More Thoughts On Feminist Lunacy

Yes, there’s a lot of it going around these days. Some of it is merely mildly amusing or mildly unpleasant. Some of it is actively life-threatening, as we can see from the witch-hunts inspired by recent, highly publicized but apparently false allegations of rape.

Milo Yiannopoulos has produced yet another impressive piece, this time about a feminist virago so hysterical, so vicious, and so utterly bereft of good sense that were she not demonstrably flesh, I would have assumed her to be a fictional character. I hadn’t heard about this...person previously – I don’t keep in touch with events in Silicon Valley to the extent I once did – but given recent developments among technologists, both on corporate boards and among low-level employees, her activities there come as no surprise.

By any reasonable person's definition, and even by the standards of Silicon Valley, Kane is an abusive engine of discord, creating precisely the opposite conditions to those needed for happy co-operation between the sexes. So how did she land a feature-length profile in Matter, Silicon Valley's long-read organ of choice—even though her paranoia and control freakery eventually screwed up what would probably have been a fawning profile and left journalists and readers alike aghast at her childishness and self-destructiveness?

(In case you're not familiar with the story, follow those two links, which have to be read to be believed. Evidently Matter started calling around, asking people about Kane's personal and professional life in preparation for their profile of her and her work—doing journalism, in other words—and she threw a hissy fit and started defaming and smearing the journalists in question, who were respectable professionals, beyond reproach in their dealings with her.)

That second paragraph is the key. Such harridans cannot bear scrutiny and will play every card in the deck to deflect or evade it. In this they most closely resemble racialist mouthpieces such as Al Sharpton, who receives unbelievable deference from the media but whose personal conduct has been so vile as to merit absolute condemnation. Yet they continue to get unearned attention and respect, mainly because they belong to “certified victim classes” the media has resolved never, ever to cross.

Unearned respect is almost always abused to the detriment of the genuinely respectable and respect-worthy. Shanley Kane is striving to present us with a demonstration.

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A pair of terms with which employment lawyers will already be familiar, assumption of risk and informed consent, are relevant to much of the feminist slander-slinging today.

He who voluntarily and without inducement enters some place or situation is said to have assumed the risks that pertain to that place or situation. For example, a Christian tourist who decides to travel covertly to Mecca, an Arabian city nominally closed to non-Muslims, has assumed the risks associated with discovery. An unarmed man who ventures at night into an area known to be the haunt of muggers and drug dealers has assumed the risks that come with that territory. Assumption of risk lays the burden of coping with the risks, including all the damages that would fall upon him should those risks be realized, upon the principal’s own shoulders.

A woman who voluntarily goes unaccompanied, unarmed, and otherwise unprotected through a district where a significant number of rapes have been reported in the recent past has assumed the risks of that activity. Though the deed is criminal and should be investigated and prosecuted, nevertheless she has no moral claim to having been “failed” by anyone. Neither can she validly protest, when informed of the stupidity of her decision, that to be so informed constitutes “blaming the victim.”

The other term, informed consent, pertains to decisions taken under inducement. An employer induces his employees to enter his place of business by offering a salary and / or other benefits. A shopkeeper induces customers to enter his store by advertising its existence and / or promoting his wares. The inducement constitutes an obligation on the part of the inducer to inform those induced of any non-trivial risks attached to such behavior. If the inducer can validly claim to have done so to the best of his knowledge and ability, he is at least partially indemnified against any damages that may accrue to those induced from the realization of those risks.

An invitation to a “frat party” constitutes an inducement. But what does “informed consent” come to in such a case?

• Fraternities are populated by young men.
• They almost always feature alcoholic beverages.
• Laws against them notwithstanding, they frequently feature various recreational drugs.
• Young men, with few exceptions, are interested in having sex.
• Young women, with few exceptions, are the persons with whom young men want to have sex.
• Though this might come as a shock to the terminally naive, quite a lot of sex occurs at frat parties.

Just how out of touch, friendless, and intellectually deficient must a young woman be not to know all that before she first sets foot on a college campus? Does such a girl belong in college at all?

This common-sense observation won’t halt the cries about “rape culture” and “patriarchal oppression,” of course.

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The feminist harridans’ diatribes against men et cetera won’t halt until the media, particularly the Main Stream Media, demand that they hew to the same standards that are expected of men. However, the Main Stream Media long ago abandoned all pretense of “objective journalism.” Like the rest of the Left’s coalition of agents, they’ve signed on to an agenda, in part out of conviction but in at least equal measure because in our time, the preservation of coalitions of allegiant customers is a matter of old-format media survival. Indeed, even some of the “new,” online media have become dependent on such ideological patron groups.

This is a devastating criticism of the journalistic trade. It opens wide the question of whether there’s any “news source” whose reporting can and should be believed by default. When the details of such reports include allegations of rape, molestation, sexual harassment, and the like, careers and lives hang in the balance. A heavy moral onus for destroying innocent lives should rest upon those who promote unfounded accusations.

Women, having allowed feminists to redefine them from the “strong” profile they claimed a few decades ago to the “fragile flower” category they were supposedly striving to escape, will be the ultimate victims. Economic forces are already rearranging matters to separate men and women in business and commerce. The legal hazards of marriage and fatherhood have brought about a huge aversion to those things among young men. Socially, young Americans are partitioning themselves into gender-specific camps to a degree unknown since the Victorian Era. Only terminal blindness to foreseeable consequences can account for it; only the opening of millions of women’s eyes to those consequences can undo it.

“You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Retribalizers Part 3: A Special And Specially Threatening Case

Just a few days ago, I wrote:

Metrosexuality, spornosexuality, and the widening gulf between the sexes generally are not the consequences of overpopulation. Indeed, the reproduction rate of the First World has fallen so low that several nations are disappearing as we watch: they’re “going out of business,” not due to lack of “customers” but to lack of “workers.” Nor is this a recent development; its inception can be traced back at least five decades. This leads to some fascinating correlations and investigations.

In America, the traditional masculine ideal was encapsulated in the manly virtues: in essence, the cardinal Christian virtues:

• Prudence,
• Justice,
• Temperance,
• Fortitude,

...unified around a clearly conceived standard of right and wrong, plus the courage required to uphold that standard when it’s challenged in word or deed.

If the cited essay alarmed you, Gentle Reader, it achieved its aim. Today’s tirade will have a different focus.

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Milo Yiannopoulos continues from his earlier essay with this gem of observation and analysis:

[Daryush] Valizadeh agrees with masculinity author Jack Donovan that men have been feminised by a culture that rejects and ridicules male characteristics and habits. "Good luck naming one male role model that men have today that actually helps them become men," he remarks. These thoughts are echoed on occasionally rude but compelling male-oriented blogs, such as the phenomenally popular Chateau Heartiste.

They are also supported by the current state of the sex wars, which are constituted bizarrely. One of the remarkable things about recent high-profile skirmishes with feminists is how few mainstream heterosexual men have been involved. In the GamerGate video games controversy, opposition to "social justice warriors" and their attempts at censorship on Twitter has come from older gay men in public life and younger geeks, gamers and drop-outs; in the case of Matt Taylor, it was geeks and other women.

Straight young men simply don't want to know any more. They're not getting involved. Some women, too, horrified by what lesbianised third-wave feminism claims to do in their name, opt out of the argument. The absurd result is that geeks, queers and dykes are dominating the discussion about how men and women should interact. Jack Donovan, for example, is gay, as is your present correspondent. It's as if gays are the only men left prepared to fight masculinity's corner.

Men want normal relationships that include sex, says Valizadeh. Some of them will read pick-up artist books or go to seminars by people such as Roosh V if they don't get it or need to be trained out of "white knight" behaviours instilled in them by a female-dominated culture. (Men have been taught that being a nice guy gets you laid. It doesn't.)

What strikes a lot of women as strange is how rational and systematic so much of this decision-making is by men. Many young men literally perform a cost-benefit analysis and decide that women aren't worth the hassle. It's girls who lose out in this scenario: men don't need the sustained emotional intimacy that comes with a fulfilling sexual relationship and can retreat into masturbatory pursuits, prostitution and one-night stands much more comfortably.

But that's exactly what it is, from a male point of view: a rational opting out from education, work and marriage by men who have had enough, as a remarkable book by Dr. Helen Smith called Men on Strike warned in July last year.

[Emphasis added by FWP.]

See also many of the essays at The Return of Kings.

The gender war is real.
It’s rapidly growing in scope and intensity.
And it presages the end of society as we older folks have known it.

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If it isn’t obvious from the title, my focus here is on the artificial nature of the gender gulf. It’s a creation of a very small number of gender-war feminists: “angry ugly girls,” as my Vietnamese-American sweetie Duyen likes to style them, who have succeeded by stridency, repetition, and the skillful play of the victim-card in dominating all discussions of male-female relations to which they’ve been admitted.

These are not good people. Their sole aim is destruction, animated by their corrosive envy of those who have what they have not: courage, energy, enterprise, firm morals and ethics, beauty, femininity, love. They don’t intend (and have never intended) to compel the redress any objective injustice. They seek solely to alienate women from men.

Inventions such as “lookism,” “rape culture,” and “patriarchal privilege” are laughable in light of the state of the law, the social and commercial advantages women command over men, and the extraordinary lengths to which men have gone to create a world in which women can be and do whatever they please. Yet an incredible number of men, nearly all of whom ought to know better and have no excuse for acting otherwise, grant the “angry ugly girls” an entirely unearned stature as “the voices of our generation.” Why?

Rotate the question in your mind. Why would nominally intelligent, reasonably aware men deliberately place themselves in subordination to vicious-minded harridans, at least rhetorically in print and on the airwaves? What could they possibly hope to gain by such groveling self-abasement?

Think about it for a moment.

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There are tremendous ironies in one of the above-emphasized sentences:

It's as if gays are the only men left prepared to fight masculinity's corner.

It doesn’t take a lot of thought to arrive at the reason: Homosexuals have nothing to lose from entering that arena. There are no women to be alienated among their potential sexual-romantic partners. Similarly, a fair number of the most vociferous “angry ugly girls” are homosexuals, because they have nothing to lose from alienating men. (Indeed, it’s possible that the horse was their sexual-romantic uncompetitiveness and the cart was a chosen lesbianism. Women’s sexuality is more fluid than men’s, and adapts more readily in either direction.)

Among the tribalizers driving the gender wars, you will find, standing with the “angry ugly girls:”

• “Beta” males hoping for improved sexual-romantic acceptance from women;
• Hucksters avid for acceptance in the feminist commercial niche;
• Persons with a strongly left-wing political agenda.

You won’t find traditionally masculine men. Indeed, you won’t find much sincerity of any stripe.

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I call this “a special and specially threatening case” of tribalization because of its potential effect on our future. In particular, it’s depressing reproduction rates throughout the advanced countries of the world. As Mark Steyn has already noted, a people that declines to reproduce...declines. You have no shot at being part of the future if you’re never born, but then, you’re unlikely to care much for the very same reason. However, the consequences for current generations are ominous indeed.

What are your savings worth, in actual purchasing power? What can you buy with them? Why is it available to be bought? Would those dollars in your bank account be worth as much if there were only half as many humans as there are today? How about a third or a quarter as many? Are you sure about that?

The late Phyllis Dorothy James would have some thoughts for you.

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Just as there are many separate cases of tribalization taking place around us, there are many perspectives from which one can approach the tribalization phenomenon. In my view, the most profitable path for analysis is to view it as a quest for gain on the part of the tribalizers, always bearing in mind that “gain” need not be denominated in dollars. Some tribalizers are after power or prestige; others are merely straining to slake their hatred of some perceived enemy. Rare is the case in which the ideological separation of otherwise compatible groups into mutually hostile camps is spontaneous.

In no case is it anything but contemptible and vile.

The Retribalizers Part 2: It’s Not Just About Race

First, an instructive historical citation:

”Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.” – Martin Y. Latsis head of the Ukrainian Tcheka

Along with that, have a personal vignette.

About thirty years ago, I briefly dated a Chinese girl who was here on a student visa. Ming told me many stories about life in Communist China, some of them unbearably painful to relate...and to hear. The attitude the Communists strove to inculcate in the common people was a highly accurate reflection of the Latsis quote above: they were to evaluate a neighbor, not on the basis of his conduct but on the basis of his class, with some trades and classes rigidly predefined as “enemies of the people.” Thus, if you practiced one such trade, or if you were deemed a member of one such class, you were condemned ab initio, socially if not legally.

Ming’s mother had been a teacher – one of the “enemies” trades. Enormous pressure was put upon her to abandon it. She wound up operating a tea farm that barely kept her alive, in part because of the two government-assigned “helpers” that monitored and hindered her at every instant.

How, you may ask, does a nation that anathematizes teachers progress materially? A good question. My guess is that the favored ones were channeled into the education of the offspring of the political elite. But there is no question that the Communist regime prospered politically by giving the people faceless classes of enemies to hate – and that the fortunes of common Chinese were negatively affected by the policy.

Food for thought.

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Tribalization is a tactic both for forming blocs that can be herded into political coalitions, and for creating depersonalized enemies that one’s allegiants can be encouraged to hate. Indeed, a tribe would lack all significance were there neither suspicion nor animus directed against those outside the tribe. When we address a collectivizing trend in our politics, it’s best to ask both questions: not merely how the tribe is being defined, but how it defines and views any adversary tribes.

In the case of contemporary (i.e., gender-war) feminism, generic “men” are defined as the adversary: a supposedly monolithic bloc that obeys conscious and unconscious tendencies to “oppress” women. It’s essential to the feminist project that she who defines herself as a feminist accept that as a postulate. By implication, if she associates herself with a man or men, they must somehow be qualified as exceptions – in essence, they must be vetted and accepted as “women with Y chromosomes.”

In the case of Occupy-style tribalism, the adversary tribe is “the rich:” an undefined and undefinable category of persons who have supposedly contrived to profit from others’ deprivation and misery. An Occupier is encouraged to make that a principal tenet of his worldview and (of course) his political stance. That he benefits personally, often greatly, from the achievements of “the rich,” conveyed to him by the market process, must not be permitted to intrude upon his consciousness.

Viewed thus, tribalism is a species of collectivism strongly flavored with conspiratorialism. Though the aspect of conspiratiorial thinking that posits conscious plotting of some against the rest is often absent, the attitude remains immensely useful to the retribalizers: the hucksters and grievance-mongers who labor to divide us into mutually suspicious tribes.

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The most unfortunate thing about tribalism in society and politics is that it cannot be met head on. There is no salvation from any sort of collectivism in “counter-collectivism.” That’s merely a short route to open warfare. The sole remedy, as frustrating as it is to contemplate, lies at the individual level. Men of good will must individually and repeatedly demonstrate that they are such, in the ordinary course of life among other men, no matter what perverse social or political notions they or their neighbors may hold.

America has no shortage of men of good will, but that alone is insufficient. Tribal boundaries are not easily lowered or dissolved, especially when the retribalizers are laboring to raise and strengthen them. Atop that, there are pro-survival aspects to certain categorical suspicions and cautions, as painful as that is to admit. ("I can be walking down the street at 2am in Jackson Mississippi, hear footsteps behind me and be relieved it is a white man behind me." – Jesse Jackson) Survival will always trump more abstract political considerations.

The damage tribalism has done to American society is extensive and severe. It will take many millions of persons quite a long time to repair; though trust is slow to form and hard to cement in place, it can be shattered in an instant. Nor will the retribalizers kindly suspend their efforts while we work to undo them.

Pray.

Oathkeepers

This is a cross-post.

This is a rather interesting article. Now, you tell me, who would be upset about those sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign AND domestic?

Indeed, article VI of the Constitution clearly says, in part, that everyone, including those aforementioned politicians, shall be bound by the laws of the land and by the Constitution. It also says that they (the politicians again) shall be bound by oath or affirmation to the Constitution. In fact, just re-reading article VI over a couple of times, I cringe at just how far afield we have drifted in this country over the course of the last few years in allowing some in Washington, DC to not follow this document.

You, uhm, know of any person/group in violation of this?

The Retribalizers

“You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Two years and more ago, I wrote a series of pieces titled “Tension And Habitat” that explored, among other things, the phenomenon of tribes and the influences that can form them, strengthen them, weaken them, and destroy them. The one that drew the most attention, and caused the most controversy, included this passage:

Even after nation-states have formalized their legal systems and all that goes with them, whatever tribes they have subsumed will still exhibit tribal characteristics, at least for a while. In particular, members of a subsumed tribe will continue to prefer one another to the members of other subsumed tribes. In historical studies, this is often called sectionalism, but the geographical connotations of that word should not be allowed to lead us astray. After subsumption by a nation-state, the members of a tribe will often undergo some degree of internal dispersion. Yet they will continue to maintain tribal preferences as they disperse, until interpenetration and the slow process of binding to their new locales have had time to weaken them. Consider the resistance of various religious groups to exogamy as an illustration.

Should political incentives arise that reinforce tribal distinctions and preferences, havoc will ensue. A nation-state cannot endure under conditions of internal inter-tribal strife; as Abraham Lincoln put it, a house divided cannot stand. There must ultimately be either a convulsive reduction of the tribes to political passivity, for example by warfare, or a parting of the ways that dissolves the nation-state into two or more separate units, as happened after the British relinquished the rule of India.

A subsumed tribe reluctant to weaken its cohesion and its preferences, but unwilling to risk open conflict with the enveloping polity or with other subsumed tribes, will sometimes "go underground." That is: it will attempt to pull its distinctive characteristics and its methods for preferring members to non-members out of public view. This isn't always possible; when possible, it isn't necessarily easy. But it does occur, for example in the case of the Amish, the Mennonites, and similarly insular groups in American history.

Most fascinating of all, interior conflicts brought about by political forces can actually germinate new tribes within the nation-state. Those conflicts, and the nascent tribes they elicit, can arise from:

• Legal privileges granted to some persons but not others;
• National policies that have regionally, racially, sexually, ethnically, occupationally, religiously, or otherwise discriminatory effects;
• De facto infringements or abridgements of the rights of recognizable groups.

What has occurred in Ferguson, Missouri over the death of Michael Brown, and is occurring in New York City over the death of Eric Garner, demonstrates that at least one political force in the United States appreciates the potential power of tribes. Indeed, the Left has done everything in its power to collectivize American Negroes into a unified, anti-American tribe – i.e., a cohesive bloc whose sole allegiance is to the tribe itself. In doing so, they have loosed an avalanche whose terminus even they cannot foresee. The overarching political problem is that Americans who find the consequences revolting are largely incapable – intellectually incapable – of dealing with it.

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The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. – Henry Hazlitt

It is normal and natural for persons to prefer others like themselves: socially, economically, politically, religiously, and in whatever other ways might exist. This has long been evident in matters of race.

The century from the Emancipation Proclamation to the first Civil Rights Act saw a great many changes, but sociologically none more significant than the weakening of racial animosity and distrust among both Caucasian and Negro Americans. The Civil Rights Act itself was evidence of that: though its intended beneficiaries were negroes, the Act was the product of Caucasians, passed by Caucasians, enforced by Caucasians, and near-universally approved by Caucasians. The tribal preference commonly mislabeled racism had weakened sufficiently to make the Act possible.

Unfortunately, the Act contained provisions that opened the door to retribalization. Its enforcement proved racially divisive in ways few men of good will had foreseen. The reasons are as illuminating as anything in American history.

Post-World-War-II American government had become almost wholly bureaucratic: i.e., its operation had been entrusted to large departments of Civil Service employees who were essentially beyond any need to account for themselves or their actions to the electorate. Bureaucracies of that sort are dedicated to growth and exceedingly difficult to restrain. The bureaucracy that formed in response to the Civil Rights Act joined forces with the New Frontier and Great Society welfare bureaucracies in their efforts to increase their size, their budgets, and the scope of their operations.

The intentions of the “field agents” of these bureaucracies included (but were not limited to) the promotion of the bureaucracies themselves and their benevolence toward their intended clients. They naturally sought out the demographic most likely to respond approvingly to what they had to offer. As American Negroes, particularly those concentrated in urban areas, were economically still well behind American Caucasians in material well-being and security, that demographic received by far the greatest share of the new bureaucracies’ attention.

The incentives thus introduced began the retribalization process – of Negroes and Caucasians both.

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The law of unintended consequences, often cited but rarely defined, is that actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. Economists and other social scientists have heeded its power for centuries; for just as long, politicians and popular opinion have largely ignored it. – Rob Norton

“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” – Originator unknown

It is wrong to confer legal privileges on some that are denied to others. The consequences have been devastating wherever and whenever that error has occurred.

When a legal privilege, especially one that can be exploited to yield economic gain or political elevation, is conferred upon a recognizable group, it will be exploited by a steadily increasing fraction of the group, to the detriment of persons outside the group. Over time, it can come to define the group in outsiders’ minds, turning the group into an aristocracy of sorts. This will often occur even if the privilege is not exploited – indeed, is viewed with distaste – by the great majority of the group. The existence of such differential levels of privilege inherently engenders resentment...even when the privilege was conferred out of a desire to remedy prior injustices and assuage the resentment they generated.

The legal framework produced by the Civil Rights Act led, de facto though surely not by design, to racial hiring quotas and a guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude toward employers among the Act’s enforcers. Over time, the damage spread to other walks of American life, such as real estate marketing and sales. The dynamic was exacerbated by racial hucksters who agitated ceaselessly for more and larger government programs targeting urban Negroes, often with threats of mass violence should they not get their way. Politicians eager to gain the votes of that demographic hastened to comply.

No counterforce has arisen to offset or reduce the effects of the CRA / welfare dynamic. In consequence, we have crippled the ordinary processes of American businesses, have produced huge numbers of “permanent welfare class” citizens, and have institutionalized racial demagoguery as an ineradicable component of the national discourse.

That’s not all. American Caucasians are being retribalized as well. Their sense of having been abused has grown to the point where it overwhelms the largely artificial “white guilt” syndrome the racial hucksters have exploited. We’re seeing the gradual coalescence of “white nationalist” groups and communities formed, sotto voce, around that premise. Interracial tension is at heights never before seen in these United States. Efforts by the well meaning to dampen those tensions and restore an acceptable degree of interracial amity are unequal to the power of the tribal dynamic.

This is a formula for disaster. The reactions to the Michael Brown and Eric Garner incidents should make clear how destructive are the forces those well intended but racially discriminatory laws and programs have unleashed. The natural processes by which persons choose to congregate and associate with one another, whether geographically, socially, economically, or in any other way, should never have been warped by law. That they had previously been warped by “Jim Crow” laws ought to have taught us how ugly the results can be.

The beneficiaries – bureaucrats, racial demagogues, smarmy politicians, and others whose prosperity and prestige depend on exacerbating the situation – would prefer that you not know that. It threatens to upset their scheme. That the tribes they’ve built, intentionally or otherwise, are on the verge of open warfare with one another is merely one of those pesky unintended consequences...the sort in which the Left disbelieves and from which it refuses to learn.

Winter Break? Bah, Humbug!

I work in a public school.  As a result, I've occasionally been corrected - very gently, I must say - when I refer to the 2 week vacation at the end of the year as "Christmas Break".

Oh, no, I am informed, it's a GENERIC holiday celebration (I generally refrain from pointing out that HOLIDAY is a variant of the original HOLY DAY).  Just happens that SO many important holidays occur around this time that it's convenient to adjourn for vacation.

I always respond by saying, "I'll call it Winter Break the very first year that it DOESN'T include Christmas".

Christmas is the ONLY reason for the break

READ MORE:

The Cry Of The Left: “Eat Your Neighbors!”

First, a snippet from one of my books:

    Patrick Wolzman mounted the dais and addressed the crowd.
    “Things have been fairly quiet around here lately,” he said. “Quiet enough that you might be wondering why I called this meeting. It’s simple enough, really. Has anyone else been following developments at Morelon House?”
    Barton started. Althea came to full alert. The crowd murmured uneasily.
    Wolzman nodded. “I thought not. I have, for several reasons. The Morelons have turned their mansion into a fortress. They’ve mounted big guns at all points of the compass. Laser cannons like the ones here.” He waved at the Spacehawk laser turrets. “It got me wondering why, and about what else they might have planned for the near future.”
    His gaze fell directly upon Barton. “I see the Morelon patriarch has graced us with his presence. Perhaps he’d care to join me up here and explain the actions of his clan, which many of us might deem provocative.”
    Barton growled “Hold hard, Al,” moved to the front of the gathering, and hoisted himself onto the dais with some difficulty. He glared at Wolzman with unconcealed anger.
    “Refresh my memory, Patrick,” he said in his sweetest tones. “Your clan is in the weapons business, is it not?”
    Wolzman nodded warily.
    “Have you had a downturn in business lately?”
    “Not noticeably, no.”
    “Well, what moves you to question the desire of Clan Morelon to develop some weapons of its own? You don’t mean to claim a monopoly over the trade, do you?”
    In the perimeter lights around the battery, Wolzman’s face darkened visibly. Yet glimmering behind the mask of anger was a well-concealed smile of satisfaction.
    “Monopolies are why we’re here, Bart,” he said. “Just now, Clan Morelon wields a trio of them. And a few of us here and a few not so nearby are getting just a wee bit worried at the trend.”
    Barton frowned. “We have no monopolies. Everything we sell is available from other sources.”
    Wolzman produced a smile of triumph. He turned to face the crowd.
    “Who here gets his power from a source other than a Morelon fusion plant? Please raise a hand.”
    No one did so. Wolzman nodded. “And what clan, whether or not it’s represented here, possesses ground-to-orbit capability and an outpost on the Relic? Please! Don’t all answer at once.”
    The uneasy rustling from the crowd became more pronounced.
    “Monopolies,” Wolzman said. “Not engineered by the destruction of your competition, I’ll grant that. But complete enough that if you wanted to ruin any of us, for any reason, you have the wherewithal, either by cutting off our electrical power or by bombarding us from sperosynchronous orbit.”
    —Don’t interfere, Al.
    It’s hard.
    —I know. Don’t.
    “What would make anyone think we plan any such thing?” Barton was maintaining his composure with an all too visible effort. “We’re merely using technology to provide electrical power—a product, I might add, that derives completely from my kinswoman’s massive investments and embrace of enormous personal risks to achieve that bastion on the Relic, where she did the research that produced it.” He waved at Althea, who had moved to the front of the crowd. “There she is, Patrick. Will you castigate her for her industry, her bravery, or both?”
    “Neither,” Wolzman said. “I’m castigating you and your clan, for not sharing her breakthroughs with the community at large.”
    Barton snorted. “And what ethical principle would compel us to do that? Oh, by the way, I’m still waiting to hear about our third monopoly. You did say ‘trio,’ didn’t you?”
    Wolzman nodded. “I did. Show the crowd your left arm.”
    Barton stared at him in incredulity. “Are you serious?”
    “Please, Bart.”
    He skinned back his sleeve.
    The arm was essentially regrown. It hadn’t yet developed to a mature girth or muscle tone; that would take time, nutrition, and a long course of steadily intensifying exercise. Nevertheless, it was complete, all the way to a hand with fingers and a nail at the end of each.
    “A brand new appendage, ladies and gentlemen,” Wolzman purred. “For those of you unaware of it, Bart lost that arm in combat with forces to which my clan was allied. Forces that came together for the same reasons I’ve asked you here this evening: to break the Morelon stranglehold on facilities that no single clan should command. Facilities that simple justice demands they be shared with all of Hope.
    “There’s the third of them, Bart. With the adoption of Claire Albermayer—”
    “It’s Claire Morelon now, Patrick,” Barton spat.
    Wolzman nodded. “As you wish. With that adoption, Clan Morelon has acquired the power of bodily regeneration. The ability to replace any lost or damaged body part, as long as the victim remains alive. Do you plan to share that with the rest of us, Bart?”
    Althea had reached battle readiness. She restrained herself from leaping onto the dais by the narrowest of margins.
    “It will be commercialized,” Barton said.
    “Oh?” Wolzman snorted. “How generous! What you’ve received as a gift from your adoptee, we will have to pay for! Shall we bow to your majestic beneficence now, or would you prefer to have our obeisance choreographed?”

[From Freedom’s Fury, the third volume of my Spooner Federation trilogy.]

Hope, a world populated by the descendants of anarchists who fled Earth before the genocidal wrath of the States, has grown prosperous and well populated...well populated enough that some have arisen who envy their fellows’ superior achievements and seek power over them. They tried, earlier in the series, to take what they wanted by force, but failed. (That’s the reason Clan Morelon fortified its two mansions as described above.) In the above, we see one of their leading lights trying the other perennial tactic of the Left: inducing neighbors to distrust one another.

Eowyn of the excellent Fellowship of the Minds notes a smaller-scale example of the tactic:

Use of snitches seems instinctive to the Left....

B. Christopher Agee reports for Western Journalism, Dec. 4, 2014, that in response to a shooting incident last week in downtown Austin, Police Chief Acevedo held a press conference to emphasize the shooting could have been prevented had someone reported the gunman’s behavior to law enforcement before his rampage.

Saying that he stays awake at nights worrying about “these homegrown extremists that are lone wolves, that are mad at the world, that are angry,” Acevedo encouraged Austin residents to report to authorities anyone “who’s a gun enthusiast or is armed with these types of firearms and they’re showing any type of propensity for hatred.”

The police chief said: “It’s important for us as Americans to know our neighbors, to know our families. Tell somebody if you know somebody that is acting pecu—with a lot of hatred toward any particular group.”

Couching his instruction with the caveat that turning in a friend or family member for owning guns “doesn’t mean that we’re going to take them to jail,” Acevedo noted that “we might want to vet these people.”

By my lights, Acevedo’s words, if they were reported accurately in the above, constitute adequate grounds for removing him from his position and barring him from ever again occupying a position of public trust. But Austin, despite being the capital of gun-friendly Texas, is rather far to the left politically, so I doubt that any such thing will occur. However, it’s Eowyn’s first sentence that’s most thematic:

Use of snitches seems instinctive to the Left.

Not only is it reflexive on their part; it’s also highly revealing. Totalitarians of all stripes are aware that they can never command sufficient police power to impose their will on a whole nation, unless their subjects actively participate in the process of oppression.

But in a free, peaceful, prosperous commonwealth, that’s a very difficult thing to do ab initio. It requires an emotional infrastructure that must be carefully designed and laid down.

It requires a pervasive atmosphere of fear.

---

Among the Left’s recent losses of more than transient importance has been its loss of two tactics of longstanding importance: racism-shouting and “women’s issues.” Note how badly candidates who leaned on those traditional pillars were beaten in the recent elections. The implication seems obvious: it’s no longer sufficient for the Left to accuse conservative or libertarian candidates of wanting to oppress Negroes and / or women. Yet those tactics have been instrumental in its rise to political power and to its grip on what it still possesses. Therefore, it must seek new weapons to take the place of those it has unintentionally blunted.

The Left’s gropings appear to have landed on an approach no man of good will would have expected: accusations of sexual predation. Consider the following stories:

• Lena Dunham’s claim that she was raped “by a College Republican.”
• Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s whole-cloth fantasy about a gang-rape at a University of Virginia frat house.
• Danmell Ndonye’s claim to have been raped at Hofstra University.
• This case, which the hard-left Sacramento Bee appears to have scrubbed from its online edition.

Each of these “rapes” was used by the Left as a tool for encouraging women to fear men – especially for young women to fear young men. If that doesn’t have you thinking about Rupert’s cri de coeur, check your pulse: you may have died and not noticed.

Pervasive mutual fear is the most fertile of all soils in which to germinate a totalitarian State.

---

Only by turning us against one another can the Left succeed in completing its campaign to extinguish all traces of freedom.

We already live under a cloud of fear, but at this time it’s principally fear of government. So many organs of government at all levels have been revealed as predacious exploiters of power and privilege that Americans’ trust in government has sunk to an all-time low. No one believes any longer in the restraining effects of the Constitution or the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. No one grants any agent of the State the presumption of benevolence. And no one with three functioning brain cells willingly allows a uniformed “law enforcement officer” into his home...especially not those of us with dogs.

I find myself wondering if there’s a wandering planetoid in our future...or perhaps, given the ESA’s recent achievements, a habitable comet.

---

The situation is grave, and becoming graver as we speak.The IRS has embraced its role as Censor of the Right to a degree even I could not have predicted. Other of the “alphabet agencies” are striving with all their power to suppress American enterprise, that the Left’s gains in reducing so many of us to dependence on State handouts not be reversed. And of course, we have the rampant use of militarized local police forces and their unConstitutional use of “civil asset forfeiture” to fund their operations and keep us all cowering behind our curtains.

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley has several times spoken of a “tipping point,” passing which could put an end to any remaining semblance of Constitutional government. If we haven’t yet passed such a point, we’re surely teetering at the edge of it today.

Food for thought.

(Cross-posted at Liberty’s Torch.)

The Last Of The Harbingers Of Doom...

...comes when we cease to breed:

"My generation of boys is f**ked," says Rupert, a young German video game enthusiast I've been getting to know over the past few months. "Marriage is dead. Divorce means you're screwed for life. Women have given up on monogamy, which makes them uninteresting to us for any serious relationship or raising a family. That's just the way it is. Even if we take the risk, chances are the kids won't be ours. In France, we even have to pay for the kids a wife has through adulterous affairs.

"In school, boys are screwed over time and again. Schools are engineered for women. In the US, they force-feed boys Ritalin like Skittles to shut them up. And while girls are favoured to fulfil quotas, men are slipping into distant second place.

"Nobody in my generation believes they're going to get a meaningful retirement. We have a third or a quarter of the wealth previous generations had, and everyone's fleeing to higher education to stave off unemployment and poverty because there are no jobs.

"All that wouldn't be so bad if we could at least dull the pain with girls. But we're treated like paedophiles and potential rapists just for showing interest. My generation are the beautiful ones, " he sighs, referring to a 1960s experiment on mice that supposedly predicted a grim future for the human race.

After overpopulation ran out of control, the female mice in John Calhoun's "mouse universe" experiment stopped breeding, and the male mice withdrew from the company of others entirely, eating, sleeping, feeding and grooming themselves but doing little else. They had shiny coats, but empty lives.

"The parallels are astounding," says Rupert.

Overpopulation has little to do with it. Nor is Rupert, a young German, a member of the population I have uppermost in mind. Please read the rest of the article and return here forthwith.

---

The Calhoun “Mouse experiments” alluded to by Rupert and cited above were designed to explore the consequences of overpopulation, but the consequences Calhoun observed need not be tied exclusively to that cause. Human beings respond to ideas and perceptions quite as strongly as mice respond to a lack of space or food...and there are some very pernicious ideas in the social atmosphere in our time.

Unless you’ve spent the last thirty years in a medically induced coma, you’re surely aware of the phenomenon called metrosexuality. The implications for traditional masculinity, male participation in the forward motion of American society, and male-female relations were disturbing from the first. However, it might prove to have been a transitional stage to something more ominous yet: spornosexuality, the complete descent of male consciousness into self-worship and self-indulgence, divorced from any perception of need or desire for the female.

It’s possible – barely – to view spornosexuality as a perverse hypertrophy of masculinity. Indeed, some of its characteristics, such as the immersion in fitness and sports, appear quintessentially masculine. But it omits all the other defining characteristics of masculinity as we have known it since the Cro-Magnons. In particular, it lacks the value of heroic courage, the desire to excel and to rise to leadership, and the drive to win a mate and reproduce. It is wholly self-absorbed, lacking all need or desire for the admiration of others...especially not that of women.

Viewed thus, spornosexuality seems a closer approach to narcissistic solipsism – an expensively groomed sort of eremitism – than to any variety of masculinity as its long been understood. One thing it is most assuredly not: a path that promises the continuation of our society beyond the present generation.

---

Metrosexuality, spornosexuality, and the widening gulf between the sexes generally are not the consequences of overpopulation. Indeed, the reproduction rate of the First World has fallen so low that several nations are disappearing as we watch: they’re “going out of business,” not due to lack of “customers” but to lack of “workers.” Nor is this a recent development; its inception can be traced back at least five decades. This leads to some fascinating correlations and investigations.

In America, the traditional masculine ideal was encapsulated in the manly virtues: in essence, the cardinal Christian virtues:

• Prudence,
• Justice,
• Temperance,
• Fortitude,

...unified around a clearly conceived standard of right and wrong, plus the courage required to uphold that standard when it’s challenged in word or deed. As I wrote in the cited essay:

A man must learn "where the line is:" the line that separates behavior that must be tolerated from behavior that must not be. He must be willing -- personally willing -- to fight in defense of the former and against the latter, though it might expose him to risk and cost him injury or death. He must be ready to swallow his distaste and protect the rights even of persons he finds repulsive, if they have harmed no other human being.

A man must learn proportionality and restraint. Biology has optimized the male body for purposive aggression, sudden acceleration and focused violence. These are not things to be deployed in their 200-proof strength against trivial or unworthy targets. A man doesn't kill the bounder who steals his parking space, his business idea, or his wife. Even a punch in the nose is excessive for infractions like these.

A man must learn never to shirk a freely contracted obligation. If you've said you'll do it, you do it. No excuses. Conversely, if you have failed to meet an obligation, you must admit to it and try to do better next time.

A man must learn not to whine about disappointments, reversals, or the ways of women. Especially about the ways of women. They're not men -- thank God -- and we can't fairly hold them to manly standards.

A man must learn reverence in the presence of the numinous. The fact that each of us is a part of an infinitely greater whole manifests itself in innumerable ways. Learning to let it in, to cherish it, and to use it to buttress oneself in times of darkness is critical to attaining the endurance the world expects from a man.

Last and most important, a man must transmit the manly virtues to his male children.

Every last atom of this set of desiderata has been under attack, by radical feminists, enemies of Christianity, haters of patriotism, pseudo-peaceniks, and others, for a minimum of fifty years.

The attacks have never commanded the active allegiance of a majority of Americans. Yet they have gained an enormous amount of “silent deference:” the reluctance to challenge their promoters, usually out of fear of the consequences. They’ve established a powerful bastion in the law and in popular culture. And in the minds of our impressionable young, they have largely succeeded in demonizing masculinity of the traditional sort.

But everything that exists exists as something specific. A thing cannot be devoid of all characteristics and identity. That applies to us male “things,” as well. So if our young men are being successfully deflected from the traditional masculine ideal, they will perforce replace it with some other ideal – and if among the driving force displacing traditional masculinity is an agglomeration of female lies, contempt, and legal hazards, the replacement ideal will naturally reduce the importance of women and their potential as mates well below other considerations...possibly to zero.

Such a demasculinized generation will never reproduce. It only takes one such generation to engineer the extinction of a nation.

---

Senescence begins when growth ends -- “Lansing’s Law”

The above formulation originated, to the best of my knowledge, in James Blish’s novel They Shall Have Stars. Nevertheless, gerontologists use the cessation of growth as a reliable indication of the onset of senescence. It’s more empirical than theoretical, based on the lack of any observation of the reverse transition – i.e., the resumption of growth after a period of plateauing or decline.

“Lansing’s Law” appears to hold true for societies as well as for living organisms.

Mark Steyn’s marvelous book America Alone presents us with a stark survey of the First World societies whose reproduction rates have fallen below “replacement rate:” 2.1 live births per woman. Not one of them can be said to be healthy and vital. All are practicing the management of national decline. Some are frantically straining to shore up luxuriant welfare states by importing population from other lands. Others are merely doing what they must: centralizing their essential resources and services, the better to conserve what they require to sustain their shrinking, steadily aging populations.

Every nation in Western Europe is in this situation. So is Japan. A survey of the attitudes of young men in those nations suggests that, like Rupert, they have turned away from masculinity as older Americans understood and honored it. If American youth were to do the same...what then?

There are reasons to believe that America’s young men are doing the same. Metrosexuality and spornosexuality are our warning bells, for those inclined to listen.

---

It approaches tautology to note that you cannot induce a people to breed for the sake of future generations. A people that has ceased to breed has lost interest in future generations, and in the future as such. If the young men of the First World have fallen into that abyss, only they can right themselves...but current conditions and present trends continuing, the likelihood is small.

What, then, must we do? Aside from pray, of course?

(Cross-posted at Liberty's Torch.)

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Christmas!

Yes, this IS the Christmas season, even though I'm technically jumping the gun, according to the Church (this is Advent, the time BEFORE the Christmas season - Christmas doesn't actually begin before December 25 - it lasts 12 days, ending on Epiphany - actually, the day before, January 5).

But, this is when all the frenzy begins.  So, why am I so excited?

Because, for high school teachers on the semester block system, we're nearing the end of our time with this group of kids.  We break for Christmas (NO, I will NOT call it Winter Break, until that unlikely year when it DOESN'T coincide with Christmas) on December 19, return for a week of review and testing on January 5, and bid goodbye to them at the end of the day, January 9.  That's 16 days away (15 for me - I have a professional development day next Wednesday).

It's not that I don't like this group - over the semester, I've gotten quite fond of them.  But, I'm looking forward to having Juniors and Seniors, rather than Freshmen and Sophomores.  The younger students are nice, but wearing over the long run.  The DRAMA!  The ENERGY!  The NARCISSISM!

I need a nap.

The 2 week break also allows me R & R time.  I can catch up on world events, read a book NOT related to my work, stay up past 9 pm, and catch up on housework.

And, of course, blog.

Seen This Movie Before. Sucked the First Time.

Article By: SilverDeth
Written for: League of Outlaw Bloggers
Date: December 5th, 2014

Ahhh right on cue...

Bill Quick over at Daily Pundit lays out the backstab:

"Not if the GOP won’t abide by its oath to protect and defend it. And why would they? This way they get the scamnest the Gentry desperately wants, with the added bonus that they get to blame Obama for it – and then run against him for the next two years while pushing lies about repealing it." - Bill Quick

Click HERE to read the entire article.

We do hope those of you who so... dutifully carried the Republican's water enjoy getting shived. Do spare those of us who understand how useless voting is in America the gaping maw and pie-plate eyes... we've seen this shitty movie before. Hated it the first time. Told you how it ended. You didn't listen. Sympathy? Non-f*cking-existent.

The beauty of this total conniving betrayal, is that even though it's happening live and in open public, "the folks" will still continue to pull the lever for these clowns - these "merry pranksters" who promise one thing, and cheerily deliver the polar-opposite. Need we remind everyone that the Neo-Confederates ran against the ACA in 2010... and despite all their fury and bluster - and the power to nullify the law en-total - they refused to lift a finger to strangle that abomination in it's crib. These "jovial-joksters" then campaigned against Illegal Aliens in 2014 - with all the fervor of a Baptist minister delivering the word of God to "African heathens..." the whole while fully intending - from day one, second zero - to deliberately tie their own hands and blame the Prog-Nazis and President Drone-kill for what the RePubican's Corperatist owners desperately wanted:

Cheap labor. When the Chamber of Commerce says "Bark," Cry-baby Boehnor goes "Woof!"

Not just fruit pickers and burger flippers mind you. Oh no. H1B visas galore! White collar Professionals from other nations to sate Silicone Vally. Engineers. Programmers. Designers. Doctors. Skilled and intelligent people, who are just as smart, just as capable, and just as willing to work hard as Americans are - for about half the cash.

Now... don't relish your Schaden-boners too much Libtards. Your own fuckers sold YOU up the shit-river on every single thing they promised in '08 and 2012. The Commies transformed "FREE Healthcare for all" into "Gigantic-Public-Money-Pig-Fest" for the insurance industry and Pfizer! Hooray for your titanic social victory proles! Savor the fact that men now pay for pelvic exams, and women have to lay out cash for testicular cancer screenings! (That sure worked out well for the health-care industry! Funny how all you serfs now have to fund sh*t you can't even use... at gun-point... that must be what Heinlein called "*Bad Luck!"). We won't even get started on the precedent for executing US citizens without a trial, El-FBI acting the role of Copyright attack dog, unrelenting spying by any and all FedGovCo acronyms, the glorified blue gloved mall-cops molesting your five year old daughters, the militarizing of every f*cking federal agency ever, and don't forget to mention the feds coating Barney Fife from crotch-to-gizzard in enough surplus battle-rattle to occupy Somalia.

Who are the saps again? All of yah.

Keep being "pragmatic." That buys you Wiemar Germany. (And everything that follows after). Republicans... Democrats... just illusions for the rubes, to dice the revulsion over our governance into chunks Leviathan won't choke on.

Think that's not so?

Ok then sports fans... answer this:

"Why is it that President Peace-Prize was stoking the race-baiting Ferguson-furnace full tilt, (and let's be fair... the Cop-Loving RePubicans on the right were feeding the "opposition"), with all the willingly polarized left/right media-apparatchiks in tow... until a city was burned down in an orgy of rage and banditry...

...but now, when we have video of the "virtuous" NYPD choking a man... TO DEATH - over F*CKING LOOSE SMOKES - something that a near plurality of people regard as inexcusable - and suddenly... not a even meep to be heard from the flock of freaking agitators as the pigs responsible prance away scot-free?

Funny how that works, ain't it?

We'll offer a hypothesis on what truly terrifies the puppeteers:

Stromboli's nightmare is one of "The Peasantry"(TM) coalescing together long enough to compare notes - they might just realize whose playing them for morons... which would undoubtedly be double-plus-ungood for the life-expectancy of the gentry class. Both metaphorically and existentially.

So then... back to the games... all the little players get to pretend their sports team is the great white knight, crusading for virtue, liberty and justice... and all that other associated bullshit. But after the show-vote, their chosen champions inevitably sell their fans out whole-cloth - to the power players which our oligarchy truly services. You know... the people who ACTUALLY matter - who don't have to trouble themselves with peon-justice or laws. The VIPs - who buy their representation billions of dollars at a time. They don't give two-shits what mascot their bought-and-paid-for government minions paint on their helmets, so long as they deliver.

The lamentably hilarious thing is... even people who just read this entire screed... will still march on, like automatons, casting ballots for the left or right head of the mutant snake, thinking themselves "doing their civic duty," "battling for goodness!" or "picking the lesser of evils." Meanwhile, back in the desert of the real, they are volunteering to peacefully surrender their wealth and liberty to the creature who's eating the Bill of rights from left and right simultaneously.

It'd be endearing, (in a naive-retard-discovering-he-has-opposable-digits-kind-of-way), if it wasn't such a pathetic waist of what was once a reasonably free nation. That and sinking the rest of us into the abyss alongside these suicidal nimrods.

However, in the interest of fairness... vapid-pragmatism and cheerily participating in a society's desolation is not something we modern fools have a monopoly on...

"As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;" - Rudyard Kipling, 1919

We've been the main attraction of a managed stage show for a very long Goddamned time.

*Stolen shamelessly from the good Dr. Reynolds.

Thanks For the Invite

I've been nominated to be the TDG's representative here at yonder outpost of like-minded patriots.  We promise to take our hats and boots off before we come inside. And don't fret, we'll be all courteous-like to the fairer-sex - but know that we don't pull punches when it's time to brawl.  We, the liberty-minded are fighting a battle for our very existence right now... and the Marquess of Queensberry can piss right the hell off.  This war's for keeps, and if we're hitting above the belt at any point... we're doing shit wrong.

Most of us came from Montana originally, and we've migrated hither and yonder since - a motley crew of ranchers, lawyers, squibs, nerds, and everything else in between.  Aligned "interests," and the (almost un-coerced) willingness of SD's boy to host our ravings lead to us sharing our particular brand of insanity with anyone foolish enough to get in earshot.  So pull up a stool.  We might just blunder into something meaningful and coherent - in between shooting sacred cows with an M203...

Shortly, I'll post up an article our co-insurgent cooked up, with regards to the coming amnesty betrayal at the hands of the Republicans - lizards that some folks here no doubt clasped their noses to hoist into the majority - despite their every deliberate attempt to claw failure from certain victory. 

You gotta wonder... who needs the moonbats when our own "representation" stuffs a  bayonet right in between our shoulder blades?

Law, Lethality, And The Watchmen: A Problem Of Processes And Principles

“It is capricious to treat similar things differently.” – Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.
“It is capricious to treat different things the same.” – Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.

Now and then, it seems that only a complete outsider can bring order and rationality out of the chaos and emotion rampant in a set of publicly inflammatory incidents...or a pair of them.

These past few months we’ve watched the unfolding of two partly similar, partly dissimilar cases of civilians dying at police hands: that of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, and that of Eric Garner of New York City. The foofaurauw over those two cases has risen to deafening levels, such that quite a lot of persons are turning off their televisions rather than be bombarded by any more of it.

The cases are similar in that:

• A large black civilian died at a white policeman’s hands in each of them.
• In both cases, the police involved have been accused of an illegal use of deadly force.
• In both cases, black racialist mouthpieces have incited “protests” – i.e., riots – over the incidents.
• In both cases, a grand jury has returned a verdict of “no true bill:” i.e., it has declined to indict the cop(s).

The cases differ in that:

• Officer Darren Wilson had attempted to question Michael Brown in connection with an extremely recent petty theft involving the violent intimidation of a store clerk; Eric Garner’s arrest was over the sale of untaxed cigarettes on a Staten Island thoroughfare.
• In the Brown shooting, the evidence strongly demonstrates that decedent Brown physically attacked Officer Wilson, at one point trying to wrest Wilson’s gun from his hand; in the Garner case, four New York City policemen brought about Garner’s death with a chokehold in the course of arresting him.
• There is no video evidence of the Brown / Wilson confrontation; there is video evidence of the Garner arrest.
• Ferguson, Missouri is a predominantly black city; Staten Island is overwhelmingly white working-class, with a large population of New York City police and firemen.

It’s been said that a white cop will never be tried for killing a black man, particularly a black “youth.” It’s also been said that a Staten Island jury would never dare to indict or convict a New York City cop, regardless of the facts of the matter. Yet the matter goes beyond sentiment, including racially oriented sentiments and biases, into a realm only one commentator has even brushed against to this point:

[Garner’s] initial crime: Selling “looseys” — individual cigarettes — in violation of NYC tax law. When you pass a law, however trivial, you are providing an opportunity for police to use lethal force.

Ace’s brief analysis follows from that:

Did Eric Garner deserve to die? No. The crime that began all this was selling "Loosies," single cigarettes out of the pack, in defiance of the state tobacco tax laws and all the other nonsense laws they throw on people about only selling things in their original packaging. Minor shit. Nonsense.

And yet, he defied police orders when they attempted to arrest them. When they tried to cuff him, he defied them again, pulling his arms away. He decided, as a Jury of One, that the law was silly and he would not be being arrested today.

I can't entirely blame him for feeling that way, but I know that if the police attempt to arrest you for a law which you are in fact breaking, even if you think it's a minor harassing sort of law, you do not have the right to resist arrest.

What followed is what follows in all resisting-arrest cases: some escalating violence as the police attempt to physically impose their will on the noncompliant suspect.

Some number of such situations will result in the death of the suspect.

The initial problem – i.e., that the law in question defines an offense that many of us, perhaps even all of us, believe to be absurd, even fundamentally unjust – is beyond our reach except by recourse to a process that has proved capricious, intractable, and maddeningly frustrating. Once it’s in place, its very existence opens the door to violent police / civilian confrontations in the process of investigation and / or arrest. As Ace has noted, some percent of those confrontations will result in serious, perhaps fatal harm to someone.

The next problem is that of principle: the principle of proportionality.

It’s the case, de facto if not de jure, that a near to indefeasible presumption of “lawful action in the performance of public duty” is conferred upon a policeman accused of an unreasonable or disproportionate use of force. It takes irrefutable evidence, multiply confirmed, to get that presumption set aside. Granted that the “blue wall of silence” is often a factor in such cases, an accused cop can always claim that in the situation he faced as it unfolded, the only way he could see to discharge his duty was the approach he took, and that any other cop placed in that situation would have reacted in the same fashion. Yet when the offense in question appears trivial and non-violent, onlookers will want to know why deadly force is permitted in the enforcement of such a law.

However, the law makes no distinctions among varieties of penal offenses. All arrests occur under the presumption that the arrestee is legally required to submit to the justice system without resistance. Moreover, if the law were to attempt a categorical distinction – say, between misdemeanors and felonies, or between non-violent and violent crimes, such that potentially lethal force may only be employed in an arrest for the latter sort of crime – it would result in the perpetrators of the former sort being legally permitted (and often effectively able) to resist arrest, perhaps by killing the arresting officer. Think about it.

Glenn Reynolds’s take on this problem:

That’s why I favor fewer laws, not more.

...is my own...yet as long as there is government, there will be laws that criminalize non-violent offenses such as tax evasion and entering the U.S. illegally. Absent the total privatization of all judicial and penal processes – i.e., anarchism – there isn’t much that can be done about it.

What we are left with is an inherently imperfect and imperfectible arrangement in which Juvenal’s question Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is ultimately unanswerable. Trust the police unquestioningly? Unacceptable. Hold them accountable for never injuring a civilian who hasn’t yet been convicted of a violent crime? Unworkable. No position between those poles can be defined to a degree of specificity that would eliminate all possibility that someone, uniformed or otherwise, will get away with murder.

Life as fallible men trapped under the veil of time is like that.

(Cross-posted at Liberty’s Torch.)

Simple Arithmetic

Back in the Seventies, there was a sporadic feature in Analog science-fiction magazine titled “Probability Zero!” Each segment of that series featured an “impending calamity” that actually had no significant chance of occurring...yet the piece would be written in the panic-style common to the doom-shouters of every era. There’s No Time To Waste!! The Governments Of The World Must Act At Once!! On their face they were humorously intended, but behind the laughs loomed a larger point about the readiness of so many persons to accept crisis-mongering if it comes with even a shred of pseudo-logical cover.

The one I have in mind this morning is “The Population Implosion.” The rationale behind that piece, which purported to demonstrate that the human race is shrinking toward extinction, was that since each of us requires two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, et seq to exist at all, the number of persons in each generation can only be half of the previous one at most. Why, pretty soon we’ll be down to just one of us...and what then, Gentle Reader?

Of course it’s nonsense. Even a child can see through it. Yet far older and more intelligent persons are regularly seduced by equally simple arithmetic, for an equally simple reason.

The reason, as Thomas Sowell and others have pointed out, is extrapolation in the absence of comprehension.

Consider the temperature of your neighborhood on a spring morning at, say, midnight. At noon, the temperature is virtually guaranteed to be higher, perhaps twenty or thirty Fahrenheit degrees higher. Would it be valid to extrapolate that trend forward by another twelve hours? By twelve hundred hours? Doesn’t it lead to inevitable calamity, specifically the roasting to death of everyone on Earth?

We can see this to be an absurd extrapolation because we grasp the reason for that midnight-to-noon temperature increase: the rotation of the Earth. Your neighborhood has rotated out of the Earth’s sun-shadow and exposed it to sunlight. Over the next twelve hours it will rotate back into the sun-shadow. The process is clear; the extrapolation is faulty because it doesn’t take it into account.

The simple-arithmetic method of forecasting has produced other absurdities as well. Consider “peak oil.” The very persons who in the Seventies predicted the imminent exhaustion of world oil supplies founded their crisis-mongering on simple arithmetic. The proven reserves at that time equaled about thirty years’ global oil consumption. Therefore, in thirty years the oil would all have been used up. Q.E.D., right? Right?

Of course not. Note that those folks are all silent today. Except for the ones who’ve “moved on” to other “crises” and those who are currently lamenting the supply-driven decline in fossil-fuel prices as a blow to their schemes for totalitarian control of the world economy, that is.

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The poster-boy for simple-arithmetic forecasts is Thomas Malthus, he who endeavored to scare us into believing that the “geometric” increase of the world population would soon starve us all to death. Malthus was misled by his static views of both Mankind and technology. He made no allowance for the influence of industrialization and urbanization on birth rates, and even less for the possibility of massive improvements in food production technology. He admitted to those mistakes in a Second Essay on the Principle of Population, which isn’t nearly as well known as the first one. Yet the population-bomb doom-shouters of the Seventies repeated Malthus’s early mistakes virtually without deviation. Even as bright a man as Isaac Asimov was seduced by their pseudo-logic, which merely confirms Einstein’s observation that no one is so smart that he’s immune to gross blunders.

Robert M. Pirsig, best known for his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, recounts therein a similar mistake by his early, pre-electroshock-therapy self, to whom he refers in the book as “Phaedrus.” Phaedrus was misled into the belief that scientific method – indeed, rationality itself – is inherently defeated by the infinite number of possible observations one can make and hypotheses one can form. That ignores the mind’s ability to filter irrelevancies and the efficacy of Occam’s Razor at winnowing through the possible explanations for the phenomenon under consideration. Yes, “the more you look, the more you see,” but that doesn’t mean that everything you see is therefore relevant to the specific mechanism you’ve set out to explain.

Phaedrus / Pirsig was rather young when he made his admittedly life-altering mistake, so perhaps we should cut him some slack. Then again, he did get a massive bestseller and international fame out of it, so perhaps it needn’t be very much slack after all. And he did piss in his own cornflakes with Lila, which lost him – deservedly – most of the admiration his earlier book had earned.

There’s a moral in there, somewhere.

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If it sounds to you as if I’m about to say something like “Leave the simple arithmetic to the simpletons,” you’re not completely off base. Simple arithmetic is exactly that: simple. It attains its greatest relevance in simple situations. How many cookies are there in the jar? If you eat one per day, how long will they last you? That sort of simple arithmetic works – if we insist on the proviso that no one add cookies to the jar between your visits to it. It’s the failure to contemplate the possibility of such additional mechanisms that causes the forecaster’s problems.

The phrases that belong in all such proposed extrapolations are “Current trends continuing” and “All else being held constant.” Economists know this; the honest ones say it frequently and openly. But not all persons who award themselves the sobriquet of “economist” are honest.

BUT!

Some simple arithmetic can go a long way toward explaining matters that others would prefer that we not understand. For example, consider the current, extremely long (by historical American standards) average period most unemployed Americans of working age remain in that condition. Granted that the economy hasn’t been good, though its condition varies regionally. Granted also that other factors, such as the explosion of financial burdens and legal hazards statutorily laid on employers, have something to do with the reduced pace of business expansion and consequent hiring. But there’s also an arithmetic component:

1. Food stamps are available virtually for the asking;
2. Unemployment insurance pays benefits for more weeks than ever before;
3. It’s easier and safer to work “off the books” – i.e., without it becoming known to officialdom – than ever before;
4. The difference in de facto income between persons in the “working class” economic segment and those exploiting conditions 1, 2, and 3 has been shrinking, and is now smaller in real terms than ever before.

Arithmetic of that sort reminds us of something quite a lot of activist types would rather we’d forbear to consider: people work to improve their lot in life. If work’s ability to improve one’s standard of living should decline, so will its appeal to potential workers. And thus shall it ever be.

Pretty simple, eh?

(Cross-posted at Liberty’s Torch.)

It’s On: No Longer Just My Mad Notion

Think ol’ Curmudgeon Emeritus Fran has gone a bit overboard about the race war he considers to be in motion? Well, have you considered the opinions of this state senator? Have you asked for the sentiments of the Bosnian-Americans of St. Louis, Missouri? And what about this charming fellow:

Do his opinions carry any weight?

I don’t think it’s safe to laugh all of that off, Gentle Reader. Do you?

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We approach a critical mass.

You cannot repeatedly dispense the most inflammatory, divisive imaginable rhetoric at a demographic without inflaming that group to violence. Indeed, the relentless exhortations to hatred of whites by blacks has reached such an intensity – now reinforced and amplified by subtle encouragements from the White House itself! – that the greatest wonder of the current situation is that white neighborhoods nationwide are not yet under open, armed attack by mobs of angry blacks.

Wait a moment. Let me check that. They’re not, are they? I mean, given the propensity of the Main Stream Media for reflexively suppressing such news... but no. Surely I would have heard about it some other way. The sound of gunfire travels very well.

American whites approach their own, far less well publicized critical mass. Many, especially in racially mixed regions of the country, are making ready: stuffing their pantries to bursting, checking the guns and laying in stocks of ammunition, and quietly conferring with their neighbors to ensure that their communities are prepared to react effectively should the chaos come their way. But should that occur, don’t bet on whites simply defending their homes and neighborhoods from the assault and then going back to their peaceable ways.

Will these critical masses form? They can still be headed off. Whether the steps necessary to avert calamity will be taken is uncertain. Indications to this point suggest that they won’t be:

• No public figure has yet demanded a stern response to the disorder.
• The National Guard has been deployed only after-the-fact, and to trivial effect.
• Firm suppressive measures (e.g., water cannons) have not been employed against embryonic riots.
• Police have actually tried to disperse – even arrest – armed private-citizen guardians of potential targets.
• The racial patterns in “knockout game” attacks, recent events such as the murder of Zemir Begic, and violent crime generally continue to be suppressed.

A plague of civil disorder can only be quelled by harsh measures. Indeed, they must be so harsh that even a slight possibility of being subjected to one will outweigh the pleasures of violence and the potential gains from looting. If such measures are not undertaken and applied remorselessly, the violence and looting will continue and increase, in obedience to their own internal dynamic. Race riots are not an exception to this rule.

Draw your own conclusions.

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We met on the beach amid rumours of war
Your head in your hand, what you saw you won't say
As the newspapers flew in the wind.
I can see you're one of that kind
Who carry around a time bomb in their mind, no one knows
When you'll slip the pin.

Rumours of war...rumours of war.

I see that your dress is torn at the edge
You are lost, intense, like a man on a ledge, waiting to jump
As the waves break over the shore.
You say there's a storm that can't be delayed
And lately it seems to be coming this way, you can hear it break
Like the slam of a door.

Rumours of war...rumours of war.

You tell me, just look all around
At the past and the present, the cross and the crescent
The signs and the planets are lining up like before.
There are souls on fire in the day and the night
On the left and the right, in the black and the white
You can see it burn in the eyes of the rich and the poor.

Rumours of war...rumours of war.

[Alasdair Ian Stewart]

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. Justice is not postponed...Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation]

If you’ve never seen me mention the vigilance committees of the latter Nineteenth-Century West, here’s your chance to acquaint yourself with them. They formed in response to public perceptions that the “authorities” were unable to do their proper jobs or were uninterested in doing them. Though they’ve been given a bad rap by sententious historians eager to ingratiate themselves with political power, they appear to have functioned at least as well as any “public” system of justice has ever functioned.

The vigilance committees were usually stimulated by breakdowns in the public peace far milder than an epidemic of race riots. Granted that I speak here of the pre-statehood West, whose population tended to be far more individualistic and assertive than the contemporary American populace; all the same, there is a tipping point somewhere. We might not determine its location without passing through it, after which all the theoretical questions will once again be matters for the historians.

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It’s an unfortunate but irrefutable fact that the sole generally satisfactory agency for maintaining order within a cohesive demographic, whether the unifying factor is race or anything else, is that demographic’s own, internalized set of morals and ethics. If the demographic fails to enforce those morals and ethics upon those who flout them, there will be a corrective response from outside the demographic. If the demographic goes further, by not merely refusing to discipline its lawbreakers but affirmatively shielding them from correction, a violent us-versus-them confrontation becomes inevitable.

Of one thing we may be sure: every debt is paid. The social debt currently accruing, owing to blacks’ unwillingness to silence the racialist hucksters inciting violence and to discipline their own unruly elements (or to have others discipline them), will be paid. The sole questions are who will pay it, and when.

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation]

Verbum sat sapienti.

(Cross-posted at Liberty’s Torch.)

An Embarrassment Of Riches

I hardly expected to wake up this morning:

1. Half a pound lighter than I was on Thanksgiving Day morning;
2. With so many articles to cite and write about.

And you, Gentle Reader, will be the ultimate beneficiary.

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1. The Multiplicity Of Dividers.

Tom Maguire pens an interesting headline...and then fails to exploit it. The headline itself:

When Pundits Just Don't Get It, Part Forever

But the subsequent post fails to address why “pundits just don’t get it.” Maguire does make one pithy statement at the very end:

At the state and local level plenty of politicos from both sides of the aisle will ensure their fundraising success and continued power by promoting division rather than reconciliation. At the Presidential level only one of the strategies can succeed, but if the losing side is competitive and can envision success in the next cycle, the politics of division can continue for quite a while.

Isn’t it quite clear that “pundits,” and the media organs that employ them, have learned to emulate the politicos – that they, too, promote division as a tool for securing a loyal “base?” Once that’s recognized, doesn’t it become immediately clear that such a strategy is far more likely to be deliberate than accidental?

The syndrome isn’t confined to voices on the Left. Few op-ed writers with substantial followings haven’t “chosen a side” and resolved to promote and defend it regardless of all other considerations. And no matter which way your politics incline and which pundits you favor, that is not a good thing. But there I go, trying to talk sense again.

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2. It’s On, The Continuing Saga.

Jerry Pournelle cites an interesting development:

At least one black leader, a State Senator, has declared that we are now in a race war, blacks and their sympathizers vs. everyone else. She has no authority to declare any such thing, and she certainly does not speak for anything like a majority of African Americans, nor, I suspect, for anything like a majority of liberal intellectuals, but it is an astonishing thing to say.

Actually, it’s only astonishing because it was said by an elected official. The truth of the matter has been plain for some time, though American Caucasians have been reluctant to confront it and to respond appropriately. However, Pournelle is as race-shy as most white opinion-mongers:

We are not in a race war, but there are similarities to a barbarian invasion. We have a barbarian culture within the United States. The most common cause of death of black males is to be killed by another black male. There are other sub cultures in which homicide is common. Generally the barbarian culture does not interact with the majority of the middle class, but in so-called ghetto areas American citizens cannot avoid interactions with the barbarian culture. They live there, and they can’t avoid it.

If it’s not a race war, why are nearly all the thugs Negroes, and why are other Negroes so protective of them? Moreover, Pournelle’s take on the distribution of the malady varies from mine. It’s most definitely escaped the urban ghettoes and penetrated the bastions of middle-class America, though it’s left its pretense of “poverty” behind. But Pournelle makes an important observation:

The cure for barbarians within the gates is to educate the barbarian children. Humans are not born civilized. They acquire civility by living in civilization, and they learn it as they grow up in it....American citizens act civilized because they are civilized, not from fear of apprehension and punishment.

Say rather that American citizens once acted civilized because they had been civilized at the earliest stages of their lives, whether by the schools or by their parents. But we’re not quite finished here:

But the way to civilize barbarians is to do it in the schools, from the earliest grades on: enforcement of discipline, being polite, respectful deference to authority – not cringing fear, but respectful deference. But those values have to be instilled, and enforced.

And how, given the Left’s near to absolute control of American education from kindergarten to graduate studies, are we to bring that about?

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3. Barbarism.

The redoubtable Mike Hendrix moves from Pournelle’s piece to other fascinating citations. Here are the ones that knocked me for a loop:

Bosnian immigrants respond in the comment section of this post (which, you’ll notice, is oh-so-careful not mention the race of the black savages who perpetrated the attack):

Ok, Bosnian businesses in St. Louis, it’s time to show who’s in charge. Let us chase the animals away from our neighborhood. No tolerance. None whatsoever. You mess with us? You mess with genocide victims? You don’t stand a chance. We will wipe you out! No EBT cards accepted at any Bosnian businesses from now on. Bevo Mill neighborhood is our land now. We will use our language and we will do as we see fit. All are welcome, yes, this is America, the land of many peoples, but we will not tolerate any more of this nonsense. If any suspicious African-American woman or man comes onto Bosnian businesses, you will most definitely be stopped and questioned. Every single last one of you. You will be questioned and you will have to answer to us. You will be interrogated. If you do not keep up your properties, you will be forced out. If you do not pull up your pants, we will pull them up for you. It is now time. We are cleaning up the south side. No tolerance.

Another:

That’s it. Five Bosnians now have been murdered by black men. That’s the last straw. No mercy for these animals. We will drive them out of the neighborhood. Our Bosnian economy is getting stronger. We will not speak English to them in our stores. We will not rent to them. It is over, folks, completely over. We have suffered genocide and we will not suffer it again. I am a person who is very considerate. I love Croatians, Serbians, etc. I have friends from everywhere. But for those who will destroy us, I will not be friends nor will I give them my business. We will drive them out. We Bosnians will drive these animals out. I hope the media will take note. Because we will discriminate.

In Tom Clancy’s first, blockbuster novel The Hunt For Red October, Clancy has Jack Ryan muse, en passant, over the possibility that it would take immigrants attracted to America by American ideals -- not by America’s opulent standard of living – to keep those ideals alive and well defended. Perhaps the Bosnian immigrants who penned the above comments are part of such a defensive cadre. We shall see.

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4. The Rationalizers.

Fourth, have some observations and thoughts from the indefatigable Sara Noble:

“Demon” and “aggressive” are racist terms and whites don’t see black children “as worthy of being alive”. The problems affecting black society stem from slavery of their ancestors. All this is according to one liberal black writer and one has to wonder how many others believe exactly as she does.

Stacey Patton, in an article in The Washington Post last week, presented a bizarre piece to justify the violence and criminality we see in Ferguson and elsewhere.

Patton is a pretty, smart, accomplished black woman who made her own way out of dismal circumstances and came to the conclusion that slavery and white people are to blame for what ails poor black communities. Ferguson and Michael Brown serve as examples of police brutality and mistreatment of blacks in her mind.

Not once does she or anyone mention gangs and drugs when they discuss Ferguson but it is gangs that are destroying black communities.

Her premise is that whites, particularly white police officers, don’t see black children as children, they see them as threats. It is the reason they are disproportionately represented in prisons, it is the reason for much of their problems, according to Stacey Patton.

The reality is that absentee parents, drugs and gangs are destroying black youth.

Please read the whole thing.

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5. Polymath.

The novel is taking longer to complete than I first thought it would, because the final segment, which (for the first time since I first embarked on a novel-length project) is intended to act as a bridge to a sequel. Making it sound for both purposes – i.e., as a story in its own right and as a segue piece – is costing me considerable effort.

Yes, there will be further novels and stories in the Onteora Canon. Christine D’Alessandro, Malcolm Loughlin, Kevin Conway, Todd Iverson, and Stephen Graham Sumner will all be back. I hope you’re happy about that.

And yes, I really, truly do intend to finish the novel based on “The Warm Lands.” Honest Injun.

Have a nice, non-fattening Cyber Monday.

(Cross-posted at Liberty’s Torch.)