Enjoying their tolerance

It's always mildly amusing to see progressives forced to face the consequences of their moral posturing, however disastrous those consequences may be for everyone.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles for over a decade and have seen my fair share of transgender/gender fluid people. They in no way offend me. I'd consider myself pretty progressive and tolerant of most things...except maybe people who identify as a person wearing socks with sandals. We all have our line in the sand and that's totally mine. But how transgender people feel, how they choose to dress or any surgeries they get, don't infringe on any parts of my life, so I support their decision to live as they see fit. I've also seen my fair share of transgender women in the women's restroom before. Not ALL the time. But over the past few years, I'd say 4-5 that I noticed. Men...who were in some stage of transition and making every attempt to be a woman from mascara to heels. Transgenders who certainly felt comfortable in the women's room and probably frightened to go into the men's. At these times, I smiled…I peed...and life went on. But 2 weeks ago something very different happened.

I was at Disneyland with my son, my friend and her son. We were over in California Adventure in the food court area. We’d just finished eating and decided to pee before we headed out to The Little Mermaid. I went to the bathroom while she watched our boys in their strollers, and then I did the same. (For anyone who’s tried to fit a stroller in a bathroom stall, you get it).

I was off to the side waiting with the two boys, when I noticed a man walk into the restroom. My first thought was “Oh shit, he’s walked in the wrong restroom by mistake. lol” He took a few more steps, at which point he would’ve definitely noticed all the women lined up and still kept walking. My next thought was, “Maybe he’s looking for his wife…or child and they’ve been in here a while.” But he didn’t call out any names or look around. He just stood off to the side and leaned up against the wall. At this point I’m like, “WTF? Ok there is definitely a very large, burly man in a Lakers jersey who just walked in here. Am I the only one seeing this?" I surveyed the room and saw roughly 12 women, children in tow, staring at him with the exact same look on their faces. Everyone was visibly uncomfortable. We were all trading looks and motioning our eyes over to him…like "What is he doing in here?” Yet every single one of us was silent. And this is the reason I wrote this blog.

If this had been 5 years ago, you bet your ass every woman in there would’ve been like, “Ummm what are you doing in here?”, but in 2017? The mood has shifted. We had been culturally bullied into silenced. Women were mid-changing their baby’s diapers on the changing tables and I could see them shifting to block his view. But they remained silent. I stayed silent. We all did. Every woman who exited a stall and immediately zeroed right in on him...said nothing. And why? B/c I and I’m sure all the others were scared of that “what if”. What if I say something and he says he "identifies as a woman" and then I come off as the intolerant asshole at the happiest place on earth? So we all stood there, shifting in our uncomfortableness…trading looks. I saw two women leave the line with their children. Still nothing was said. An older lady said to me out loud, “What is he doing in here?” I’m ashamed to admit I silently shrugged and mouthed, “I don’t know." She immediately walked out, from a bathroom she had every right to use without fear.

It's always informative to spot the exact point at which the progressive virtue-signaling stops. It's invariably somewhere between "violence directed at me" and "potential violence directed at my children." Adjust your rhetoric accordingly.

The decline of trust in the USA

Bill Bishop attempts to address it, in the Washington Post, of all places.

The easiest sell of President Trump’s life is that a “corrupt” media produces “fake news.” After all, fewer than 2 in 10 Americans have “a lot” of trust in news organizations, the Pew Research Center has found, and we live in a “Matrix”-infused “conspiracy culture,” according to social scientists, where one is thought to be impossibly simple to not understand that the world is ruled by collusion and machination.

Trump has helped make trust a big deal for media types, and they are now searching for ways to regain the faith of their readers. To combat the “fake news” charge, the New York Times, for example, is running full-page ads and even bought a television spot during the Oscars declaring that “the truth is more important now than ever.” For some, the problem is that journalists have allowed too much of their personalities to creep into their work. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editor David Shribman prescribes “less analysis and more reporting, less personality and more facts.” For others, there’s a need to demonstrate that journalists are not faceless elites but real people. Washington Post opinion writer Dana Milbank wrote of his newsroom colleagues: “They hail from all corners of this country, from farms and small towns, the children of immigrants and factory workers, preachers and teachers.” But even local papers, the ones most closely connected to their readers, are struggling to defend their integrity. One editor of a rural California paper accepted an op-ed about the danger of “fake news” in an attempt to instill some faith among the anti-press crowd.

You can hear similarly fretful discussions in dozens of other professions. The president has maligned politicians, scientists, judges, teachers, labor union leaders and intelligence officials, among others. “Donald Trump’s most damaging legacy may be a lower-trust America,” the Economist’s Lexington column predicted. Trust in American institutions, however, has been in decline for some time. Trump is merely feeding on that sentiment.

The leaders of once-powerful institutions are desperate to resurrect the faith of the people they serve. They act like they have misplaced a credit card and must find the number so that a replacement can be ordered and then FedEx-ed, if possible overnight.

But that delivery truck is never coming. The decline in trust isn’t because of what the press (or politicians or scientists) did or didn’t do. Americans didn’t lose their trust because of some particular event or scandal. And trust can’t be regained with a new app or even an outbreak of competence. To believe so is to misunderstand what was lost.

Well, I certainly think the behavior of the media, the political class, and the university professors has contributed to the decline in trust.  However, look at how the USA is more heterogenous and more US residents now possess national backgrounds from historically low-trust peoples.  Thanks to Robert Putnam, there is now an understanding that a more diverse population is a lower trust one due to inter-group dissimilarities.

But I haven't seen anyone connect the fact that low-trust immigrants tend to bring their lack of trust with them to these observations of declining trust, even though the demographic math would indicate that it is likely an additional contributor.

Why the Alt-Right is so scary

Robert Weissberg explains the Alt-Right is threatening to the political establishment because only the Alt-Right is speaking the truth about what everyone can see is happening all across the West:

Even in today’s acrimonious political landscape, nothing seems to draw as much vitriol as the minuscule “Alt-Right” (shorthand for an alternative to mainstream Conservatism Inc.). Indeed, if America’s political class organized 1984-style two-minute hates, the Alt-Right would be the star of the show with Richard Spencer substituting for Emmanuel Goldstein.

Given this aversion across the ideological spectrum, one might surmise that the Alt-Right embraced doctrines totally antithetical to core American values. Not quite. In at least in one key regard, the Alt-Right is as American as apple pie...

.Let me offer a speculative explanation. In an increasingly heterogeneous society where there is always a potential for internecine strife, prudence dictates permitting everyone (regardless of race or ethnicity) to create their own “private” ethno states, but caution also counsels the Mafia’s Omerta, the code of silence. Not even the liberal-dominated mass media will run stories of how real estate developers in cahoots with elected officials undermine residential diversity with under-the-radar “ethnic cleansing” by enticing large numbers of urban underclass blacks into suburban public housing (Ferguson, MO is one example). The only way a New Yorker might realize that whites are forcing out blacks in historically black Harlem is by reading reviews of new trendy restaurants and clubs in Harlem.

Into this Omerta comes the Alt-Right willing to speak the unspeakable: if we want America to be America, exclude low-IQ Syrian goat herders and wife beater with nine children who embrace a religion deeply incompatible with America’s core Christian principles. Alt-Right trouble-makers relish recounting grim tales of culturally indigestible immigrants or explaining how corporate America willingly destroys the country to attract cheap Third World labor all the while sending the clean-up bill—policing, welfare, medical care–to hapless, largely white taxpayers. The Alt-Righter resembles an un-socialized youngster who regularly blurts out the unspeakable, embarrassing truth.

And finally, there’s The Great Fear: this Alt-Right “virus” may escape the laboratory’s Petri dish and gain a modicum of political traction. Think Marine Le Pen and the National Front in France or, in Germany, Frauke Petry and the Alternative for Germany, two nationalist, anti-immigration parties that arrived out “of nowhere” and are now serious electoral players. After all, there is a demonstrable market for the idea of a white ethno state and an ambitious demagogue, perhaps a modern-day cleaned up George Wallace, could easily champion it. To be sure, an American National Party would be unlikely to capture any office, particularly under its current leadership, but it could peel off 5% or so of the popular vote as a protest vote in at least some states. Stranger things have happened so it is no wonder that the establishment obsesses over this tiny handful of heretics whose xenophobic views resonate with millions of deplorable Americans.

The Left is lying. The cuckservatives are lying. The conservatives and civic nationalists were misguided, but at this point, if they're still sticking to their guns, they are knowingly speaking what they now know to be false.

And that is why the Alt-Right scares all of them. Because we speak the truths that they wish to hide.

How Trump happened

Brendan Neill explains at The Spectator:

It happened because you banned super-size sodas. And smoking in parks. And offensive ideas on campus. Because you branded people who oppose gay marriage ‘homophobic’, and people unsure about immigration ‘racist’.

Because you treated owning a gun and never having eaten quinoa as signifiers of fascism. Because you thought correcting people’s attitudes was more important than finding them jobs. Because you turned ‘white man’ from a description into an insult. Because you used slurs like ‘denier’ and ‘dangerous’ against anyone who doesn’t share your eco-pieties.

That's part of it, anyhow. But it also happened because conservatives refused to fight for the nation or to conserve anything. It also happened because neocons invaded the world while inviting the world. It also happened because corporations set up factories in China and hired H1B foreigners instead of employing Americans. It also happened because Churchians decided it was more important to spare the feelings of non-Christians than obey the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Bible.

RIP Richard Adams

The author of the great novel, Watership Down, is dead at 96. As you've probably already heard, Carrie Fisher, aka Princess Leia, has also died, at 60.

What War on Christmas?

The Carlos Slim blog can't find it:

It’s that time of year again, folks. It’s time for the War on Christmas.

What is that, you may ask? The short answer: a sometimes histrionic yuletide debate over whether the United States is a country that respects Christianity.

For the longer answer, keep reading.

The idea of a “War on Christmas” has turned things like holiday greetings and decorations into potentially divisive political statements. People who believe Christmas is under attack point to inclusive phrases like “Happy Holidays” as (liberal) insults to Christianity.

For over a decade, these debates have taken place mainly on conservative talk radio and cable programs. But this year they also burst onto a much grander stage: the presidential election.

At a rally in Wisconsin last week, Donald J. Trump stood in front of a line of Christmas trees and repeated a campaign-trail staple.

“When I started 18 months ago, I told my first crowd in Wisconsin that we are going to come back here some day and we are going to say ‘Merry Christmas’ again,” he said. “Merry Christmas. So, Merry Christmas everyone. Happy New Year, but Merry Christmas.”

Christmas is a federal holiday celebrated widely by the country’s Christian majority. So where did the idea that it is threatened come from?

Where indeed?

Berlin Christmas market attack killer still on the loose, say police

Also, if you say "Merry Christmas" to anyone, you are insensitive, a racist, a bigot, and an anti-Semite.

Happy Kwanzanukkadan, and may the metaphorical spirit of evolution naturally select you, your kin,and those who immigrate to replace them.

A society in decline

Declining life expectancy is the expected result of a society that has peaked and is on the way down:

One of the fundamental ways scientists measure the well-being of a nation is tracking the rate at which its citizens die and how long they can be expected to live.

So the news out of the federal government Thursday is disturbing: The overall U.S. death rate has increased for the first time in a decade, according to an analysis of the latest data. And that led to a drop in overall life expectancy for the first time since 1993, particularly among people younger than 65.

"This is a big deal," says Philip Morgan, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who was not involved in the new analysis.

"There's not a better indicator of well-being than life expectancy," he says. "The fact that it's leveling off in the U.S. is a striking finding."

One can't say it is surprising. The same thing happened in Russia under Yeltsin, when the country was being strip-mined by the oligarchs in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia has found its confidence again in its return to Christianity and nationalism, and both its birth rates and life expectancies are on the rise again.

If Americans are fortunate, the God-Emperor Ascendant will be half as good for his people as Putin has been for the Russians. The more foreigners are driven out, the more the secularists and atheists and pagans are forced to accept their second-rate status, the more America will be made great again.

Equalitarianism is neither just nor healthy, and diversity is no more a strength than war is peace or black is white. If it was, the diversity advocates wouldn't have to repeat it like a retarded mantra in defiance of all history and science.

The great irony is that allowing minorities equal status in a society is not only bad for the majority, it is almost always bad for the minorities themselves. After all, if they were even remotely capable of constructing a society in which they wanted to live in the first place, they would be the majority.

Mailvox: stuck on cuck

It's clearly going to take more than the ascendance of the God-Emperor to get some conservatives unstuck from their cuckish clinging to increasingly outdated ideology politics. Consider one self-professed Alt-Right sympathizer on Twitter:

• I think worldview is what's important and race is a lazy proxy.
• Race is just a proxy. It's a lazy way to categorize. I think it's important to do the hard work.
• I know it's hard but if the alt-right could substitute worldview for race, it would be more powerful.

Translation: if only reality would accede to my fantasies, what a wonderful world this would be! This sort of conservative tends to remind me of the white liberals who californicated Colorado and are now californicating Texas.

Sure, what I believed before completely failed, so I had to leave, and even though you haven't asked for my opinion, I'm going to help you improve through making this place more comfortable for me by making it more like the place I just left!

The question from the emailer, who is a reader, is, as you would expect, considerably more intelligent.

Is a racial identity the only identity option, or merely the most reliable or probable given historical precedent? Put differently, is there a deterministic nature to it, or just probabilistic?

I ask this in that racial identity seems to be only an initial filter, and ideological identity always follows soon afterwards.

Is there a specific reason you believe the ideological can't be the first filter?

Off the cuff it seems like it can't because we don't really know what people think or believe, and people can lie, so we sort first by the most obvious traits and then afterwards by the more subtle.

It feels like the effort to sort primarily by ideology and secondarily by race is at the root of the "proposition nation" concept, that there would be a nation unified by an identity which superseded racial identity.

If the failure of the "proposition nation" was that it had no identity, let alone one which superseded racial identity, then in spirit the idea could exist if an identity which superseded race actually existed.

I believe that identity could exist within biblical Christianity, but given that it is personal and not political (like Islam or Judaism which have detailed theocratic components built in), perhaps the only unity possible in this life even with a Christian identity is genuinely "in spirit"?

Racial identity is not the only identity option. The two primary identities are race and religion. Again, to quote the founder of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

The recent presidential election demonstrates that race is a more powerful identity than religion, as more Mormons in Utah voted for Trump than for Evan McMullin, although the fact that so many Mormons were willing to vote for a no-hoper like McMuffin demonstrates the power of religious identity.

The irony is that those who desperately want to cling to the idea of a proposition nation fail to grasp that the only possible alternative to a race-based nationalities in the West is Christian theocracy, complete with a Department of Inquisition. I have yet to see a single person who cringes at the thought of nationalism and professes to be concerned about black and brown Christians endorse the concept of expelling every individual who does not share a Christian identity.

If you don't like either race war or identity politics, then you should not have stupidly embraced immigration from other nations with competing identities. But it's too late now, so it's time to get unstuck from the cuck. You're going to do it sooner or later, so you might as well accept the truth and spare yourself the embarrassment of having to look back on a series of desperate evasions and intellectual dishonesties to go with your previous mistakes.

And for the love of all that is good and holy, beautiful and true, don't even think about quoting Galatians at me. Just spare yourself the inevitable humiliation.

Shooting at Ohio State

There was a minor attack of some kind at Ohio State University:

At least 8 people have reportedly been injured in a mass shooting at Ohio State University. Columbus Fire Department officials tell CBS affiliate WBNS that 8 people have been transported to area hospitals.

Seven of those patients were reportedly stable, at least one of them critical.

Law enforcement say one suspect has been shot and is dead.

Police tell WBNS that the incident started around 9:30 a.m. this morning when a vehicle ran into the chemical engineering building.

Some reports coming in say that some of the victims have been stabbed, with at least 4 being shot.

No word on if it is Sudden Jihad Syndrome, but the fact that it took place at the chemical engineering building tends to indicate that it wasn't an omega taking out his frustrations on women.

UPDATE: AAAANNND it's Muslims. A Minnesota Man, to be precise, which I understand is the proper way to pronounce Somali. So sad. Another Magic Dirt fail.

The price of badthink

Scott Adams said that he used to be scheduled to do at least two speaking engagements per month. Since he's been talking about Trump, he has not received one request. And one scheduled for next year, was canceled as "they are going in a different direction".

It's no wonder the Left has been winning the cultural war. The Left is very good about supporting its cultural leaders. Castalia readers aside - they have been reliably great in this regard - far too much of the Right would rather back a Left-approved winner than support any of its own. Of course, I'm guessing that very little of that speaking engagement money came from anyone who was spending his own money, and most of it came from SJWs who managed to put themselves in position to spend someone else's.

If you were at the Big Fork meeting last night, please note that this is the right time to get involved and start supporting it. You've got the Paypal address already; we'll get a button on the relevant page by Monday. We will continue to do it on a shoestring; we're comfortable with that. But the more people who start using it, the more server resources we'll require.

And for those ready to start making some noise next Monday, there is more than one way to do that. (These are not the OG shirts, they're being prepared, so hold off on those as you'll all be emailed about them. And it's not the only Crypto-Fashion now available.

The idiot intellectuals

Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains why the world desperately needs to ignore the idiot intellectuals who presently rule it:

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke, who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They cant tell science from scientism — in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they call “rational” or “irrational” comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

I could not agree more. One thing I have noticed, regularly and reliably, is that the professional class of the so-called cognitive elite are simply not that smart. I mean, they're not exactly stupid, but most of them are 2SD midwits who are considerably less intelligent than Taleb, me, or most of the genuinely smart people that I know.

Remember the lesson of the Excluded: "The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133. It then falls about 1/3 by 140. By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%! In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions."

Or as Taleb puts it: "Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry. The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited."

Churchianity and the feminized church

It's really rather remarkable, that as Christians lament declining attendance in their churches, and particularly, the growing absence of men of any age in them, they continue to double-down on the Churchian doctrine of the Holy Lady Parts. Rollo Tomassi observes that there is a material price to the structural and spiritual violations of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, to say nothing of 1 Timothy 2:11–12 and 1 Timothy 3:11.

After almost six years of following the religious aspects of the Red Pill, I think it’s high time men acknowledge that modern Christian culture simply does not have men’s best interests as part of its doctrine anymore. Christianity, in particular, is by women, for women – if not directly executed by women, though even that is changing.

Church culture is now openly hostile towards any expression of conventional masculinity that doesn’t directly benefit women and actively conditions men to be serviceable, gender-loathing Betas. The feminist narrative of “toxic masculinity” has entirely replaced any semblance of what traditional masculinity or manhood once was to the church. Any hint of a masculinity not entirely beholden to a now feminine-primary purpose is not only feared, but shamed with feminine-interpreted aspersions of faith.

I recently read a study that our current generation is the least religious in history and I think as far as men are concerned much of that disdain for religion is attributable to a church culture that constantly and openly ridicules and debases any male-specific endeavors or anything characteristic of conventional masculinity. It’s no secret in today’s church franchisement that reaching out to, and retaining the interests of, men is at its most difficult.

Again, this is attributable to a generation of feminized men being raised into a church culture, and eventual church leadership, that has been taught to prioritize and identify with the feminine and reinforced with articles of faith now defined by the Feminine Imperative. The modern church has trouble reaching men because the church no longer has a grasp of what it means to be ‘men’.

To be clear, that’s not an indictment of the genuine faith itself, but rather a fairly measured observation of the way a feminine-primary church culture has shaped that faith. In the future, any man with a marginal capacity for critical thought will avoid the contemporary Christian church and religion for the obvious misandry it espouses; the only religious men you will find will be those raised into a life of religiously motivated Beta servitude – or those dragged to the feminine-directed church by wives who hold authoritative ‘headship’ in their relationships.

And even in what some consider to be pro-masculine or “macho” churches, we still find the Paper Alpha leaders preach from a mindset that defers wholesale to the feminine’s “Godly perfection” as they attempt to AMOG other male member to greater devotion to qualifying for, and identifying with, the feminine influence that pervades their church.

In this, as in so many things, observe that the consequence of following the lie is eventual destruction. This is what Paul means by knowing things by their fruits. If a church can throw out such clear Biblical direction in the interest of remaining in harmony with the current social or political consensus, it is only a matter of time before it will throw out any other instruction that makes anyone feel uncomfortable, and eventually, the Cross and the very concept of sin as well.

One need not be a theologian, or even a Christian, to see how this process has played out over the last 50 years.

Mailvox: how can you tell?

JI wants to know how one can accurately pick out the sociopaths among one's acquaintances and colleagues. A few observations:

1. Look for abrupt changes in demeanor as the situation changes, and particularly for a wide-eyed, "caught red-handed" reaction when such a change is observed. Sociopaths go from bright-eyed, charming, and friendly to dead-eyed and icy cold in the blink of an eye. Normal people do not.
2. Beware of anyone who is too friendly too soon. It's one thing to hit it off with someone, it's another to have someone glom onto you for no apparent reason.
3. Perma-victims are usually perpetrators. Female sociopaths, in particular, are adept at revising every story to make themselves the victim, especially when they were the culprit. If nothing is ever someone's fault, it's usually all their fault.
4. Trust your instincts. If you find someone repellant but you don't know why, it's your subconscious picking up on small contradictions that you haven't recognized. Keep a close eye on that individual and you'll usually discover what it was that your subconscious was warning you about.
5. Sociopaths have a very alert gaze and they are always scanning to see if anyone is watching them. If you intentionally let them know you are onto them by not looking away and smiling at them in a "gotcha" manner, they will confirm their sociopathy by abruptly changing their behavior towards you, usually by becoming avoidant and launching a whisper campaign against you. This can be risky, of course, but it does provide certain confirmation. I would not recommend it for most people, as most people are insufficiently ruthless to deal effectively with sociopaths.
6. A shallow "salesman" effect. If someone is always "hail fellow well met", but doesn't have any real friends, this is a warning sign.
7. An attempt to "take over" a group of friends or a social organization, particularly if they attempt to cut out the person who brought them into the group.
8. Persistent cheating and parasitism, especially in small matters that no one normally keeps track of. I'm not talking about someone who is cheap, but someone who is always a taker and never a giver or even a fair-exchanger.
9. Constant whisper campaigns. Sociopaths are even more concerned with controlling the narrative than SJWs. If you find that someone has told three different stories to three different people about the same event, be alert.
10. Be very skeptical of all sob stories. If you encourage a sociopath telling one by feigning shock and sympathy, he will proceed to go deeper, adding more and more detail, and more and more pathos, taking the story into completely absurd territory in order to see how much of a sucker you are and what he can get away with.

None of these things are definitive, they are merely suggestive. But taken as a whole, they are reliably conclusive.

The importance of illumination

Status 451 contemplates the damage caused to organizations and individuals by "value-extractors":

There’s a pattern most observers of human interaction have noticed, common enough to have earned its own aphorism: “nice guys finish last.” Or, refactored, “bad actors are unusually good at winning.” The phenomenon shows up in business, in politics, in war, in activism, in religion, in parenting, in nearly every collaborative form of human undertaking. If some cooperative effort generates a valuable resource, tangible or intangible, some people will try to subvert the effort in order to divert more of that resource to themselves. Money, admiration, votes, information, regulatory capacity, credibility, influence, authority: all of these and more are vulnerable to capture.

Social engineering, as a field, thus far has focused primarily on hit-and-run tactics: get in, get information (and/or leave a device behind), get out. Adversaries who adaptively capture value from the organizations with which they involve themselves are subtler and more complex. Noticing them, and responding effectively, requires a different set of skills than realizing that’s not the IT guy on the phone or that a particular email is a phish. Most importantly, it requires learning to identify patterns of behavior over time....

In Chapman’s analysis, a subculture’s growth passes through three phases. First come the geeks, the creators and their True Fans whose interest in a niche topic gets a scene moving. Then come the MOPs, short for “Members Of Public,” looking for entertainment, new experiences, and something cool to be part of. Finally, along come the sociopaths, net extractors of value whose long-term aim is to siphon cultural, social, and liquid capital from the social graph of geeks and MOPs. Sociopaths don’t just take, unless they’re not very good at what they do. Many sociopaths contribute just enough to gain a reputation for being prosocial, and keep their more predatory tendencies hidden until they’ve achieved enough social centrality to be difficult to kick out. It’s a survival strategy with a long pedigree; viruses that burn through their host species reservoir too quickly die off.

Corporations, of course, have their own subcultures, and it’s easy to see this pattern in the origin stories of Silicon Valley success stories like Google — and also those of every failed startup that goes under because somebody embezzled and got away with it. Ditto for nonprofits, activist movements, social networking platforms, and really anything that’s focused on growth. Which is a lot of things, these days.

Organizations have a strong incentive to remove net extractors of value. Would-be net extractors of value, then, have an even stronger incentive to keep themselves connected to the social graph. The plasticity of the human brain being what it is, this sometimes leads to some interesting cognitive innovations.... If you’ve ever seen an apparently-thriving group suddenly implode, its members divided over their opinions about one particular person, chances are you’ve seen the end of a sociopath’s run.

This is why sociopaths and predatory narcissists hate and fear people like Mike Cernovich and me. Both being Sigmas and more than a little inclined to march to our own beat, we are not vulnerable to the social pressure that silences most people when they get suspicious about a sociopath. Remember, sociopaths are always on. They are always scanning, trying to get a read on who might be aware that they are not what they pretend to be.

I can't tell you how many people I've caught in the middle of a hyperaware perusal of the group they are in, like a wolf in disguise surveying the sheep around him. They always react physically when caught out, often physically recoiling. Even more damning, they react in one of two ways. They either stay away from me and begin exhibiting signs of extreme personal dislike or they suddenly get very friendly in an attempt to figure out if I'm really onto them or if it was just a coincidence. If I don't respond in a warm and clueless manner, they soon turn openly hostile.

Most people have some inkling that there is something off about the sociopath, but they simply can't get their heads around believing what their subconscious is telling them. But if you get that ping from your subconscious radar about someone, don't ignore it, start watching him closely. Make a habit of it. More often than not, you'll soon see something that will justify your suspicions that everything is not as it should be.

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.