Tag: society

Mailvox: an American in Europe

A reader visits Italy and discovers that what I’ve been saying about the very distinct European nations is true:

This being my first time in Europe I noticed right away that I had been working with a mental blind spot that I think most/all Americans who have never been abroad are likely suffering under.  Maybe it’s the homogenization of the ethnicities in the US, or maybe just the ubiquitous “we’re all the same” message that we’re fed so much that we notice it no more than the fish notice the water, but I was surprised – more like shocked – at how obvious the ethnic differences were between the European peoples.  We spent a lot of time at major tourist sites, so we were constantly awash in a polyglot.

Besides English I can only speak a smattering of Spanish, but merely identifying the various languages is pretty easy.  I began playing a mental game of “guess the ethnicity” and was surprised at how accurate I became. I would see a family group and try to guess where they were from based on their physical appearance and behavior, before hearing them speak.  It was easy to be right 50%+ of the time after just a few days.

To untraveled Americans, I think the ubiquitous mental image of the European countries is analogous to “states” in the connotative sense, not the denotative one.  Other than the fact that they speak different languages, we picture each of them as being as ethnically diverse as California.  Maybe it’s not true for everyone, but for me at least it was an eye opener to see that I could frequently distinguish between a Frenchman and an Italian even though they likely lived less than 700 miles apart.  In fact the only people I could rarely guess the nationality of correctly were Americans, as I’d frequently assume they were British, German, or Nordic.

I find it quite easy to spot the Americans myself. They tend to be fatter and louder than anyone else, and they are the only ones besides Africans who wear white sneakers. They also have whiter and straighter teeth.

What people living in the USA tend to forget is that their imported nationalities are all watered down now. Virtually no one is pure Irish or Swedish or Italian anymore, and so the US facial features tend to be a little blurred in comparison with the sharper features of their distant Old World cousins. In fact, here one can not infrequently identify what town an individual comes from on the basis of their facial appearance alone.

Of course, given my complicated background, I can very easily pass for anything from Bavaria south. One of my hobbies is explaining my excellent, unaccented English to American tourists in need of assistance.

“Thank you so much. I spent three years studying to be a rodeo clown at the University of Idaho.”

On a tangential note, it’s hard to believe, but the USA is even more cucked than Sweden. Keep that in mind every time you hear people intoning that Europe is doomed. The situation in the USA is worse by nearly every single measure.

Vox’s First Law in action

The Left has three insults and one joke. The insults:

  1. You’re stupid.
  2. You’re evil.
  3. You’re irrelevant.

The one joke:

  1. Do you know that guy? He’s stupid.

It’s painful to see left-wing comedians attempt to do political humor. Guess what Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump have in common?

You guessed it. They’re stupid. You can literally take old jokes about Gerald Ford, change the name to Donald Trump, and they’ll be the same as today’s jokes about Trump. And these people genuinely believe they are the smart ones.

The crucial question

Fred Reed asks one of the most important questions of tomorrow’s post-economics society:

The first crucial question of coming decades: Who is going to buy the stuff pouring from robotic factories?

The current notion is that when a yoyo factory automates and lays off most of its workers, they will find other well-paid jobs and continue to buy yoyos. But as well-paid jobs everywhere go automated, where will the money come from to buy yoyos? Today participation in the work force is at all- time lows and we have a large and growing number of young who, unable to find good jobs, live with their parents. They are not buying houses or renting apartments. (They may, given the intellectual level of today’s young, be buying yoyos.)

Enthusiasts of the free market say that I do not understand economics, that there will always be work for people who want to work. But there isn’t. There won’t be. There is less all the time. Again, look at the falling participation in the work force, the growing numbers in part-time badly paid jobs. Short of governmentally imposed minimums, wages are determined by the market, meaning that if a robot works for a dollar an hour, a human will have to work for ninety-five cents an hour to compete , or find a job a robot can’t do–and these get scarcer.

From a businessman’s point of view, robots are superb employees. They don’t strike, demand raises, call in sick, get disgruntled and do a sloppy job, or require benefits. Building factories that are robotic from the gitgo means not having to lay workers off, which is politically easier than firing existing workers. Using robots obviates the Chinese advantage in wages, especially if America can make better robots–good for companies, but not for workers in either country. That is, production may return to the US, but jobs will not. In countries with declining populations, having robots do the work may reduce the attractiveness of importing uncivilizable bomb-chucking morons from the bush world.

A second crucial question: What will we do with people who have nothing to do? This has been a hidden problem for a long time, solved to date by child-labor laws, compulsory attendance in high school, the growth of universities as holding tanks, welfare populations, and vast bureaucracies of people who pretend to be employed. Few of these do anything productive, but are supported and kept off the job market by the rest of us. But there are limits to the capacity of Starbuck’s to soak up college graduates. (The economic fate of America may depend on our consumption of overpriced coffee.)

As time goes on and fewer and fewer people can find work, and particularly the less intelligent, something will have to give. We won’t see it coming. We never see anything coming. Businessmen will observe productivity going up and labor costs going down. What could be wrong with that? Businessmen do not concern themselves with social questions. Methinks, however, that social questions are about to concern themselves with businessmen.

As standards of living decrease, unrest will come.

My father and I first began discussing this back in 1985. I remember it well, as we were driving to his office together after I’d helped him take one of the family cars into the car dealership for servicing.

“I employ over 100 people,” he said. “And how many of them actually do anything? How many of them sit in an office looking at paper? That’s what they do. That’s what I do. But except for a few people like the guy at the dealership who will fix the car, no one is really doing anything.”

And that was at a company that had been named to the Inc 500 for the second straight year.

The Information Society was supposed to replace the Industrial Society, and we all know how well that has worked. Very, very well for some, not so well for most. People didn’t find alternative employment so much as they were provided make-work jobs and kept in school for four to eight more years.

Now the Robotic Society is replacing the Information Society and the ability to disguise both the lack of employment and the lack of need of employment is rapidly vanishing. The fundamental falsity of increasingly outdated economics models are also becoming apparent; no conventional model can survive the near-complete replacement of labor with capital.

Diversity, discovered

White American left-liberals at the Washington Post belatedly discover that the Indians and the Chinese aren’t exactly fond of Africans, despite them all being “minorities”:

China and India have a huge problem with racism toward black people

Just minutes before his birthday, Masonda Ketanda Olivier was beaten to death. The Congolese national was confronted by a mob of men late at night last Friday in New Delhi and killed. Police said the incident was a dispute over the hiring of an autorickshaw; Olivier’s friend, an Ivorian national, said it was a clear hate crime, with racial epithets repeatedly invoked.

This week, irate African diplomats in the Indian capital pointed to Olivier’s murder as evidence of wider discrimination and bigotry against black people who visit and live in India. Olivier, who reports indicate was about to turn 24, was teaching French.

“The Indian government is strongly enjoined to take urgent steps to guarantee the safety of Africans in India including appropriate programmes of public awareness that will address the problem of racism and Afro-phobia in India,” Alem Tsehage, the Eritrean ambassador and the diplomat representing other African envoys in New Delhi, said in a statement. They also warned against new batches of African students enrolling in Indian universities.

On the same day, on the other side of the Himalayas, an ad for a Chinese laundry detergent went viral. It is shockingly racist: The video, which you can watch above, shows a fetching Chinese woman lure a paint-stained, lascivious African man toward her. She briefly toys with him before shoving a detergent capsule into his mouth and him into the machine. Out emerges a fresh-faced Chinese man, looking sparkling white and clean.

I’m looking forward to the American Left’s reaction when they finally discover that Hispanics in general, and Mexicans in particular, despise blacks more than the KKK ever did. White progressives really are that stupid, and that ignorant, about the minorities they love to champion.

When I lived in Japan, the Japanese openly referred to blacks as “monkeys” and made it clear that they were not even “gaijin”. And the Chinese superiority complex is considerably more entrenched than any of the European ones ever were; they still consider Europeans to be technologically advanced barbarians. Remember, both Japanese and Chinese cultures knowingly turned their backs on technological advancement in the name of societal stability, and there are certainly some increasingly strong arguments on that score.

In light of the observably deleterious consequences of the US and European wars on racism, I’d be very surprised if the Indians and Chinese didn’t come to the conclusions that even the most virulent racism is considerably better than having your nation invaded by Africans.

What society do you think functions better, a racist, ethnically homogeneous society with intact families or a diverse, ethnically heterogeneous society with the vast majority children being born illegitimate and raised without fathers? Which society do you prefer?

Those are the options presently on offer.

Should women vote?

Louise Mensch and I discuss everything from conservative feminism to universal suffrage and Native American intelligence at Heat Street:

Louise:  We’re now debating feminism. Vox, you go first. Hit me with your best shot, as Pat Benatar once said.

Vox:  Okay. Louise, I know that you identify yourself as a feminist, and you also identify yourself as a conservative. Given the connection between feminism and progressive politics, I am curious to know how you rectify those two positions, those two identities.

Louise:  I don’t see that there is any reconciling to be done.  I can’t stand the social justice warrior thing of identify as. I am a feminist. I am a conservative. I said in our last debate to you that conservatism was about equal opportunity, and to me feminism is therefore a subset of conservatism. If conservatism is principally about equal opportunity, personal liberty, free trade, etc, feminism is a subset of that – because feminism argues that men and women should have equal opportunities.

Which is not to say the same opportunities, but equal opportunities. I recognize the biological differences between the sexes. To me there is no distinction between conservatism and feminism, except that feminism is a smaller version of conservatism, it’s a subset of it.

Vox:  I agree that the logic holds. That’s within the logical structure your proposing that that is consistent, but the problem I have with that is that surely an aspect of conservatism is to conserve something. It seems readily apparent to me that feminism is intrinsically incapable of conserving anything from Western civilization, to even a functional, civilized society.

There is more, considerably more, there. Read the whole thing. Then discuss it here, keeping in mind that it is a transcript of a free-flowing conversation and I frequently have absolutely no idea what she’s going to throw at me next.

It’s actually a rather interesting challenge, especially in light of the fact that I know people are going to have hissy fits over anything that is worded in an infelicitious manner.

America is not an idea

And Americans are not proposition people:

The concept of American Exceptionalism is one that on its face would seem to be a healthy one, which is what makes it so pernicious. In practice, American Exceptionalism is a favourite idea of the Glenn Beck crowd. Often what this belief comes down to is that the rules that apply to every country on the planet don’t apply to America, because there’s a piece of paper with ink on it in Washington that claims so.

America isn’t bound by blood like every other nation on the planet. Ethnicity and race may matter everywhere from England to China, but not in America. America, you see, is an exception to these rules, because America was a country created by ideas put forward by the founders. America is a proposition nation, they will tell you. Ideas built America.

This seems to me to be quite the concept! I wonder what it would look like to see Liberty and Equality running around Boston in 1750. How would the Declaration of Independence have managed to push further and further westward, trekking through miles of dense forest, weathering the rain and the snow and the hail, civilizing what was in in effect barren wilderness? What a sight it would be to see ideas clearing forest, laying down railroads, and building canals! I can’t say I have ever seen anything so incredible, but perhaps I would if I took a trip to the propositional nation to the south of me.

Yet, somehow, I doubt it. What mainstream conservatives have largely forgotten is that ideas can shape societies and peoples, but they don’t create them.

It would have been vastly preferable if the Founding Fathers had stuck to the original term – the Rights of Englishmen – rather than trying to make them sound universal for the purposes of rhetoric.

Just to give one example, those who don’t believe in the existence of a Creator God cannot possibly appeal to unalienable rights that stem from Him.

Conservatism and progress are dead ends

A commenter at Steve Sailer’s observes as much:

Social conservatism, which is largely concerned with morals legislation, is essentially dead, and has been since the Supreme Court Lawrence decision in 2003 (as Scalia correctly prophesied.) Thus anyone could have predicted the victory of SSM, and the discovery of all manner of rights in terms of sexuality, since, apparently, one’s membership card in LGBTQQIV2A is the only self-identification that means anything (not race, not religion, not language, not culture: just with whom and how you like to have sex: this includes asexuals of course, the “A” above: there’s another one for Allies.) So Ross can just give up on that. The same pertains to third trimester abortions or anything else, because virtually any attempt to police human conduct (except the ingestion of drugs, of course) can and will be carried into an argument about our innate right to do whatever we want.

Hawkish internationalism is also a dead letter, since we just had a decade or more of foolishly prosecuted wars, and one can (some cynically, I suppose) claim that with the most pressing issues for the DOD being the extension of selective service registration to women, and the integration of transgender drill instructors into the the Marine Corps Recruit Depots, it is highly unlikely that there will be any non-foolishly prosecuted wars in the near or far future.

Free market economics is also dead, since the American economy has already been heavily socialized by a variety of government controls, restrictions, and, most importantly, benefits, which the citizenry (at this point) cannot live without.

So Reagan is dead, so is Reaganism. The only question is what can we do to improve the lot of regular Americans, materially, and what can we do to generate some kind of purpose for our people and our nation.

The correct approach is not to attempt to save, or fix, the United States of America. As I noted back in 2004, it’s dead. It is no more a true nation than Yugoslavia, or South Africa, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire were.

The long term American focus should be on successfully doing what the South Africans failed to do, which is peacefully dividing the empire between the various nations. This will no doubt be difficult for many to accept, but it is what is going to happen anyway, and the sooner that “conservatives” understand that this is the only way to preserve the actual nation, as opposed to the mythical “proposition nation” which is now based on nothing more than Magic Dirt Theory, the more likely it is that they will be able to come away with something sustainable.

The very great irony is that the combination of multiculturalism, feminism, and propositionism is collectively less societally viable than North Korea’s insane political economy. North Korea is a totalitarian nightmare, but it has indubitably remained Korean, in fact, more Korean than England is English or Germany is German.

History demonstrates that a nation can survive evil kings and nightmarish ideologies, but may not be able to survive what many, if not most, in the West today consider “progress”. One really should be inspired to completely reassess one’s ideology when it is observably more societally destructive than Juche.

A judge worthy of the name

I am a harsh critic of the American judiciary. I think it is, structurally speaking, probably the biggest single problem in the USA today besides the immigrant invasion. But even in the morass of political corruption that is the judiciary, there are a few good men worthy of the title they bear:

Sgt. Joseph Serna of the US Army Special Forces was arrested and charged with driving under the influence in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He got probation and entered a treatment program. He had to regularly report to the court on his treatment. During one of those court appearances, he confessed to Judge Lou Olivera that he had lied about a recent urine test.

Judge Olivera was himself a veteran, having served during the Gulf War. He understood that though Serna had broken the law, he was not a criminal by nature.

But he had to do his duty, so Judge Olivera sentenced Serna to spent 24 hours in jail. Then he took off his robe and joined Serna in his cell for the full 24 hours. The Fayetteville Observer reports:

    “Where are we going, judge?” Serna asked.

    “We’re going to turn ourselves in,” Olivera said.

    “He said he was going to stay with me,” Serna said. “I couldn’t process a judge being my cellmate.

    “They take me to the cell, and I’m sitting on my bunk. And, then, in walks the judge.

And then the two veterans talked:

    Mostly, from five in the afternoon on April 13 until 6:30 a.m. the next day, the judge and the veteran talked about their respective military service, Serna’s post-traumatic stress disorder from three tours of duty in Afghanistan and how the inmate could turn around his downward spiral that had resulted in a driving-while-impaired charge and other serious traffic offenses. […]

    “We talked for hours about our families and our military service,” Olivera says. “Our dreams for us and our families, and the road to take us there.”

The judge wanted to help Serna climb out of the hole:

    “I thought about a story that I once read,” Olivera says. “It talked about a soldier with PTSD in a hole,” he says. “A family member, a therapist and a friend all throw down a rope to help the veteran suffering. Finally, a fellow veteran climbs into the hole with him.

    “The soldier suffering with PTSD asks, ‘Why are you down here?’ The fellow veteran replied, ‘I am here to climb out with you.’

 One has the responsibility to do one’s duty. That is one measure of a man. But how one does one’s duty is arguably a more significant measure.

The demand for social dominance

John C. Wright sees through the SJWs and their little speech-policing tactics:

A reader with the euphonious name of Ecreegan hold forth an opinion on the courtesy owed to transvestites, transgendered, and transrationals.

Sometimes there’s no polite option. Tell me, what pronoun do I use for a pre-operative male-to-female transexual? “She” is a lie. “He” is considered highly offensive, and “it” is considered beyond the pale. (I try to use names. The new name is not a lie, even if it doesn’t make any sense.)

I very strongly disagree, so much so that I cannot tell if you are making a joke.

When you say the words “considered highly offensive” I cannot imagine anyone having any right to be offended at such a thing, nor any honest man taking such offense seriously.

Highly? Really?

To the contrary, it is highly offensive even to assert that an honest man should lie like a dog, a lie no one believes and no one can believe, merely to please the arbitrary whims of some petty tyrant trying to demean your soul and rob you of dignity.

The rule in English is that males and male objects are “he”, and persons whose sex is unknown or undetermined is also “he.” One says “he or she” only in a legal document where that degree of precision overwhelms the need for good grammar. Otherwise is it an error. “They” used in a singular merits horsewhipping.

A man who cuts off his penis and has false breasts implanted is not changing his sex, that is, his biological reality, but is attempting to change his social role: he is a man who wants to be treated with the honors and titles of a wife and mother. He also suffers from profound mental illness, so much so that he cuts off parts of his body.

But since the pronoun deals with the sex and not with social roles, he has no right to be offended if he is a “he”.

It is like being offended that A is A or being offended that twice two is four. If twice two were four, then there would be four lights. There are five lights!

More to the point, it is like being offended if a prole says Oceania was allied with Eastasia last year. Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia!

Saying a he is a “he” is not what offends.

The political correction officer is playing a social dominance game with you. He is making himself to be offended with you so that you will obey him.

Precisely. The correct pronoun for both a man and an individual of indeterminate sex is “he”. This is a long-established grammatical rule and also happens to be in line with science. One no more need call an amputated man wearing a dress “a woman” than one need call a costumed man wearing a furry lupine outfit “a wolf”.

One can, of course, quite reasonably elect to indulge one’s friends if one sees fit. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with addressing a friend as “Emperor” if he happens to sincerely believe he is Napoleon. But etiquette does not demand that we automatically defer to the delusions of others.

Mailvox: when is firing justified?

CC asks the wrong question:

Assume an employer discovers he has in his employ a vocal and known racist. Assume the presence of that racist in his employ is hurting his business due to people choosing to no longer do business with him. Is he justified firing the racist?

The answer is to this rhetorical query is, of course, yes? So, is a person who opposes racism justified in calling on people to not do business with an establishment that employs a known racist?

I don’t know why CC is even asking me this question. I believe in, and advocate, free association. That means that an employer can fire any employee for any reason he chooses.

So, I’m absolutely fine with an employer firing a racist simply for being a racist. What I would ask CC is this: is he likewise fine with an employer firing a black for being a black, a Jew for being a Jew, a woman for being a woman, a pregnant woman for being pregnant, a feminist for being a feminist, or a Communist for being a Communist? Because I support all of those hypothetical firings as well, on both logical grounds and on the basis of being protected by the Constitutional right of free association.

What is not fine, however, is those who are not involved attempting to put pressure on the employer to fire the racist, the black, the Jew, the woman, the Communist, etc. because they do not approve of the employee. Remember, Ben Shapiro did not say that he would refuse to hire anyone who is a socialist, he did not say he would not do business with anyone who employs Jews, he said that racists should be hunted down.

That is not free association.  That is not eucivic behavior that is compatible with either civilized society or peaceful coexistence. Society can survive many things, but it cannot survive this aggressive ideological totalitarianism aimed at extinguishing the acknowledgement of observable reality. SJWism is both dyscivic and dyscivilizational.

What SJWs want is thought policing and enforcement. They want certain thoughts protected from criticism and certain other thoughts eliminated. A person who opposes racism can only be justified in calling on people to not do business with an establishment that employs a known racist insofar as anyone else is equally able to call on people not to do business with other establishments for any other reason.

If that’s the war the SJWs want, that’s precisely the war they’ll get. But judging by their frightened response to something as minor as The Complete List of SJW, it seems unlikely that they are genuinely up for it. Because they know, as well as we do, that it is a war they will lose. Badly.