Tag: society

Lest you think my view of the Rule of Law being dead in America is unjustified:

Ohio’s highest court has ruled that a person may be convicted of speeding purely if it looked to a police officer that the motorist was going too fast. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that an officer’s visual estimation of speed is enough to support a conviction if the officer is trained, certified by a training academy, and experienced in watching for speeders. The court’s 5-1 decision says independent verification of a driver’s speed is not necessary.

With this helpful new judicial technique, I have no doubt that crime clearance and conviction rates will skyrocket, making for a safer, crime-free America! This is practically a perfect example of subjective law. Why even bother with actual written speed limits at this point when we can simply leave it to the discretion of the favored class to decide who is going too fast at any given moment.

Clayton Cramer explains:

When I was in elementary school, I had very few classmates who were even chubby. There was one kid out of 400 in my elementary school who would be considered fat (and probably not even obese)—and he was from Turkey. There are many causes of the increasing obesity problem, and this article focuses on one very substantial cause—but let me emphasize that it is not the only cause—just one that liberals caused.

One of the advantages kids had back then was mothers who were home, and actively involved in child rearing. Even mothers who had to work full-time (like mine) still managed to play an active role in encouraging healthy dietary habits. I was limited to one soft drink a day. Dinner included reasonable portions of meat, a starch, and vegetables—and as much as I hated overcooked vegetables, I was expected to eat them. Desserts were infrequent in our house—perhaps once a week. Nearly every other kid that I knew came from a similar home, with parents making similar efforts to encourage self-discipline and healthy eating….

This transformation didn’t just “happen.” It was the result of a conscious decision by liberals to actively promote the idea that no woman was really “fulfilled” unless she had a full-time career—and staying home and raising kids wasn’t part of the career track. Through active propaganda campaigns and passage of laws banning sex discrimination in employment, liberals destroyed the postwar social consensus that a man would normally be the primary breadwinner. Part of what helped destroy that postwar consensus was that there were a lot of well-educated women who wanted to be more than just mothers. Another factor was the rise of no-fault divorce, which made it much easier for guys to dump their families. Women who had been content to be homemakers now had no choice but full-time employment.

I recall that there were two fat kids in my high school graduating class of 160, and only the girl was obese. And while it’s been some time since I was last in the USA, but I distinctly remember desperately looking around for a harpoon until I realized that evolution works too slowly for all of the grotesque, waddling creatures I saw to be land whales.

Just one more aspect of societal decline for which feminism is to blame. And what was the benefit, again?

I find it remarkable that so many men here have demonstrated such a difficult time understanding that being a social outsider, for whatever reason, does not in itself have anything to do with the social category I describe as sigma. It’s really not a difficult concept once you understand that the Game theoreticians, with their binary score/no score perspective, would consider sigmas to be a sub-category of alpha. Remember, their whole goal is to a) educate men about the realities of female behavior and b) teach betas to simulate alpha behavior in order to have a better chance of achieving their goals, whatever those goals might be. So, the more refined categories are unnecessary for their purposes even though a few of the synthetic alpha techniques they recommend are more reminiscent of sigma behavior than alpha dominance.

Perhaps an image of a social scene might help better illustrate the categories in a manner everyone will comprehend.

Alpha: The tall, good-looking guy who is the center of male and female attention. The classic star of the football team who is dating the prettiest cheerleader. The successful business executive with the beautiful, stylish wife. All the women are attracted to him, all the men want to be him or at least his friend. At a social gathering like a party, he’s usually the loud guy telling self-flattering stories to whom several attractive women are listening with big, interested eyes. Alphas are only interested in women to the extent that they exist for the alpha’s gratification, physical and psychological.

Beta: The good-looking guys who aren’t as uniformly attractive or dominant as the Alpha, but are nevertheless confident, attractive to women, and do well with them. At the party, they are the loud guy’s friends who showed up with the alcohol and who are flirting with the tier one women and pairing up with the tier two women. Betas tend to genuinely like women and view them in a somewhat optimistic manner, but they don’t have total illusions about them either.

Deltas: The normal guys. They can’t attract the most attractive women, usually aim for the second-tier women with very limited success, and stubbornly resist paying attention to all of the third-tier women who are reasonably in their league. This is ironic, because deltas would almost always be happier with their closest female equivalents. When a delta does manage to land a second-tier woman, he is constantly afraid that she will lose interest in him and so he will, not infrequently, drive her into the very loss of interest he fears by his non-stop dancing attendance upon her. This is the vast majority of men. In a social setting, these are the men clustered together in groups, each of them making the occasional foray towards various small gaggles of women before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and engaged responses are not forthcoming. Deltas tend to put the female sex on pedestals and have overly optimistic expectations of them; if a man talks about his better half or is an inveterate White Knight, he’s probably a delta. They like women, but find them confusing and are a little afraid of them.

Gammas: The outsiders, the unusual ones, the unattractive, and all too often the bitter. Often intelligent, reliably unsuccessful with women, and not uncommonly all but invisible to them, the gamma alternates between placing women on pedestals and hating the entire sex mostly depending upon whether an attractive woman happened to notice his existence or not that day. These are the guys who obsess over individual women for extended periods of time; gammas supply the ranks of stalkers, psycho-jealous ex-boyfriends, and the authors of excruciatingly narcissistic doggerel. In the unlikely event they are at the party, they are in the corner muttering darkly about the behavior of everyone else there… sometimes to themselves. Gammas tend to have have a worship/hate relationship with women which is directly tied to their current situation.

Omega: The truly unfortunate ones. The losers who were never in the game. Sometimes creepy, sometimes damaged, often clueless, and always undesirable. They’re not at the party. It would never have crossed anyone’s mind to invite them in the first place. Omegas are either totally indifferent to women or hate them with a borderline homicidal fury.

Sigma: The outsiders who don’t play the social game and manage to win at it anyhow. The alphas hate sigmas because they are the only men who don’t accept or at least acknowledge their social dominance. (NB: Alphas absolutely hate to be laughed at and a sigma can enrage an alpha by simply smiling at him.) Everyone else is vaguely confused by them. At the party, it’s the guy who stops by to say hello to a few friends accompanied by a tier one girl that no one has ever seen before. Sigmas often like women, but also tend to be contemptuous of them.

So, hopefully that makes everything a little more clear. To me, it is lunacy to attempt to describe yourself in some manner that you think is “better”. No one cares what you think you are and your opinion about your place in the social hierarchy is the one that matters least. There is no good or bad here, there is only what is observable social interaction. Alphas seemingly rule the roost and yet they live in a world of constant conflict and hierarchical testing. Sigmas usually acquired their outsider status the hard way; one doesn’t become immune to the social hierarchy by virtue of mass popularity in one’s childhood. Betas… okay, betas actually have it pretty good. But the salient point is that you can’t improve your chances of success in the social game if you begin by attempting to deceive yourself as to where you stand vis-a-vis everyone else around you.

In which the New York Times’s best liberal writer flirts with the idea of reviving Western imperialism after belatedly discovering that not everyone is inclined to behave like an upper middle class liberal New Yorker:

Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, found that the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.

Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.

Naturally, Kristof thinks the idea is to give – GIVE – women more control. How very white and neo-colonial of him to decide how Africans should live their lives. And, as PJ Tobia, who is not PJ O’Rourke, points out, they already have control, indeed, the African social system appears to be arranged so that women can keep their men happily occupied with doing nothing but drink while leaving them free to get the work done.

The best part about all of this is that these guys are able to sit around long enough to get drunk on a drink that has almost no alcohol content. For one thing, their wives know exactly where they are, whom they are with, and what they are doing, and don’t have a big problem with it. For another, as these men sit and drink, the village comes to them. Boys will make the rounds of each Chibuku bar, selling cigarettes. A village woman will arrive with pieces of meat on a skewer or hardboiled eggs with little baggies of salt and hot-pepper flakes on the side. Down the street someone may be roasting corn or making maize fritters. The whole community does their part so the drinking can continue uninterrupted.

In short, the drinkers of Africa have it made. Sure, they have no healthcare, the literacy rate is among the lowest in the world, and December through March is the “famine season,” but they can drink and hang with their friends pretty much all day. Also, the word “nag” doesn’t even exist in any of the more than two-dozen languages spoken in the region.

What rural African regions lack in material wealth, infrastructure, and modern conveniences, they more than make up for in drunken leisure time.

When you put it that way, it’s clear there are worse ways to spend your life. Raise your carton of Chibuku and drink to great grass hut matriarchy!

To the extent that one can have an opinion on a generation, I have always felt negative about the baby boomers in a way that I simply don’t feel about any other generation. And it’s not due to my feelings about my parents either. I always thought their “never trust anyone over 30” slogan was remarkably stupid; even as a child it was clear to me that it is a philosophy with a time limit. In his article, The Technicality Generation, Larry Pressler offers an explanation for why doubts about the baby boomers, particularly the elite ones, tend to be well justified:

THE problems faced by Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general, over his depiction of his military service are indicative of a broader disease in our society. The issues of integrity in business and politics that plague us today — the way elites are no longer trusted — are rooted in the dishonesty that surrounded the Vietnam-era draft….

In private conversations with my classmates, I was told over and over that they didn’t want to serve in the military because it would hold up their careers. To the outside world, though, many would proclaim they weren’t going because they were opposed to the war and we should end all wars. Eventually they began to believe their “idealism” was superior to that of those who did serve. They said that it was courageous to resist the draft — something that would have been true if they had actually become conscientious objectors and gone to prison.

Too many in my generation did a deeply insidious thing. And they got away with it. Big time. Poorer people went to war. The men who didn’t were able to get their head start to power.

Now that flawed thinking has been carried forward.

Despite being raised to revere the Marine Corps and being an lifelong student of military history, I don’t fault those who were genuine conscientious objectors. They were right to resist the draft, right to refuse to serve in an illegitimate and undeclared war, and their willingness to go to jail rather than play the technicality game or serve as an armed slave of the state was more heroic than anything the civil rights leaders ever did in their manifest self-interest.

And yes, conservatives, the Vietnam War was not only unjust, it didn’t even rise to the level of an actual war. You will have to show me the declaration of war if you want to even try to defend it.

As, apparently, do the police lies:

An attorney for the family of a 7-year-old girl who was killed by a police officer’s bullet during a weekend raid at their home said Monday that he saw video of the raid that contradicts the police department’s version of what happened.

Attorney Geoffrey Fieger said he watched three or four minutes of video that showed police fired into the home after lobbing a flash grenade through the window. He said this contradicts the police department’s story, which was that the officer’s gun discharged during a struggle or collision inside the home with the girl’s grandmother.

You know it is getting bad when people start automatically assuming that the police version is false. I don’t know about you, but it never even crossed my mind that the “struggle with grandma” story could possibly be true.

Ban SWAT. They are conclusively proven to be more dangerous to American children than al Qaeda, the Taliban, Iran, and pit bulls combined.