The Drug War is Eugenic

Everyone wants to stop the drug war. Liberals want to further their libertine utopia. Libertarians champion the notion of freedom above all else. Conservatives worry about government profligacy. Others are concerned with incarceration of non-violent felons, group disparities in drug arrests, and just getting high, man.

Only the most hidebound social conservatives support the drug war as a means of maintaining societal calm. They argue that while we must limit government overreach, it does have the power to curtail noxious activities. And sure, drug use reduces to a personal choice, but it's one that has inexorable consequences for the rest of us via insurance rates, crime, border violence, and general cultural slothfulness.

However, one needn't be concerned with the viability of the above argument - namely the direction of the causative arrow between drugs and pathology. In fact, one only needs to consider a cost-benefit analysis between abject freedom and societal stability. In other words, should government implement laws that hinder our freedom yet have powerful ramifications for maintaining societal order?

I'd say yes, but the "powerful ramifications" don't derive from stopping drug use. Instead, just think about who gets caught doing and dealing drugs. In my experience, only two types of individuals ever get caught involved with drugs:

-really stupid people
-those are already engaged in some other type of criminal activity

Of course, there's a large overlap between the two groups. For the first, despite all the grousing about draconian drug laws, you have to be really dumb to get caught. Do the drugs in your own home with little fanfare. Simple as that. I've had tons of friends who smoke pot regularly, yet I've known only two people who ever got caught by the police and both barely graduated high school.

For the second, if you're involved with large quantities of drugs through dealing, shipping, or growing, it's highly unlikely that's all you're doing. Sure, some hippies in the Emerald Triangle peacefully grow pot in their backwards; yet they stand out amongst those that move lots of product. So we catch druggies moving large amounts of drugs and that's what we charge them with, but it's a proxy for all sorts of other much worse criminal activity associated with drugs. These involve physical violence, murder, and human trafficking.

In the end, I don't feel sorry for exceedingly stupid people involved in all sorts of bad goings-on. The drug war seems, perhaps accidentally, a eugenic initiative and that's why I support its ongoing existence.

My Trip to the Liberal Twilight Zone

I have a close friend that I'll dub Bizarro OneSTDV (BOS) as he epitomizes the middle class SWPL liberal. This past week we went to a bar together and, invariably, politics came up in the conversation. FWIW: I don't much enjoy extemporaneous arguments, primarily because I always get frustrated thinking about counter points I failed to offer.

In the midst of our conversation, he regurgitated the standard liberal tripe. Though I hesitate in calling what he said "liberal", as that term inadequately describes the delusion therein. So I give you, partly for my own purposes of commiseration, actual quotes uttered by BOS. (If necessary, context is in italics and commentary in bold.)

"But we are a nation of immigrants". [See AE's devastating critique of this neologism.]

Regarding the connection between Islam and terrorism: "What about Timothy McVeigh?" [Once again, liberals don't understand rudimentary statistics.]

After I supported extremely limited immigration: "But our diversity and tolerance is what makes us great." [Finland says otherwise.]

After I said we should profile Muslims in airports: "We're America, we're better than that". [I guess better dead than "racist"?]

Scoffing at notion that pre-1970 immigrants all happened to be European: "Oh the good kind right?"

"Anyone can come here and be anything they want to be. That's what America helps people do."

"It's so hard to immigrate here, even legally."

"At its worst, government regulation hurts the flow of money and hinders entrepreneurship. At its worst, corporate freedom kills people. I'll take the former."

In regards to why the TSA scans everyone and not just Muslims: "Everyone is being profiled because big corporations need to sell their scanning machines". [There are currently 250 scanners nationwide.]

In response to my opposition to unfettered immigration: "Oh, so we can have all those dumb white people." [I wonder who scores the worst on intelligence exams? And here's statistics on Mexican educational attainment.]

George Carlin on the "War on Childhood"

I'm not a fan of George Carlin, but here's his fantastic diatribe against what I've deemed the "War on Childhood". See my previous posts on this disheartening phenomenon: Overmedication, Occupational Therapists, Abolishing Summer Break, Bipolar disorder, and Autism. (I've bolded the best parts.)

Today's kids are way too soft. For one thing, there is too much emphasis on safety. Child proof medicine bottles, fire proof pajamas, child restrained car seats... and helmets! Baseball, bicycles, skateboard helmets. Kids have to wear helmets now for everything except jerking off! Grown-ups have taken all the fun from being a kid just to save a few thousand lives. It's pathetic. What's happening is that these soft fruity baby boomers are raising an entire generation of soft fruity kids who aren't allowed to have hazardous toys. Whatever happened to natural selection; survival of the fittest? The kid who swallowed too many marbles doesn't grow up to have kids of his own. Simple as that. Nature knows best. We're saving entirely too many lives in this country of all ages. Nature should be allowed to do its job of killing off the weak and sickly and ignorant people without interference from airbags and batting helmets. Just think of it as passive eugenics.

One more item about children, and that is, the superstitious nonsense that blames tobacco companies for kids who smoke. Listen, kids don't smoke because the camel in sunglasses tells them to. They smoke for the same reasons adults do: because it relieves anxiety and depression. And you'd be anxious and depressed too if you had to put up with these pathetic insecure striving anal yuppy parents who enroll you in college before you're old enough to know which side of the play pen smells the worst. And then they fill you full of Ritalin and drag you all over town in search of meaningless structure: little league, cub scouts, swimming, soccer, karate, piano, bagpipes, water colors, witch craft, glass blowing, and dildo practice. They even have play dates for Christ's sakes. Playing is now done by appointment! Whatever happened to: you show me your weewee and I'll show you mine?

Favorite Late Night Talk Show Host

Saturday Audience Participation

SWPLs love Conan O'Brien. Christian Lander explains:

It is not hard to understand why white people love Conan O’Brien, he embodies so many of the things they already like before he even opens his mouth: Ivy League Schools, Red Hair, the Boston Red Sox, Self Deprecating Humor, The Simpsons, and Bad Memories of High School (likely, but not confirmed). Seeing him on television five nights a week is a comforting reminder of community to the white people who still have televisions.

For some reason, I really hate self-deprecating humor. He also notes their disdain for Jay Leno:

Note: Under no circumstances should you ever mention that you prefer Jay Leno. This might cause white people to think you have the same taste in humor as the wrong kind of white people, or worse, their parents.

I don't really ever watch late night talk shows, but I have seen enough to know who I like. And by far my favorite is Jimmy Kimmel. Letterman is smarmy, Leno isn't funny, I can't understand anything Ferguson says, and O'Brien is too spastic.

So today's question: Who is your favorite late night talk show host?

Americans' Unrealistic Dream

If juxtaposed, two recent articles at Slate.com constitute an uncommon indictment of American culture. The first, entitled Not Everybody Can be Bill Gates: The world doesn't need more entrepreneurs, it needs more people for entrepreneurs to hire, criticizes the glorification of American hero-entrepreneurs. The author argues against American reverence for brazen innovators; instead, he condemns those who vacate middle management positions for the lure of high reward, high risk success.

In an economy such as the United States, where start-ups are revered, people who would make perfectly good project supervisors or salespeople establish their own companies, starving the ecosystem of middle managers. Thousands of perfectly smart and highly useful people feel inadequate because they are not heroes. Many make the wrong career choices in search of glory.

The second article, entitled Going Dutch: Women in the Netherlands work less, have lesser titles and a big gender pay gap, and they love it, discusses the "paradoxical" female Dutch population who gladly accept gender subservience. Nonplussed at these atypical women immune to feminist idiocy, the author anxiously reconsiders the "truths" of today's modern American woman.

Though the Netherlands is consistently ranked in the top five countries for women, less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time. And they like it this way. Incentives to nudge women into full-time work have consistently failed. Less than 4 percent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the workplace, and most refuse extended hours even when the opportunity for advancement arises.

In the United States, the race for equality has gone mostly in one direction. Women want to shatter the glass ceiling, reach the top spots in the hierarchy, and earn the same respect and salaries as men do.

After all, studies of female happiness in the U.S. find that even as our options have increased and we have become financially more independent than in any previous time in our history, American women as a whole are not getting any happier. If anything, the studies show that we are emotionally less well-off than we were before. Wasn't the whole point of the fight for equality in the workplace to improve our wellbeing?

So what's the connection between the two? It seems our culture does not respect the commonplace worker bee, the man who lived ascetically, quietly, and honestly. He went to a thankless job that underpinned our economy, he paid his taxes, and he provided for his wife and children. He didn't own a fancy car. He didn't show off frivolous purchases. He didn't grouse about opportunities lost or the emptiness of his personal achievements. He was content to assimilate himself into the productive masses.

Yet America seems rife with Willy Lomans, the ever disconsolate and unsatisfied family man dreaming of bigger and better things than he has now or could ever attain. We all want to be Bill Gates, the next big thing with the next big idea. We lionize the intrepid individual, Zuckerberg with Facebook, Gates with Microsoft, Jobs with Apple, Trump as the blustering man of industry, Richard Branson infamous for his audacity, and John Galt as the reborn hero of today's businessman. And we define success commensurate with this ideal. So women like the Dutch, content to raise a family or relax in leisure, defy our values and puzzle our pundits. We can't fathom their relative listlessness. We can't understand their lack of desire for self-aggrandizement and material wealth.

Of course, the Dutch case study undermines feminist doctrine. Yet I'm more interested in why Americans scoff at the common worker bee. Perhaps it's the founding narrative of America - the unknown land settled as a means for freedom in all aspects of life. Or perhaps it's the more recent "land of opportunity" construction of America that views itself as the central factor in attaining success. Both narratives appeal to American exceptionalism and the notion that our quantifiable economic and technological success supports this uniqueness. In other words, we need entrepreneurs to convince us that the American way is special, that only in America could these individuals prosper. Only in America could women find such widespread equality in the workplace. Only in America can we pursue our wildest dreams. Our culture convinces the masses that America imbues them with something special. So we encourage the masses to shirk the mundane jobs of middle management, thus becoming a nation of chiefs, some without a tribe to follow them.

How to "Argue" on Thanksgiving

A quick tip for Thanksgiving dinner and any other family socializing this weekend:

Those of us who understand anti-PC ideas often have to watch what we say. Anti-PC ideas aren't exactly accepted in polite society, especially if expressed outside a humorous or drunken context. And even though family get-togethers center around innocuous topics like school, weddings, and babies, sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of a political discussion. So here's my advice for those eager to spew forth all their iconoclastic knowledge:

Adhere to the Socratic Method.

Just let them do the talking. Ask probing but ultimately oblique questions concerning the relevant topic. Avoid any direct statements on any subject. So feel free to mock your sanctimonious vegetarian cousin by accidentally dropping ham (veggies really hate red meat) on his plate. But when he goes into his diatribe about Thanksgiving as revisionist history, animal cruelty, or the "hungry people who can't even afford a decent meal", go Socratic.

[Bonus video: Hilarious SNL sketch on "Ruining Thanksgiving."]

The Real Life Good Will Huntings and Class-Based Entitlement

There are 5,000 janitors in the United States with PhD's.

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

In going over the stats, the author positively references Charles Murray. He also perspicaciously connects the cited statistics with the "everyone goes to college" nonsense:

The relentless claims of the Obama administration and others that having more college graduates is necessary for continued economic leadership is incompatible with this view. Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level—there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees.

As the author notes and I've written about extensively, college is largely a social activity with little practical relevance. In pushing everyone to college, we have flooded the market and a college degree is now only a checkmark on the resume. I hope the public increasingly understands "the growing disconnect between market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists", yet the statistics do seem to contradict one of my pet theories.

I've long thought a more subtle consequence of the egalitarian absurdity is the stigmatization of blue collar jobs and menial labor. Sure, these jobs never carried high social cachet, but a job was a job. Now, the notion of "college as birthright" has expanded to the proceeding job market; as almost all graduates believe their "investment" should guarantee a corresponding middle class position. So we have what I've deemed the "entitlement paradigm" - college graduates simply will not settle for blue collar work. Given this elitist denunciation and the parallel idea that not having a degree is tantamount to failure, no one wants blue collar positions. And this leads to an entire stratum of the economic hierarchy vacated by potential employees.

Yet it seems even PhD awardees take jobs despite the above attitude. So how do I reconcile this apparent contradiction? Simple, some will ignore the social repercussions, but most will not. In point of fact, the statistics reflect the inundation of the middle-class market, a phenomenon caused by the attitude I present. Imagine the desperation experienced by a PhD holder when he applies for a waiter position. Only a middle class job market with no availability, flooded with status seeking conformists, could create such desperate individuals.

We've created an education bubble - too many people think they're entitled to something better than they should justifiably get. Let me end on a positive note though: imagine all those Gender Studies graduates who can only find work at the nearest Applebee's.

[For this whole post - sorry Chuck.]

TSA Screenings: What Everyone Knows

For the past few weeks, air travelers have expressed frustration with increasingly intrusive patdowns and body scans. Don't worry though - this administration is hard at work refining the system! And even though they assure us that change will come, their rhetoric reflects total pessimism:

Heeding a sudden furor, John Pistole, administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, said in a Sunday afternoon statement to POLITICO that airport screening procedures “will be adapted as conditions warrant,” in an effort to make them “as minimally invasive as possible, while still providing the security that the American people want and deserve."

We all wish we lived in a world where security procedures at airports weren't necessary, but that just isn't the case.

Obviously, we should simply profile Muslim and Middle Eastern looking individuals. (Did I really have to even say that?) But look at how political correctness so completely restrains the conversation from considering the most obvious and easiest of solutions. "We live in a world", as if America has no autonomy in making decisions. "We live in a world", as if America is but a passive bystander with other entities dictating her behavior. "We live in a world" where the implicit constructs of PC stand as the most sacrosanct of values.

Further, note how liberal obstinacy against profiling reflects the liberal rejection of "no free lunch" and the undue concessions America makes to minorities. Given their idealism, liberals simply do not understand the concept of "no free lunch"; whereby, in practical situations, trade-offs must be made. Not everything will turn out perfectly, so one must choose the alternative that minimizes the bad. Yet in the liberal paradigm, they want the free lunch and, not only that, the free lunch better go to their protected minority groups.

So instead of enacting a utilitarian approach whereby the vast majority of travelers avoid screening yet a small subset must (admittedly unfairly) endure it due to their ethnic or religious background (Muslim), liberals make everyone suffer. This illustrates the minority paradigm: the majority must make every concession possible to appease minorities. So we have Muslim foot baths at colleges, yet no Christmas music, Women's Center but no Men's Center, "Holiday Bush" but no Christmas Tree. And in this instance, we all must suffer because we can never speak the "hate facts" of racial or ethnic group differences or heartlessly hinder minorities from having every privilege possible.

Bias in Racial Bias Studies

Elite academia, for all its intellectual bravado and self-assuredness, is ironically full of many willfully short-sighted thinkers. Surely, one should not consider academic scholarship the unbiased investigations of an artless class. Instead, one should view research efforts connected to a political matter as a means to pushing forth a certain end - namely liberal ideology. Fittingly, academics rarely ruminate on possible qualifications for their work, alternative conclusions, or opposing viewpoints. Sure they may pay lip service to the other side, but rarely do we get a comprehensive look at a particular issue.

With this mind comes an essay by Princeton sociologist Susan Tufts Fiske entitled We Might be More Racist than We Think We Are. Dr. Fiske is well known for her research into social conditioning, stereotypes, and other post-modern convolutions to explain away obvious biological realities. She does however begin by enumerating the latest research into unconscious bias and its relationship to race:

A twenty-year eruption of research from the field of social neuroscience reveals exactly how automatically and unconsciously prejudice operates.

Neuroscience has shown that people can identify another person’s apparent race, gender, and age in a matter of milliseconds. In this blink of an eye, a complex network of stereotypes, emotional prejudices, and behavioral impulses activates.

She continues, noting the knee-jerk response many have for those of another race:

Results like these have obvious implications for racial prejudice, which is often elicited by similarly superficial characteristics. Indeed, a great deal of recent research has shown how our knee-jerk biases are directed toward members of other races.

When white men in their study briefly saw pictures of unfamiliar black male faces, their brain activity spiked in a region known as the amygdala, which is involved in feelings of vigilance generally, and in the fear response specifically; the amygdala lights up when we encounter people or events we judge threatening.

So at least Dr. Fiske concedes that racial bias seems pre-programmed in our brains. In other words, the extant social boundaries concordant with race would seem a natural reflection of our innate cognitive biases (connotation neutral). But Dr. Fiske surely couldn't offer such pessimistic findings, so she did further research showing participants could overcome these automatic reactions:

more recent research shows that our prejudices are not inevitable; they are actually quite malleable, shaped by an ever-changing mix of cultural beliefs and social circumstances. While we may be hardwired to harbor prejudices against those who seem different or unfamiliar to us, it’s possible to override our worst impulses and reduce these prejudices.

Her evidence:

In my own lab, for instance, we showed white study participants a series of photos, some of white faces and some of black ones. We gave them two seconds to answer one of three questions about the people in these photos: whether they were over twenty-one, whether they had a gray dot on their face, or whether they liked a certain vegetable. When participants had to decide if the people in the photos were over twenty-one, we saw a spike in their amygdala activity, similar to what had been found in the studies I mentioned earlier. But when they looked at these faces to judge what kind of vegetable the person would like, or when they were looking for a gray dot, their amygdala activity was the same as when they saw white faces.

In other words, when our study participants had to place others into a social category -- even if it was by age, not race -- they saw black faces differently than white faces. More important for everyday interactions, when participants were prompted to judge these people as individuals -- individuals with their own unique tastes and preferences -- they reacted no differently to black faces than they did to white ones.

She advocates widespread social engineering so that we may attain this glorious diverse utopia:

We must also try to help them share common goals, on which they must cooperate to succeed; ensure that they’re treated as equals and have positive, noncompetitive interactions with one another; and show that their cross-group relationship has the support of authority figures.

At first, her results seem quite convincing. She successfully dampened the automatic response and showed that whites could react to blacks independent of racial classification. Yet, Dr. Fiske presents her work as practically evocative, in that she surmises complete racial integration is a possibility based on her work. Of course, with such a politically encouraged idea, one can't ask that Dr. Fiske consider any qualifications to her work. Luckily for Harvard and Princeton professors, we have amateur Internet bloggers to do so for them.

Was the Effect Sustained?: Dr. Fiske uses data from fMRI scans for evidence. I assume each trial, defined as a participant looking at an individual picture, lasted only a few seconds. One could justifiably characterize this as a temporary change. But for practical purposes, the change would have to be almost permanent, impliable to external stimuli and constant without a conscious task to take up cognitive energy. Basically, Dr. Fiske only shows the malleability of the brain, not that these changes can be reproduced in a real-world setting. The hereditarian perspective on human nature does not champion a strict environment-genes dichotomy, so she pursues a strawman.

To put it it into context, consider any pain response. Surely, everyone agrees that the pain response is an inevitable biological reality. Yet, given the right environmental circumstances, the pain response can be turned off entirely, even by non-experts. Additionally, everyone agrees that men are attracted to women and that in everyday life, men do not find gay sex at all appealing. However, given a lack of opportunity for heterosexual sex (jail), men can still become aroused by other men. (Ed. note: I'm having trouble thinking of more examples along these lines, so I'll add any given by commenters.) This shows the malleability of our reactions, a reality further substantiated by the efficacy of hypnosis. The brain is surely a malleable entity, yet Dr. Fiske has only shown this applies temporarily; for her larger hypothesis to hold, she has to prove it does so permanently. And given the pain thought experiment and considering charts like this, good luck.

We don't exist outside social context: Dr. Fiske says that racial bias only manifests when we think of individuals in regards to some external social context, such as race. Yet when proposing a wholesale social reeducation program, she takes it for granted that social context would just disappear. While her optimism is "laudable", I find it quite unrealistic. It goes without saying that social context is inexorably part of our personal and social lives. It underpins how we move, how we speak, what we think, and what we like.

Surely, Dr. Fiske would attribute the correspondence between race and culture to historical precedence. Yet, the organic separation of racial groups in any social context, i.e. school cafeterias, contradicts this hypothesis. Further, one notes the genesis of exceedingly different cultural memes amongst the racial groups. For example, while gangsta rap caught on amongst white teens, it didn't arise independently in white suburbs. And the cultural divergence of Europe, Asia, and Africa, places that one could view as huge sociological experiments, again undermines Dr. Fiske's idealism.

Basically, it seems as though culture reflects racial aptitudes and predilections instead of it being imposed by a nefarious and always ambiguously defined external entity. Blacks gravitate towards people and activities that call to them, the dozens, free style battling, street ball, bad grammar - and these things are very often liked by other blacks. As Steve Sailer put it regarding blacks' use of Twitter, "Black people [just] like being black."

And finally, real-world evidence further undermines Dr. Fiske's suppositions. Will any of this stop more academics from putting forth similar work?

SWPLism Defined

SWPLism is the educated, middle class, urbanite version of goth. It's a relatively insular cohort of individuals who repudiate mainstream conformity only to conform themselves to an alternative standard. If you look at the SWPL list, you'll note many of the markers are a social exclamation of "getting it". In fact, I'd describe SWPLism, with their admiration for Mos Def, ironic tattoos, self-aware hip-hop references, microbreweries, Whole Foods, Arrested Development, and indie music, with the following phrase:

"Oh yea, I know, me too."

SWPLs engage in these behaviors because they want to project to other SWPLs. They want other SWPLs to know they're part of the club, they're in on the irony (a SWPL favorite), the joke, or the stuff everyone else just doesn't get! In this vein, I give an amazingly illustrative depiction of the modern SWPL.

The example isn't actually the main focus of the following video, though that could fit the bill as well. Instead focus on the girl in the white shirt at the lower left corner of the video. And while doing so, just imagine her saying: "Oh yea, I totally get the joke, haha. This is hilarious! Haha! You guys hearing this?! Oh man, I love this kind of ironic, sarcastic humor! Right guys? Haha, man this is funny, isn't it?" Also, note that in addition to her excessive hand waving and swaying, she repeatedly motions to her friends and looks at the camera.

[Anyone else disturbed that this is based on an attempted rape?]

Age and Politics

Saturday Audience Participation

The media often frames conservative movements as comprised of ossified fuddy-duddies looking to relive an idealized version of their childhoods. These "old foggies" don't understand the sagacity of leftist change and reject beneficial progressivism as a result of this blindness. They hold onto a past better forgotten. They want to reverse positive progress just because it hasn't been good to them. They stubbornly oppose change as a means to maintain their dwindling power.

Of course, this analysis represents a potent leftist shaming tactic whereby liberals associate specific political groups with undesirable traits or archetypes, such as the old, senile curmudgeon. While this smear tactic surely works, there does seem to be a connection between age and political persuasion. As depicted on the timeless comedy All in the Family, each generation brings forth an unjustifiably confident group of idealistic rabble-rousers. They think they've got all the answers and, inevitably, these answers seek to undermine the cultural and political institutions of yesteryear. For example, Obama got about 70% of the 18-29 vote in the 2008 Presidential election and surveys often reflect the socially liberal attitudes of youth.

The idealism vs. pragmatism dichotomy is summarized in this popular Winston Churchill quote:

If you're not a liberal when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative when you're 40, you have no head.

So today's question: How old are you? (Feel free to comment under 'Anonymous' if you generally use another name.) How have your political positions changed over time? Does your age affect your politics? Is the future ultimately up to the young or the old? Should we erect checks against youthful idealism, i.e. raising the voting age to 25? Are old people just plain out of it or should we listen to their "school of hard knocks" wisdom?

Finally, feel free to take a guess at my age.

External Value and Self-Worth

Here and at other venues online, I've mocked the absurd Fat Acceptance Movement:

The fat acceptance movement has got to be one of the funniest identity politics schemes I’ve ever seen. And all these fat [women] complaining about “discrimination”. Well of course your company sticks you on the phone or in the back where no one can see you. Having some fat slob at the front counter is not only offputting from an aesthetic perspective, but it reflects poorly on the company’s image.

Of course, I agree with the above sentiment, but perhaps I've too hastily rejected their aims. Yes, sensible people do justifiably avoid their insufferable grousing, unappealing corpulence, and antagonistic attitude. But underneath all the fat (pun intended) is hidden an incisive condemnation of a common human flaw.

The fat acceptance movement contends their "struggle" derives from society's unjustified and ultimately harmful insistence on thinness. In doing so, they shirk personal responsibility and castigate a faceless entity for the problems faced by fatties; all of these play well with an emotionally vulnerable cohort looking to pawn off blame. Yet, perhaps by accident, the fat acceptance movement stumbles upon the external validation of self-worth. Of course, besides platitudes about "loving yourself", this nugget of information gets lost in the midst of eternal anger directed at the fit.

While fatties suffer from it more, we all seek to substantiate ourselves by comparison to some external metric. High school overachievers yearn for the Ivy League, nerds find solace in their World of Warcraft ranking (?), rich businessmen buy cars, and slutty women search for male companionship. Without thinking, we define ourselves and others by college, social class, and economic level. Sure, on the macro-level such perfunctory observations often ring true and group assumptions usually bear out in making societal level decisions. But what of the individual who only sees himself as the sum of quantifiable measures?

I'm not advocating laziness or lack of ambition or even the blind rejection of external validation. In fact, very often this is the means to motivate hard work and to ultimately realize self-satisfying objectives. In some instances, we need an external barometer to measure our progress, to give us a goal, to tell us when we've accomplished something worthwhile. And we need these external sources of value to discourage certain behavior or shame people from engaging in particular actions.

But when the vapid becomes our primary means of self-satisfaction or even when tangible accomplishment serves the same purpose, we've erected a faulty basis for self-worth. I know it sounds cheesy, but really, no external measure of value can make up for self-acceptance. Accomplishments are fleeting and material goods are used up. Without a viable construct of self-worth unswayed by the ephemeral, nothing will ever be good enough. Take Harvard, full of individuals one would presume had ample confirmation of their own value. It has the highest suicide rate in the country.

So where does self-value come from if not bestowed upon us by external actors? How can we find satisfaction in who we are if we can't point to our unique aptitudes, our wealth, or our status? Well, the religious can find solace in trusting "the mind of God", the omniscient conscious who knows better than they do. For those unsatisfied by such an answer, it's surely a difficult task. And I'm not sure I have the answer or I probably wouldn't write this post. Maybe we can appeal to The Beatles' timeless pronouncement to "let it be" and live life without context. But even then, I don't know; staving off nihilism can be quite an ordeal.

The Connection between Social Values and Economics

In a series of posts, I've argued that a successful political ideology must understand the interplay between social values and economics. Smug free market libertarians ignore this connection and, in doing so, have little insight in examining where money goes and why it goes there. Further, they are impotent in stopping depressive change, as a result of both their insufficiently personal elucidation of the facts and their complete rejection of the actual problem.

Luckily, some prominent politicians understand this false dichotomy; and push social values with minimal appeal to "Moral Majority"-era evangelism. Here's Jim DeMint, who somehow overcame the peerless Alvin Greene in the South Carolina Senate race, offering a maxim to this end:

You can't be a fiscal conservative and not be a social conservative. A large part of the expansion of government is to make up for a dysfunctional society because our culture is falling apart, the family is falling apart.

DeMint does get the overall point correct, but his subsequent explanation fails in addressing a particular issue. Sure, our current economic hardship has been spurred by a parallel cultural malaise and DeMint seems to argue that only good culture can combat the dysfunction that leads to economic decay. I imagine he would use single motherhood as an example, citing our moral acquiescence on the issue leading to unemployed single mothers, broken families, and little economic advancement from children reared in these homes. I agree.

But I wonder if Mr. DeMint also understands an additional problem caused by progressive morality. Specifically, once society accepts a certain moral value, it then must see that this moral value is upheld. Failure to uphold this moral value is viewed as a gross societal transgression and initiatives are undertaken until we rectify such an offense. In our post-Great Society era, the relevant social values often conflict with natural group proclivities and such naivety compounds the situation. An example should suffice in expanding upon this hypothesis.

In the 60s, society decided that housework and raising children unfairly stifled women. Instead, society accepted the idea that women should comprise half of the workforce, freeing them from their subordinate status. Yet making this objective a reality required a complete overhaul of society. Since women, as a group, lacked competency in the burgeoning technology sector and gravitated towards jobs with almost no value creation, i.e. communications and art, we had to spend money. Colleges spent tons of money, recouped through tuition increases, to create Women's Studies programs and to expand Art History, French language, and Communications departments. Then, the government had to fund female students in these areas, often never getting back their no-interest loans due to low salaries in the given fields. Further, administrative offices got huge to ensure all these girl-power career women could find jobs. Inefficiency dominated, especially when government pays three women to do the work of one. Additionally, female frivolity inundated the market; now everyone needed an interior designer, a family therapist, and all the clothes his wife now had access to. And I haven't even mentioned divorce settlement thievery, useless graduate degrees, single mother welfare, and gender diversity hires.

If not for this basic first cause, then we'd have saved all that money. So clearly, all of this profligate spending came about due to a shift in one particular social value. Now think about all the other progressive idiocy pervading polite society and the money we'll spend to make such lunacy into reality.

Mainstream Conservatives on Immigration

Here in the anti-PC Right, commentators offer hesitant praise of mainstream conservatives. Unlike modern liberals, these mainstream figures don't actively hate the West; yet their tacit adherence to PC doctrine often undermines what good they could accomplish. To maintain a minimal amount of credibility, mainstream conservatives advance ideas only trivially different than those of their liberal counterparts. One contentious issue illustrating this parallel is illegal and legal immigration.

In a post captioned Pro-immigration, anti-lawbreaking, HotAir.com blogger Ed Morrisey and Tea Party pundit Bill Whittle discuss "what we believe" in regards to national trespassers. The Right's position is that Americans should only oppose illegal immigration. Mainstream Republicans stress this dichotomy forcefully - the notion that illegal immigration and legal immigration reside in different spheres of discourse, with the latter an axiomatic privilege bestowed upon the world's populace and the former a grave sin against America's lawfulness.

Concordant with this perspective, both Whittle and Morissey concentrate on the law in justifying their arguments. Whittle explains and Morissey parrots him:

But the all the things that drives people to risk their lives to come to America are...all irreducibly founded on respect for the law.

What unifies this nation is the rule of law. Our nation is conceptually founded on the principle that a free people can set its own laws and those who wish to live free agree to abide by them. Laws that don’t work can be repealed or replaced through the open processes of representative government, and in some cases direct democracy

I've dealt with this neocon conception of America before and its implicit globalism, so I won't rehash the arguments. I'll merely add an additional observation concerning this idea. By focusing solely on legal principles as the founding edifice, these "conservatives" parse out "the people" from "the nation". Morissey alludes to this blank slatism explicitly, as does Whittle, in discussing foreign turmoil:

The US has no real ethnicity, no unique language to unify us.

It's the lawlessness and corruption of Mexico that causes people to flee, it's the extralegal arrests and property confiscation in Cuba, the murdering death squads throughout South America, the grinding poverty of Africa...all of which are the result of lawlessness.

This sterile view of a nation, defined by esoterica available only to eggheads with infinite patience, obscures and ultimately enervates nationhood. The legal conception ignores the will of the people in defining a nation. It rejects the traditional institutions that define a nation. It dismisses the mythic narratives and individuals that cultivate national cohesion and pride. If we are but a set of laws, privy to the capricious biases of progressive activists, then we are nothing.

Due to their fear of leftist smear tactics, mainstream conservatives formulate arguments that dehumanize actual Americans. The nation becomes merely ideas written in abstruse tomes. They do this because, like leftists, they wish to not define the "other", as such an exercise would inevitably lead to even more leftist attacks.

But they don't stop there, mainstream conservatives must then defer even more to the prevailing liberal zeitgeist. Whittle expresses mawkish reverence for legal immigrants and Morissey agrees:

Thus, as Bill states, illegal immigration and tolerance for it insults those who legally migrate to the US, a process almost everyone supports.

[Illegal immigration] makes chumps out of honest, hard-working, and motivated legal immigrants who spent their entire fortunes and years of their lives showing the respect and desire for their new home, filling out the forms, waiting in line. And that goes for everyone who's willing to play by the rules and pass a test that most Americans could never pass. [See, they're even better than we are!]

Blank slatism abounds throughout both the video and the accompanying essay. Both assert that America's singular system of government will civilize and then meld foreign entities into a distinctly American fabric. Whittle ends his video with quixotic musings on a "new people cut from clean cloth", blithely ignoring all evidence to the contrary and contradicting his conception of America not as a people but as a system of laws.

This video illustrates the weakness of mainstream conservatism and why only a paradigm honest on race and society will motivate actual reactionary success.

How Western Academics Discuss African Superstition in the Context of Liberal Ideology

The elites use a number of social cues to distinguish themselves from, as Katie Couric recently deemed them, the "unwashed masses". For the every day elites, such markers serve a practical purpose and demarcate the acceptable boundaries of their social interaction. One could view this practice as benign, constituting merely the difference between wearing Brooks Brothers (upper) and Nike (middle). Yet to the meddling elite, these markers are a way of stigmatizing or shaming entire cohorts of people.

And who does the meddling elite harbor passionate antipathy towards - whites, especially the working class. I won't recount the numerous caricatures used to this end; instead, as relevant to the article I will cite, religion is generally the most illustrative. While elites espouse secularism or universalism and practice Westernized Eastern mysticism or enervated Christianity through the Episcopalian Church, the lower classes gravitate towards more concrete religious doctrines as in the Southern Baptist and Evangelical traditions. We then get elites haughtily laughing at the religious practice of the lower classes, including speaking in tongues, belief in the devil, and disbelief in evolution. The intention is obvious: look at those dumb hicks with their stupid beliefs - how could anyone believe that crap?

Yet a problem arises when liberal elites realize their favored groups, especially blacks, practice and believe in even more odd stuff. So the elites have a conundrum - mocking the uncouth lower class whites demands they also admit that blacks might be just as dumb and unrefined. This Slate.com, entitled The Valley of Taboos, wonderfully illustrates the situation and the risible avoidance of it:

There is a great thudding taboo in any discussion of Africa. Western journalists and aid workers see it everywhere, yet it is nowhere in our coverage back home. We don't want to talk about it. We don't know how to. We smother it in silence, even though it is one of the most vivid and vibrant and violent parts of African life. We are afraid—of being misunderstood, or of sounding like our own ugliest ancestors. The suppressed topic? The African belief in spirits and spells and ancestors and black magic.

But one asks why is the truth so taboo? If Africans believe in this crazy stuff, then why smother it? Perhaps because these academics begrudgingly understand the implications - both for African intelligence and their liberal framing of American classes.

These are not trivial side-beliefs, like vague fears of black cats crossing your path. They are at the core of many Africans' understanding of themselves and the world.

And unlike almost all lower class white Americans (they still go to the doctor after all), the Africans REALLY believe this stuff:

I have stood in a blood-splattered house in Tanzania where an old woman had just been beaten to death for being a "witch" who cast spells on her neighbors. I have stood in battlefields in the Congo where the troops insist with absolute certainty they cannot be killed because they have carried out a magical spell that guarantees, if they are shot, they will turn briefly into a tree, then charge on unharmed. I have been cursed in Ethiopia by a witch-doctor with "impotence, obesity, and then leprosy" for asking insistently why he charged so much to "cure" his patients.

Unsurprisingly, the author takes a transparently sympathetic view towards the indigenous beliefs. According to the author, Africans really just need these quaint beliefs as a means of coping:

These beliefs are often the best story people can tell to make the world seem bearable again. It's a way of regaining a sense of control amid chaos.

So the same beliefs that make life bearable can make it unbearable again.

And don't worry, Africans are slowly discarding these antiquated belief systems.

I wish I could take him to see the work of the Tanzanian campaign group HelpAge, who are leading the indigenous African fight against these beliefs.

The author also can't help but erect a parallel to America's religious climate, a device we should view not as an academic exercise, but one of implicit denunciation via association:

Just this small dose of rationality—offered by one African to another—had revolutionary effects. Of course the superstitions didn't vanish. The most scientifically advanced society in the world, the United States, still has candidates for high office who have to deny being witches.

So he optimistically casts Africans as inexorably free of superstition and America as equally, yet pessimistically, backwards. Further, the author somehow blames whitey (don't they always find a way!):

Of course, there are more ambiguous—or outright ugly—attempts to change these beliefs, mimicking the old imperialism.

The imperial rape and pillage of Africa was "justified" by claiming Africans were "primitive" and "backward" people sunk in a morass of voodoo, who had to be "civilized" in blood and Christianity...any legitimate and necessary criticism of the problems with Africa's indigenous beliefs will never be welcome from Europeans or their descendants.

Finally, in an almost unbelievable amalgamation of noble savagery, blank slatism, Gaiaism, and anti-white ideology, the author offers this insight:

Almost all homegrown African belief systems are, or were, based on a reverence for local ecosystems—a belief that the forests and rivers are sacred—and this helped persuade people to preserve them, alive and intact. But when the colonialists arrived, they dismissed such notions as mumbo-jumbo and forcibly imposed religions that originated in the desert and had nothing to say about the African environment. The old taboos were stamped out, and before long the forests began to be systematically destroyed. It's an eco-catastrophe from which Africa has never recovered, and which many Africans have picked up and are continuing to perpetrate today.

So the author is confronted with an intellectual contradiction potentially undermining the elites' framing of American society. Instead of considering African superstition in the context of James Watson's infamous comments, the author concocts a narrative that whitewashes the ubiquity of belief, recasts their superstition as concordant with modern environmentalism, portrays their beliefs as justified, valuable tradition, and quaint, draws a mendacious parallel to American religion, and finally blames it all on white imperialists.

OneSTDV on Blogging

In the solitude of New England's woodlands, Henry David Thoreau mused on the despondence of man:

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

This blog has been my humble way of avoiding such a fate. Prior to the start of OneSTDV, I had all sorts of ideas floating around in my head without an outlet to release them. I needed this blog to maintain my sanity in a world dominated by obfuscation and outright falsities. I needed to create a forum where I could cogitate on such absurdities, where I could meet up with others who shared my despair, who didn't fall for the pretty lies of polite society. I needed confirmation that I wasn't crazy. I needed to know that others saw the Emperor's naked body amidst all the smoke and mirrors. So I've used this blog cathartically, to relieve frustration concerning the political, social, and cultural landscape.

And to some critics, I've created an echo chamber. They contend this blog presents one point of view at the expense of alternative ones. Critics (sounds more scholarly than "haters") lament the general consensus of the commentariat. They don't like the presumed intellectual insularity, the obvious bent of the opinions expressed.

I'd argue that such criticism doesn't apply, with commenters engaging in passionate disagreement and the blog's main page espousing viewpoints at odds with conservative or niche doctrine, as in support for teachers' unions and secularism and censure of capitalism and men's rights advocates. In a previous post, I listed my sympathies for a variety of political schools.

But even if I have erected a closed-in atmosphere, I've done so because I have an actual ideology. Perhaps it's amorphous and eclectic, but I don't waver on the bounds of opinion, like the "too cool for school" SWPLs at Jon Stewart's Rally or the "above it all" moderates at FrumForum. These individuals' steadfast refusal to actually take a position represents the absolute worst of political discourse. They avoid mockery, but in in doing so, they stand for nothing, empty persons amenable to whatever cultural fad arises.

Further, and perhaps more importantly, in a world dominated by anti-reality, I have a refuge and I sincerely hope that others have one here as well. I've been remiss in expressing my appreciation for the commenters. But I do greatly enjoy reading everyone's responses, something I check incessantly every single day. I truly admire many of the commenters here, a non trivial accolade given the parsimony with which I give praise. It is the incisive thoughts of commenters that allows me escape from the odd intellectual environment of polite society. This landscape restraining the most minor of thoughtcrimes can make those with anti-PC ideas somewhat crazy. And this avoidance of insanity originally motivated me to start the blog.

So that was my brief retrospective on blogging. Thank you to all those who visit here and those that have supported my work through linking, word of mouth, and adding me to their blogroll (including big time bloggers Sailer, Vox Day, Roissy, HalfSigma, Gates of Vienna, and Moonbattery!). Also, if you haven't noticed, I've kept my own blogroll rather exclusive, a reflection of my admiration for those chosen few listed.

(H/T: Ferdinand Bardamu for inspiration.)

The Practical Importance of Religious vs Liberal Creationism

Saturday Audience Participation

A few years ago, the culture war centered on the specious Intelligent Design, a more erudite sounding version of biblical creationism. Though legally concerned with science education, the contentious debate, much as it did with 1925's Scopes trial, derived from a concern about the spiritual implications of evolutionary theory. In essence, both sides correctly view evolution as a way of describing the basic nature of man - either as an incorporeal being of divine enterprise or a wholly physical collection of particles forged by years of blind selection.

Yet such a debate deals only with esoterica and ignores the practical importance or non-importance of what we teach children. Since this site champions the notion of pragmatism above all else, I find the latter far more interesting. Via SecularRight comes an article from the steadfast moderates (read: liberals) at FrumForum in which Nils August Andresen criticizes the Republican party's scientific ignorance:

But over the past 30 years, national Republicans have formed an intensifying alliance with religious conservatives more skeptical of science and knowledge. I don’t know whether discarding evolution goes against common sense; but I’m pretty sure it goes against most Ivy League-educated senses.

Let me summarize: smart people don't like Republicans because Republicans reject evolution and evolution is smart people science. But again, what's the practical importance of arguing over intellectual topics, especially macroevolution which has little relevance for modern science? As I've stated before, liberals and preening "conservative" intellectuals use belief in evolution as a means to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses. Yet, this is politics and we must ask if any of this posturing actually matters for improving real life.

In the summer of 2009, I posted probably my most well-liked post enumerating the similarities between liberal creationists and religious creationists. I intended to argue that each side relies on what makes them feel good, yet I also wanted to show that despite their correct science, liberal creationists enacted harmful policy due to their political motivations.

So today's question: Does it really matter what we teach children about evolution? Is religious creationism, even the Young-Earth variety, more practically benign than liberal creationism? Should conservatives who accept both evolution and HBD yield on the creationist issue if religious creationists accept cognitive realism? Do conservatives who accept evolution have an ally in either religious or liberal creationists? Are there really any harmful practical consequences of religious (macroevolution) creationism? Do you personally know any very bright religious creationists (I know one with a physics degree from Stanford)?

Contrasts of Beauty

Update: I changed the Miranda Kerr picture because the site asks me to remove it.

These are two of the highest paid models in the world. One is perfection personified, while the other's lofty status continues to confuse me.

"I'm in love with an asshole and I can't leave him."

Salon.com's advice column has been quite a boon for posting material. This week comes a woman hopelessly in love with a narcissist (read: asshole) and perplexed as to her undying emotion:

I think I am in love with a narcissist. If so, is there anything to be done about it?

The opening is very telling and appeals to the notion that women in supposedly unfulfilling relationships are somehow trapped with no recourse for leaving. She describes her boyfriend's behavior, and offers a laundry list of alpha traits:

1. It is always my fault. "It" can be anything, but whatever "It" is, it was caused by something I did, said, did not say, did not say well, etc. I do not believe that is true. Just now he said that this past week, which has been shitty, was my fault.

2. He is always right. I can be logical and argue my own point. But until I give in, there is no peace between us.

3. He thinks he is the smartest guy in the room.

4. He cannot be kind, compassionate or emotionally dependable when he is angry, upset or not feeling good. He says things like, "Are you even capable of listening?"

This woman clearly understands the rationale behind leaving a man who offers little emotional support. After all, popular sentiment celebrates the nice guy beta, obsequious in demeanor, compassionate in action, and altogether unassuming in totality. Yet these men do not spark the female hindbrain, a paradox countered by rationalizations like the one quoted below:

Is this narcissism? Or do I expect too much? I truly do love him, so very much. He usually is the smartest guy in the room. And he's gentle and loving more than not.

Classic push-pull behavior from this natural alpha. The Salon.com columnist offers rather predictably naive advice:

Leave the narcissist. You don't have to be ready. You might never be ready. Do it anyway. I can't tell you how to handle the way you will feel after you do it. But I can say I feel confident you will handle it OK. It will be better than staying.

He supports this advice by couching this situation as one of masochism instead of subconscious pleasure:

I think part of you wants to stay with the narcissist and be punished for not being as good as you are supposed to be. Part of you thinks the narcissist is right, that you really aren't good enough. Part of you that thinks you've failed somebody and must pay.

But given the prevalence of abused woman staying with abusive men, even until their deaths, one wonders if the masochistic argument is viable. Obviously, I'd say no because, in essence, women seek dominating men and abuse, whether physical or emotional, illustrates this characteristic. Note how the man in question offers almost none of the traits supposedly imperative for a good relationship. He belittles her, he dismisses her emotions, and he demands she act in servile manner. Yet, she stays and even with society encouraging her to leave, our intrepid crusader for love searches for a satisfying rationale.

The advice columnist, unsurprisingly, espouses all the expected explanations for this seemingly odd behavior. As in any discussion concerning PC topics, he presents this convoluted reasoning because the real explanation deals with some unsettling truths about female attraction. His premise that all "abused" woman lack autonomy, that their situations derive from self-abasement, and that abusive men hold a mystical power over them, ostensibly obscures reality. And not only doesn't it make any sense, but it could actually be construed as sexist (yes, I just used that word).

I mean, imagine the woman depicted by the advice columnist and the battered woman archetype to whom he appeals. She's a helpless, willfully subordinated emotional wreck who lacks self-esteem and believes she deserves her lover's scorn. This woman has no strength in order to leave and ignores logic in making her decisions. She invites her lover's abuse and does nothing to stop it. Who knew the patriarchy was such a force as to cripple women so forcefully?

In actuality though, this all makes perfect sense. The social constructionists engage in a futile effort to subvert biology, a war they'll keep fighting despite loads of evidence and case studies indicating the true winner.

"White People Osmosis": The Next Step in Reducing Racial Disparities

There's a popular meme amongst liberal race commentators that I'll deem "white people osmosis":

The seemingly intractable racial achievement gaps would disappear if blacks could be surrounded by white people in every aspect of life.

We see this in movies like Freedom Writers that promote the "nice white lady" savior lifting up impoverished minority youth. Teach For America then tries to make such idealism a reality by sending bright-eyed Harvard grads to inner city schools. Post-natal incubation centers like Geoffrey Canada's much lauded Harlem Children's Zone makes this objective explicit in their "from cradle to college" slogan. Similar ideas dominate discourse on neighborhood racial composition, income disparities, and occupational ascension.

Errol Louis, a New York Daily columnist substantiating OneSTDV's law of black intellectualism, argues that institutionally enforced segregation causes all the problems. He begins by discussing discriminatory housing brokers and quotes this hilarious observation:

Another case involved a Corcoran agent who allegedly marked up a map of Brooklyn for a white possible homebuyer, indicating in red pen the places the tester should consider: the mostly-white neighborhoods of Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights and Windsor Terrace.

That's not only illegal, it's unnecessary. "The real estate agents should stop presuming that whites don't want to live near blacks and vice versa," is what Shanna Smith, the president of the NFHA, told me. "You would have natural integration rather than block-by-block gentrification."

See if only those ignorant real estate agents would stop with their unreasonable assumptions! This person actually believes that absent some external influence, racial integration would flourish. Has she ever been to a public school cafeteria? But the problem isn't merely the apparent sin of racial segregation, though Mr. Louis never actually explains why we MUST integrate. The author blames all sorts of social pathologies on segregation:

Segregation haunts questions of public safety, education, housing and fairness in the workplace.

Perhaps I'd interpret this differently than Mr. Louis intended.

And the poison spreads from there. Racially segregated zones make it "natural" for cops and prosecutors to make decisions about law enforcement (including stop-and-frisk procedures and low-level drug busts of sellers rather than buyers) that inevitably track with race.

I wonder if actual crimes "inevitably tracks with race" too? He ends with a nebulous plea common amongst liberals - never actually define the problem and the incessant grousing will thus never end:

Welcome to the fight, kids, and good luck making New York what it will someday become: a city for everyone.

Through all of Mr. Louis' indignant rhetoric, I just barely can parse out an actual point. He basically condemns Bloomberg's New York for permitting racial segregation then assumes this causes all the evident disparities.

As stated above, he promotes the idea of "white people osmosis". Many liberal creationists believe that merely living amongst whites will change everything. They blame black dysfunction on the assumed disparity in public funding and focus, a laughable assertion if one actually considers the numbers. For example, Mark Zuckerberg just recently gave 100 million dollars to the persistently failing Newark public school districts. Of course, black kids just need all the presumed privileges bestowed upon middle class whites - new textbooks, computers, and the like. Funny though that Newark public school district spends about $22K on each student, compared with New Jersey's average of about $13,500.

So if not money and government focus, then what's the casual link between segregation and social pathology? Willfully obtuse individuals like Mr. Louis refuse to consider what a "bad neighborhood" almost always entails and why upwardly mobile blacks seek to escape them. Throughout Mr. Louis' piece, he consistently implies that white neighborhoods offer higher living quality than black neighborhoods, a rather controversial statement if he ever expressed it in more direct terms. A liberal creationist of course could never even admit to this obvious truth; yet, no other conclusion seems reasonable given Mr. Louis' insistence that these exclusive white enclaves admit scores of black residents.

And surely we can't expect Mr. Louis to ponder the most contentious of suppositions: that blacks neighborhoods are bad primarily because of who lives there. To Mr. Louis the disparities between white and black neighborhoods, euphemistically referred to as "bad neighborhoods" in polite society, arise from either serendipity or the efforts of racist politicians. One could then ask why black neighborhoods don't create their own insulated utopia if excluded from the trappings of white privilege.

In the end, despite all the posturing about hating whitey, blacks have an understanding of the racial sugar daddy relationship. Articles like this show that perhaps even government handouts won't do; they want everything whites have, inherent predilections be damned.

The War on Childhood: Bipolar Disorder

Academia can't understand why so many more kids are diagnosed with social pathologies like bipolar disorder. In fact, they can't even agree on the proper descriptive terms, as bipolar, manic depressive, "explosive child", "strong-willed child", "difficult child", "quirky kids", "opposition-defiant disorder", "intermittent explosive disorder", and "conduct disorder" are all in use. Despite the risible reliance on euphemism in a supposedly scientific field, the "problem" persists and continues to perplex intellectuals.

Of course, even in the absence of a viable definition, diagnoses have increased 40 fold just in the time period from 1994 to 2002. But don't worry, they'll hand out hardcore prescription pills like candy based on stringent criteria like:

The Juvenile Bipolar Research Foundation provides a 65-item online test with questions like, is your child "very intuitive and/or very creative"? Is he "intolerant of delays"? According to the survey, these characteristics could suggest bipolar disorder. (Or it could be "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria," yet another label that might soon be added to the list, suggesting a sort of bipolar lite.)

The "experts" weigh in and, shockingly, blame those nefarious insurance companies and the lack of access to mental health professionals (seriously!):

And yet the mental health system is so fragmented, variable in quality, and frankly unfair to those without money that "there are virtually no guidelines, no gatekeepers—other than the insurance companies, who essentially create protocols for care according to what they will pay for."

Insurers stepped in as gatekeepers because access to psychiatrists had to be limited. Why? For every 11,000 American children—of whom at least 1,000 to 2,000develop a mental health disorder—we have only a single pediatric psychiatrist. There simply aren't enough doctors around to provide the key treatment for explosive behavior: face-to-face time for cognitive and behavioral therapy.

So the experts think we need more involvement from strangers telling us how to raise our children. And all of them encourage increased psychiatric help despite the numbers of bipolar cases increasing so rapidly. None of them even consider that perhaps the kids need less impersonal dissection, not more. But we can't expect anything else from the scientific establishment, so tainted by PC and leftism that the public should view their findings incredulously.

In reality, there's a collusive effort amongst helicopter parents, complicit doctors, insurance companies, educational romantics, anti-male culture, acritical culture, single mothers and emasculated fathers. I'll very briefly touch on each of these in bullet form:

Single Mothers and Emasculated Fathers: Children, especially boys, simply do not listen to maternal parental figures. With the increasing rate of single motherhood and the cultural undermining of father figures through feminism and pop culture that frames them as ignorant dolts, children simply have no one to put them in their place.

Anti-male/boy culture: Many cases of ADD and ADHD are simply rambunctious boys. In the early years of these diseases, only kids with actual problems were targeted; now, any slightly hyper boy gets deemed a headcase.

Acritical culture: "Anything goes" culture of liberalism discourages parents from dictating behavior and delineating boundaries. So if your 5 year-old son wants to dress up as the Little Mermaid, better let him.

Helicopter parents and Educational Romantics: Suburban mothers, in the era of the "Genuis in Us All", can't accept mediocrity in their children. Thus, they react histrionically to their child experiencing any mild delay or illustrating average proclivities. They naively believe that expert involvement will cure their children of these concocted maladies. So they seek advice from doctors willing to prescribe anything in order to dampen the mother's excitement and pocket some money from big pharma.

And the War on Childhood continues...

Why America is Fat

With Michelle Obama's laudable Let's Move campaign and America's every growing waist line, the obesity epidemic persists as front page news. But will America ever overcome this seemingly indomitable foe or will we continue our decline into unparalleled corpulence? Unfortunately, I'll go with the latter and it's a result of three memes: low-fat and steady exercise idiocy, celebration of weight loss, and technology abetting the fast results mindset.

Subway's now decade long ad campaign featuring former fattie Jared Fogle epitomizes the first two memes. For the past few months, Subway has run a series of ads hyping Jared's preparation for the New York City Marathon. Commercials have touted his Subway diet as a healthy option and his marathon preparation as indicative of his lifestyle change. Funny that Subway has so wonderfully framed themselves as the "healthy" fast food chain, a specious portrayal that illustrates the potency of marketing. In the aforementioned ad campaign, the commercials focus on Jared's favorite low-fat sandwiches, implicitly adhering to the low-fat paradigm set forth by outright false scholarship. Of course, the main ingredients of Subway subs are anything but good for you: processed lunch meat, huge refined bread, other condiments/sauces containing lots of unknown chemicals and sugars, and a cookie, refined carb potato chips, and a soda on the side. The campaign also promotes the similarly false claims of steady exercise advocates and their irrational affinity for marathons.

Further, the celebration of Jared as an icon for good health fits into the "most improved" narrative popular in elementary schools. Instead of lionizing the successful and eminently proficient, we celebrate pseudo-successes like Jared, a role model only suitable for attaining mediocrity. In America, we have the burgeoning fat acceptance movement nudging into the Ivory Tower, while Abercrombie can't hire attractive people without getting sued. Shows like The Biggest Loser and Celebrity Fit Club engage in similar glorification, yet individuals who exercise rigorously without ballooning first get belittled as shallow meatheads and bimbos. [Counter: Our glorification of professional athletes does somewhat stand in opposition.] This bad scholarship and perverse set of values have helped to underpin the obesity movement.

Additionally, one notes the preponderance of exercise scams sating the get results fast mindset of many Americans. Recently, I've seen ads for the Shake Weight that promises better results than using standard dumbells. I needn't actually criticize the workout as the commercial does so by itself.

This is not a a workout...this is a revolution. This is Shake Weight for men and it's going to kick your butt...in just six minutes, guaranteed.

And in only SIX minutes you'll look like a bodybuilder! Though this product doesn't compare to the Mercedes of exercise scams: the FlexBelt - get six pack abs without actually doing anything. Yes, it's a product that supposedly works out your abs for you.

Of course, such listlessness hasn't come about just in our recent cultural malaise. People have forever searched for ways of dampening their burdens. Yet, in this era of technology, mass production, and wealth, regular people have the means to pursue these easy way outs. Before, men had to cut their own wood and women had to handwash the clothes and dishes. Men had prepare harvests, cut their lawns with a push mower, and make their own homes. Life was damn hard and people understood that luxury was reserved for after work. Now, imbued with wealth and inundated with an attitude of entitlement, no one wants to work for objectives that should require struggle. And technology and the mass market are there to encourage our slothfulness - machines to work out for us, diet pills and gastric bypass as a proxy for impulse control, internet porn to satiate our sexual desires.

So when will the obesity epidemic subside? Only when these inimical lies and cultural forces are spoken about honestly and then fittingly undermined.

Demi Lovato Goes to Rehab

Demi Lovato, Disney "rock" princess and underratted teen hottie, has gone to rehab for "emotional and physical problems". Last summer, I discussed how Disney churns out teen idols by concocting a narrative that casts beautiful teens as the every girl with every girl problems. With the following in mind, I predict Ms. Lovato's rehab stint will endear her even more to tween fans.

Disney formulates narratives for Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato much in the same way educational romantics treat Einstein. By framing adolescent problems so that even the coolest and best-looking girls go through it, Disney creates beautiful, talented and ACCESSIBLE stars.

What's interesting though is that, despite her beauty and fame, Ms. Lovato suffers from depression and pathological insecurity, troubles she has apparently dealt with for quite some time. In situations like this, one notes the paradox of an individual exhibiting mutually exclusive personality traits. She has pursued a career in show business, a job that demands she perform daily in front of tens of thousands of people. The average person, or even the more ebullient among us, would find this quite daunting. And given the demands of all those eyes silently judging you, one presumes most artists would be insensitive to criticism and highly secure in their self-esteem.

Yet, this supposition doesn't apply to Ms. Lovato or a number of other performers. Perhaps we can chalk it up to the complexity of human personality and the contradictions inherent to each person.

Cursing

Saturday Audience Participation

A few days ago, a commenter called me a p*ssy for not spelling out the insult p*ssy. If you're a regular reader, you've probably noticed I use almost no curse words in my posts. I do this because people leave act with little decorum on the Internet. In some instances, as in anti-PC blogs like this one, the lack of restraint is beneficial; but in other online venues, such as any YouTube comment section, it's not.

In other words, I've tried to motivate the level of discourse via the blog's front page and the language used therein, hoping to avoid the juvenile and often vile type of discourse present in many places online. Of course, the blog isn't too academic and the comment sections (which I greatly enjoy and check continuously) often reflect this. Yet even in emotionally tinged conversations or those pertaining to social decadence, you won't see YouTube/Perez Hilton type debates that reduce to, "fag/gay/dick/fuck/shit/tits".

Ironically though, I curse very often in real life. Don't really know why though.

Today's question: Do you curse often in real life and online? Why do you curse and in what venues do you find it acceptable? Do you curse in the presence of authority figures? Have you used cursing as a means for some social end? If so, why?

Tim Wise Loses It

At DailyKos, Tim Wise belies his often professorial demeanor and offers a vitriolic screed against "white folks" (H/T: Mangan). One can't consider this anything but naked hatred, and dare I say, overt racism. Some excerpts:

By then, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it. Do you hear it? The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently? Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.

Because you’re on the endangered list. And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.

And in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

I've always considered Tim Wise a vile character, inimitable in his intellectual smugness and unparalleled in his animus. But this tome goes beyond the baseless invectives he usually proffers; this basically calls for a genocidal campaign against whites in the nation they founded. In the essay, he predictably excoriates whites for perceived racism and ironically speaks as if we're living in 1953. All the while, he takes a triumphalist tone dripping with condescension and hostility.

Wise's tone is rare even amongst blowhards like Cornel West and Skip "Acting Stupidly" Gates, yet the value system evinced by the essay is quite common. For a moment, let's accept the moral transgressions of past Americans as valid criticism. (And surely we must concede this, though in the context of their contemporaries, colonial Americans were quite timid.) OK, but what then of their singular successes, along with those of Europe? What then of European and American science, medicine, technology, literature, art, and philosophy? What of these laudable aspects of American history that continue to this day?

To Wise and other liberals, no value supersedes that of racial egalitarianism and the corresponding need to degrade whites. Awhile back, in a post entitled The Left's Highest Moral Priority, I covered an NYT editorial arguing felons should vote simply because not doing so depresses the proportion of blacks eligible. The author considered no other reason besides that as justification. Similarly, Wise is blind to every aspect of American life besides "discrimination". His bias precludes him from noting the good of predominantly white countries. His bent also demands that he ignore the pathologies present in "black and brown" countries/communities, a situation he undoubtedly blames on whites as well.

Wise cheers for white demographic death because he's astoundingly deluded. I'll conclude with a passage that reflects Wise's sheer lunacy. Only a man suffering from such psychosis could foresee a utopic society comprised of blacks and browns released from white oppression, free to pursue medicine, astrophysics, and poetry, to celebrate their wondrous culture, and to finally showcase their racial vibrancy?

Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims. They have to study you, to pay careful attention, to adjust their body armor accordingly, and to memorize your sleep patterns [Blacks know when whites sleep? WTF. Are they Santa Claus?].

San Fran Bans Happy Meals

San Francisco has passed a resolution to ban Happy Meals. The law would forbid restaurants from including free toys with "unhealthy meals". The proponents of this initiative imply private industry must consider the inimical effects of their products - capitalism with a conscious:

"This is a challenge to the restaurant industry to think about children's health first and join the wide range of local restaurants that have already made this commitment," Supervisor Eric Mar, who introduced the legislation, said in a statement.

The ban defines "unhealthy" in conjunction with the outright false low-fat paradigm:

* Calories: Less than 600
* Sodium: Less than 640 milligram.
* Fat: Less than 35 percent of calories from fat; Less than 10 percent from saturated fat (with exception for nuts, seeds, eggs or low-fat cheese).

Meals would also have to offer fruit or vegetables.

In this instance, the intention is undoubtedly a laudable one. The problem is that government has no right to dictate my eating habits. Sure, others may have to pay for my dumb choices through higher insurance costs, but in the non-ideal world in which we live, trade-offs are often a necessity. To liberals though, a cohort dominated by romanticism and utopic thinking, free lunches abound. Further, one notes the absence of personal responsibility demanded by the left. In this example, the imposition seems minimal. However, this ban fits into the broader pattern whereby liberals refuse forthright condemnation, blame some external force (often one of their scapegoats like corporations), and then seek change through Big Brother initiatives. Their approach to education squares well with this process.

So what alternative do I propose? Simple: reinstitute societal shame for the overweight. With the fat acceptance and "everyone is beautiful" campaigns, individuals do not suffer as much if excessively overweight. Of course, fatties understand the visceral reaction felt by others, but our "everything goes" culture, always tepid in its condemnation, somewhat protects their fragile egos. Let me add that I don't suggest we demean fatties, call them names, or consider them worthless as people. Instead, the prevailing zeitgeist, primarily reflected in popular culture, needs to change in order to champion the right values. I do concede that one could point to many instances of health living culture, but the aforementioned campaigns enervate the message. And as stated above, the censure of faceless causes, such as McDonald's and KFC, further abates the healthy living message's strength. Additionally, in a more open sexual landscape, especially for women, fatness no longer represents a severe hindrance. Thus, our (feminist-inspired) societal values have undermined a primary motivation for keeping slim. And finally, disabuse the public of the low-fat, high-carb idiocy.

Is the Conservative Shift Permanent or a Cycle Repeating?

Yesterday, Republicans took the House and forced a major swing within the Senate. Several important governorships went red as well. With the palpable fervor of this election season and the corresponding ire directed at Obama, some on the Right are celebrating what they consider an unparalleled political shift. But such optimism conflicts with the rather capricious leanings of the American citizenry.

We are a nation of swingers. In the last 16 years, each party has had a presidential victory and taken control of Congress in what was heralded as a realignment of American politics. Now it's happened again.

A similar conservative sweep occurred in the 1994 mid-term elections. And that gave us Bush-McCain "conservatism", a troubling precedent that should dampen too much excitement. Most blame the conservative uprising on a bad economy, with exit polls showing almost 90% figuring this as their primary concern. These pundits point to historical parallels when previous administrations experienced similar rebukes during times of economic peril. Concordantly, given the vitriol spewed in recent months, one can't view this as anything but a direct repudiation of Obama's politics, even the supposedly timid version he's put into action.

The left, while they won't admit it, likely hopes that America has rejected merely this administration, the populace still unaware of the intellectually recondite ideology that underpins modern liberalism. In previous years, perhaps one could countenance such liberal optimism; yet I sense something different this time around. This election season was special because so many conservatives were willing to define the "other" - epitomized by the birther and Ground Zero mosque controversies earlier this year.

While PC-addled talking heads will either conveniently shirk this distinction or use it as justification for smear campaigns, the intellectually honest could view this election as not just a referendum on economics. For once, it seems that the public is slowly understanding the confluence of social values, elite academic ideology, and government intrusion. We see this somewhat in the Tea Party, once a wholly libertarian outlet that transitioned into social conservatism, an amalgam typified by new Kentucky senator Rand Paul.

Will the new Republican leadership continue the rightward trend it MUST follow? Or will they regress into a RINO party doing little to extirpate liberalism? It does worry me that the Right now lacks an obvious foil as provided by the Pelosi-Reid-Obama led Congress. It was this starkly anti-American, almost criminal power structure, that awakened the American people. Without such naked leftism, the Right may struggle to maintain its enthusiasm gap. And if that doesn't happen, the left's most powerful edifices, elite academia and the media, will continue to push the zeitgeist and this country further into ruin.

Update: Apparently, this has been the biggest swing in one election since 1948 (H/T: Auster).

As I write, the House results indicate that Republicans have gained a net 61 seats. So the Republican net gain will be something like 67 seats—more than any party has won in any single election since 1948...the Republicans’ majority is likely to be greater than in 1994 and the largest since 1946 (54%-44%) and perhaps since 1928 (57%-42%). We are, as I wrote in the first sentence of my Examiner column, in uncharted territory.