ZMan lays it out.

Yesterday’s post could have been much longer, as there are many angles to the modern American skins game. In the fullness of time, there will be many books written on the subject or at least using it as a launching pad in analyzing the late America collapse. One point of entry is belief. People are believing machines. They will organize themselves around a set of beliefs, even if those beliefs are insane. That is what we are seeing in modern America. Christianity has faded, so something new filled the void.

That something new is a grab bag of ideas borrowed from Cultural Marxism, hung like ornaments on the burnt out husk that is Christian universalism. That is modern Progressivism. Cultural Marxism, by itself, has never made much sense, but inflated with the zeal of universalism, it is a very powerful force in modern society. It certainly does not make a lot of sense and it does not offer anything as pleasing as an afterlife, but for the true believer, it fills the void that Christianity once filled.

That’s most obvious when it comes to race. Progressives are endlessly chanting that race is not real. They are also endlessly chanting that racism is the most dangerous evil spirit in their hierarchy of evil. Most of what is going on today is based in their belief that whites are racists, simply because whites have acted to benefit whites. The trouble for Progs, though, is that this contradicts their support for non-whites. Everywhere you turn, non-whites are out flying their team’s flag and cheering for their side against the honky.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Well, for one thing, he’s a Nazi:

And if they want him to host the Emmys, then the Emmys must be Nazi, too.

It’s all very simple.

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Well. There it is.

For the same reason, a free market outperforms a centrally directed economy. As Friedrich Hayek once said, no group of us is as smart as all of us.

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Actually, I don’t have a problem with that. Anybody who is rich enough to lay out half a mil on a visa, and wants to come to America badly enough to do so, is the sort of immigrant I think we ought to encourage.

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Good news, if true. Perhaps his Islam is in remission.

Corporations do not pay taxes. They merely collect taxes and pass the money on to the government; the taxes are paid by their customers in the form of higher prices. Low Information Voters don’t see this sleight-of-hand because they are dimwitted. The correct ‘corporate tax rate’ is zero.

To the extent that corporations have to collect taxes for the government, it raises the bar for achieving a successful business, because not only do they have to cover their actual costs but they have to pay the protection money imposed by government. Governments just love these Invisible Taxes; that’s why the VAT is so popular in Europe.

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The trouble with ‘virtue-signalling’ is that often it doesn’t so much signal virtue as foolishness.

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Every generation seems to be lionized by the press with the observation that the values of the new group are not that of their parents, thank goodness. They don’t have the serious hunger for possessions, the terrible acquisitiveness for material things that define their parents’ generation. Rather, as seen by the reporter, they have loftier views of society, generally the views of the reporter or the views that the reporter wishes to have us believe they hold. One recalls how the baby boomers were “not like us”. They were going to live on the land somewhere in the high sierras making sandals and candles. Some years later when it was revealed that the Pentagon was paying two thousand dollars for special toilet seats, the question among boomers was in what colors were they available.

Today much has been made of the sharply varying characteristics of the Millennial generation. During the recession and its prolonged twilight recovery we had to keep asking: “is it really a structural change we are seeing or just cyclical?” We have found in most cases when some see harbingers of dramatic changes in societal values it is often just economic realities at work. Wait for the data is a great admonition in such cases.

Steve Sailer does the fisking.

From The New Republic, a recantation by the co-author of the influential 2002 bookThe Emerging Democratic Majority (which I reviewed) of his thesis that the Democratic Party’s Coalition of the Fringes can eventually achieve one party rule over America.

…

As opposed to the 1950 and 1960s Censuses, in which 100 percent of Latinos were identified as white because, during that era of Flight to White, Latino organizations like LULAC successfully lobbied the Census Bureau into assuming that the Spanish surnamed were simply Caucasian. But then the Hispanic/Latino ethnicity was invented for the 1970 Census to facilitate handing out affirmative action privileges.

Or as opposed to how South Asians used to be counted as Caucasian … but then successfully lobbied to be grouped with Orientals in a new Asian category in order to be eligible for minority business development low interest loans and affirmative action on government contracting.

Or how Arab groups lobbied the Obama Administration to get themselves de-Whiteified through a 2020 new racial category called Middle Eastern and North African (nobody seems to know what the Trump Administration will do about the Obama Administration’s plan).

Want to know somebody’s Official Race? Follow the (Federal) money.

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Unexplained: How he can do that when he Lacks Empathy and is the New Hitler. I mean, the DemLegHump Media said it, so it MUST be true.

Joe Bob Briggs does the breakdown.

News executives love disasters. They get to act like Chuck Norris and Assemble the Squad.

“Maginnis, you cover first responders.”

“Wilson, get over to NOAA and stay on those maps.”

“Kelly, official press briefings. Work with Yurozawski to keep tabs on every emergency room within a 300-mile radius.”

“Bergram, you’re Cop Shop, but we’ll keep the aperiodic radio tracking the locals.”

“Ramstein, find that German guy who gets a hard-on for global warming.”

And yet Trump is the New Hitler.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/08/friday-funny-if-only-they-had-signed-that-treaty/https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/08/friday-funny-if-only-they-had-signed-that-treaty/https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/08/friday-funny-if-only-they-had-signed-that-treaty/

Read it.

The biggest surprise in President Trump’s willingness to work with Democrats is how much of a surprise it is to much of America. Expressions of shock are coming from all corners, suggesting that many of us view fierce polarization as normal and bipartisanship as abnormal.

If so, add that to the legacy of Barack Obama. He was the ultimate my-way or the highway president.

Dennis Prager takes a stab.

If someone asks what I am politically, I just say ‘anti-progressive’.

Like anti-Communist in the Good Old Days, it tells you everything you need to know.

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Oberlin is the alma mater of Lena Dunham and, somehow, Michelle Malkin. Until recently, it was the professional home to finally-fired, virulently anti-Semitic professor Joy Karega, who has suggested that Israel plotted the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. which killed 2,996 people.

Markets work, even when it’s Politically Incorrect.

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When the Marquess of Salisbury was asked whether there was a future for Randolph Churchill in the Conservative Party, is reputed to have said, ‘What man, having gotten rid of a boil on his neck, ever wishes it back again?’ I imagine that’s what a lot of Democrats are thinking about Hillary right now.

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We have the technology.

How about that Climate Change? Is it time for us all to die, women and minorities hardest hit etc. etc. yet?

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That’s okay. The useful Mexicans are already here.

Lion of the Blogosphere explains some inconvenient truths.

As I’ve written before, that’s an old-fashioned definition of rich. Today, it’s considered low class to not have some kind of job. And the thing about the top out-of-sight rich is that because of their high social capital, in addition to their inherited financial capital, they tend to get paid a lot more money than you think relative to their actual value-creating contributions to the economy. So a top out-of-sight lifestyle can be maintained with less inherited wealth because it’s supplemented with a six-figure salary.

Furthermore, as I’ve also written before, non-transferable capital (what might be called human capital) has become a more important component of being rich. Mere ownership of assets have become a declining source of income. The dividend yield on stocks, the interest rates paid on corporate debt, have never been lower. If you’re just sitting on your assets, then your wealth is declining. I believe that the money which used to go to stockholders is now being transferred to C-level executives, investment bankers and other finance types, and to a lesser extent overpaid corporate helpers like BIGLAW partners and management consultants.

Most of the Chattering Class, and all of the Democrat Underclass base, have no clue about these simple truths.

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This is an interesting ‘space’, as the tech writers say. For some reason, even though I am notorious among my friends for being boring and unadventurous when it comes to food, I am strongly attracted to meal delivery services like Blue Apron. And my native indolence responds to the appeal of Amazon Fresh and Instacart, although the economics don’t work out for two people who eat out more often than not. Still: Interesting times.

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The debate over the morality and efficiency of so-called “price gouging” during natural disasters and other emergencies provides a unique opportunity to explore some of the most fundamental ideas in economics. Understanding those ideas is important not just for the economics of emergencies, but for how market economies operate in more normal times and why they are superior to the alternatives.

The biggest advantage of market economies is the way in which they tie together how we decide who will get to purchase and consume goods with the way in which those goods are supplied. Market prices are not only a good way of determining who should get goods. They also work to encourage people to supply more or less of the good depending on how much in demand those goods are.

…

The laws of economics are not suspended in an emergency, no matter what the laws of politicians attempt to do. When goods are more scarce, they will be costly to obtain, whether those costs are in terms of money or something else. The importance of letting market prices do their job and determining who gets what is that this process is also the way in which we make sure that there is stuff to be allocated in the first place. The only way to make sure we have sufficient production is to let market prices determine consumption.

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The first argument, which nobody in these degenerate modern times ever mentions, is that it is fundamentally immoral, because it steals from one group of people in order to give unearned income to another group of people. The primary motivation for this institutionalized theft, in a quasi-democratic state like America, is to buy the votes of the underclass under the Clever Plastic Disguise of Compassion. ‘He who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.’

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Recently Almighty God smote the city of Houston as punishment for its pathetic lack of zoning laws. I am an expert in zoning laws, having spent roughly 4,000 hours playing Sim City in high school instead of losing my virginity.

Going forward, Houston can either embrace zoning and place itself in the steady hands of technocrats who designate where bodegas, trailer parks and whatnot go, or it can stick with the present organic model, letting a bunch of mouth-breathing humans organize the city from the bottom up.

I know what Sim City would do.

Turn-based strategy games typically follow the Centrally Planned Economy of which the Soviets were so fond. That doesn’t really train you for real life, unless your ambition is to become a Faceless Bureaucrat in some future Democrat Oceania. But they are a lot of fun, and (among other things) demonstrate quite plainly that a centrally planned society will crash & burn nine times out of ten, and the tenth time is still pretty grim.

Read it.

Hey, I guess there really is something to this biology stuff, after all.

Reality exists, even when you don’t want it to.

I can’t wait to hear what Scott Adams has to say about this.

I have no respect for anyone who uses ‘gender’ as a verb, and give what they say no credence.

You have been warned.

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Very ironic when you consider that they were all Democrats.

Even more ironic when you consider that it was the election of a Republican President that triggered secession.

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Every cloud has a silver lining.

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Americans are witnessing the power of private individuals and businesses to solve pressing problems stemming from Hurricane Harvey. From the boaters and monster truck drivers engaged in search and rescue operations to local stores opening their facilities to displaced families, there’s no shortage of examples of private individuals and businesses stepping in to assist Houston in its recovery.

It’s a good thing the private sector didn’t wait for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to do all the work, because the government would have been unable to handle everything on its own. It’s true of many disasters. Recall the tremendous support during the Katrina disaster of 2005. The American people stood on their own as an example of endurance and generosity—even more remarkable than the federal, state and local governments’ responses.

Read it.

Well, maybe.

UPDATE: So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution”

ZMan looks at the New Russian Enemy (not to be confused with the Old Soviet Enemy, which wasn’t cool).

For the last few years, the American ruling class has been obsessed with Russia. The Bear Scare in DC over Trump’s alleged ties to Putin is just one ridiculous element to the obsession.  At some level, even the dullards in the media know it is nonsense, but the Cloud People are convinced that the public shares their hatred of the Russians. China and Israel are much more involved in our elections, but they are not suitable bogeymen, in the minds of our betters. To them, the Russians are the scariest of scary monsters.

The Russia-Trump story is just a sideshow, of course. The neocon insistence that we start World War 3 over Ukraine is much more representative of the ruling elite’s hatred for the Russians. Steve Sailer has done yeoman’s work documenting the neocon warmonger’s efforts to stoke the fires of Russophobia. It’s not just the neocons. The Left has gone down a similar path, accusing Putin of being the new Hitler and claiming he has plans to invade Europe. The public face of the ruling elite is sure that Putin is very bad.

Read it.

A few days ago, NRO reported that law professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander started a firestorm by writing an opinion piece that extolled bourgeois values such as education, employment, hard work, marriage, and charity. Worse, the co-authors pointed out the fact that all cultures are not equally beneficial and constructive. Worst of all, they criticized “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

Inevitably, the two professors were accused of racism by some on the left. Apparently, things like valuing hard work, grit, and persistence is something only white folks do. Well. I wonder what minority football, basketball, and baseball players think of that. Would they agree that they got where they are by avoiding hard work? Would they agree that grit and persistence are “white” traits?

Two of the world’s greatest living economists, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, happen to be black. Did they succeed by avoiding hard work and education? American physician and surgeon, Charles Richard Drew (also black), developed improved techniques for storing blood. Did he do that after dropping out of school?

Isn’t claiming that only white people care about things like learning, honesty, jobs, and kindness sort of, well, racist?

Funny how people who can predict the precise temperature and sea level of the entire earth twenty, thirty, forty years from now can’t predict where a hurricane is going to go in the next six days.

They made a bad boy outa me.

Read it.

1. DACA expressly violated federal statutes which require the initiation of removal proceedings.
2. DACA violated the constitutional obligation of the executive to Take Care That The Laws Are Faithfully Executed.
3. DACA conferred amnesty and federal benefits under the false pretense of “Prosecutorial Discretion.”
4. DACA conferred a benefit without promulgating a rule.

My thesis is that the ‘problem of universals‘ is a better conceptual framework for the modern political world than the ‘left vs. right’ paradigm that we inherited from 18th-century France.

Realists believe that, once we assign a name to a thing, however arbitrary that original assignment might have been, the assignment is locked — while the thing remains the same thing, the name we assign it ought to remain the same.

Nominalists believe that the names we assign to things are and remain completely arbitrary — if we wish to use a name assigned to a thing to include other things as well, we are free to do that.

Sound familiar?

As you might suspect, I consider myself a Realist, and judge most proglodytes to be Nominalists. A quick review of the way proglodytes use the terms ‘marriage’, ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘homophobe’, and ‘free speech’ will, I suggest, adequately support my characterization.

The Nominalist agenda (and they always have an agenda) is summed up by Humpty-Dumpty’s response to Alice in Through the Looking Glass:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Nominalists aren’t interested in Truth; they are interested in ‘which is to be master’. That’s all.

My thanks to ZMan, who first turned my mind toward this fruitful perspective.

ZMan takes a step out into the Dark.

The few times a month I bother to scan National Review, I feel the same way as when I watch a B-movie from the 1980’s. Yeah, it reminds me of that time I got to second base with Sally Sugarpants, but the movie is still terrible. Even more so now. Reading one of the bugmen NRO employs to write copy, tub-thump about their principles, I wonder what it must be like to live trapped in amber. Conservative Inc is a Potemkin village, where the people carry on as if nothing has changed since 1984. It’s creepy.

There is a reason, beyond the financial considerations, why these people cling so tenaciously to the past. They have nowhere else to go. They have always lived in a world, whose map is a tiny intellectual zone dominated by the Left. Around it is a blank space labeled “Here Be Monsters.” Even for those who figure out that the old Left-Right paradigm is no longer relevant, their fear of what’s out there has them staggering around on the fringes of the old world, like homeless beggars looking for a place to lie down.

This probably explains some of the Bernie Bros too. They no longer can tolerate Progressive Globalism, but they fear association with the Right, so they have staggered over to 19th century socialism. They don’t really embrace Bernie Sanders or his anachronistic politics, but they have nowhere else to go. It’s a form of populism they can embrace, without changing parties and supporting Trump. The Bernie Movement is just a convenient doorway for them to sleep in while the world sorts itself out.

,,,

You are either in the ideological camp based in biological realism or you are in the camp that embraces the blank slate and egalitarianism. If you reject both, you are a lost boy, staggering around in the darkness.