Have y’all seen some of this crap?

I don’t really care about science fiction.  Hell, I don’t really read fiction, period, any more.  But this tempest-in-a-teapot is interesting as an illustration of a larger social trend, to wit:

Leftists make everybody else into leftists.

Maybe it needs emphasis:  Leftists make everybody else into leftists.  The proposed solution to the rabbit infestation, of course, being: Ban the rabbits.

And most of all, we don’t have to sit back and lament the fact that they’ve taken over and ruined the organizations and institutions that we used to love. We can walk away without looking back, leave them to their inevitable implosion, and build new and better ones. But we have to learn from the failures of our predecessors. When the bureaucrats and the activists and the whiners start in with their usual routine about access and fairness and reaching out, we need to kick THEM out, not foolishly listen to them and let in the destroyers.

I agree, needless to say, but the end result is inevitably Stalinism Lite.  Because a leftist science fiction fan, like a leftist anything, is a leftist first and a science fiction fan only a very distant second.  You have to mercilessly extirpate them or they’ll take over everything.

In other words, you end up criminalizing thought.

Even David Stove came to agree.  One of the staunchest defenders free thought ever had wrote

Is the equality-opinion, then, one of those which ought to be proscribed at all times?  I think it is, and my reasons are these: that the opinion that everyone ought to be equal, leads, by logic which is clear even to the meanest intelligence, to the opinion that private property ought to be abolished; and that that opinion is, above all others, destructive of both life and of culture.  Compared with the opinion that everyone ought to be equal, the opinion that arson is innocent, or that government officials ought to be shot, are minor moral eccentricities.

Tolerance of the intolerant destroys both alike.  Some animals have to be more equal than others, or the whole system collapses.

How’s that for a premise?  Truth is stranger than fiction, after all.

I’m starting to think Vox Day is on to something.

Yet another banker has committed suicide, with a JP Morgan forex trader leaping to his death from the top of the firm’s Chater House headquarters in Hong Kong.

Over the past few weeks at least seven bankers have died under mysterious circumstances, including another JP Morgan senior manager who jumped off the top of a skyscraper in London last month.

And now a Bitcoin firm CEO has killed herself.

Yeah, it’s a high-stress job at the best of times.  These are not the best of times.  And there’s lots of statistical noise.  But goodness gracious, a lot of high-level financial people seem to be offing themselves these days….

Both Rhymes with Cars & Girls and Sailer have discussed this extraordinary post on the criminal justice system.  It’s all good, but here’s the part that’s getting traction:

But there is a much deeper and more sinister aspect to the drug issue that is both very complex and very dangerous to discuss openly.  It is indeed a dire problem on many levels.

The problem is that while ‘poverty’ does not cause crime, idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and a heavy-concentration of young men who are either not willing or able (or both) to hold down a job and get busy raising a family is a well-established recipe for disaster that was known to the ancients since time immemorial.  This problem exists in our pockets of crime, no one has any good and politically-palpable idea of what to do about it, and the accelerating three legged stool of immigration, automation, and globalization is making it increasingly worse.

How do you occupy those idle hands?  Let ‘em make a shitload of money selling drugs to others with idle hands.  Glorify it in thug culture, and, for the middle classes, glorify the war against it.  The perfect honey trap.

Not only do I think this is right, I love how it weaves together a lot of disparate threads of social analysis, cynicism, and flat-out conspiracy nonsense into a velvety tapestry of plausibility.  You know, like a velvet Elvis, but with a pit bull and an AK-47 and a pile of benjamins on it.

kinda like this, but velour

Not that the author (Handle, a new must-read) is a conspiracy nut, mind you — as I said, I think he’s spot on.  But let’s pour one out for all our homies who spent the late 80s screaming that crack cocaine was a CIA plot to keep the brothers down.  The CIA only wishes they were that competent.

One of the great unacknowledged problems of prosperity is that “idle hands” phenomenon.  Time was, only the first two estates had idle hands, and while that led to Hundred Years’ Wars and Inquisitions and such, these were too small and localized to destabilize an entire society.  Now idleness is the main problem of the masses, and if you need a refresher on the consequences and don’t feel like getting carjacked, throw in an episode of The Wire or Justified.

Speaking of tv shows….

That right there is Detroit, but it could be any American ghetto.  And before we start going off on how the Democrats have fucked the Motor City but good, let’s acknowledge that there is no political solution for the stuff in that picture.  Yeah, hippy-dippy welfare schemes don’t work, we’ve got sixty years’ proof of that; when LBJ kicked off the Great Society, Detroit was at least still habitable.  But what’s the free market solution?  A free market in what?  Ever heard of Say’s Law?  Demand follows supply, and there’s nothing being supplied in that picture but about a million damn good reasons to take drugs.

Thus, the “conservative” “solution” is ever-more law’n'order.  David Simon, who created The Wire, is as liberal as they come.  You can tell from the hideous fifth season, where the heroes are — ugggh!– journalists.  But lots of conservatives loved the show, because it showed all the bad shit that drug dealers do.  The cops were the good-enough guys, and the dealers were the bad-enough guys, and the characters on both sides were interesting and compelling.

I’m not going to tell you I’m the only one who really “got” The Wire (that’s these guys, for the record).  But the main reason I loved the show was that it showed the sheer existential pointlessness of it all.  Both liberals and conservatives are right about the “problem” of “poverty,” and they’re both wrong.  Yes, in lots of cases, poverty does cause crime — call me a Marxist if you must, but slap just about anybody down in the middle of the Balamer ghetto and in two weeks you’ll find a dope addict or a drug dealer.  And yet, dope is bad, and addicts need to stop taking it, and dealers need to be locked up.  That’s the absolute baseline for any kind of progress in the inner city, whether you define “progress” as increased social justice or more people making an honest living.

But “dope,” in whatever form, has always been with us.  That picture up there is William Hogarth’s Gin Lane, and all that dysfunction really did happen.  There is not, of course, a one-to-one correspondence between the availability of a thing and overindulgence in it, as Theodore Dalrymple never tires of pointing out, but he would most certainly agree that there’s a certain percentage of incorrigibles in a given population.  Combine incorrigibility, intoxicants, and (the economic ability to have) idle hands, and you get a whole bunch of money being made off voluntary(-ish) human misery.

Jake Hoyt: That’s street justice.
Alonzo Harris: What’s wrong with street justice?
Jake Hoyt: Oh, what, so just let the animals wipe themselves out, right?
Alonzo Harris: God willing. Fuck ‘em, and everybody that looks like ‘em.

So what to do about it?  Handle’s description is raaaacist, of course – he’s the guy who compiled the infamous list of the purged — but I doubt that bothers him or her at all.  It also seems pretty accurate.  Something must be done with the incorrigibles, and alas, the frontier is closed.  Those who don’t play well with others can’t simply pack up and move past the Appalachians, or to Deadwood, or to the Yukon.  Instead, they turn inward, and whether their residence is South Central or Gin Lane, their drug of choice alcohol or heroin, there’s a population that will exist like this, and another population of equally antisocial types to serve them (Say’s Law again).

Is it really a “honey trap”?  I really doubt it’s consciously intended that way (though see Denzel Washington’s quote, above).  But it sure looks like it.  And if we want to change it, the first step is to acknowledge it.

Steve Sailer has been on a tear lately about Victoria Nuland, Our Gal in Kiev.  He notes that so many of Our Betters in journalism fail to note that she was once George W. Bush’s gal in Kiev, too.  Before that, she was Bill Clinton’s gal….

Helping America fuck with sovereign states since the 1990s

And she’s married to a whole shitload of Kagans

Robert and brother Fred seem to have strategically implanted themselves in key policy-making positions within the Democratic and Republican party apparatus. Robert is embedded at Brookings, while Fred is ensconsed [sic] at AEI.

She’s one of the few identifiable pieces, Sailer argues, of the American deep state.

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

What I find fascinating is the need to come up with a neologism for all this.

What we now call the “Deep State” used to be known as “the way business is done, old chap.”  Back when, everybody knew that while proclamations were issued in the King’s name, it was really Lord Plushbottom, Third Earl of Funkeley-upon-Wye, who drafted them.  And, of course, Lord Plushbottom got a lot of his ideas from that one ambitious, grasping cleric who received visitors in a stately country home despite his official living as the assistant pastor of nowhere in particular.  Knowing this stuff, and how to manipulate it, is what courtiers were for.

It didn’t change with the demotization of government.  Yes, the King had less formal power and his ministers, theoretically representative of the electorate, had more, but one’s school chums from Eton had far more pull than a million voters.  The actual camera stellata went away, but Star Chamber is still alive and well.  And so forth.  Who you know, who you’re married to, who you’re sleeping with has always been far more important than your job description, let alone something so amorphous and changeable as “the will of the people.”

It’s only in America that this comes as a shock to regular folks.

For some reason, we still believe in “American exceptionalism,” that we’re somehow exempt from the way the rest of the world works.  If you want to claim that the Founding Fathers were the most extraordinary group of men ever assembled in one place, you’ll get no argument from me.  In fact, I’d even nod along if you said that most American politicians for most of the country’s history were more honorable than the average for that sorry breed.

But you can’t fight math.  Victoria Nuland is just another child of privilege, safe in her little bubble of education and marriage, friends and connections.  They know what to do about the Ukraine, and if the hoi polloi think differently, or wonder why it’s any of America’s business in the first place… well, they aren’t fourth-generation Yalies, now are they?

Stacy McCainn spotted a good one:

Using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s warming projections, Ranson calculated that from 2010 to 2099, climate change will “cause” an additional “22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases of vehicle theft” in the United States.

Because, obviously, science.

I think even Dr. Ike Antkare would be embarrassed by this.

… I agree with Peggy Noonan on this one.

Noonan:

[Y]ou see these little clips on the Net where the wealthy sing about how great taxpayer bailouts are and you feel like . . . they’re laughing at you.

What happens to a nation whose elites laugh at its citizens?

What happens to its elites?

Ace:

I guess what I’m saying is I’m far more worried about actual corruption and self-dealing among Congressmen and Wall Street guys than I am about them making gallows humor jokes about such things.

It’s the actual corruption and self-dealing that would be a concern, not their expression about it, nor their lack of concern about “how it looks.”

I worry about the actual corruption and whatnot too, buddy, but I think that ship has sailed.

Because, as you also note,

Apparently [the Weimar Republic's embrace of The Three Penny Opera] was contrary to the author’s, Brecht’s, intent, as he intended it to be horrifying.  Instead, it was greeted with laughs. (I have no earthly idea if this is true; I am second-hand reporting what I’ve just read.)

The Threepenny Opera was the Sopranos of its day. Here’s Arendt’s description:

The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gangsters. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song in the play, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” [First comes the animal-like satisfaction of one’s hungers, then comes morality], was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior, wonderful fun.

We know what happens when elites laugh at the country they rule, and what happens to those elites.  Here’s what happened to Brecht:  He fled Germany ahead of the Gestapo… but ended up in East Germany, where he supported the Ulbricht regime.

Hilter promised the mob that the elite would no longer laugh at them.  Then he promised the elite protection from the mob.  We know what happened after that.

A country can tolerate quite a bit of corruption and cynicism in its political class.  The Gilded Age — the Era of Good Stealings – was legendarily corrupt, but there was no danger of an American Weimar.  Rockefellers and Morgans and Astors led bogglingly opulent lives, but they didn’t openly mock and belittle their customers.  Weimar elites did.  Ours do.

I can’t stress this enough:  Government — law and order — remains legitimate because people believe it’s legitimate.  If belief in the legitimacy of government drops below a certain threshold, it’s every man for himself.  The best possible outcome of this is a banana republic.  For the worst possible outcome, start with Sulla and work your way forward.  Hobbes makes a pretty good case, you know.

On the one hand, grab the popcorn baby!

A whole lot of money is chasing the new cool kids, the newly name-branded “journalists” like Ezra Klein and Glenn Greenwald, who bring their friends along with them to the bottomless internet money pits.

As the good professor notes,

The bidding up of mostly mediocre journalism has to end badly.

Bubble always do end badly.  And no one expects it.

Well, except everyone who does.  Like him.  And me.  And everyone else who remembers the last time this exact same thing happened.

Which brings me to the other hand:  Is it 2002?  I had the most horrible nightmare that we somehow elected a Kenyan Marxist who banana republicanized the place in less than four years… tell me I dreamed that.   It’ll be worth another three or four years of insufferable “new media” whiz kids regaling us with all the wisdom of their inexperience if we can just avoid that horrible fate.

[PS confidential to Matt Taibbi [who?], Catherine Rampell [huh?], Mike Allen [guh?], Susan Glasser [wha?], and all the rest:  They’re lying to you.  No matter how many times you use words like “cool” and “bro” and “rad” and “cyber,” you’re still pushing the same ol’ Mao ‘n’ Marcuse nonsense the original “new media” darlings pushed.  You know, back when “new media” was badly mimeographed magazines and local tv.  William F. Buckley had your number in 1951, for pete’s sake.  “The same dumb shit, but faster” is not a viable business model.  That’s the Max Power Way.]

Stacy McCain spotted a good one.  Turns out there aren’t too many cis-womyn of the girlular gender in journalism.

According to the report, women made up 36.3 percent of newsroom staffers at American newspapers in 2013, a figure that’s decreased slightly since the American Society of Newspaper Editors Newsroom Census started its gender count in 1999. They made up just 27 percent of opinion columnists in the major U.S. newspapers and content syndication services last year.

[If anything, 27% seems a bit high for opinion columnettes.  But maybe that's because they all sound like Maureen Dowd and/or Kathleen Parker... and by the way, has anyone ever seen the two of them in the same room at the same time? -ed.]

Let’s expose the hidden premises of this familiar liberal syllogism:

1. If women are less than 50% of employees in any profession, the only explanation is sexist discrimination.

2. Working as a journalist is a career opportunity that women seek out as often as do men.

3. It is not possible that women are rejecting journalism, rather than the other way around.

To us, this is risible, since, as McCain points out, journalism is mostly low-paying drudge work.  With the cornucopia of affirmative action choices available to Gyno-Americans, no lady woman girl Person of XX-Chromosomeness in her right mind would go into journalism unless she a) couldn’t clear the minimum sentience threshold for the worst law school in the country, or b) was filled with a burning desire to ask local party hacks what kind of tree they’d be if they could be one.  Either way, 36.3% seems to be the upper bound.

That logic wouldn’t faze a liberal, though, because they’re not looking at it logically.  It’s a swillogism.  They see themselves as Crusaders for Social Justice; they’ve noticed that 36.3 is less than 50; therefore, this is a grave social ill.

I wish I’d understood this “thought” process back when.  When I was but a lad, Shannon Faulkner was trying to get into the Citadel and some guy — for some reason, his name is not readily available on Google — was trying to get into Texas Women’s University’s College of Nursing.  I made the mistake of not agreeing with a young lady I was dating, that the one was a heroic and necessary stand against entrenched injustice, while the other was a farce and a travesty.  Stupidly, I tried reasoning with her.  You can guess how that worked out.

They’re liberals, you see.  So discrimination can’t be discrimination when they do it, because they’re liberals and liberals are against discrimination.  Which was too bad for ol’ Whatzisface at TWU– and me, since I wouldn’t be getting laid that semester — but it makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it.  And so it goes with girls in the newsroom.

A good quick hit over at Steve Sailer’s blog:

What I like about this whole revolution is that it is the ultimate shut-up-button for libertarians.

Whenever libertarians moan about nationalists you can now say: “Well, when Ukraine was in trouble, who fought for liberty? Where were you guys?”

My various gripes with libertarianism boil down to the same thing my gripes about socialism boil down to: It disregards human nature.

Sometimes I think I’m the only person on the planet who really believes in evolution.  If it’s true, descent with modification applies to all life without exception.  Which means that yes, Virginia, race exists and has observable, measurable impacts on things like intelligence and behavior.  But it also means that human brains are complex pieces of software running on basic chimpanzee hardware.  Which means that most if not all humans will fight for atavistic things like tribe and nation, while very few will fight solely for sophisticated intellectual notions like “freedom” (much less for things like “the right to pay for the Reconquista”).

I thought we’d settled all that back in 1914, when internationalists both left and right swore up and down that a general European war couldn’t last more than a few weeks.  The continent’s interlocking financial systems would stop it before it started, the right huffed, while the left decreed that no workingman would fight his fellow exploited laborer.

Sigh.

Pictured: About 98% of all human behavior

And since both left and right are still running chimp DOS, I suppose now’s the time to throw in the disclaimers:  I’m not saying libertarians are the same as socialists, let alone worse than socialists.  In general, libertarians are only stupid about this one thing; socialists are stupid about everything.  But in this one case, the stupidities meet, because they flow from the same source — refusal to acknowledge a basic consequence of their own beliefs about human beings.

I think it’s time for a new word.

Swill-o-gism (n): A form of liberal “reasoning,” superficially resembling the classic syllogism, that begins and ends with self-congratulation.

If I’m right about that astrology study, below, it’s a perfect example of swillogistic logic.  I’m a liberal; liberals like science; I like astrology; therefore, astrology is scientific.  It’s a neat little engine for turning one’s personal preferences into sweeping metaphysical statements.

It also explains another thing that’s been bugging me for a long time: Liberals’ evident immunity to cognitive dissonance.  I’m not willing to go all-in on the prospect that I’m right and the neuroscience PhDs are wrong, but liberals sure as hell seem to believe grossly contradictory things with no psychic pain at all.  If I’m right about swillogism, then cognitive dissonance doesn’t kick in because the “contradictions” don’t rise to the level of propositions in the first place.

An example: Liberals who consider themselves intellectuals (ah, but don’t they all?) love this George Lakoff guy.  Conservatives think he’s a clown.  Here’s Theodore Dalrymple taking him down in typically brilliant fashion:

According to him people view the world through the lens of their metaphors, which he thinks provide them with the framework of their thought. Since the 1980s, liberals have allowed conservative metaphors to take over their own metaphoric framework, so that all discussions or arguments about social policy are carried out on conservative terms. Liberals waste their time and effort in arguing from the evidence (conservatives, of course, can have no evidence); they should instead be working to get conservatives to accept a different metaphoric framework.

A simple instance of what he means is the use of the term ‘tax relief.’ This term implies that taxation is an illegitimate burden from which people need to be relieved. Professor Lakoff is obviously in favor of high taxes as instruments of ‘social justice’ – that is to say, justice with the desert taken out – and so liberals should avoid the term, replacing it with another, perhaps ‘evasion of fiscal responsibility’ [the latter is my suggestion, not his].

Because we conservatives start from the premise that words mean what they mean, we find it impossible to take this idea seriously.  Were we ever allowed to debate Lakoff –alas, TED Talks are invitation only — we’d start by asking things like “which specific conservative metaphors currently dominate liberal thinking on social policy?” and “what the hell are you smoking, kemo sabe?”  Because, pace Lakoff, we actually do use evidence from time to time, we’d point out that Political Correctness is nothing but the imposition of liberal metaphors on public discourse, and PC has had a pretty good run these last few decades.  And so on.

But Lakoff, an obviously intelligent guy, really seems to believe that we’d all come around to socialism if only they called it “Patriotism Plus” or something, and obviously intelligent people really seem to believe him.  What gives?

I think they approach things emotionally –swillogistically– not propositionally.  We’re baffled by their love of Lakoff because we look at his theory’s content.  We know what {socialism} means, and when we get the definition of {Patriotism Plus}, we compare the two sets and find that their members are identical.  Thus we reject the proposition “you should embrace Patriotism Plus” on exactly the same grounds as we reject the proposition “you should embrace socialism,” because, you know, they’re the exact same fucking thing.  We may be knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, but nobody’s that stupid.  Ergo, Lakoff is full of shit.

Approaching it emotionally, though, Lakoff is right on the money.  It’s a swillogism.  It starts from the proposition that principled, well-meaning objections to liberal social policies are not possible.  His theory should be read like this:

• I am a good person
• I like social policy X
• Therefore, social policy X is good

From there, it’s an easy leap to

• Those who object to The Good are, by definition, Evil
• Evil can only win by underhanded means
• Therefore, those who stymie policy X can only do so underhandedly

The specific form the underhandedness takes is just details.  “Metaphors” and “frames” and such sound suitably arcane and intellectual– that one cool prof in that one required English course used ‘em — so they’ll do.  It could be “the contradictions of capitalism” or “the Trilateral Commission” or “the price of rice in China,” because that too is a swillogism:

• I am a liberal
• Liberals are super smart
• I like the sound of the word “metaphors”
• Therefore, metaphors are super smart

It’s 100% content free, but it’s emotionally satisfying.

I guess.  One of the main reasons I’m not a liberal is that I got tired of leading with my chin.  It’s just plain exhausting to scurry through life in search of feelies, constantly retconning my so-called beliefs with whatever the hive mind declares to be Good this week.  It took too much mental energy to not notice that my whole intellectual life was controlled from outside, that something nobody was even talking about yesterday is suddenly one of the most pressing civil rights issues of all time, and we’re all supposed to get passionately worked up on cue… until it’s time to move on to the next thing.

Evidently lots of folks find it easy.  Swillogisms must be comfortable for them.  Why else would they exist?