Rod Dreher Wants to Smash the Establishment

Rod Dreher has a piece on young French Catholics arguably coalescing into an indentifiable socio-political force. The post is a rejoinder to a longer piece by Mark Lilla in the NY Review of Books. In that piece, Lilla writes of these young Catholic figures thus:

This past summer I spent some time reading and meeting these young writers in Paris and discovered more of an ecosystem than a cohesive, disciplined movement. Still, it was striking how serious they are and how they differ from American conservatives. They share two convictions: that a robust conservatism is the only coherent alternative to what they call the neoliberal cosmopolitanism of our time, and that resources for such a conservatism can be found on both sides of the traditional left–right divide. More surprising still, they are all fans of Bernie Sanders…

I reckon a pre-2007 Bernie Sanders — that is, the anti-globalist one who opposed illegal immigration, due to it being a downward pressure on (white) working class wager-earners – might get significant support from even dastardly Alt Right types, were there no Trumpian alternatives. Lilla continues:

The intellectual ecumenism of these writers is apparent in their articles, which come peppered with references to George Orwell, the mystical writer-activist Simone Weil, the nineteenth-century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, the young Marx, the ex-Marxist Catholic philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, and especially the politically leftist, culturally conservative American historian Christopher Lasch, whose bons mots—“uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots”—get repeated like mantras. They predictably reject the European Union, same-sex marriage, and mass immigration. But they also reject unregulated global financial markets, neoliberal austerity, genetic modification, consumerism, and AGFAM (Apple- Google-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft).

Again, speaking as someone from the Dissident Right, this coalition of causes starts to sound familiar…

But, perhaps over a bottle or two of wine, Dreher could ask these young French Catholics why they oppose mass immigration. Once you tease out the true reason, they’ll quickly be lumped in with the dastardly National Front.

As I have written about before, watching the ongoing ‘red-pilling of Rod Dreher’ has become something of a sport of mine. Watching him discover the compounded truths and consequences of race realism (as manifest through mass third world immigration to the West), and then struggle to contextualize this reality with his banal, preexisting, Christian humanism, is sometimes almost painful to witness. But I see Dreher as something of a bell-weather for the attitudes of many boomer Normies intuitively dissatisfied with the neoliberal political order.

With respect to the aforementioned young French Catholics, Dreher predictably trips over himself in a ramshackle, preemptive attempt to disassociate them from the (cue Darth Vader music) National Front:

Lilla points out that many establishment intellectuals in France don’t take these young Catholics seriously. They mistakenly (says Lilla) view them as National Front apologists. I can tell you from personal experience that Lilla is right: this is simply not true at all.

He cites as proof:

Lilla points out that Marion Maréchal Le Pen left the National Front’s successor party, and dropped the “Le Pen” from her name. Unlike her infamous grandfather and her aunt Marine, Marion is an intellectual and a serious Catholic. And she is young. She is the kind of political figure that certain young right-of-center intellectuals in the US want Trump to be, but that’s beyond his capacity.

Yes, changing one’s name, but retaining the identical positions of the party you just left is proof you are now on God’s side!

Marion Maréchal, as Lilla points out, is very much on the side of firm and decisive engagement and battle. Her CPAC speech (watch it below) was about this. I honestly don’t know if this kind of conservatism can ever take root in America, but I deeply hope so.

This coming from a man who vilifies the dastardly ‘Alt Right’ every chance he gets.

The money-shot quote, though, from Dreher’s piece has got to be this passage:

… I’m reading Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe and learning in much greater detail how the European establishment — left wing and right wing — sold out their civilization to mass immigration for the sake of global capitalism and “diversity,” I believe that that Establishment deserves to be smashed. The new French conservatism, and its political frères in the former Eastern Europe, represent the best hope Europe has to avoid real fascism. EU-style technocratic, deracinated liberalism is dying, and deserves to die.

So, Dreher is getting around to reading Murray’s book, with its emphasis on the cumulative effects of mass immigration, leading  him to suddenly write: “I believe that that Establishment deserves to be smashed.”

Whoa.

And always operative in his rhetoric on what constitutes the Right is his false dichotomy of his approach vs… ‘fascism’. A longstanding canard in Dreher’s writing is to equate the Alt-Right (or Dissident Right), despite all its nuances and variations, with ‘fascism’. He simply cannot shake this knee-jerk reaction.

What struck me most in that passage above is him writing: “EU-style technocratic, deracinated liberalism is dying, and deserves to die.”

I’d like to see Dreher expound upon “deracinated”. Is he implying that the indigenous French ought to be able to openly espouse keeping France ‘French’, and not be called racist for taking this position?

If so, he’s starting to sound like one of those awful “Alt Right” people he so often vilifies.

Posted in Alt-Right, Christianity | Comments Off on Rod Dreher Wants to Smash the Establishment

Yu & The #AngryAsians

One of the ways we can mark the year 2018 is as the year that the #AngryAsians motif truly flowered. In a previous post, I discussed how, in terms of political orientation, Asian-Americans have been trending leftward in recent decades, but a wider sense of resentment within certain vocal elements of the Asian community is leading a substantial cohort of Asian-Americans to “ally” with boilerplate grievance groups (e.g., blacks, Hispanics) and to appropriate the same anti-white rhetoric of these groups.

And while we haven’t seen too much in the way of overt ‘hate on whitey’ rhetoric from Asian ethnic groups in the way that we have with the aforementioned groups, this is largely because Asian youth have been too busy with their heads in STEM books, over-achieving and accomplishing things to an impressive degree. (With great discipline and efficiency, Tiger Moms like Amy Chua see to this.)

But for those rare Asians who explore Wokeness Studies in between STEM classes, the sky’s the limit… especially in terms of trumped up ‘microaggressions’. The normal and expected growing pains of being a second-generation immigrant (from virtually any country) — where one had to navigate, sometimes clumsily, a still-dominant white mainstream culture — becomes therapeutically reinterpreted as a series of microaggressions, and for the ‘victim’ the cumulative effect of these microaggressions is tantamount to PTSD.

Enter Ms Yu, whose recent piece in HuffPo communicates, if nothing else, just how insufferable these people are (“What It’s Really Like To Be A Young Woman Of Color In Tech”). A recent UC Berkeley graduate with an undergraduate degree in chemical biology (surprise), and now working at one of the gazillion tech companies in the SF area, Yu is also supremely Woke:

I was a loud, opinionated 22-year-old with a penchant for leaving the country to deal with my problems.

WTF does that mean?

I pushed through the radical beliefs I’d acquired at Berkeley and found ways to justify the fact that I was contributing to an industry responsible for intense gentrification, displacing local communities struggling to survive in the spaces they’ve lived their whole lives. I ignored the silent, nagging voice in the back of my head reminding me that my Southeast-Asian community was being decimated as I benefited from this unjust system.

It’s not at all clear how her Southeast-Asian community is allegedly being “decimated”, other than vis-a-vis the same generalized level of uber-gentrification pushing everyone (including awful white people) out of SF, but no matter. There are bigger fish she wants to fry. Regarding her time with one tech employer:

In my first month, I met a handful of strong and talented women of color who gave me a sense of community. During my first project, a brilliant Latina writer took me under her wing after we spotted each other across the room at a meeting. Sensing my isolation in the workplace, she told me we should get lunch, and I immediately felt more comfortable. She gave me pep talks when I was ignored in meetings, pointed me to other women and men who would help me grow, and infused me with hope in moments I got frustrated with the primarily white population of my department.

Notice the tribal visual cues, the nonverbal communication, based on race (non-white). To SJWs like Yu, whiteness is the unit from which everything is measured.

And, keep in mind, the workplace we’re talking about here isn’t the Central Pacific transcontinental railroad works of the 19th century, or a modern Chinese industrial slave factory, but a tech company in the uber-leftwing SF area, where the whites are overwhelmingly prog leftist themselves:

Practically every day that passed, older, married men stared at my body.

Huh? How does she define “staring”? And, if she is so concerned about this, why does her Instagram page feature her in a series of cheesecake wanna-be-model poses… some with her black boyfriend? How to square this dissonance? Yu rationalizes this (or, rather, is cognizant of its strangeness when coming from a Woke SJW) in a previous post she wrote for Vice titled “As a Teen, I Was Haunted by the Sexual Persona I Created to Protect Myself”,

The person I created on the internet shielded me from the slut-shaming I endured at the hands of high school bullies. Rather than let their words break me, I molded my online image to embody sexuality.

At age 15, she turned down a classmate’s sexual overtures, her male classmate pointing out a variation of this same dissonance:

“I don’t get it. It totally looks like you’re down. Why else would you post pictures of your boobs, like, bursting out of bikinis on Facebook?”

My whole life has been caught in a feedback loop of battling the public perceptions of the very internet persona I created to feel safe.

Translation: Yu posts sexualized pictures of herself online (even today) because… who knows. But her stripper-like self-esteem issues are definitely someone else’s fault (high school bullies; wypipo; Drumpf) and she is the victim here. And don’t you forget it.

Ms Yu working hard to ensure no one stares at her.

In fairly short order, it becomes quite apparent that Yu is a very angry person. Her Twitter page features Sarah Jeong-like outbursts of Id, like this:

Back to her HuffPo rant:

Meetings were dominated by white males droning on and on, often talking over their female counterparts or ignoring them altogether. White women sometimes seemed to feel like they were competing against you, rather than working with you.

All those awful Biffs & Beckys (err… I mean Ezras & Evies). How did she ever survive?

Ms. Yu is even angry that fellow Lib coworkers notice her extreme degree of SJW Wokeness!

Worse yet was when people assumed I was their guru for all things “young and woke,” turning to me for insight on everything from how to decode popular memes to explaining the meaning of SoundCloud rap and identity politics in the Bay.

As with Sarah Jeong’s litany of visceral, very angry, anti-white tweets (while at the same time confessing she only dates white boyz), one begins to question the psychological balance of a person who (again: in a San Francisco office environment) writes things like:

Not everyone treated me this way. But these were themes that repeated time and again in the white, corporate tech spaces in which I worked. So, despite these companies’ attempts to foster a liberal and inclusive culture, I often endured the strange experience of being surrounded by people who seemed to share my ideals, but would always fall a little short of truly understanding me.

A natural question for the rest of us is: How does one become someone like this, someone who ascribes the most minute and irrelevant social dynamics as ‘microaggressions’, someone this sexually and racially confused, someone this miserable?

Posted in Anti-White, Asian, Political Correctness | Comments Off on Yu & The #AngryAsians

The Shape of The Square (2017)

After reading the interesting premise of the film from a discussion of it at Counter-Currents, I watched The Square (2017), a film directed by Ruben Östlund. It’s a very interesting film, with encoded anti-PC themes that are very salient for the Dissident Right. (Spoilers ahead.)

At the beginning of this film, we see the toppling (officially sanctioned) of a statue of a Swedish King (in a military pose on a horse), that was standing in front of an old and officious public building, the statue’s head symbolically decapitated in the process. [In his comments at the Counter-Currents piece, Gösta Bäver notes: “The name Christian is not really a comment on Christianity, although that works too. But it’s primarily a Scandinavian in-joke. It’s a reference to Christian II of Denmark, a Danish king who ruled over Sweden in the 16th century and was responsible for the “Stockholm bloodbath”. The joke is that the museum is located in the Swedish royal palace and the boss is again a Dane named Christian who causes havoc.”]

We then experience the awful sight and sound of beautiful ancient cobblestones in an old public square being sawed away to make room for a modern art exhibit, this one to be called ‘The Square’. The Royal Palace, formerly the residence of the Swedish royal family, has been transformed into a large modern art museum, the type that displays pretentious ‘concept’ pieces, and that seeks to transgress for the sake of transgressing. Such are the ‘sacred space’ church surrogates for the left, full of staid, predictable, and thoroughly conformist transgression-as-an-end-in-itself ‘art’ that is an elixir of today’s elite art world. Within this class of bourgeois art snobs, social norms exist for no other purpose than to be transgressed, an obligated sport of faux-intellectual one-upsmanship. At one point in the film, a moment of satirical commentary on this aspect of the art world, a custodian accidentally sweeps up some of the piles of gravel from “the Gijoni exhibit”, a current exhibit consisting of… piles of gravel. In another scene, the protagonist scratches the surface of philosophical aesthetics (e.g., Danto’s institutional theory of art) when, upon being asked ‘what is art?’ rhetorically asks the interviewer that, were he to place her handbag into the sacred space of the museum, would it become ‘art’?

The protagonist of the film, who is chief curator at the large modern art museum, is named “Christian”, itself an allegory for what has become of Christianity in Scandinavia. The very first words spoken in the film are by an assistant who asks a napping Christian (after an apparent night of decadent partying): “Are you awake? Christian?”

THE PLEA FOR HELP:

Early in the film, as Christian is leaving work and is crossing the square, a young white woman comes running up to him (and another man next to Christian) frantically screaming while looking in the direction from which she came: “Help me! He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill you too!” Soon, a muscled, white guy with a New Right-ish haircut runs up to them, stops, then says to Christian and the other Good Samaritan: “I wasn’t going after you guys!” and moves on. The symbolism here seems to be that the woman was irrationally (?) terrified of an Alt-Right type guy, reflecting how for many in Sweden the Right Wing is more of a ‘threat’ than Muslim immigrants.

Immediately after this encounter, Christian feels exhilarated, showing how his stultified intellectual life is rarely punctured by anything somatic and existentially visceral. A rare experience of even the potential for violence, of defending a woman, is an outlier experience.

THE THREAT:

As it turns out, we’re led to believe that the woman Christian ‘defended’ was, in fact, part of a scam that leads to Christian having his phone and wallet stolen. Using GPS software, he is able to track the phone’s location to a public housing project. With the help of his young, reasonably assimilated, Arab employee, Christian embarks on an attempt to get his belongings back. It is the Assistant who recommends writing a threatening letter, and sticking copies of it into every one of the project’s mailboxes. Christian is hesitant, but the Assistant convinces him otherwise:

Christian: Isn’t a threat a bit over the top?

Assistant: “To the person who robbed me, I’ll bash your head in if you don’t return my stuff.”

Christian: No, no. Come on, that’s way too violent.

Assistant: These people are criminals, that’s how they roll.

Christian: It doesn’t justify bad behavior from us.

Assistant: Don’t be so Swedish! Ditch the political correctness crap. They should fucking pay for this.

On their drive to the housing project, the Assistant tries to get them pumped up by turning on some loud House music by a band called, appropriately enough, Justice. Like his earlier, momentary confrontation with the possibility of violence in the square (with the Alt Right guy), Christian allows the infectious grooves of the music, and the overall mood of this ‘mission’ to wash over him, if only for a few seconds where he conjures the image of Thor’s hammer:

Assistant: We’re coming with the cavalry!

Christian: Coming at them with a hammer! A great big hammer!

Outside the public housing complex, the Assistant waits in Christian’s Tesla, while Christian goes to place the flyers in everyone’s mailbox. Some kids (we never see their faces, but presume they are immigrants) come over to check out the Tesla, and ask the Assistant to start it up. The Assistant declines. One of the kids then kicks the car.

Assistant: What are you doing?!

Kid: Whatever I want.

THE SQUARE:

The Square itself represents Sweden, particularly the latent social contract of Swedish society, built over the course of hundreds of years, and now significantly eroded over the course of just a few decades. “The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring,” reads the artist’s manifesto. “Within its boundaries, we all share equal rights and obligations.” Expounding on the artist’s intentions, Christian notes: “There is a contract implied by The Square, to look out for each other. We help each other. If you enter this space and ask for help, anyone passing by is obligated to help you.”

The failure of The Square to actualize its intended effect represents the erosion of social capital that multiculturalism has wrought. (In the discussion of the film between John Morgan & Fróði Midjord, Midjord notes that before making this film Östlund actually had an art exhibit called “The Square”, very much like the one depicted in the film, and became fascinated with how his art piece became a hangout spot, with people making fun of its intentions.)

We see instances of this erosion of social capital when Christian (even being white and well-dressed) asks passers-by to borrow their cell phone, wherein they ignore him. We also see, in several different scenes, the root causes of this social capital depletion: various gypsy-immigrant-looking beggars, including a quite rude one who, in a 7-Eleven, asks Christian to buy her a sandwich; once he agrees to, she then orders him not to put onions on it. In another beggar instance, the beggar says to passersby: “Please, I have three children and diabetes. One krona?”, a notable aspect of this being that having three children (when one cannot afford them) and diabetes are both largely preventable situations that a responsible individual would have made different decisions about. (Midjord describes how, in contemporary Sweden, Gypsies are shameless in their beggar scams — faking leg disabilities, etc. – essentially exploiting the altruism of native Swedes.)

The complicity of political correctness to justify inconsiderate and bad behavior is also on display in the sequence with the Tourette’s guy. The museum is holding a public discussion between an American artist (Dominic West) and one of the museum’s female administrators. [Gösta Bäver notes: “The artist played by West is a parody of Julian Schnabel, who is Jewish… Östlund mentioned Hollywood and the Jews earlier this year, when The Square was nominated for an Oscar. A journalist asked him what he valued highest, the Palme d’Or or an Oscar. He answered that of course the Palme d’Or is more prestigious – if he wanted to win an Oscar, all he would have to do is make a movie about the Holocaust. The Swedish journalist was perplexed and Östlund had to explained how a “Jewish community” is very prevalent in Hollywood. It became a mini-scandal but Östlund survived without too much problem. Some journalists came to his defense, and talked about how Ricky Gervais and various Jewish comedians have joked about this. One newspaper interviewed a Jewish-American scholar who explained that of course Hollywood is run by Jews, you’re just expected to be careful when talking about it, and preferably also portray the Jews as victims, because they came to Hollywood as refugees. I don’t know how well it works in Google Translate, but it’s a pretty fun read.”]

A man in the audience with Tourette’s begins making everyone uncomfortable with his random shouts and insults, especially the interviewer, who turns to the crowd and pleads: “We have this one opportunity to meet this fantastic artist… We can’t hear a thing. The atmosphere is stressing him [the artist being interviewed] out.” It stand to reason that, out of courtesy to others, a responsible individual with Tourette’s would not put himself in a situation whereby his condition would make a public spectacle or otherwise ruin a public event (e.g. a museum talk.) Nonetheless, a white virtue-signaler in the audience lectures the room about “tolerance” (“Try to be a bit tolerant. The man is suffering from a neuropsychiatric disorder. This isn’t voluntary, so show some tolerance.”), to which others, including the very female interviewer who was most visibly upset by the Tourette’s guy, immediately and sheepishly concur.

Then, late in the film, Christian tells his two young daughters a poignant, apocryphal story:

This reminds me of something your grandpa told me. He was a boy, about 6 years old. And he was about to go out and play… His parents made him a tag and wrote his name and address on it. They hung it around his neck and sent him off to play all by himself in the middle of Copenhagen. Imagine if I had done that to you when you were six. That never would have happened. Attitudes change… Back then, people trusted other grownups, to help their children if they had problems or had lost their way. But nowadays, you tend to regard other adults as potential threats.

THE AD CAMPAIGN:

The Millennial advertising kids (“They were born into this fast-moving arena. It’s their home turf.”) emphasize the very short attention spans of people today, and press the need for a viral ad campaign. “Controversy” is needed. “Can we tie it to trends or current events?” asks one. “The challenge here is to cut through the media clutter. Your competition isn’t other museums, it’s disasters, terrorism, and controversial moves by far-right politicians.” The grouping of far-right politicians in with terrorists signals the implicitly shared leftism of all in the room. Later in the film, the Millennial ad kids present their ad campaign idea:

We conducted market research on what’s shared the most on social media. It’s generally vulnerable groups. People post about women, the disabled, the racialized, LGBTQ people… You can make that list longer, but there is one group that affects people: beggars. So we’d like to use a beggar in this clip, but also turn it up a notch by making the beggar a child. In addition to this, the beggar will have fair hair. Personify the Swedish…

We open on the Palace courtyard. The Square is visible. So, there’s product placement from frame one. Towards this artwork… is daybreak and the Square, is shimmering with its promise of trust, caring, moral courage and all that good stuff… Then we see a little girl approaching the Square. She’s shivering. She’s all alone. She’s crying. She’s wrapped in a dirty blanket. And you sense that she’s homeless. These are powerful images so we’ve hooked the viewer. The girl keeps on walking… She’s crying as she moves along… She enters the Square…

And there, it’s time for the unexpected. The total opposite of everything the Square stands for. The surprise effect will generate the attention we need, creating the perfect platform to express your message. All those values and issues your exhibition would like to raise.

In the ad, which does go viral, the blonde child is then shown being blown to smithereens, while standing in The Square. There is no need to depict who did the bombing, as we all know who would do such a thing. (This affords Östlund with plausible deniability regarding any “anti-Muslim” sentiment.) Again, with The Square representing Sweden itself, particularly its eroded norms of social reciprocity, this image is highly resonant.

After a degree of public outrage ensues over the tastelessness of the video ad campaign, the museum Director registers her discontent, however imperceptibly, with Christian, who, as we saw earlier, was himself sickened by the video. (Midjord notes the strangely passive-aggressive quality that female politicians in Sweden have, and appear to need, in order to climb the political ladder. We see this in the words and demeanor of museum Director who forces Christian’s resignation.)

Realizing his job is at stake, and trying a last ditch effort to save it, Christian pathetically and disingenuously resorts to standard left-libertarian bromides to ‘defend’ the video:

Elna, this is an opportunity to take a stand. We, as a museum, mustn’t be afraid to push boundaries. To transcend all kinds of taboos. Nothing should stand in the way of freedom of expression. That’s my conviction. It’s something to stand up for. Without a doubt.

This theme is taken up further during the press conference in which Christian is announcing his resignation. A member of the press calls out the hypocrisy of the museum not defending ‘freedom of speech’, and also argues that Christian’s resignation is a form of ‘self-censorship’, to which Christian provides another disingenuous reply: “I believe that freedom of speech comes with certain responsibilities.” (Moments earlier, we saw him take the opposite position with his Director. Furthermore, the Director herself cited the risk of a decline in corporate donations as the main driver of his imminent firing.) A disorienting moment occurs when an immigrant-looking woman yells from the crowd a completely unrelated and inappropriate question: “Where is your solidarity with the voiceless and the vulnerable members of society?” The incongruity of this moment emphasizes the surreal qualities of how political correctness (in the form of The Other’s well-being as the paramount concern of everything) permeates all discourse on virtually all topics.

THE GIRL:

A subplot of Christian’s dalliance with the female reporter (played by Elizabeth Moss) demonstrates the decadence of modernity, and reads like a Heartiste seminar. Feminism has engendered anonymous, transactional-level sex as ‘empowering’, but this clashes with certain biologically innate responses and contextualizing mechanisms that females have before, during, and after sex. The odd scene of a domesticated chimp in her apartment represents this primate-level aspect of their dalliance, the chimp at one point applying lipstick (or red markers to mimic lipstick) to its lips.

When they meet at the decadent party in the former Royal Palace, the girl (Moss) is the initiator of the flirting. As Midjord and Morgan note, when having sex the girl is also the initiator; we see her on top, essentially doing the fucking, while Christian is the one grabbing at the sheets. However, after sex, she displays iconic post-coitus female responses. Despite its transactional nature, which she partook in, she wants the experience to have been ‘special’. Days later, she becomes upset that Christian hasn’t called her, that he doesn’t appear to have translated their sexual encounter as having ‘meant something’, etc. Her tone then moves to the accusatory. “Do you just go have sex with lots of other women?” she says to him, before going on to accuse him of using his ‘position of power to attract women and make conquests’, the erasure of female agency in this accusation clearly implying she views herself as one of Christian’s ‘victims’.

THE BOY:

The young immigrant boy, from one of the apartments in the housing complex that Christian left his mailbox threat-letters, endlessly badgers Christian, demanding an apology. “Apologize to me and my family, or I’ll make chaos with you.” (Midjord notes that this use of “chaos” is an oft-used malapropism by immigrants.) The boy is from an alien, honor-based culture that backs up such honor dynamics with violence. What is striking in the film is how, in several different scenes, the boy displays dominance in social situations against adults.

Towards the end of the film, after his ‘conscience’ has weighed on him for his interactions with the boy, Christian digs through the trash to retrieve the boy’s phone number. He tries calling him but gets a ‘number unavailable’ message, so he creates and send the boy a video message, one chock full of naïve liberal platitudes, rank hypocrisies, and the never failing canard that more welfare redistributionism is all we need to guarantee immigrant assimilation:

Looking back, I should have gone into your building, knocked on the doors and asked a simple question. But that never occurred to me, because… Well, honestly, I was too afraid. Afraid of the people who live… Afraid of the people I picture living in a building like yours. Those negative expectations say something about me. They say something about our society, because I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s prejudiced… You have preconceptions about us too, probably because our lives are so different.

So suddenly, it comes down to politics and the distribution of assets. Because these problems can’t be solved by individuals alone. Society needs to lend a hand too. It’s not enough that I admit I was wrong and apologize to you in a video. There are bigger, structural problems involved that society needs to deal with. I actually know one of the 291 people who own more than 50% of the world’s wealth. A guy like that could fix all this in an instant.

THE GALA DINNER:

The film’s penultimate sequence, which takes place at a black tie gala dinner at the museum, is the best allegory of the film, and if there is one note of race-realist optimism in the film, it takes place within this sequence.

During the swanky dinner, there is to be a performance art piece delivered by a man (who is white) who moves and acts, quite convincingly, like a gorilla. Over the loudspeaker, we hear jungle sounds while a narrator’s voice sets the stage:

I am asking for your utmost caution during this performance. Welcome to the jungle. Soon you will be confronted by a wild animal. As you will know, the hunting instinct is triggered by weakness. If you show fear, the animal will sense it. If you try to escape, the animal will hunt you down. But if you remain perfectly still, without moving a muscle, the animal might not notice you, and you can hide in the herd, safe in the knowledge that someone else will be the prey.

The allegory here with contemporary Western society, in the face of mass immigration from third world countries, is obvious. The man-chimp is an abstract representation of the sort of premodern, evolutionarily-wired expressions of masculine strength, dominance, territoriality, and other alpha-traits, albeit unclouded by PC niceties and un-repressed by ‘civilized’ (cucked) norms. In this regard, the man-chimp is the immigrant, who still retains and vigorously displays these masculine traits.

The man-chimp is but one creature in a room of a hundred people, but singlehandedly dominates the room. As the man-chimp moves from table to table, puffing his chest out and doing whatever he pleases, everyone sitting at their table just stares downward, in literal submission. But when the chimp/immigrant attempts to violently drag away the blonde woman (as a future sexual conquest), the measured and studied black tie males, who until then had been sitting silently at their tables, bowing their heads in beta silence, finally pounce. They collectively beat the shit out of, and presumably kill, the chimp/immigrant.

As noted, The Square won the Cannes Palme d’Or, with the jury president saying the film depicts “the dictatorship of being politically correct”. Normally, I could give two shits what French elites think about anything, but the fact that the jury president said this is, itself, sociologically significant.

Posted in Death of the West, Film | Comments Off on The Shape of The Square (2017)

Dustin Chin: Another #AngryAsians Playwright

Dustin Chin: Part of the #AngryAsians Trend

This essay is cross-posted at Counter-Currents. 

The #AngryAsians motif continually fascinates, especially given their relatively well-to-do economic position in our ‘white supremacist’ society, and the proliferation of plays and other writings by them that villainize, ostracize, and ‘Other-ize’ white people has become an identifiable trend. Snowflakes, or Rare White People can be added to this list, a supposed comedy by NYC-based playwright Dustin Chinn, which is currently being workshopped at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Chinn has a track record of churning out speculative comedies with overt racial themes: there’s his previous plays Asian Women in Space (“It’s the 24th century and the United Earth Space Federation is looking for a few good Asian ladies. Will Nausicaa Lee and her fellow wayfarers be enough to stop humanity’s greatest and most perverted threat?”), and The Rise and Fall of the United States of Asian America (“After an earthquake levels San Francisco, a clandestine organization sends the Bay Area’s Asian Americans north of the Canadian border. When the newly minted refugee government declares independence, all stupidity breaks loose.”).

In his advance review of a production of Chinn’s Snowflakes, Chris Rohmann gleefully writes of the play’s clobber-you-over-the-head moralizing and heaps approbation on the play’s anti-white racism, which, if the races were in any way reversed, would certainly outrage the Woke Crowd, leading to loud protests, de-platforming demands, firings, and the like. Rohmann begins his piece with a scene from the play:

“What am I bid for this fine specimen of white manhood?”

The swaggering black auctioneer scans the audience of prospective buyers, who quickly bid the price up, until the white man on the auction block goes to the jubilant winner for a fat five-figure sum…

This table-turning riff on an antebellum slave auction was part of the UMass Theater Department’s season kick-off event earlier this month.

No Country for White Men

If there’s one thing to be said about this satirical (?) scene, it’s that it is more relevant, allegorically, than standard white liberal optimism. Enoch Powell, in his famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, predicted that in due time, given the trajectories of mass immigration and the emergent shape of Political Correctness as a social force (which he himself had the pleasure of witnessing), “the black man will [someday] have the whip hand over the white man.” When it comes to the future of race relations in a white-minority United States, white liberals, on the other hand, hold an imagined, idealized, and often unexamined, teleological idea: they believe, explicitly but more often implicitly, that we will then enter a transformative, qualitatively different, Kumbaya State of Being, where ethnic group loyalties are shed and all races finally ‘get along’. This is the same sort of mindset which actually expected the election of Barack Hussein Obama to be so cathartic and redemptive for the nation that we’d be entering a historical era of post-racial America. That this utopia did not come to fruition during Obama’s presidency (and actually witnessed the reactive spawnings of the Tea Party Movement which peaked in 2010 or so, and the Alt-Right which peaked in 2016-2017) does a lot toward explaining the hysterical levels of anti-whiteness we’ve seen really accelerate among the Postmodern Left in the last couple of years.)

The road to Hell, as we are wont to say, is paved with good intentions. The imaginative yearnings of white liberals, even those with the best of intentions, is an unfortunate delusion completely out of touch with human history. When whites do, in fact, become the minority in the United States, revenge (for imagined slights) will be exacted upon them by newly empowered POCs, and it will assume all sorts of latent and manifest forms.

One doesn’t have to look far to see what the rationale for such vengeance will be. It is right before us: generations of POC quasi-intellectuals serving up the latest bromides of postmodernism, neo-colonialism, gender studies, and other variants of cultural Marxism. Simply put, white malevolence is the ‘root cause’ of group differences between whites and POCs. Discussion of the compounded effects of poor choices, bad behavior, and cognitive misfortunes which befall non-white group X is, as we are all too well aware, taboo. In such a white-minority future, even the Last White Man Standing will continue to be blamed and held indirectly responsible for the continued relative failure of black and brown cultures. Even after the Last White Man’s throat is slit, and his race is no more, the ‘trauma’ associated with his memory and past actions (however fancifully imagined) will then be positioned for blame and passed down through folktales and PhD theses in Departments of Wokeness Studies.

With Snowflakes, we have a play that actively fantasizes about such a future:

What’s noteworthy about this season is that, as theater professor Harley Erdman told me, “There are no canonical white male playwrights” in the mainstage lineup. In fact, three of the four plays are by and about people of color, and the fourth features a gender-fluid central character. In other words, this is not your granddad’s college theater.

Indeed.

The goal posts are shifting. Having proportional representation is no longer enough. True Diversity can only reached when whites are themselves underrepresented or essentially wiped away from the scene altogether. Again, if and when ever pressed on it, such a strategy will no doubt be rationalized by appeals to alleged historical injustices, etc. It will take the same form as contemporary appeals for slavery reparations, where future generations of whites, most of whose ancestry had absolutely no involvement with slavery whatsoever, are nonetheless to be taxed (and implicitly held as the beneficiaries of slavery) based on, presumably, sufficient levels of melanin in their skin.

Erdman said the department strives to be “conscientious about what’s taking place in the country and the world, serving our community with work that’s relevant, that reflects our ideals and aspirations.” The ability to even mount a season’s worth of shows with majority non-white casts is due in part to the department’s Multicultural Theater Certificate program, directed by Priscilla Page, which has attracted a lot of students of color as theater majors.

We are actually at a point in time in our nation’s history where having a majority non-white cast, in a country that is still currently majority white, is actively celebrated. The current demographic reality doesn’t matter. It is the Long Arc of History – you know, the one that Bends Towards Justice – that matters. It is the reality of imminent racial displacement, one that the Left is very much aware of (but that Conservatism Inc. is afraid to discuss) that matters. The projected and imminent demographic displacement of whites is a clarion call among the Left, and with Snowflakes we have leftwing agitprop using this racial displacement as a premise of the play:

It begins with a deliciously unsettling premise, building on the demographic projection that before midcentury a majority of the U.S. population will be people of color. Extrapolate that shift out a couple hundred years and, in the playwright’s imagining, Caucasians are almost extinct.

Hip, hip, hooray!

The “Listen to Black Women Party”… Coming Soon!

In this 23rd-century fantasy, humanity has evolved into a mixed-race multiculture and the country is governed by the Listen to Black Women Party, which has imposed “decades of sensible, boring, stable regulation and reform.”

At this point, the play is beginning to sound like an inversion of The Turner Diaries. It also represents another iteration of the burgeoning “shut up and listen” cultural niche animating much of the Left these days.

Remnants of the once-dominant white race are preserved on remote reservations and in Nueva New York, in the Museum of Natural History. There, in the Hall of Caucasian Peoples, two of them are exhibited as anthropological curiosities in a 1950s domestic habitat.

Similar dynamics already exist any time a coastal elite journalist is forced to do a story on ‘middle America’: their reportage on whites in Flyover Country treat them like anthropological curiosities, relics of a dead past. And why, I wonder, would there be a Hall of Caucasian Peoples? Oughtn’t such a despicable Race be forgotten and memory-holed?

When the captive couple escape from the museum with the help of a white-obsessed curator, high levels of Caucasity are released on a public that hasn’t been subjected to it for generations. The show morphs into a madcap chase thriller, as the Caucasoids’ mere presence infects the outer world with microaggressions, unconscious entitlement, “irrational self-confidence” and cultural appropriation.

Where to begin. Unpacking that last paragraph could consume an entire dissertation. Notice, however, how the reviewer’s use of the phrase ‘high levels of Caucasity’ is an acceptable sentiment in a review. It’s akin to how virtually every POC ‘comedian’ has obligatory bits about “Ever notice how white people do _____?”

Snowflakes is a giddy, sassy, reverse-transgressive fun-house-mirror image of today’s society. The dark-skinned locals are both intrigued and fearful of the pale exotic fugitives, as officials from the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Ethnic Preservation try to recapture them and contain the toxicity levels.

Now, there’s a phrase I actually like: reverse-transgressive. The Dissident Right is reverse-transgressive. Race realism is reverse-transgressive. Believing that the West is unique, and came from a particular, narrow group of Western European ethnicities, is reverse-transgressive. Believing in scientific objectivity is reverse-transgressive, ad infinitum.

UMass MFA candidate Gabriel Harrell is directing the show. The play’s themes are timely and topical, he said, citing the white male privilege on display in the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings. (In Chinn’s future utopia, most of the characters holding power are female.) “These are not issues that we can often laugh at. There’s something about the comedy of this show that I hope will enable conversation that it’s difficult to have in our day-to-day lives. In reversing the paradigm, the script allows you to laugh, and then hopefully to talk to the person who’s sitting next to you.”

From the sounds of it, every check box on the P.C. Checklist has been checked. In Chinn’s “future utopia”, power is held by females. And I chuckle every time I hear someone from the Left (e.g., Eric Holder) talk about having a ‘conversation’ about race, by which they mean a monologue involving them lecturing to you, Whitey.

After the season kick-off, I sat in on a rehearsal of Snowflakes. The cast was working through a scene in which the white couple crash a traditional Indian wedding, observed with horrified fascination, from a safe distance, by the two officials pursuing them. They freely partake of the henna tattoos and ethnic food, claiming “a real connection to what’s happening here – an authentic cultural experience.”

Even liberal white hipsters, it would seem, have no place in this future utopia. But think of what underlies this ‘comic’ bit about ‘cultural appropriation’: We are in an age where there is both a denial that a uniquely white culture exists (or even really existed in a positive way), as well as a simultaneous zeal to pounce on and vilify any discernible iota of uniquely white cultural expression. So, with no real culture of their own to publicly extoll, liberal whites and CivNat GOPE-types earnestly try to ‘experience’ and appreciate The Other. While this was supposed to be virtuous behavior among good-thinking whites, it seems to have backfired, as they are now maligned, mocked, and ridiculed. Such are the hilarious foibles of cultural genocide.

It’s worth mentioning that Snowflakes has very specific racial casting recommendations (strictures?):

Roles by Race: 1 middle eastern or arab american, 1 black or african american, 1 latinx, 1 native hawaiian and other pacific islander, 2 white

It doesn’t look like the UMASS production has an Arab or Pacific Islander in the cast, though I’m not certain. Question: If their representation is lacking, does this mean the whole production is itself racist?

Rohmann’s interaction with the UMASS production’s cast of Snowflakes, which from the accompanying photos as well as the cast’s names appears to have a high Wakandan ratio, is most telling:

During a break, I spoke with some of the cast members. I asked the actors of color what it’s like being the majority in a show, for a change.

“It’s really beautiful,” Sabine Jacques enthused. “It’s a beautiful feeling to be in the majority on this stage, because we’re not often represented and I want to show representation for young black women and girls.”

Taylor Mickens observed that while TV is getting “a little more open” for actors of color, positive roles are often given to light-skinned black women “and usually color blind. But in this show the roles are meant to be people of color because of the circumstances and the setting, so the fact that it’s majority people of color, and meant to be that way, is also breaking some boundaries.”

One of the token white actors displays all the requisite contrition, virtue-signaling, and Soy Boy Wokeness:

Nicholas Cummings plays one of the two white characters. I wondered what it’s like for him to be in the minority, for a change. “It’s been incredibly valuable to me, to just sit there and listen,” he said. “Everyone has heard the white guy’s story a million times, and to have an environment where other people can talk, and hearing everything they have to say, has really impacted me. I’m really grateful for that.”

Yes, “just sit there and listen”, White Boy. We don’t want to hear you anymore. That is what we want of you, and all we want of you, thank you very much.

Oh, and for you to continue to subsidize our existence.

Indefinitely.

You awful racist monster.

Posted in Anti-White, Political Correctness, Theater | Comments Off on Dustin Chin: Another #AngryAsians Playwright

NYT: Nervous Demographers

Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous” is the NYT title, in a piece about the year 2044, when white Americans are projected to fall below half the population and lose their majority status.

They’re not nervous about the actual ramifications of racial displacement, mind you, but rather how some (aka: whites & gloating Dems) might *perceive* such racial displacement. Towards the former’s realities, there is no real concern. Towards the latter, well, something must be done.

“I said ‘I’m really worried about this,’” said Dr. Prewitt, now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University. He added, “Statistics are powerful. They are a description of who we are as a country. If you say majority-minority, that becomes a huge fact in the national discourse.”

The piece posits a false dichotomy between ‘white nationalists’ (who else would see the Great Displacement being a ‘bad’ thing?) and gloating Dems:

For white nationalists, it signifies a kind of doomsday clock counting down to the end of racial and cultural dominance. For progressives who seek an end to Republican power, the year points to inevitable political triumph, when they imagine voters of color will rise up and hand victories to the Democratic Party.

The piece then goes into the serious strategizing various (mainly Jewish) scholars are scrambling to put together to shape perceptions on The Great Displacement.

Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale University, spotted the risk immediately. As an analyst of group behavior, she knew that group size was a marker of dominance and that a group getting smaller could feel threatened. At first she thought the topic of a declining white majority was too obvious to study.

But she did, together with a colleague, Maureen Craig, a social psychologist at New York University, and they have been talking about the results ever since. Their findings, first published in 2014, showed that white Americans who were randomly assigned to read about the racial shift were more likely to report negative feelings toward racial minorities than those who were not. They were also more likely to support restrictive immigration policies and to say that whites would likely lose status and face discrimination in the future.

Mary Waters, a sociologist at Harvard University, remembered being stunned when she saw the research.

“It was like, ‘Oh wow, these nerdy projections are scaring the hell out of people,” she said…

“That’s what really lit the fuse,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, referring to the 2008 projection. “People went crazy.”

The concern, it would seem, is how the irrational ‘demographics is destiny’ beliefs about displacement (aka the dastardly white supremacists) might spread to a wider slice of whites. This is in no small measure due to liberal Dems’ gloating about how… demographics is destiny:

It was not just white nationalists worried about losing racial dominance. Dr. Myers watched as progressives, envisioning political power, became enamored with the idea of a coming white minority. He said it was hard to interest them in his work on ways to make the change seem less threatening to fearful white Americans — for instance by emphasizing the good that could come from immigration.

“It was conquest, our day has come,” he said of their reaction. “They wanted to overpower them with numbers. It was demographic destiny.”

Good news, though:

Dr. Myers and a colleague later found that presenting the data differently could produce a much less anxious reaction. In work published this spring, they found that the negative effects that came from reading about a white decline were largely erased when the same people read about how the white category was in fact getting bigger by absorbing multiracial young people through intermarriage.

Yes, the good doctor and his ilk will be sure to present (enframe) the data in such a way as to minimize the chances of this information being perceived as what it is: demographic displacement. My prediction is they will lobby for, and successfully obtain, significantly widened definitions of ‘white’, so that ‘white Hispanics’ like George Zimmerman will be classified as ‘white’, etc., thereby deflecting the realities of the radical demographic change taking place in the U.S.

The piece contains this gem, the NYT making a discovery 50+ years after the fact:

It is unclear exactly when the idea of a majority-minority crossover first appeared, but several experts said it may have surfaced in connection with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

And, lastly, there’s this great quote from a neo-Boasian relativist:

[R]ace is about power, not biology, said Charles King, a political science professor at Georgetown University.

“The closer you get to social power, the closer you get to whiteness,” said Dr. King, author of a coming book on Franz Boas, the early 20th-century anthropologist who argued against theories of racial difference. The one group that was never allowed to cross the line into whiteness was African-Americans, he said — the long-term legacy of slavery.

Yes, black would be seen as white… if it weren’t for that dang slavery.

Just like night would be seen as day… if it weren’t for the danged sun.

Posted in Race, White Identity | Comments Off on NYT: Nervous Demographers

Racial Polarization Will Widen

A very good piece by Eric Kaufmann, which gets to the heart of the matter.

Kaufmann begins with the evidence that, across Western nations, more diversity leads to steadily widening political divisions.

This new schism springs from several forces. First, the unprecedented post-1960s level of long-distance migration from the developing world to an aging West. Second, the Left-wing ideological shift from class populism to pro-minority cosmopolitanism. The latter has successfully made any meaningful discussion of immigration and national identity taboo, with mainstream parties until recently steering clear of such topics for fear of being branded ‘racist’.

However… when there is a vacuum, it gets filled:

When liquor isn’t supplied by the market, bootleggers move in. So, too, the expanding anti-racist ideology hemmed in the major parties on immigration, opening space for populist Right entrepreneurs such as the Sweden Democrats or Donald Trump. In Britain, where the debate was more open, it was the failure of first Labour, then the Tories, to control numbers that permitted the BNP and Ukip to flourish.

And by those dastardly Alt-Right types.

Kaufmann cites recent evidence of how the racial-displacement-of-whites projections is framed (which is largely driven by media coverage) affects how such whites interpret this future scenario:

As coverage of the increase [in non-white immigration] grows, the public becomes more focused on the potential long-term loss of what I term the nation’s ‘ethno-tradition’, i.e. its characteristic ethnic composition of having a substantial ethnic majority alongside minorities. It also makes white majorities more aware that their group, with its collective memories, sense of common ancestry and cultural practices, is declining numerically in relation to other groups.

In other words, in the Western democracies — which are the countries founded by ethnic ‘whites’ and that (until the post-1960s, Third World, mass immigration debacle) were clear-majority ‘white countries’ — demographic racial displacement will increasingly lead to forms (plural?) of white racial consciousness.

As society grows more diverse, these divisions will steadily widen. This self-reinforcing triple-lock will tighten its grip. The US is at a more advanced stage in the process, but as the German regional elections show, Europe is following suit: the centre is hollowing out.

Kaufmann’s piece stumbles, however, at his proposed ‘solution’ for the intensifying racial discord we are seeing (and will continue to see) worsen:

The remedy lies in what I term Whiteshift, the voluntary assimilation of minorities into the majority though intermarriage – a process which will need active telegraphing as mixing won’t be strong enough on its own to make much difference to social cohesion until the end of the century.

I fail to see how any such racial intermarriage, particularly among about half of the white electorate, will come to fruition. It’s an idea that seems to bely the widening polarization we’re seeing emerge along racial lines.

Unless, that is, an implicit auxiliary hypothesis of Kaufmann’s is that, for all intents and purposes, the Left will have won, causing the eventual disappearance of a heightened white racial consciousness.

Posted in International, White Identity | Comments Off on Racial Polarization Will Widen

Whitey on the Moon

Richard Brody

Rabbi Richard Brody doesn’t seem to like Gentile White People. He especially doesn’t like films that feature Gentile white people as the leading characters. We recently saw Brody take issue with the Unbearable Whiteness of John Krasinski’s horror film A Quiet Place (“The noise of A Quiet Place is the whitest since the release of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri…) and the recent film Peppermint.

In his review of First Man, the new Neil Armstrong biopic by Damien Chazelle, more of the Rabbi’s hostility emerges. The film is a “right-wing fetish object… a film of deluded, cultish longing for an earlier era of American life, one defined not by conservative politics but, rather, by a narrow and regressive emotional perspective.”

Okay, then!

Of the flag-planting kerfuffle:

When “First Man,” Damien Chazelle’s drama about Neil Armstrong’s mission to the moon, premièred at the Venice Film Festival, in August, it stirred up an absurd controversy among right-wing blowhards who hadn’t seen the film but nonetheless damned it on the basis of reviews stating that the movie doesn’t depict the iconic moment when Armstrong planted the American flag on the lunar surface. It’s true that the flag-planting isn’t dramatized, but the blowhards need not worry: “First Man” is worthy of enduring as a right-wing fetish object. It is a film of deluded, cultish longing for an earlier era of American life, one defined not by conservative politics but, rather, by a narrow and regressive emotional perspective that shapes and distorts the substance of the film.

Brody also dislikes the stoicism of Armstrong, especially when women and minorities were existing in other spaces and places in time. At a deeper level, he seems to dislike the creation of Gentile white ‘heroes’, both now and even then, at a time when the country was about 90% white and Christian. Hence, per the Rabbi, among the film’s many sins, the biggest appears to be that it doesn’t have enough screen time for BLM & #MeToo concerns:

Nothing in the film suggests that Neil is even aware of what’s going on in the world around him. Much of the action in the movie takes place in Jim Crow states where public facilities were segregated, but there’s no hint of this in the film; there’s no hint of where Neil stands on the pressing questions of the time. He has no black colleagues, no female colleagues; meanwhile, a female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, flew a space mission for the Soviet Union in 1963. What did he think?

How can one possibly make a Neil Armstrong biopic without exploring what he thought of an obscure female cosmonaut? What serious filmmaker would tackle the Apollo missions without addressing why NASA had so few blacks in 1969?

The Rabbi’s fangs really come out with the film’s unbearable Whiteness. He describes the movie as “whiter than a Fred-and-Ginger ballroom set” (the contempt and hostility in this guy’s tone is amazing).

There has been a most peculiar, and longstanding, animus against manned space exploration by the likes of the Rabbi and his ilk, as there was with Barry Obama. I would argue their types lack the Faustian soul of European Man; they’d rather be spending the money on wider welfare redistributionism & high speed rail boondoggles:

The one scene that embodies the sixties onscreen is, to my mind, among the most contemptible scenes in recent movies. It takes place midway through the action, when Congress begins to question the value of the space program. Neil is dispatched to represent NASA in a meeting at the White House, where senators fret about “taxpayer dollars,” and while there he is summoned to the phone and informed of the deaths of three astronauts in an Apollo test. The point is clear: that the astronauts are risking their lives while Congress is counting beans and playing politics.

But Chazelle takes that notion even further a few minutes later in the film, when, racked with unspeakable grief over the deaths of his colleagues, Neil drives off to be alone. “Half the country” may oppose the moon mission, but here Chazelle offers a peculiar, tendentious, and self-revealing cinematic interpretation of that phrase in the form of a montage. It shows Kurt Vonnegut, appearing in a black-and-white television clip, saying that the government would do better to spend the money on such things as making New York City “habitable.” There’s an archival clip of chanting protesters, featuring, prominently, a sign saying “¡Ayuda al Pueblo!” and footage, staged for the movie, of Leon Bridges performing Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 song “Whitey on the Moon.”

Chazelle openly mocks people who thought that the moon money was spent foolishly—those pesky intellectuals, blacks, and Hispanics who go on TV or into the street demanding “gimme” while the likes of Neil and his exclusively white, male colleagues uncomplainingly put their lives on the line to accomplish historic things in the interest of “mankind.” In its explicit content, and by artful omission, “First Man” subscribes to the misbegotten political premise that America used to be greater—and that the liberating and equalizing activism of the sixties ignored, dismissed, and even undermined that greatness.

Posted in Film, Left | Comments Off on Whitey on the Moon

Study on PC Sentiments

Interesting (albeit frustrating) numbers from a poll that attempts to measure public attitudes toward both Political Correctness and so-called ‘hate speech’. The headline takeaway is the seeming contradiction that: “81% of poll respondents said they think political correctness is problematic, and 82% said hate speech is an issue”. Among the public, is there significant cognitive dissonance on these issues?

Some other interesting facets:

The study found that ‘progressive activists’ were the only of the seven categorized political groups to express strong support for political correctness. The co-authors said the group makes up 8 percent of the U.S. population.

IOW, 8% of the general population (i.e., our SJWs) are a loud bunch who, increasingly, are getting their way when it comes to the formalization and bureaucratization of PC dogma.

Majorities of different demographic groups said political correctness is a problem. That viewpoint was shared by 79 percent of whites, 82 percent of Asians, 87 percent of Hispanics, 88 percent of American Indians and 75 percent of African Americans.

Wow. POCs think PC is a problem more than whites?! What that tell me: There are huge numbers of self-loathing whites racked with liberal white guilt.

The study found that the greatest predictors for whether a person believes political correctness is an issue is their education and income.

Eighty-three percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 a year said political correctness is a problem, compared with 73 percent of respondents who make more than $100,000.

Similarly, 87 percent of respondents who did not go to college said political correctness is an issue, while 66 percent of those with postgrad degrees shared that sentiment.

Stands to reason: the wealthier and more educated a liberal is, the more rigidly he believes in PC dogma.

Posted in Political Correctness | Comments Off on Study on PC Sentiments

2018 Nobel Prize in Economics

William Nordhaus and Paul Romer both won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics. In this very simplified summary of their respective areas of originality, which led to their respective wins, this article describes Romer’s work thus:

The mainstream economic analysis of the 1970s, when Romer was a graduate student and Nordhaus was an assistant professor, was mostly dedicated to what’s known as general equilibrium analysis: if consumers were to maximize their utilities, and producers were to maximize their profits, what would happen? Both Romer and Nordhaus provided key insights to thinking about what happens over time. That is, how our individual decisions today shape the outcomes for society as a whole in the future. They both framed their ideas in the then-nascent field of economic growth, and both changed it completely.

The concept of economic growth was jump-started by Robert Solow (who won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in 1987) with a model that connected the decision to save with the amount of capital available in the economy. It was mostly used as a device to connect the past and the future by obtaining constant growth rates that made sure the economy scaled with time.

But economists failed to address the underlying reasons for technological progress — it was just assumed to happen — and they took the fact that it had risen enormously since the industrial revolution for granted. There was little interest in why some countries grow faster than others: after all, it was assumed, everyone in the world was using similar technologies.

My Spidey senses tingled at that last paragraph. Will they? The suspense builds…

The piece continues:

Romer, it has been suggested, was inspired by a graph showing how economic growth has skyrocketed since the industrial revolution, and decided he wanted to get to the bottom of it.

In doing so, Romer changed the old approach to economic growth completely. Instead of technological growth simply happening — as if falling upon the economy from the sky — his doctoral thesis assumed that economic agents, such as people or businesses, can actively affect the speed of economic growth.

The rate of growth of GDP per person began to meaningfully depend upon the proportion of the labor force dedicated to developing new ideas. Obviously, more people producing ideas means fewer people producing goods in the short run. But you’d get a higher rate of growth in the long run due to more ideas leading to better productivity. Other economists followed this line of thinking (Robert Barro, Daron Acemoglu, Philippe Aghion — all prize candidates for a few years now), and the Journal of Economic Growth that covers these topics is now one of the most prestigious and most cited in economics.

Maybe I’m missing the plotline here, but this just seems to highlight to me how empirically wanting international macroeconomic theory is when attempting to make sense of something like how and why the industrial revolution in England occurred (vs the rest of the world), but pays zero attention to population genetics and race realism.

There is such opportunity for cross-fertilization between disciplines if and when The Cathedral ever relents on taboo subjects for discussion.

Posted in Economics | Comments Off on 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics

A Study in Contrasts: New School vs. Old School

First, watch Flake from the other day, looking down at his shoes while a hysterical SJW cries about “her body” and then a Wise Latina lectures him:

Then, as a pairing, watch Joe Manchin from earlier today, similarly deferential to another annoying SJW “survivor”:

And then, finally, compare both to the very different, old-school response of Orrin Hatch. Watching the Harpies scream when he tells them to “grow up” is pure joy:

Posted in Political Correctness | Comments Off on A Study in Contrasts: New School vs. Old School