Conservatives think that people can rise by hard work and sacrifice as certainly many people have. Thing is, most people can’t. Commentators only see those who made it…. The tendency of the Beltway 99th to live in an imaginary world, of conservatives to think that everybody can be a Horatio Alger, of liberals to believe that inequality arises from discrimination, guarantees wretched policy. Those who can do almost anything need to recognize the existence of those who can do almost nothing. Few of the latter are parasites. The waitress has worked all her life, as has the truck driver. They ended up with nothing.

First, Fred is mistaken in thinking that most of the commentariat possesses IQs over 140. Speaking as someone who actually does have an IQ over 140 and has suffered through numerous interactions with many members of the commentariat, most of them are barely Mensa material, if that. While Pat Buchanan and Charles Krauthammer are both highly intelligent, they are actually somewhat unusual; there is a reason that media figures seldom write more than two books that are little more than collections of their past columns. Furthermore, many of the books “written” by big name media figures are actually ghostwritten. For example, Rush Limbaugh’s second book was actually written by Joseph Farah.

Second, while Fred is correct about the liberal misapprehension regarding the utility of college education, there are few, if any, conservatives who think that everyone can be Horatio Alger. Fred, being somewhat soft-hearted, doesn’t understand that both libertarians and conservatives accept failure and have little desire to try to rescue people from themselves or the natural consequences of their bad decisions. This isn’t because they don’t know that life is hard, but because they understand the futility of fostering dependency.

Finally, abstract theory matters because its application has great effect on the lives of the elite and the great unwashed alike. And Keynesianism, in particular, matters because the long run has finally arrived.