First they came for the male feminists, and no one spoke out”because no one likes them, not even the female feminists.
Dearest faithful reader, I”m a man who finds something to dislike about nearly everything and everyone, yet even I find male feminists to be especially grating”they”re perched wayyyy up near the top of my “Don”t Like “Em” list. The very term “male feminist” seems as masochistically counterintuitive as “black Klansman,” “Jewish Nazi,” or “white Democrat.” Sure, one expects women to be feminists, just as one should expect all living organisms to be motivated by self-interest, but there’s something downright gender-traitorous about male feminism. Self-loathing is not an attractive trait in any of God’s creatures, and these dweebs are the Benedict Arnolds of the Invisible Biological Brotherhood.
It only took me a cursory perusal of Google Images to get the strong suspicion that most males get into feminism for the same reason that females do: because they are failures at embodying their gender’s most attractive traits. In other words, females become feminists because they”re failures as women, while men do it because they”re failures as men.
The white knight gallops in quickly and wants you to look at his shiny white horse, because if you took a long hard look at him, you”d never agree to get on that horse and go galloping into the sunset with him.
Seriously”have you seen many of these self-proclaimed male feminists? When I see all these sullen dorks standing like political prisoners holding their “I NEED FEMINISM BECAUSE…” signs, I wish that one of them could be honest and say they need feminism because they”re not naturally attractive to women.
I therefore posit that in at least some cases, male feminism is a mating strategy for men who aren”t getting laid on the virtues of being men alone. So they switch gears and attempt to get laid on the merits of proclaiming to be feminist “allies.” The “allies” thing is all lies. It is a sneaky way of trying to appeal to women by loudly proclaiming that you hate the type of guy who normally appeals to women. I believe the most reasonable explanation for the very existence of the modern “male feminist” is rooted in evolutionary biology: Calling oneself a male feminist is a deceptive and despicable little shame-dance, a pathetic self-puffing mating ritual that beta male lizards do to garner even a scrap of female attention.
It’s like going to some pro-marijuana rally because you know someone there is going to have weed. If you hang around enough girl feminists long enough and claim to be a feminist, sooner or later one of them will fuck you…maybe…right?
I theorize that these genetic-lotto losers”who tend to be either too fat or too skinny yet are invariably too unhandsome”obviously aren”t going to sow much seed being the uninspiring specimens of near-manhood that they are, so they appeal to feminine wiles in a sort of Hail Mary pass.
But their untrained and unskilled minds don”t grasp that you don”t have to be a male feminist to get laid; in fact, all the available evidence suggests it’s an impediment. I would go so far as to pay top dollar for verified scientific evidence of a woman lubricating to the sound of a man saying, “I’m a feminist.”
For all that they claim to be women’s natural allies, these schmucks don”t have the first clue about female psychology, or they wouldn”t need to turn to feminism as a sort of invisible date-rape drug. To these self-centered bitter little men bouncing around in their baby bubbles, it’s not really about empathizing with women at all, because they obviously don”t understand how women operate; it’s about scoring with women. It is in this sense that male feminists are more misogynistic than, well, you know, the misogynists. Failing desperately in the categories of natural charm and sex appeal, male feminists seek to gain access to women’s bodies via deception.
Male feminists are therefore, by my own tortured logic, the biggest enemy that modern women currently face. They excuse and thereby enable the worst excesses of female feminist behavior while symbolically cuckolding their own entire gender on the outside chance that one of these girls will sooner or later consent to giving him oral.
The Week’s Most Unpleasant, Putrescent, and Adolescent Headlines
NIPSTERS: MAKING HITLER HIP AGAIN
If you”re a dedicated white nationalist who laments the fact that the left dominates the media, education, public relations, and youth culture, this may be the news you were waiting to hear”or maybe not. A loosely organized group of nationalist German youth is attempting to repackage and rebrand the “far right” in ways that would make it seem hip and edgy rather than crusty and stodgy.
Enter the “nipster.” It’s a portmanteau of “Nazi” and “hipster,” or for those who don’t claim the “Nazi” tag, you can substitute “nationalist” for “Nazi” and still qualify. Last week, Rolling Stone ran a long feature (called “Heil Hipster”) on this odd trend of ironic Aryanism that seeks to give white nationalism a makeover.
Fashion-wise, gone is the blunt, rough, skinhead chic of the 80s and 90s, although you can still find more tasteful iterations of it through latter-day online peddlers of Germanic streetwear. Instead, the nipster aesthetic is far more muted and attempts to blend in with the mainstream”leading, of course, to charges that it is far more insidious and dishonest than good ol’ Nazism. At least when it comes to fashion, nipsters don’t discriminate. It is perfectly kosher for them to appropriate the same dumb mustaches, sunglasses, skinny jeans, and ironic sneakers as your average bored leftist hipster. Many”of course”find this gradual stylistic shift toward non-threatening attire to be even more terrifying than skinheads, since “You can’t tell what a neo-Nazi looks like anymore, which makes it easier for them to commit violent acts.”
Also gone is the supposedly innate fascistic revulsion for rainbow-coated, hippy-dippy things such as veganism (there’s even a neo-Nazi vegan cooking show) and black music. There is now allegedly neo-Nazi hip-hop, neo-Nazi reggae, and a techno performer who goes by the handle DJ Adolf. Even on Tumblr, that Matterhorn of unhinged leftist social-justice crusading, there are neo-Nazi Tumblr pages composed almost entirely of fascistic imagery. Nipsters are also loudly proclaiming their nipster nature by attaching the #nipster hashtag to their Instagram photos.
The Rolling Stone article profiles 30-year-old Patrick Schroeder, host of a yearly “Live H8” extravaganza that he describes as the planet’s “most extreme Nazi concert.” Schroeder and a friend lament how their unabashed public appropriation of right-wing rhetoric and imagery have sabotaged their career chances in modern Deutschland: “We’re the new Jews in Germany, except we don’t wear stars,” Schroeder says.
Maybe not, and maybe this odd new trend won’t get squashed dead like a bug within weeks”but nice sunglasses anyway, dude.
JIMMY SAVILE: A NECRO AS WELL AS A PEDO?
It didn’t take long after British pop celebrity Jimmy Savile’s 2011 death for allegations of sexual abuse to start worming their way eagerly through his corpse like so many hungry maggots. Now, on top of the 400-plus earlier allegations from a 2012 police investigation of Savile sexually preying upon both genders and all ages, comes a new report from the National Health Services alleging that Savile may have been a necrophile as well as a pedophile.
Not that Savile didn’t drop some hint-bombs about this throughout his life, as he once allegedly boasted to a reporter that he’d spent five days alone with his mother’s corpse after she died. There was also this creepy 1982 confession to the Sunday Express, wherein Savile describes helping his “friends” the morticians dispose of bodies:
When I lay those bodies away, I look at good muscles, good organs, good brains, beautiful eyes, liver and kidneys, and I think, “What a waste.”
According to the new NHS report, Savile told hospital workers that he wore rings on his fingers fashioned from “glass eyes from dead bodies in Leeds Mortuary where I work and I love working there, and I wheel the dead bodies around at night and I love that.”
Perhaps most sickening is the allegation that Savile boasted of performing oral sex on corpses. According to a former nurse’s testimony, he even had a name for the act”“gamaroosh”:
He [Savile] was saying that they used to put the bodies together, male and female, and he also said that they took photographs and also that he got involved in some of the photographs … I was a little bit upset because I had no concept, in those days, of necrophilia. … [Savile] talked about gamaroosh … It means oral sex … that he [Savile], he would go down on them and gamaroosh and muck about.
The NHS report claims to have received sixty accounts of sexual abuse allegedly performed by Savile at Leeds General Infirmary”a place where Savile described himself as the “chief cheerer-upper””acts that were undeniably ecumenical and nondiscriminatory, as they were perpetrated over the course of decades upon adults, children, males, females, patients, and staff members. It also notes that over the years, Savile raised more than $5 million in charitable donations for the hospital.
It was perhaps the idea that he kept so many potential whistleblowers employed”combined with the blinding sheen of his massive celebrity”that may have discouraged prosecutors and frightened potential accusers into silence.
GARY OLDMAN OFFENDS JEWS, THEN GROVELS (AND RE-GROVELS)
In a Playboy interview released last week, actor Gary Oldman “went there” and stood right on the “third rail” of American public discourse”he implied that Jews control the film industry:
Mel Gibson is in a town that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him”and doesn’t need to feed him anymore because he’s got enough dough. He’s like an outcast, a leper, you know?
Seemingly within moments after garnering public opprobrium for his comments, Oldman sought to avoid a one-way boat trip to the leper colony and pecked out what can only be described as a severely contrite letter to the ADL:
I am deeply remorseful that comments I recently made in the Playboy Interview were offensive to many Jewish people. … I have an enormous personal affinity for the Jewish people in general, and those specifically in my life. The Jewish People, persecuted through the ages, are the first to hear God’s voice, and surely are the chosen people.
ADL head hunchback Abe Foxman said that Oldman’s apology was “insufficient” and “not satisfactory,” leading Oldman to rush onto the Jimmy Kimmel show and apologize yet again:
Words have meaning, and they carry weight long after you’ve said them. … I don’t condone or excuse the words that I used in any context. … I am profoundly, profoundly sorry and deeply apologetic. … I’m a public figure, I should be an example and an inspiration. And I’m an a-hole. I’m 56, and I should know better.
Despite his shamelessly self-shaming public ankle-grabbing, it appears as if the Jews have yet to forgive Mr. Oldman. Abe Foxman dismissed any suggestion that Jews control Hollywood as being based in “tired anti-Semitic tropes,” and we couldn’t agree more. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that these crazy Jew-hating conspiracy nuts will not be silenced until organizations such as the ADL and SPLC issue statistically verifiable spreadsheets proving that Jews are not disproportionately represented in the media relative to their numbers in the overall population. That’s all it would take. It would seem so easy to do; heck, it would probably also be a wise public-relations move.
Those who irritate us and give us grounds for righteous indignation are our secret benefactors, for there are few states of mind more gratifying than that of righteous indignation. And therefore, in a certain way, I should be grateful to L”Oréal, the enormous French cosmetics company, for having instituted the L”Oréal-UNESCO “For Women in Science” laureate program.
In the arrival hall of Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris there have for some time hung from the ceiling large and elegant posters publicizing these awards, showing women (mainly Japanese) at laboratory workbenches, with the words “Science needs women” emblazoned across them. The posters were still there when I arrived again last week.
Science does not need women any more than it needs foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis. What science needs (if an abstraction such as science can be said to need anything) is scientists. If they happen also to be foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis, so be it: but no one in his right mind would go to any lengths to recruit for his laboratory foot fetishists, pole-vaulters, or Somalis for those characteristics alone.
One of the main glories of science is that it is universal, or at least approaches universality as nearly as it is possible for a human activity to do. Within a few years of Commodore Perry’s opening up of Japan to the outside world, Japanese scientists were contributing to the (then) new science of bacteriology on an equal footing with Western scientists. But that is not at all the same as saying that science needed the Japanese. It could have got on very well without them.
It is true, of course, that women are demographically underrepresented in the ranks of scientists, but so are many other groups. (This means, of course, that others are overrepresented.) This may be for more than one reason: lack of aptitude or interest, for example, or deliberate or subtle obstructiveness. But historical attempts to recruit scientists according to some demographic criterion or other have not been met with success, even as far as the advancement of science itself is concerned, and have been made by the very worst dictatorships that in other respects have been abominable. Social engineering and engineering are two very different activities. It would be no consolation to know while on a collapsing bridge and about to plunge into the deep ravine below that it had been built by a truly representative sample of the population, and was therefore a monument to social justice.
Suppose that, instead of Science needs women, other slogans based upon exactly the same logic hung over the arrivals hall: Heavyweight boxing needs Malays, for example, Football needs dwarf goalkeepers, Quantity surveying needs bisexuals, Lavatory cleaning needs left-handers: the absurdity of the argument would be immediately apparent. In fact the categorization both of human activities and humans themselves being almost infinite, the obsession with demographic representation as the most important criterion of fairness or social justice is virtually without end. The search for social fairness in this sense can lead only to perpetual conflict, much as the imposition of parliamentary democracy has done in countries in which it is not an organic outgrowth of their history, and as a true parliamentary regime in the European Union would very soon do.
Whether more women in science would result in faster scientific advance is an open question. It might but it might not. More scientists do not necessarily mean better or even more science. Are the women to replace men, or be additional to them? And a prize for women in science is inherently, though no doubt unintentionally, condescending. Good science is good science, irrespective of who has done it; and the prize brings to mind Doctor Johnson’s famous remark about women preachers, that they are like dogs walking on their hind legs: it is not well done, but one is surprised to see it done at all.
In his recent piece for Takimag (“Gun Control and the Scope of Ethics”) Alexander Fiske-Harrison confesses to “complete mystification” concerning the gun-control debate in America. This frank admission of ignorance notwithstanding, he goes on to critique (typically, as “absurd”) what he cannot understand. I would certainly agree that Fiske-Harrison is mystified, as he describes an America which simply does not exist:
My problem is with why so many of you seem to fight so hard against stopping people who are completely ignorant of gun usage and safety or, worse, have histories of criminality or mental health problems, from walking into shops, buying a gun, and then being allowed to carry it with them wherever they wish to go. … why object to rudimentary training and testing?
Do you know anyone who believes that criminals and crazy people should be free to buy guns and carry them around? Even the most die-hard gun-rights advocates agree that some restrictions on gun ownership are necessary. Federal laws already exist, binding on everyone, which prohibit felons, drug addicts, domestic-violence offenders, and the mentally ill from buying or possessing guns, and prohibit others from selling, giving, or lending guns to them. Even the concealed-carry permits issued to law-abiding citizens don”t allow them to carry their guns “wherever they wish to go.” And they require training and testing”and a background check”before they are issued. I took such a class in Tennessee”put on by our local sheriff and his wife”which included live fire with the gun I intended to carry, out to a distance of 25 feet. Had I not demonstrated reasonable competence with my pistol, and a thorough knowledge of relevant laws and safety practices, I would not have received my permit.
Bottom line: No one is advocating the unrestricted gun freedom which Fiske-Harrison describes. Nowhere does such freedom exist. And no one is “fighting hard” to have existing restrictions repealed.
Indeed, his essay abounds with such false claims. He self-identifies as a gun owner, and says he opposes banning guns. Yet he appears to be quite content with current British gun laws, which are draconian by American standards: not only are concealed-carry permits not issued in Britain; pistols have been banned entirely! All pistols, both revolvers and semi-automatics, are illegal to possess! Even in one’s home! This law is so strictly and universally enforced that even the British Olympic pistol team must go abroad to practice.
Yet Fiske-Harrison implies”without stating it outright”that British and American gun laws are more or less equivalent, both enshrining the right to keep and bear arms:
America has good historical reasons for the existence of its 1789 Bill of Rights”the year of the French Revolution, in case you have forgotten”just as my country Britain had for its own a century earlier, both of which enshrine the right to keep and bear arms.
Does Fiske-Harrison not realize that from the American perspective”using our Second Amendment and state and federal gun laws as the standard”the right to keep and bear arms no longer exists in Britain? Far from enshrining it, the Brits have amputated it almost beyond recognition. Treating the two nations as if their gun policies were in any way similar is disingenuous at best. It mystifies me why Fiske-Harrison would attempt to foist such misinformation upon us.
But he shows his true colors when he argues that “the state has, and should have”in large part”a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and therefore on the tools of violence,” revealing himself as an opponent of the Second Amendment, which stipulates specifically that the state shall not have a monopoly (“in large part””whatever that means”or otherwise) on tools of violence: that citizens too have the right to utilize those tools. “The legitimate use of violence” includes citizens” use of firearms”including pistols“in lawful self-defense.
What Fiske-Harrison’s words do accurately describe is the current state of affairs in Britain, where the state does possess a complete monopoly on specifying the conditions of gun ownership. Is Fiske-Harrison mystified that we Americans do not wish to surrender our freedoms in a similar fashion?
He clearly prefers the European way (of citizen disarmament), and judges America by the European sensibility: “The statistics on gun homicide in the U.S. are simply absurd when read by every other civilized country in the world.” He quotes statistics that a U.S. citizen is 54 times more likely to die by gunshot than is a citizen of Britain.
What I find absurd is Fiske-Harrison’s contentment with a government that won”t allow him to own a pistol in his own home, and his unwillingness to mention this inconvenient fact while boasting about how his nation has enshrined gun rights. For my part, I”ll gladly suffer the increased risk he cites, in return for the freedom to own the means of self-protection.
What should also be pointed out is that gun crime in the U.S. is to a large extent concentrated in isolated areas, mostly decaying inner-city neighborhoods. Most people avoid them. Outside of these high-crime zones”that is, in the vast majority of places”there is a much lower incidence of gun deaths, and gun violence is not a concern. Much of this inner-city gun violence is gang- and drug-related; and to be honest, no one gets too upset when a couple of crackhead gangbangers”whatever their race”off each other …
Apparently anticipating this argument, Fiske-Harrison insists:
And as for those who are in favor of the National Rifle Assocation-promoted argument that most of those statistics represent gangs of nonwhite origin killing their own: aside from being repugnantly racist and showing nil respect for the rule of law …
So … pointing out that a large percentage of the recorded “gun-related violence” involves nonwhite bangers shooting each other somehow reveals a disrespect for the rule of law? Try as I might, I can”t make sense of that statement…
And not just racist, but “repugnantly racist”! (Is he implying the existence of a non-repugnant racism?)
In any case, the fact remains that in most areas of America, gun violence is not something anybody worries about.
“… they”re also tactically deluded. They assume that as long as someone has a pristine Sig they”ve no training with in their bedside drawer, they”ll stand a chance when battle-hardened, tooled-up gangbangers come through the front door. They won”t.”
Here again Fiske-Harrison sets up a straw man position which no sane person holds, then proceeds to refute it. In fact, no one I know imagines that they can just buy a gun, not bother to train with it, and be well protected.
Just the opposite, in fact: we gun owners are constantly being reminded by our peers that training with our weapons is an essential part of responsible gun ownership. Classes on proper gun handling technique and gunfighting tactics abound. There are plenty of well-trained gun owners with well-used Sigs (my own two have had thousands of rounds through them; one of them rides happily on my hip as I type this) who would be more than a match for A. F.-H.’s hypothetical gangbangers, who (the bangers) probably have not trained or done much practicing.
A memorable anniversary “ Europe’s first suicide attempt “ The Hun is at the gate “ Signor Rosario is very afraid “ Europe’s second suicide attempt “ Swamping the lifeboat “ The great job robbery “ The Door to Hell “ Vibrancy in the World Cup “ Born again
When I hear the words Sykes-Picot I more often than not feel like punching an Englishman or a Frog—any Englishman, any Frog—in the mouth, but then I think of François Georges-Picot’s granddaughter Olga, and my pugilistic thoughts turn to romantic mush. More about those two arrogant and ignorant fools later, but first Olga.
I was twenty-two and she was nineteen or twenty and we met in New York where she was studying acting and I was studying girls. It was love at first sight and we swore we’d never ever look at anyone else ever again but then the summer ended and we never saw each other again. Mind you, I did see her, but she was twenty feet tall and in Technicolor. Twelve years after we first met I went to see Freddy Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal in a cinema in Leicester Square, starring the wonderful Edward Fox as the paid assassin, and suddenly there was Olga falling off her horse on purpose in the Bois de Boulogne, with her intended victim immediately coming to her aid.
I was with a couple of karate buddies and I started hyperventilating and yelling “My Olga, my Olga,” but no one paid any attention and some wise guy from behind told me to be quiet. Olga was perfect in the part. She gets the old fool minister to pillow talk, and warns the OAS. I’ve always been pro-OAS and always believed de Gaulle to have betrayed the army and those who brought him to power in 1958, but it was so long ago, the only thing I can think about now is poor Olga who suffered from depression and committed suicide almost 20 years ago.
Her grandfather and his equally arrogant to the point of blindness partner Mark Sykes carved up the Ottoman Empire back in 1916, not unlike a butcher slicing up slabs of meat fresh out of the freezer. The Sultan had wisely divided the Middle East along ethnic lines into provinces. The Anglo-French duo in 1916 proved as ignorant as George W. Bush was to be 87 years later. Had they never heard of the Sunni-Shia divide? The 1990s wars over Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, the Gulf War of 1991 and the disastrous Iraq war of 2003, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, can all be traced directly to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920 and those two fools carving up the Middle East while their minds were obviously elsewhere. (Most likely trying to figure out whose family was older and richer.)
Winston Churchill doesn’t come out very well either. He actually created Iraq, or Mesopotamia as it was then called, and by the time he was thrown out of office in 1922 his folly had become Iraq as it is today. He created the artificial monarchy that ended so badly in 1958, thinking he was dealing with sleepy Bedouins who would genuflect in front of Faisal, whose family realm in Saudi Arabia had been usurped by some camel drivers who had never used an indoor loo.
Which brings me to the usurpers whose ambassador to London wrote an article in last week’s Daily Telegraph that was obviously inspired by Baron Münchhausen’s memoirs. “We oppose all foreign intervention and interference,” writes the Saudi envoy, and as diplomats are supposed to go abroad and lie nonstop, there is nothing anyone can do about that false statement, except list it along with the other two biggest lies: money means nothing to me, and let me put it in just a little bit. The Saudis first and then the even more horrible Qataris privately empowered and financed the jihadists that morphed into ISIS after the war in Syria began.
Ever notice that when you read an article on something you know a lot about, they”ve got 50% of the facts wrong? Whether it’s a story about your hometown or your favorite band, it’s always shocking how half-assed the journalists are. Apparently, lots of people have noticed this. Last week, we learned of a Gallup poll that said confidence in the media had plummeted to 22%. In 1979 it was 51%. This is because we”ve gone from investigators hitting the pavement to ideologues pounding their keyboards. A reporter used to go where the story led him. Now he starts with the story and crams in facts until it fits.
This may be because the demand for news outpaces the supply, so they blurt out, “Uh, the guy who hit Tracy Morgan was up for 24 hours because Walmart,” since it sounds good. It may be because print ads are dead and income is increasingly based on the number of clicks a web article gets”hence the term “click bait.” Another far more sinister possibility is the vast majority of reporters are basically Marxist liberals and they use the news as a propaganda tool for the “greater good.”
I suspect it’s the latter. There are too many fake stories that fit the liberal narrative for it to be an accident. It seems like every time we see evidence of the left’s hateful worldview, we learn it’s a hoax. Remember when KFC demanded a disfigured girl leave their restaurant because she scared the customers? That never happened either. How many times have we found “Faggot” and “Nigger” scrawled on a wall only to discover later it was done by the same non-hetero-normative person of color who claimed to be a victim? Is there anyone in the country who isn”t convinced every journalist outside of Fox is in the tank for Obama?
I often wonder … wait; “wondering” is a hate crime. When Cliven Bundy dared to wonder if some blacks were better off during slavery he was vilified. Fuck it. I”m going to wonder. I often wonder why these journalists want America to be a hellhole full of prejudice. I think it’s because their academic years consisted of far-left professors telling them the entire country is a Klan rally and they had better devote their careers to untangling this mess.
When they get a job at MSNBC, Media Matters, Raw Story, or Daily Kos, they look around and see a bunch of totally reasonable white males saying “Hello, how do you do?” Their war on hate quickly becomes a war on a vacuum, so they start randomly grabbing detritus to fill the hole.
They are able to continue this charade unabated because they don”t live in the real world, so there are no checks and balances. They don”t know any truckers, so they don”t realize it’s impossible for them to work more than 11 hours a day. They”ve never been to the ghetto, so they can keep pretending gun violence is about whites hunting blacks. It’s easy to assume everyone is a racist, sexist homophobe when you only talk to other liberal journalists.
At this point, almost every time I hear something that fits the narrative, I assume it’s false. Remember when the black guy from SNL said black women aren”t funny? It started a huge backlash of people listing funny black women and calling him a sexist, racist, horrible dude. They”d have National Enquirer-esque headlines such as “Keenan Thompson Thinks Black Women Aren”t Funny” with his actual quote showing how wrong they are right below it.
“It’s just a tough part of the business,” he said, describing his own personal experience; “in auditions, they just never find ones that are ready.” I knew he never said “Black women aren”t funny.” You can just tell. Of course, he’s lamenting the fact that they can”t find any. He’s BLACK for crying out loud.
I”ve personally been through this false narrative meat grinder a million times. This morning, I learned that selling my shares and having American Indian children can still mean I”m a “racist” who was “fired” (I told the editors I plan to sue so the link may change). All modern journalists need to justify their false allegations is to point to other lazy writers who make stuff up. A few months ago, while discussing food stamp abuse on Hannity, I asked why our poor are so fat. Another guest said it’s because they lack nutritional education, and I explained it’s not a “fat pill” you take once and balloon out. The headline became, “Fox News guest tells Hannity: “Overfed” blacks use food stamps as a “fat pill.”” (They changed it to “non-whites” after I threatened the author with violence.)
When I said I find Neil deGrasse Tyson’s fans annoying and added, “He could defecate on them and they”d be dancing in the streets,” Media Matters called it a “race-based attack.” Al Jazeera called me Fox’s “house racist” and spent half an hour discussing the conservative right’s hatred of science. Death threats ensued, coworkers quit, and eventually Facebook revoked my page. I don”t think you”d get the same response if you found Bill Nye annoying.
In the early 1980s I became familiar with a cartoonist whom I considered to be one of the cleverest men I had read in a very long time. I collected as many of his pieces as possible. When I showed a friend his work, however, she diffidently sniffed, “This is nonsensical;” a common response from anyone too dense to understand erudite wit. My judgment was vindicated within a few years when the first of Gary Larson’s collections was released, and by the 1990s it was almost heretical not to peruse his daily entry.
Perhaps the quintessential frame in his canon depicts a traveling salesman at the door of a hapless moron. In the peddler’s hand is a thick pamphlet which advertises “Double Your IQ or No Money Back!” to which his mark responds, “Well, I dunno … Okay, sounds good to me.”
Is there a better epitaph for modern America? Watching the election results being tallied in Mississippi, one would doubt it.
For where else do people complain so much about their state of affairs yet do so little to alter them? The hoary phrase goes, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.” If so, then irritability is having to endure rubes falling for the same slogans again and again.
Therefore I have devised the following elaborate theorem, which offers at least some possibility of reprieve: never under any circumstances cast a ballot for an incumbent.
Oh, we”ve all heard the arguments (usually from someone desperate to cling to his seat). Our district will lose seniority. Our system needs to be guided by experience. Our long-suffering plutocrats have served us for too long to be cast aside by any save death itself. Let us take these as they are slung at us.
While seniority is certainly important on the Hill, as soon as your party is a minority in the body, those prime appointments to chairman are lost and said savior of his district becomes another warm body in an easy chair, gathering time. So this is a dubious argument at best, and vapid if you are a Republican in the Senate or, to a lesser degree, a Democrat in the House.
As for experience, it is many of those learned hands that have rammed the ship of state upon the shoals. They say that for your first two years in the House (in other words, your entire first term) you do nothing but listen. Then, if party bosses think you can hold onto your office, they might listen to what you have to say around year six. There are exceptions, but very few. On the contrary: almost any problem from the VA to Iraq is the responsibility of incumbents elected approximately 1992 or before. Neophytes couldn”t possibly do worse than what we have now.
Most pathetic of all lamentations from those with precarious seats is the claim they have been such fine stewards of the public good that we should overlook a terrible record and reelect them because they are decent people. Many a fool falls for this nonsense, and few realize the commendation they received when their high school team played the regional championship, the congratulatory note for winning prize porker at the state fair, and even birthday cards to centenarians are more attributable to a good staff than a good statesman. Why is it that because someone is a nice fellow to little old ladies it should follow that he won”t stab everyone from steel workers to subprime mortgage victims in the back?
Given the condition of the government today, radical change needs to occur. Given the populace’s inability to comprehend that Washington is a swamp which most soils those who remain in it the longest, there is but one solution. Never vote for an incumbent. Vote for anyone else.
Elect alternatives. Elect third parties. Elect the homeless. Elect the feeble-minded. Elect the deviant. Elect the insane (although future historians may well argue that’s exactly what has gotten us into this mess).
A few columns ago I mentioned in passing that the Mrs. and I had been watching Breaking Bad. This brought some inquiries about whether we got to the end of it, and what I thought. Here are the answers.
Yes, we got to the end, after four months or so of Saturday-night marathons via Netflix. For once I concur with the general opinion on a pop-cult phenomenon: It was very well done. If this is what good multi-season TV dramas are like nowadays”I wouldn”t know: this is the only one I”ve watched”the narrative arts have a healthy future.
Casting was excellent, with a lot of human types we can all recognize. The crooked lawyer was superb, and probably appealed to the mass of viewers as an archetype of what they suspect”unfairly, no doubt”about the legal profession in general. Equally good was the lawyer’s factotum Mike, the bored working stiff whose nine-to-five consists of surveillance, intimidation, corpse disposal, and the occasional homicide.
Mrs. D.’s favorite was Jesse, who I think was written to appeal to female instincts. (Am I allowed to say “female instincts” on TakiMag? I am? Thanks.) I don”t myself see the charm, but I did like the symmetry of Jesse, the show’s all-time loser, being the only one of the criminal side to get away at last.
Jesse looked right, too”not very bright, and just slightly crazy. The faces were altogether memorable: Walter’s wife, with that high-testosterone man-jaw and weirdly large mouth, taking charge at key moments; and her ditzy sister, whose intellectual horizons are bounded by People magazine and local TV news.
Then there was Hank, the law enforcement guy we all know: a type that nobody much likes but that we all understand at some level is essential to the maintenance of civilized life.
Whether Hank’s obnoxious skill set is usefully employed in service of the DEA is open to question. The whole show plays cleverly into our ambivalence about the War on Drugs. Is it really worth all this cruelty and corruption just to prevent the underclass from staggering around stoned? What use is the underclass, anyway, in an age of self-checkout stores, robot factories, and (soon) self-driving vehicles? Perhaps it would be kinder to let them stay narcotized, legally.
The underclass types in Breaking Bad are all white or pale-Hispanic, giving us a welcome vacation from having to think about black people and their everlasting damn problems. The only significant black character is Gus the crime boss, and he’s so buttoned-up, over-controlled, and smart, he might as well be white. Hey, just like … Never mind.
The landscape deserves an honorable mention as almost a character in itself: that endless desert in whose sunburned nakedness a multitude of sins can be hidden.
Best of all, the show mostly gets humanity right, in all our self-deception, guilt-restrained egocentricity, and unsteady dutifulness. There is a great moment of truth”of truth about human nature, I mean”halfway through the final episode, when Walter is with his wife Skyler for the last time.
Up to this point we”and Skyler”have been given to understand that Walter has been doing what he’s been doing so that his family will be provided for after he’s dead. (The criminal factotum Mike is likewise motivated by the hope of providing for his granddaughter. There’s a whole sub-theme on family loyalty running through the show”a legacy from The Godfather, perhaps. Given the results, you come away thinking the Absolute Nuclear Family is probably optimal.)
So there’s Walter, saying his farewell to Skyler.
Walter: All the things that I did, you have to understand …
Skyler: If I have to hear one more time that you did this for the family …
Walter: I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. I was … really … I was alive.
I”m being a pain in the ass again. My childhood makes me do it. When I was 11, we boy kids in Alabama liked to shoot a wasp’s nest with BB guns and run like hell. I guess it stuck.
In this column I will explain why the Caucasian race will shortly be extinct, and why it is a good idea. This conclusion flows ineluctably from evolutionary considerations and studies of racial IQ. It is simple biology.
Here’s the evolutionary-IQ perspective: As race realists have argued at length, IQ is a reliable measure of intelligence, and is primarily genetic. Twin studies, in which identical twins have been raised apart in differing environments, show that 80% of IQ is of genetic provenance. So far as I know, these studies seem to be correct.
The realists frequently publish curves of IQ distributions indicating that American blacks have a mean IQ of 85, Mexicans of 87, and white Americans of 98. (IQs tend to wander according to the argument one is making. For national averages I mostly use the figures in the table from IQ and the Wealth of Nations, regarded as canonical by race realists.) The authors who have discovered the superiority of whites, curiously enough, are white. As a rule, realists attribute almost every instance of high intelligence to genetics and, usually, to white blood.
The accuracy is doubtful. In particular, they omit distributions of groups superior to plain vanilla whites (PVWs). For example, the slant-eyed Asians”Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. Their IQs, 105 to 108, are greatly superior to that of PVWs. Note that these Asians make up the first five countries by IQ in IQ and the Wealth. (China, mysteriously, is put at 100, but since Singapore, which is genetically similar, is given as 108, this would seem the best figure for developed Chinese societies.) There are well over a billion such Asians.
This is no statistical fluke. They are so overwhelmingly dominant in high-end universities (Caltech, 40%) that Ivy schools have quietly imposed quotas to protect PVWs”i.e., affirmative action for the non-competitive. Asians have larger brains, which perhaps explains their superior intelligence.
In short, these Asians are genetically superior. (And they know it. An acquaintance with access to the Asian community of California quoted them as describing whites as “lazy and stupid.”) By inevitable natural selection, they are beginning to replace PVWs in evolutionary niches requiring intelligence, as Cro-Magnons replaced Neanderthals.
Think I”m kidding? Here are some United States Math Olympiad winners. The proportion of Chinese names strongly suggests that the true Chinese IQ is well ahead of that of PVWs. Asians make up something like 6% of the U.S. population. Uncle Darwin is calling us to bedtime.
Non-Chinese Asians outperform whites as well. Thirteen of the last 17 winners of the Scripps National Spelling Bee have been Indians, who represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. population. Indians, says IQ and the Wealth, have a mean IQ of 81. Sure, and I”m Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst. A common response of race realists is that only very bright Indians come to the U.S. Yes, but all the very bright American kids are already here, no?
Another group that’s even more genetically superior to plain vanilla whites is the Ashkenazi Jews: mean IQ 111, 13 points ahead of PVWs. That is, the gap between the Ashkenazim and PVWs (which means, for most readers, us) is greater than the eleven-point difference between PVWs and Mexicans. Because of the workings of a normal distribution, the consequences of those 13 points are great. For example, Nicholas Wade, a genetic determinist, points out in A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History that proportionally these Jews produce about six times as many people above IQ 140 than do PVWs. The ratios grow at higher IQs.
This is huge. If you look at intellectual achievement, Ashjews are way, way ahead of PVWs”Nobel prizes, chess champions, hugely major scientists. By comparison, plain vanilla whites are just, well … how to put it? Not very bright. Careful examination shows that an imposing part of what we think of as white European achievement is actually Jewish achievement.
Into the Darwinian night. We whites had a good run. The reality of IQ shows that the world is moving on.
Now let’s look at things from a non-IQist perspective. There is no biological reason to believe that one genetic group cannot be more intelligent than another. There is a great deal of reason to wonder whether IQ is a good measure of intelligence between disparate groups, and whether IQ”the answer on the test”is genetic.
Many people are quite sure of the answers, but often have little grasp of the material. I spent years on Steve Sailer’s human-biodiversity list, a conclave of minds whose great power was matched only by their inelasticity when it came to IQ and evolution. I was astonished at their capacity to ignore unwanted evidence, abandon logic, and find pat genetic explanations for everything, probably including sunspots. Contradictions abound, like picnic ants on a half-eaten sandwich, as for example the many large differences in IQs between genetically identical groups. (Readers wanting a detailed analysis should read this, by Ron Unz.)
