Over at Z Man’s, “race realism” goes off the rails.  It always does.  Have you noticed?

Z Man’s complaint is against Our Rulers and their belief in what amounts to magic.  The only options for blacks’ lousy social, cultural, and economic performance vs. whites are race, culture, and magic, and since we’ve tried fixing culture and it can’t be race, it must be magic. Thus “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” and the rest, all of which can be summed up “bad juju, boss.”

I’ve got no beef with that.  But, as always, the danger is reductionism (see the comments).  Culture does play a part — a significant part.  For proof, read Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom, then Robert Roberts’ The Classic Slum.  Dalrymple’s underclass British whites are indistinguishable from underclass American blacks — from whom, it’s easy to see, they draw much of their worldview, language, and style.  Roberts’ underclass British whites are very obviously proles, but they’re proud, industrious proles.  You could walk down the street at night in Salford; in most British or American cities today, you’d better have SEAL Team 6 escorting you if you venture outside after dark.

What happened, of course, is that clever academics realized we’re all hypocrites, and from that, concluded that the very idea of standards is a major way The Man is keeping us down.  Back in the Jurassic, we believed in God, so men falling short of their proclaimed ideals was no big deal — we’re not angels, we’re all fallen, let him who is without sin cast the first stone and all that.  You’d never hear the following, which my Millennial students all consider the atom bomb of rebuttals:

Parent: Don’t do drugs!

Kid: You did when you were my age!

Back in the days, the parent would say “yeah, and that’s why I’m telling you it’s a bad idea!” and that would be the end of it.

Some of Roberts’ slum-dwellers had kids out of wedlock.  Some of them were alcoholics.  Some were homosexuals.  Some of them had all the modern social pathologies (adjusted for time and place).  And yet, nobody questioned that monogamy, sobriety, heterosexuality, etc. were good things.  If we can’t all practice them as much as we’d like, well, see that “we’re no angels” stuff, above.  It was important to try — you know, for the kids — such that even if you fell short, the kids would see that trying to rise above one’s circumstances is another good-in-itself.

Dalrymple’s slum dwellers have concluded that, since nobody can live up to his standards all the time, it’s stupid to even try…. and they’ll bust a beer bottle over your head if you do.

American blacks believed this once, too… or, if you must be a “race realist” about it, were forced to act as if they believed it by Jim Crow.  Either way, though, culture kept a LOT of pathological misbehavior in check.  It’s a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of social regeneration.

A million years ago, a dead white guy said that the greatest threat to civilization was “huge organized forms of self-righteousness.”  He was referring to stuff like Communism and Fascism but — harebrained nihilistic death cults though they were — at least they had a coherent body of thought behind them (yes, Fascism too, if anyone would ever bother to read it).  Today’s huge organized forms of self-righteousness lack even that.

Example: The other day I was driving to work and saw that the town must have an election coming up — there were signs everywhere reading “So-and-So for Mayor.”  The name sounded vaguely familiar, which is odd, because I don’t follow local politics in cities I don’t live in.  So when I had a free moment I googled up So-and-So… and hey, whaddaya know, he’s a failed Congressional candidate from a few years ago, from another district.

Who says politics is just showbiz for ugly people?  This clown is a character actor from central casting, indistinguishable from every other central casting clown Our Rulers see fit to bestow upon our “elections” every few years.  Should he not get elected mayor, So-and-So will no doubt be parachuted into some other town to run for alderman or something.  His resume and biography don’t matter — he once got elected to something, somewhere, so he’s “electable.”  He’ll die in office, and his obituary will gush about “a lifetime of public service”… though it won’t mention all the publics he’s served, since someone might notice that he’s not from any of those places and none of his so-called constituents could pick his mug out of a police lineup.  See also native New Yorker Hillary Clinton, or stalwart Chicagoan Alan Keyes, whose totally Constitutional qualification to run in those districts was “once changed planes at La Guardia and O’Hare,” respectively.

Hillary Clinton is, in fact, far from the worst violator, though since she’s the most prominent lately let’s roll with that.  Does anyone here think Hillary Clinton has any personal convictions at all?  Ideological convictions, I mean, since we all know that she’s deserving of a whole bunch of the other kind — securities fraud, insider trading, espionage, murder one….

To ask is to answer.  Hillary Clinton is out for Hillary Clinton, full stop.  As president, she’d have executive ordered up mandatory school prayer, concealed carry, and NASCAR attendance if someone paid her enough.  She’s more brazen than most — other hags who make noise about Feminism would at least be a little embarrassed to stay married to an out-n-proud philanderer credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults — but it’s a difference of degree, not kind.  “Liberalism” pays better than “Conservatism,” so she’s a Democrat not a Republican.

Actual ideology requires deep reading, sustained thought, and a backbone, three things which very few of our fellow citizens possess — certainly none of the casting-couched mercenaries we call “politicians” do.  Whether that’s a byproduct, or the point, of the modern educational system can and should be debated, but the end result’s the same either way.  What’s the State for, anyway?  Why should the people get to vote on stuff?  Come to think of it, just who are The People, and how did they get here?

Nobody currently occupying, or running for, any political office in the land has any clue.  Which is, as the Smart people say, problematic.

*I was going to shoehorn in some conceit about that old 90s tv show My So-Called Life, but that’s too cute and nobody cares.  But since I haven’t posted any pictures of attractive people recently, here’s Jordan Catalano.

I got nothin’ much these days, so here’s this:

When you can satisfactorily explain the appeal of Hillary Clinton, you will fathom the liberal mind.

I’m not being sarcastic here.  I understand the following reasons for supporting her candidacy:

• She’s got dirt on you (this explains half the DNC).
• She’s going to keep the graft gravy train rolling (this explains the other half).
• She’s not Donald Trump (remember, MPAI – for lots of folks, politics is sportsball and the Dems are “our team”).
• You’re a single-issue voter (feminist, abortion zealot).

But those are all tactical choices (for values of “tactical” that include the knee-jerk partisanship of the numbnuts low-info voters that are the majority of both parties’ bases).  But lots of folks sure seemed to be truly, madly, deeply in love with the concept of Hillary Clinton, specifically, as president of the United States.

If you can explain how this reptilian criminal got herself a personality cult without actually having a personality, you have explained modern Leftism.

Sorry no update lately.  A few quick thoughts on The Z Man’s foray into the Nazi briar patch:

Just as “Nazi” used to mean something real and obvious, so too did “Marxist.”  But just as the Left throws “Nazi” around to mean “anything I don’t like,” so the Right does with “Marxist.”  Of course, this is partly the Left’s own fault, as they themselves throw St. Karl’s name around a lot — your required Intro to Studies class at any college in America is nothing but Marxy Marx and the Funky Bunch, for instance.

But there’s never been a viable Marxist movement in America.  You’d be forgiven for thinking there was if you only read “Progressive” history — which is to say, all academic history written since about 1950 — but it’s wrong.  There are many groaning shelves’ worth of books about labor organizing in the Gilded Age, for example, but

• a) that’s about as far as it ever got, and
• b) it wasn’t that far, and
• c) when you actually look at their evidence, it’s all Judean People’s Front vs. People’s Front of Judea-type tempests in teapots.

In fact, that’s still the burning question for Labor History, lo these many decades later — why was there no viable Marxist movement in America?  (And yes, “Labor History” is a thing, and yes, it’s as insufferable as it sounds).  The answer, of course, is “because Americans, lacking 1500 years of feudal tradition, don’t think of themselves in class categories,” but that must be wrong, because Marx.  So round and round it goes, the only practical effects being: C. Wright Mills‘ books still get on required reading lists in college history classes, and there are some grumpy old men named “Melsor” out there.  The guys who originally pushed this stuff were the “Old Left,” and they’re deader than disco.

The “New Left,” as everyone knows, were the Sixties radicals.  They talked a lot about Marx, too, but their real inspiration was Herbert Marcuse, who said you could screw your way to Enlightenment (and liberate the proles in the process).  Since that required a lot of force — human biology being what it is, and Leftists being the losers they are — the New Left was also all-in on Mao’s style.  They were, if anything, even more economically illiterate than the Old Left (if such a thing be possible), but they didn’t care; they just knew they had to say “Marx” every now and again to keep up their street cred.

Which brings us to the PoMo Left, a.k.a. the Social Justice Warriors.  Their avatar is Barack Obama, who, as the Z Man points out, probably can’t even spell “Marx.”  They’re just old-school Calvinists cosplaying as Bolsheviks — somewhere, somehow, Wrongfans are having Wrongfun, and that must not be tolerated.  And if they get to live like Ottoman pashas in the process, well, vanguard of the proletariat and all that.  There’s no such thing as a Fact, everything’s a Social Construction, nobody’s different from anybody and everyone’s the best at everything, and if you say different, we’ll ruin your life.

Karl Marx has the blood of millions on his hands, but he never said anything that stupid.  Blaming him for SJWs is like blaming the first ape to bash another ape with a rock for ICBMs.

Yet another “Alt-Right” retard may once have been “Mainstream Left.”  Via Vox Day, the tale of Garon Archer, who, like Jason Kessler, was Occupying Wall Street just a few years ago:

But just a few years ago, Archer appeared in a 2012 YouTube video of an Occupy movement demonstration in Florida, protesting for the arrest of George Zimmerman, who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. In the video, Archer – who was himself 17 at the time   – chants slogans against racism and burns a Confederate flag bandanna.

Vox and his gang, of course, assume this is a (((Soros))) astroturf operation.  I dunno.  One of the big problems intelligence services had in the Cold War was finding deep cover operatives.  Anyone good enough at aping the other guy’s lifestyle to pass as an enemy national for long periods of time was at high risk of developing Stockholm Syndrome.  Your average Leftist obviously doesn’t suffer from cognitive dissonance, since without CD Leftism cannot be, but the kind of personality that would Occupy Wall Street just isn’t capable of faking it on the other side.

I suggest another alternative: Today’s SJW is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer.  I could swear I read some dork going off about this just the other day….

I’ve written before how the Left longs for a static, legible world, like the one the feudal system theoretically  produced — everyone is exactly what he looks like and nothing else, forever, world without end amen.  Conservative blacks, say, or non-feminist women fry their circuits, which is why they hate them with an especially venomous hate.  Having spent long years in and around the ivory tower, I’ve seen the process firsthand — they’re getting damn close to achieving their goal, in the following ways:

Fuzzy Numbers:  As any book about the Middle Ages will tell you straight off, medieval numbers are Rachel Maddow-level accurate.  “We were opposed by fifty thousand Saracens” means anything from “there were enemies as far as the eye could see” to “we were probably slightly outnumbered” to “it wasn’t our day, so we ran.”  Ditto every other unit of measurement, and as for prices, the best economic historians can do is along the lines of “a livre tournois would get you three chickens and a duck, maybe, in most parts of rural France between 1100-1300.”  So, too, with our modern medievals — nonsense like “women are paid 75 cents on the dollar” and “one in four college girls is raped” means “we’re peeved about our poor performance, but it can’t be our fault, because there were Saracens, like, everywhere.”

No Causality:  “Folk beliefs in the Middle Ages” have gotten yards of heavy scholarly treatments, but they’re still frustratingly vague for most readers.  We want to know how things work — “you’re telling me that if I piss in a bottle, mumble some mumbo-jumbo, and throw it in a river, I’ll be de-hexed?  Please for to explain this.”  But they can’t, because medieval brains didn’t work like that.  It’s doubly frustrating, because medieval logic is a wonder to behold.  They can tease out consequences, conditions, and entailments we’d need a Cray to process, but they never applied those skills to the real world.  The modern analogue is, of course, “privilege” — your average college kid can find “privilege” in, and feel guilty about, the fact that some people are smarter than others, but he can’t use those finely-honed powers of thought to realize how bum-fucking stupid that is.

Heraldry: Historians generally leave to antiquarians the question of who had to do homage to whom at a given time, because it’s nightmarishly complicated and, frankly, not all that important.  When it mattered, it was obvious — the King of England has to do homage to the King of France for England’s possessions in France, and boom, there’s your Hundred Years’ War.  Your low-rent minor noble, though must’ve had a rough time of it, as he might be called to do service for two or more lords who were currently fighting each other, despite both being vassals of the same king (this is “bastard feudalism,” as pretentious Game of Thrones fans (BIRM) probably know).  The obvious modern analogue: The Victim Pyramid.  Like feudalism, there’s theoretically a nice clear, clean org chart — gays outrank blacks outrank women, the way a duke outranks an earl outranks a baron.  The reality, though, is very messy — does a lesbian outrank a heterosexual black male?  What about Muslims?  And then there’s the trannies… There’s no Burke’s Peerage for our Sob Sisters, alas.

Heresy: Ever read any medieval philosophy?  The stuff is recondite to say the least.  They thought so, too, which is why some of their greatest minds — including the Angelic Doctor himself — had certain propositions condemned as heretical.  Even getting a handle on the drift of the points in question is enough to make your eyes bleed, but if you fuck it up, you get burnt at the stake.  The obvious modern analogue: Do I even need to say it?  Fortunately, just as the really bad stuff re: heresy fell mainly on the church’s academic elite — no, really, most peasants got off if they did penance and pinkie swore not to do it again — so, too, is blue-on-blue fire the most common today.

I’m sure there’s more… feel free to add in the comments.

Freud, that old cokehead, was really onto something with that “death instinct” business – at least when it comes to Our Betters, the Liberals.

Via Vox Day comes word that Richard Florida, urban planning guru extraordinaire, kinda sorta admits he was wrong about… well, just about his whole thing.  Florida claimed that the key to revitalizing cities was to Bohemianize them by attracting the “creative class:”

To make his case for the creative class, Florida subjected it to strange quantifications. Combining census data on occupation, education, “coolness factor” (based on the number of young people and the quality of “nightlife and culture”) and, bizarrely, the number of gay male residents, he developed a “Bohemia Index” to calculate this group’s magical effect on urban economic growth.

Anyone who has spent time in a college town could’ve predicted the result.  College-town downtowns are “vital,” all right, if you vitally need a hemp candle or to get accosted by platoons of hippie burnout bums (or both, of course, since there’s a lot of overlap in those membership rosters).  There’s “art” galore, all repeating the same trite message that Hate Is Bad, mmmmkay, which is why college towns all look the same — from Berkeley to Cambridge, the only real diversity is the weather.

Which, I’m increasingly coming to believe, is the point.

The university is a Liberal’s natural habitat.  Give them complete administrative control, an unlimited budget, and the ability to impose admission requirements, and you get a place where you can’t find a non-foodie restaurant and none of the milk comes from cows.  There are twelve coffee shops per bookstore, and the bookstores outnumber the auto mechanics by about 15:1.  And, of course, everything of consequence is run by white people, but the nice Diverse ladies who are such fun at cocktail parties make $300K per year chairing make-work departments that do nothing but issue unread Diversity memos.  Everyone’s gay, or wishes he was, and the days are spent squawking about outrages that happen far, far over the horizon.

It’s static — by design.  If you want a real challenge (and are current on your blood pressure meds), head to the nearest college town and try finding something to do that doesn’t involve sitting and staring at a glowing screen.  All the ballyhooed urban boho “nightlife and culture” is really just the Brownian movement of shallow people drifting from bar to coffee shop to bookstore to fusion restaurant to experimental theater performance, all the while twittering and facebooking about how wonderful and uplifting and educational it all is.  The only emotion they experience is the dopamine hit that comes from being outraged about stuff, which confirms their smug superiority to the unwashed masses out in Flyover Country.

You could accomplish the same thing propped up in a hospital bed with one of those IV pez dispensers full of morphine, and again, that’s by design.

All of this stuff is elaborately useless.  They’ve finally hit bottom in their worship of trannies, who are so elaborately useless they can’t even decide which sex they are today, to say nothing of the 57 genders and however-many “orientations” we’re up to.  The more useless, the better, because any actual accomplishment — hell, any actual decision — would foreclose an outrage opportunity.  If I am this, but not that, I can’t get all worked up when this is the outrage du jour and that is the new hotness.

Freud nailed it.  Their goal is to extinguish their personalities, along with anything that might remind them that life has a meaning that can only be found by living it — that is, by making choices and living with the consequences.  They’d be much happier living in the Brave New World, hooked to a feeding tube and with on-demand Soma shots.  Why aren’t the eeeeevil capitalists at Big Pharma all over this?