Tag: Culture Wars

Civilization vs. Barbarians

The Dying Of The Light

Behind Enemy Lines, Politics

[This should have appeared over a week ago, but I screwed up the posting date thingy, sorry.  It’s still relevant, and now updated.]

From the Diplomad, talking about the revolting French:

France is in real trouble. I mean REAL trouble.  That once great country, in fact, is dying.  It, along with most of the rest of Europe, has a worthless leadership class that, as we saw at the WWI commemorations, sees nationalism as a bad thing. That leadership argues that true patriotism means going along with the elite’s efforts to kill the sense, the very idea of nation;  it means allowing one’s culture, traditions, and history to be wiped away, and rewritten to justify the on-going social, economic and political destruction.  To object, for example, to the importation of hundreds-of-thousands of poor, illiterate and often violent migrants from some of the most failed countries on earth, many espousing an ideology of hatred for all that France and Western Civilization represent, makes you a vile racist and a deplorable, one who should not be heard, a “far right” pariah.  In other words, Citizen, fermé la bouche and let your betters decide for you.  Nothing to see, keep moving. Leadership should be left to the professionals;  do not attempt decision-making at home . . .

Before any of us start to crow at the Frogs’ expense, however, look carefully at the words “true patriotism means going along with the elite’s efforts to kill the sense, the very idea of nation;  it means allowing one’s culture, traditions, and history to be wiped away, and rewritten to justify the on-going social, economic and political destruction”  and try to deny that this is precisely what our own “leadership” class — political, academia and corporate — is doing to the United States.  [Hint:  you’ll fail]

Now go and buy some more ammo.

(Some of you may wonder why I haven’t suggested also buying a hi-viz jacket as used by the French protesters.  That’s because we Murkins don’t do hi-viz — we do camo.)

The Old In-And-Out

Essays

…and I don’t mean the California-based greaseburger chain, either.  Apparently, we Westerners aren’t doing enough bonking, and according to the New York Post, this means The End Of Civilization As We Know It.

This should be a golden age for sex — if not the swinging-from-the-chandelier kind, then at least the regular, reliable fun type. The economy is booming, and America, and the world, are safer than ever. Young people can find willing mates just by swiping on their phones.
It’s a cushy, luxurious time. So why aren’t we naked and rolling around in bed to celebrate?

As always, I’m going to start off by asking the usual questions:  how do we know that people are having less sex — given that when asked about their sex lives, most people lie like Clintons anyway — and if we are making fewer beasts-with-two-backs, so what?

But let’s grant the writer’s hypothesis as truthful, and explore the issue.

The the Usual Suspects can be trotted out:  Internet porn, Netflix, Tinder, Fecesbook followings, constant checking of phones et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  In other words, Westerners are finding things to do with their spare time other than to have sex.  There may be some truth to all of this:  Chinese peasants seem to have no problem procreating (within State-mandated limits, of course), nor do Nigerian tribesmen or Indian farmers.  In fact, go to any Third World area where there is no electricity and people are breeding like rabbits.  But as the article later suggests, it’s not all about reproduction:

A sexless society is a dying one, and not only for the obvious reason that sex produces babies to replenish the population.
Sex serves as a bonding agent between people in relationships, and when they stop having it, or have it a lot less, that affects the kind of connections they are forming. That loss of intimacy is a big problem.

Here’s my theory about all this.  It’s not one thing that’s causing this problem, it’s a multitude of things, and the arrival of mass entertainment as explained above is just one of them.

The danger to (Western) civilization is not a lack of shagging, but said civilization’s decades-long undermining by academia and other counter-culture hippies.  This is coupled with the wholesale immigration of hordes of people who (if the population growth stats are to be believed) do not have a no-bonking issue — rather, the reverse — but who have few if any ties to said Western civilization.  So the culture is being undermined, and replaced with one that is more, shall we say, primitive.  (Go on: challenge  that statement:  I dare you.)  In a hundred years’ time, when all vestiges of Anglo-Saxon / Judeo-Christian culture have disappeared and the United States looks and behaves more like, well, Central America, there will be no articles written about how sex is disappearing, I guarantee you.

As for the “sex-as-bonding” hypothesis, when we as a society have an easy-come-easy-go [sic] attitude towards relationships (including marriage, through no-fault divorce), commitment does not and cannot take place with only sex as the bonding agent.  Here’s where I can easily point a finger at today’s hook-up culture, made all the easier by applications such as Tinder;  if sex is seen as pure recreation long before a couple is married, its value as a bonding agent has been irreparably undermined.

Another problem:  find me a young married couple today (not living on a farm) where only one of the couple is working.  I’ll save you the trouble:  you won’t.  The plain fact is that even without the feministical Career-Girl Have-It-All-Baby influence, it is no longer easy, or even possible, to have a single wage-earner support a family — and I’m not talking about wealthy Wall Street financiers’ families (who typically don’t have large families anyway);  I’m talking about ordinary folk, to whom having more than one or two children means financial catastrophe unless both partners are working (and sometimes, even then).  When both partners are working their asses off, and have easy access to entertainment through their cell phones, it’s no great leap to understand why sex takes a back seat.  Add to that the fact that when a couple does finally have young children and / or babies, sex falls off a cliff, as any fule kno.

Let’s also address the other great issue:  people aren’t going to want to procreate (which is the primal instinct which drives the desire for sex) when the future is unknown, or uncertain.  I defy you again to find me any group of young people who have not experienced a layoff, or a company shutting down or being merged out of existence, or having a career suddenly disappear when their function is replaced by automation or foreign-based workers.  Once again, I’ll save you the trouble:  you won’t, because everyone under the age of forty has had one of the above happen to them, and probably more than once withal.

I also know that the Welfare State makes it easy for single parents to have multiple children, but I would argue that the Welfare State is not a feature of Western civilization, even though that’s where it’s most often found.  (Imagine, for example, the Founding Fathers seeing some modern urban ghetto, and their likely reaction upon learning how that lifestyle is subsidized, and you’ll get my point.)

I have no solution to this because as far as I can see, there is none.  At best, if a solution does exist, it’s going to be a.) incredibly difficult and time-consuming to implement, and b.) so unpopular (for a variety of reasons) that its chances of success are infinitesimally small.

I have no idea, for example, how to lower the cost of living to, say, 1950s-era levels where a family of four can live in a reasonably-modest dwelling, own one or two inexpensive cars, have enough to eat, and afford to give the kids a decent education — all on one salary, at a stable place of employment.  In order to get there, we’d have to make drastic changes to our national way of life, changes that I’m pretty sure that nobody would want to make.  I also have no clue how to instill the values of long-term commitment (from, say the early 1900s) into a generation which would resist that change mightily.  Those kinds of changes might make common sense if the goal were to improve our current society’s laissez-faire / “whatever”  attitude to, well, just about everything, but I just don’t see the Me-me-me Generation wanting to turn back the clock.  Good grief, most of them can’t tell time on a dial clock anyway, so what are the chances?

But should we somehow reach that state, I can guarantee that everyone would be having sex, and a lot of it.

The generation which produced the Baby Boom is all the historical evidence I need.

No Shit, She-Lock

Grooming, Mocking Furriners, Modernism

You have to be utterly self-absorbed and narcissistic to post something like this:

Apparently some things are too much, even for the French, and I can see why.  Fucking hell, I’ve seen more demure clothing on the midnight shift during Fleet Week.  From now on, every new edition of the dictionary will feature this woman’s picture under “Trashy”, and rightly so.

And of course, every bloody barracks-room lawyer is going to whine that the Louvre’s rules (note the capitalization, idiot) technically allow any outfits, even one like hers inside the building.  Yeah, fine, and I’m quite aware that the museum isn’t a church too.

But:  let’s hear it for the Louvre guard who didn’t want the priceless works of art inside his building sullied by this whore I mean “influencer”.  (Oh yeah, she has X thousand “followers” and groupies, so that excuses everything.  Not.)

Of course, she is Australian so it’s understandable that she would have no class, manners or sense of decorum, but that just makes me all the more satisfied that someone would actually step up and say, “Non!”

There should be more of that.  A lot more.

Killing The Monster

Entertainment

I see that singer Michael Bublé has decided to quit singing and the limelight.  I can quite understand why.  At a time when his beloved son was close to death from cancer, Bublé found himself in a blizzard of “well-meaning” Press attention, with articles sensitively entitled “Michael’s Torment“, “Michael Looks Depressed As He Leaves Hospital” and the always-popular “Will Michael Bublé Ever Be Able To Sing Again?”  (“No” being the eventual answer to this question, as it happens.)

Under those circumstances, Bublé discovered that while his fame sold albums and made him rich, the price he had to pay was the complete loss of privacy and even dignity.  For attention-whores like the Kardashians and their ilk, this celebrity and attention might have been accepted, even welcomed;  for him, facing that most awful and personal of tragedies, the scouring of his anguish and its parade in the tabloids must have been torture — and his desire to quit the spotlight both literally and figuratively is both understandable and even laudable.

And good for him, say I.  His wealth is secure, his family likewise;  but should his young son ever get nailed by cancer again — a horrible possibility — I can only hope that he and his wife can deal with whatever happens in solitude and isolation.  I don’t even want to hear about it, for that matter.  Whatever happens, Michael Bublé deserves his privacy, and I can only hope that the Media Vultures leave him alone from now on.

I for one will refuse to read anything about him and his family ever again.  I can’t escape the future headlines, should they occur, but I don’t have to reward the Jackals Of The Press by reading about the details.  He deserves the anonymity he craves, and I’m happy to grant it to him.

Michael, I wish lasting happiness, health and peace to you and your family;  and thank you for sharing your magnificent talent with us while you did.

Raging Back At The Enemy

Essays, Politics, Two-Minute Hate

As Longtime Readers know, I used to work in the Stat Research department of a Great Big Research Company, so I know a little about numbers.

Here’s the problem with statistics.  They’re a great tool for providing context — e.g. if unemploment now is at 3.7% and it was 7.2% during the reign of the sainted Obama, then things are better for the labor force now than they were then.  (Unless of course you’re a socialist, for whom a lower unemployment rate is disastrous because then they can’t make more people dependent on the State.)

In doing further (non-statistical) analysis, however, the problem then becomes less statistical and more historical.  Here’s an example.

Morris Fiorina of the Hoover Institution is doing his best Chip Diller / Animal House act (“Remain calm!  All is well!”) in looking at how the majority of the American populace is less political than the politically-active / -aware, thus:

To understand contemporary American political life, you should begin with the realization that most of the people blabbering on cable television, venting on Facebook, and/or fulminating on Twitter are abnormal. They are abnormally interested and involved in politics, they tend to occupy the policy extremes, and they are abnormally opinionated. As of today, there are about 235 million eligible voters in the United States. About one percent of them subscribe to either The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. Liberals rail against Fox News and conservatives against MSNBC; they should take consolation in the fact that the Fox viewing audience is about one percent of the eligible electorate while news shows on MSNBC fall short of that.
Some suggest that the internet and social media have replaced the older print and electronic media, but the available research does not support that suggestion. If “hundreds of millions of people” really were doing politics on social media, I would share Hanson’s worries, but such a claim overstates the number of social media activists by several orders of magnitude. A 2013 Facebook study that tracked Bing toolbar searches found that 96 percent of the users clicked on zero or one opinion column in a three-month period. In 2017 the Pew Research Center reported that less than four percent of adults consider Twitter an important source of news.
In many respects the American electorate has changed surprisingly little in more than six decades. In 2016 about 10 percent of the eligible electorate made a campaign contribution—to any campaign at any level, the same figure as in the 1950s. Despite media hype about Obamamania in 2008 and Trump rallies in 2016, less than 10 percent of the eligible electorate attended any kind of campaign meeting or rally in those years, the same figure as six decades ago. As for people who knock on doors or make phone calls for campaigns, we are talking about two to three percent of the eligible electorate, the same small proportion as in the Eisenhower era.

And so on.  To be fair, Fiorina does allow that our polity has become more polarized (he calls it “sorted”) since the 1950s, but this is where history starts to stick its nose into statistical analysis.  If the Eisenhower era, for example, was not as polarized as today’s, then one shouldn’t look at the former as the comparator.  Rather, we should look at times when political and public opinion was polarized to get a proper perspective.  And you don’t have to be a dorky historian (such as I) to find two excellent examples of that.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 1776 and 1860 – and in both cases, what happened was war:  revolutionary in the first case and civil in the second.

The only argument to be made is whether today’s polity is as polarized as those were back then — and I would suggest that the correct answer is:  not quite yet.  But it’s damn close.

Let me finish this preamble by examining another of Fiorina’s theses:

Finally, some words about immigration, a major bone of contention between Republicans and Democrats in the political class, although surprisingly, less important than commonly believed among normal Americans. Although the U.S. is an immigrant nation, today’s emphasis on ethnic identity politics understandably leads many people to conclude that today’s immigration differs from that of previous eras, with more negative implications. But the kinds of controversies the United States now is experiencing are strikingly similar to those that accompanied earlier large waves of immigration. Hanson certainly is correct in asserting that political pressures to assimilate are much lower today, but societal pressures remain strong. The evidence indicates that despite the rhetoric of ethnic identity group activists and today’s celebration of diversity, the American melting pot continues to boil. Ongoing studies report, for example, that English language acquisition is proceeding at a rate comparable to, if not faster than, that in the early 20th Century; in particular, by the third generation Latinos are English-dominant or fully bilingual.

Here’s my major problem with this perspective.  In the early 20th century, immigrants came to America to find a predominantly (and fairly stubborn) Western-European / Protestant culture, so the incentive to assimilate and acculturate was strong.  In today’s society, with its multi-culti insistence and hatred of the eeeevil Western European ethos, there is no incentive to assimilate.  In fact, given the deliberate racial / ethnic / gender / cultural divisions caused by the Left, there is a negative incentive to do so because to assimilate is to wave goodbye to all the little financial and societal goodies given to members of all those little sub-groups by waves of Leftist / Progressive / neo-Socialist (and un-Constitutional, an argument for another time) government programs.  And sorry, under such circumstances we don’t have three generations to see if the melting pot will work.

To summarize:  all is not well — in fact, it’s as far from well as I can imagine — and to remain calm under such circumstances is not only counter-productive, it’s a formula for defeat.  Which brings me to my principal point.

“So Kim, what should we do?”

Be aggressive as hell, and fight back (to quote that Commie fucker Obama, “Punch back twice as hard”).

  • If you come out of a restaurant and find your car has been keyed because of your NRA decal, consider finding two cars with liberal decals (e.g. “Beto” (Texas) or “Resist!”), but don’t key the shit out of them:  a simple splodge of black spray paint over the decal will suffice.
  • If some Pantifa fuckwits threaten you with weapons at a protest  / counter-protest event, be ready to pepper-spray or kick the shit out of them — do not be afraid to confront these cocksuckers.  And if they escalate the violence… it will be their problem.
  • If some baying liberals start screaming at you outside a restaurant, why not call the cops on them?  Insist on laying charges of intimidation, public indecency, assault and hate crimes (yeah, let’s use the Left’s little weapons against them).  And if the cops refuse to do anything, file suit against them.
  • If Socialist professors call you out in class publicly for being a conservative or Republican, feel free to tell them that you intend bring civil charges (not university-based, but legal ones) against them personally for creating a “hostile study environment” (see above).
  • If some feminist harpy accuses you of “rape” (regardless of definition), be sure to have filmed a little video of your encounter;  then find a way to publish said video on the Internet as a counterweight to her accusations.  Failing which, make sure you are never alone with a woman (see:  the Pence Rule);  or be sure to have witnesses who can be relied upon to take your side.
  • If you’re asked to speak at a college campus and the Left starts going batshit and threatening you, say nothing;  but consider quietly asking for some volunteer pro bono bodyguards to protect you  — about two dozen should do it.  (And if you’re asked to be one of those bodyguards, accept the gig.  Wear a dark suit, white shirt, sturdy black shoes and a conservative tie, put an earpiece into your ear and talk into your cuff frequently.  Also:  equip yourself appropriately.)
  • Always — always — insist on speaking, and being spoken to in English, regardless of circumstance.  If the other guy continues to scream at you in Spanish, respond with random Spanish expressions such as “Tierra del Fuego!” or my favorite, “Huevos y putas!”.  If being yelled at in Ebonics, simply say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Zulu”.
  • Feel free to add your own suggestions in Comments.

If all this sounds extreme, then let you remind me of the simple irrefutable truth of this situation:  we didn’t start the extremism;  the Left did.  They are very fond of using the old Marxist trope of “Reactionary!” against us, but the problem is that we haven’t reacted enough, or at all, in the face of their criminal and confrontational behavior.  (Note that I am not suggesting pre-emptive or “strike first” action.  But it’s sure as hell time for us to bring a little reaction to the party.)  And yes, some of what I’m suggesting might be considered illegal.  Compared to what the Left have done against us, it’s nothing — and compare spraying someone’s car to tarring and feathering a British magistrate, back in 1776.

It’s time some of the Left’s little pigeons came home to roost — or else we’re forever doomed to be browbeaten, belittled, intimidated and ultimately beaten down by these power-hungry, amoral cocksuckers.

No more.

Yes, I’m aware I might get into trouble for this post.  To those who might attempt to initiate some kind of violent action against me, I have a simple response:  FOAD.  Someone has to take a stand, and it might as well be this immigrant and naturalized citizen.  And please:  don’t bother with death threats, for obvious reasons.