Caring isn't evil, per se. We did deliver some jabs in Cult of Caring, but then again the issue there was more with the pretend caring. But that's just the thing. A virtue can be misapplied for evil outcomes. Patience is the canonical virtue but, if you knew I was patiently awaiting the opportune moment to kill you and your family, you might take pause to reconsider the benefits of virtue. The more noble the virtue, the greater its potential for grievous abuse, because an agenda cloaked in virtue is easier to sell to others, and to ourselves. The American public won't go to war for imperialism, but will to "spread democracy."
Caring is a virtue. We care. No one would read or write blogs like this if they didn't care about passing on the civilization they inherited to their children. Frankly, there are other more fun or leisurely activities to engage in. Politics is hardly my primary hobby, and is frequently maddening. We engage out of concern of societal decay and a sense of duty. If we didn't care, we wouldn't bother.
So it's not caring that's the problem, but caring stupidly. Stupid is never a virtue, as much as pop culture tries to indoctrinate us to that end. Virtually everyone wants to appear to be caring, a subset of them actually do care, and an even smaller subset has the intellectual curiosity to see that whatever emotionally gratifying acts of caring they engage in actually effect the desired outcomes. There's a market for caring, and a lot of people are selling. Democrats effectively sell caring to their clientele, in exchange for political power [see Churchonomics]. And yet, the hallmark of a liberal program is that it has the opposite of its intended effect. They care so much for the poor that they create a poverty trap and government dependency. They care so much for college students that tuitions and administrative budgets have exploded at many times the inflation rate, and students matriculate as neofeudal debt slaves. They care so much for the non-home-owning minorities that they cause a housing market collapse that drives millions from their homes. These kinds of programs aren't sold to the American people by rational people on sound economic principles. They're sold by career politicians who sell a sense of caring in return for votes.
But politicians don't deserve all the credit. At the end of the day most are just high-scale prostitutes, willing to do whatever dirty deeds the public demands of them. The people are perfectly capable of engaging in their own destructive caring without the treachery of elected officials. Some recent figures on orphanages are alarming. Despite shrinking poverty worldwide, orphanages are expanding. In Haiti the numbers have grown at least 150% just in the six years since a major hurricane garnered public attention. Eighty percent of orphans have at least one living parent, and over 80% of orphanages are not officially registered. Children raised in orphanages it shouldn't need saying - are many many more times likely to become prostitutes or commit suicide. But here's the real kicker: the number of orphans grows in response to donations from charity. [That the emotionally driven throwing of money at problems worsens the original problem seems to be a hard & fast rule, rather than merely a rule of thumb.]
Throwing money at the orphan problem creates a demand for orphans. Shady charities set up shop to capture some of the inflow. If orphans can't be found, they can be made. Many of the children in third-world orphanages have effectively been sold into servitude by their parents, who get a kickback from the money that Judy from Vermont is sending down to help. Judy doesn't like to brag about the good work she's doing, but then again all her friends have heard about it several times now. Haiti in particular has had an explosion in orphan-related donations, not because the hurricane created a proportional number of orphans, but because the television coverage pulled on the sympathetic heart strings of caring but gullible Americans. Haiti is especially potent to prog-indoctrinated Americans because, in addition to being very poor, Haitians are very black, maximizing virtue-signaling potential.
A second phenomenon driving the growth of orphanages is voluntourism, which is just what is sounds like. Rather than a week on the beach, Judy flies to Santo Shitholé to volunteer at the orphanage, where she heaps on loads of caring and incidentally uploads some selfies to her social media. She makes a grand show to the children of her deep concern for them before flying back north, never to be seen again. The kids deal with this week in and week out. Fake orphans serving fake charities who sell status-signaling packages to supposed do-gooders. And, despite our political bent, let's not pretend that this is all the work of lefties. 90% percent of the donations come in from faith-based organizations. Although, to that end, I'm not sure how valid the Christian = conservative stereotype is. I know a lot of conservatives who don't attend church any more, I know a lot of liberals who do attend, and all the churches in my neighborhood are practically social justice operations. [Two are Unitarian, if that tells you anything. One of them rented space to a daycare, which is moving out. Rumor is that the church became a local hangout for trannies who were creeping out the parents.] Hell, even the Pope is a Communist.
The third driving force in all this is the sex trade. The other locale highlighted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation is Cambodia. A lot of people travel to southeast Asia as sex tourists. A lot of them shop for children. That's just how it is. Many charities are just fronts for sex trafficking. They double dip. They get pimp scratch and a check from Judy, who doesn't realize she's funding modern-day slavery and child prostitution. She just knows she got over four hundred likes on Facebook.
Monday, November 26, 2018
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Science Says
Here's a little doozy of an editorial from Nature.
We're accustomed to this kind of nonsense, but Nature is the most prestigious scientific journal, in a general sense, and has spawned a whole family of journals, with names like Nature Reviews Cancer. Perhaps they should review their own editorial page, which is cancer. Here is a current screenshot of just what I was able to fit in a browser window. Political agendas have been underlined in red.
America needs open borders, Palestine should receive more foreign aid, Brexit is scary, and Democrats gaining the US House is a "welcome change." It's all liberal politics. Nature is effectively a converged institution, meaning its primary purpose is as a political weapon, and second being whatever its original purpose was. However, it currently still maintains a dominant position in the realm of academic prestige. In this list of the top scientific journals in the world, 20 of the top 50 are variants of Nature. So their editorials and opinions are the opposite of obscure: they represent the de facto mainstream academic consensus.
When liberals proclaim that a genital-centric definition of gender "has no basis in science," they are celebrating the logical framework they've created in which all counterarguments are automatically invalid. That is because they have already decided that gender is a nonscientific construct. There seem to be about three different ways that gender might be described. One is biological, or genital-centric. That is the way science approaches all animals besides humans. We note that, while the number of human genders stands at 96 and counting, the number of chimpanzee genders - our closest extant relatives - remains steadfast at two. A second way would be to measure behavioral characteristics and use clustering algorithms to determine genders. This would help solve some open and valid gender questions, such as why soyboys like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg are biologically men but and talk and act like girls. The third way is that gender is whatever you want it to be. It is a social construct, and thus there is not objective input from science as to what gender is.
It is, of course, the third option that liberals have adopted. How do they defend their anti-scientific positions? With science! Take ownership of the top scientific journals, and you can decide what science is and isn't. We note here - often - that for liberals the term democracy just means the things that they like. Similarly, science just means the things they think are right, and won't allow you to question. So here they claim that science doesn't support a traditional interpretation of how gender should be defined. Of course it doesn't! They themselves define gender as a thing not rooted in science. So there is no way any gender theory could have a foundation in science. The obvious question, then, is what is the scientific foundation of genders like ambigender or otherkin? Or, how are there 96 valid genders and one of them is bi- (meaning two) sexual? The obvious answer is that there won't be an answer. Science is just a blunt political object for bludgeoning WrongThinkers, no longer a tool for sifting out objective truth.
My kindergartener has finally mastered Simon Says. The topmost liberal academics now operate at a similar intellectual level. Suggest that gender might have something to do with biology? Science didn't say that! You're out, you don't get to play the game any more.
We're accustomed to this kind of nonsense, but Nature is the most prestigious scientific journal, in a general sense, and has spawned a whole family of journals, with names like Nature Reviews Cancer. Perhaps they should review their own editorial page, which is cancer. Here is a current screenshot of just what I was able to fit in a browser window. Political agendas have been underlined in red.
America needs open borders, Palestine should receive more foreign aid, Brexit is scary, and Democrats gaining the US House is a "welcome change." It's all liberal politics. Nature is effectively a converged institution, meaning its primary purpose is as a political weapon, and second being whatever its original purpose was. However, it currently still maintains a dominant position in the realm of academic prestige. In this list of the top scientific journals in the world, 20 of the top 50 are variants of Nature. So their editorials and opinions are the opposite of obscure: they represent the de facto mainstream academic consensus.
When liberals proclaim that a genital-centric definition of gender "has no basis in science," they are celebrating the logical framework they've created in which all counterarguments are automatically invalid. That is because they have already decided that gender is a nonscientific construct. There seem to be about three different ways that gender might be described. One is biological, or genital-centric. That is the way science approaches all animals besides humans. We note that, while the number of human genders stands at 96 and counting, the number of chimpanzee genders - our closest extant relatives - remains steadfast at two. A second way would be to measure behavioral characteristics and use clustering algorithms to determine genders. This would help solve some open and valid gender questions, such as why soyboys like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg are biologically men but and talk and act like girls. The third way is that gender is whatever you want it to be. It is a social construct, and thus there is not objective input from science as to what gender is.
It is, of course, the third option that liberals have adopted. How do they defend their anti-scientific positions? With science! Take ownership of the top scientific journals, and you can decide what science is and isn't. We note here - often - that for liberals the term democracy just means the things that they like. Similarly, science just means the things they think are right, and won't allow you to question. So here they claim that science doesn't support a traditional interpretation of how gender should be defined. Of course it doesn't! They themselves define gender as a thing not rooted in science. So there is no way any gender theory could have a foundation in science. The obvious question, then, is what is the scientific foundation of genders like ambigender or otherkin? Or, how are there 96 valid genders and one of them is bi- (meaning two) sexual? The obvious answer is that there won't be an answer. Science is just a blunt political object for bludgeoning WrongThinkers, no longer a tool for sifting out objective truth.
My kindergartener has finally mastered Simon Says. The topmost liberal academics now operate at a similar intellectual level. Suggest that gender might have something to do with biology? Science didn't say that! You're out, you don't get to play the game any more.
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Churchonomics
How is it that we think we can get away with calling the left a religion - a somewhat derisive label - while at the same time not criticizing, say, Christians for being a religion? We don't even criticize Muslims for being a religion or, for that matter, even for being an ideology of expansive militant fundamentalism. One difference is a matter of self-awareness. If you ask a Christian or Muslim their religion, they will reliably respond with the appropriate denomination. Ask a liberal the same question, and they'll never respond that their religion is Progressivism. Another distinction may be that the major religions tend to believe in one or more humanlike spiritual beings. But then, it's not exactly a hard rule. Catholics believe in an ethereal Holy Spirit. Progressives believe in ethereal evil spirits like whiteness and systemic racism.
Even considered on a spiritual level, the case can certainly made that modern secular religions are still religions. Maybe it's a bit of a stretch, since there is no explicit assertion of the supernatural, but the dynamics remain the same. However, we tend to be talking on a social level, at which the two types of belief systems become indistinguishable. Virtue signaling, demands of piety, burning heretics, exercising demons...it's all there. We don't even comment on those traits too much, because they're common through all human cultures. What we comment on is the delusion. Liberals believe they are the vanguard against superstitious religions, rather than just another on the list. At this distance we have great clarity that the Communist Russia and China persecutions of organized religions were merely aimed at reducing their ideological competitors. For modern liberals, the dynamic is the same.
Considered economically, the secular religions remain indistinguishable from the others. A cynical take would be that the church redirects wealth from the congregation to itself, which is correct but misses too much. The church takes money from the congregation, but distributes much of it back into the community, aiding the needy and destitute. The economic model of the church is that of the charity, which creates a wealth flow from richer to poorer, and situates itself as a middleman. Whether the church operates as a good charity or a bad one is a a variable and subject to its own debate, but in either case it must maintain the perception that it is engaging in good works to keep its economic niche safe. The most corrupt charities aren't the ones who distribute the least. Those that distribute no funds lose the faith of their donors. The biggest scammers know that they must keep some funds flowing downstream to keep the gears turning.
It is easy to make a positive case for charities, which is that they help ease misery in a world that is unfair. The other side of the coin is that they are selling a pardon of guilt for their well-to-do donors. The charity arranges a transaction in which both parties find some benefit, and then take a cut of the action for themselves. They are businessman, is all. Religions then can be thought of as a highly sophisticated charities that actively instill the guilt/redemption dynamics that give it the best benefit. Look at how the Christian church evolved. The teachings of Jesus bestow a strong expectation of charitable acts and serving the poor, in opposition to the self-aggrandizing Jewish priestly class. The Church would go on to evolve concepts like Original Sin - bumping the guilt factor - and a Fire & Brimstone vision of Hell - adding a strong dose of fear to the mix. But even they would take it too far. A major gripe of the Lutheran mutineers was the the sale of Indulgences, which were seen as extortions to enrich the church rather than to serve the needy or the spiritual wellbeing of the congregation. The Church had overextended itself beyond the threshold of plausible deniability.
To survive, the Church must maintain its legitimacy before both segments of society. Of course it needs the affluent class to provide the economic lifeblood on which it depends, but it also must ensure that the needy also believe the Church to be a charity. If not, the wealthy will eventually get the message, and may even become embarrassed by their affiliation with the Church, which is equally devastating.
In that context, consider the statements made recently by a Democratic campaign staffer to an undercover Project Veritas investigator.
Liberal voters fall into one of three camps: needy recipient, guilty donor, or empowered middleman. If you wonder why people like Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton would support tax schemes that would greatly increase their own tax burdens, it is because they are so well-placed within the wealth transfers process that their wealth and power grow with the size of the government. Their shows of personal sacrifice are mere theater.
So if a charity is an economic entity that arbitrages a grievance/guilt disparity in the free market, and a religion is a charity that acts to exacerbate the disparity by driving grievance and/or guilt forces, the question is how can we destroy one that has become our enemy? Generally, it is neither possible nor desirable to purge charity from society. Grievance and guilt are normal sentiments of any society and healthy in moderation. It's normal to feel aggrieved for being denied what has been earned, or guilt for attaining what has not been earned. The notion that we could eradicate grievances from society reeks of social justice. It is utopianism. We must accept that no system will ever be perfect, that charity channels are necessary inefficiencies that arise in response to meritocratic gaps, and that religions will seek to multiply the effect of those forces.
The first step to countering a religion is to compete with its charitable underpinnings, because in a vacuum someone will fill the niche. Your charity must address the guilt/grievance market that actually exists. Again, we can't pretend we live in some social-justice utopia, and - as said here before - We Must Solve Our Problems of it's Just Going to be Communism. This doesn't mean adopting their mindset, or fighting fire with fire. It just means solving societal problem's and keeping the meritocratic gap small and safe from exploitation.
Second is to expose the religion's manipulations by telling the truth. There's no high bar here, no need to reach a million listeners or practice perfect logical deconstruction of their fallacies. Merely to exist and tell the truth is enough. If no one challenges a false religion, then it must be assumed to be legitimate. You can deny them that conclusion, and take great joy in possessing a mind that has not fallen to their influence, as few as the number of your brethren there might be.
The third step is just the preventative step, which is to not allow the meritocratic gap to grow very large in the first place. For a society, this means not falling prey to false schemes. For instance, socialism would seem to be a solution to the meritocratic gap: just use the government to balance the sheets. In reality, socialism always increases the meritocratic gap. Socialism is system that spots a meritocratic gap, offers a solution, which increases the gap, which gives ever more leverage to argue for socialism, and repeat until collapse. Vote for socialism, flee for capitalism, vote for socialism, etc. It is worth noting the minor concessions we might make with the left accumulate over time. They exacerbate the meritocratic errors that we should be working to reduce, giving more and move space for a false religion to grow and sing its siren's song. Quarry slabs are split from a single tiny crack, which is leveraged to tear the great monolith apart.
Even considered on a spiritual level, the case can certainly made that modern secular religions are still religions. Maybe it's a bit of a stretch, since there is no explicit assertion of the supernatural, but the dynamics remain the same. However, we tend to be talking on a social level, at which the two types of belief systems become indistinguishable. Virtue signaling, demands of piety, burning heretics, exercising demons...it's all there. We don't even comment on those traits too much, because they're common through all human cultures. What we comment on is the delusion. Liberals believe they are the vanguard against superstitious religions, rather than just another on the list. At this distance we have great clarity that the Communist Russia and China persecutions of organized religions were merely aimed at reducing their ideological competitors. For modern liberals, the dynamic is the same.
Considered economically, the secular religions remain indistinguishable from the others. A cynical take would be that the church redirects wealth from the congregation to itself, which is correct but misses too much. The church takes money from the congregation, but distributes much of it back into the community, aiding the needy and destitute. The economic model of the church is that of the charity, which creates a wealth flow from richer to poorer, and situates itself as a middleman. Whether the church operates as a good charity or a bad one is a a variable and subject to its own debate, but in either case it must maintain the perception that it is engaging in good works to keep its economic niche safe. The most corrupt charities aren't the ones who distribute the least. Those that distribute no funds lose the faith of their donors. The biggest scammers know that they must keep some funds flowing downstream to keep the gears turning.
It is easy to make a positive case for charities, which is that they help ease misery in a world that is unfair. The other side of the coin is that they are selling a pardon of guilt for their well-to-do donors. The charity arranges a transaction in which both parties find some benefit, and then take a cut of the action for themselves. They are businessman, is all. Religions then can be thought of as a highly sophisticated charities that actively instill the guilt/redemption dynamics that give it the best benefit. Look at how the Christian church evolved. The teachings of Jesus bestow a strong expectation of charitable acts and serving the poor, in opposition to the self-aggrandizing Jewish priestly class. The Church would go on to evolve concepts like Original Sin - bumping the guilt factor - and a Fire & Brimstone vision of Hell - adding a strong dose of fear to the mix. But even they would take it too far. A major gripe of the Lutheran mutineers was the the sale of Indulgences, which were seen as extortions to enrich the church rather than to serve the needy or the spiritual wellbeing of the congregation. The Church had overextended itself beyond the threshold of plausible deniability.
To survive, the Church must maintain its legitimacy before both segments of society. Of course it needs the affluent class to provide the economic lifeblood on which it depends, but it also must ensure that the needy also believe the Church to be a charity. If not, the wealthy will eventually get the message, and may even become embarrassed by their affiliation with the Church, which is equally devastating.
In that context, consider the statements made recently by a Democratic campaign staffer to an undercover Project Veritas investigator.
Remember our saying, modern day fairy tales start with ‘once I am elected.’The Democrats are actively engaged in creating the necessary environment for a religion to operate: a needy lower class and a guilty upper class. The poor in this country have it better than the poor have ever had it in the history of the world. They are far more likely to be overfed than malnourished, forcing us to redefine what is meant by poor. The neo-Church must convince them and a new underclass (minorities, LGBT, etc) that they are aggrieved, and "whip them into a frenzy" to give the orchestrated grievance public exposure. Then they must browbeat the whites into guilty servitude. Thus, the churchonomic cycle is completed. Both segments endorse (by vote) a Democrat government program the transfers wealth towards the bottom, with itself, of course, situated as the middleman with great legal powers and deep pockets.
Medicare for all, that will never happen.
Whip up” the poor into a “frenzy in order for them to vote.
You have to appeal to white guilt.
Liberal voters fall into one of three camps: needy recipient, guilty donor, or empowered middleman. If you wonder why people like Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton would support tax schemes that would greatly increase their own tax burdens, it is because they are so well-placed within the wealth transfers process that their wealth and power grow with the size of the government. Their shows of personal sacrifice are mere theater.
So if a charity is an economic entity that arbitrages a grievance/guilt disparity in the free market, and a religion is a charity that acts to exacerbate the disparity by driving grievance and/or guilt forces, the question is how can we destroy one that has become our enemy? Generally, it is neither possible nor desirable to purge charity from society. Grievance and guilt are normal sentiments of any society and healthy in moderation. It's normal to feel aggrieved for being denied what has been earned, or guilt for attaining what has not been earned. The notion that we could eradicate grievances from society reeks of social justice. It is utopianism. We must accept that no system will ever be perfect, that charity channels are necessary inefficiencies that arise in response to meritocratic gaps, and that religions will seek to multiply the effect of those forces.
The first step to countering a religion is to compete with its charitable underpinnings, because in a vacuum someone will fill the niche. Your charity must address the guilt/grievance market that actually exists. Again, we can't pretend we live in some social-justice utopia, and - as said here before - We Must Solve Our Problems of it's Just Going to be Communism. This doesn't mean adopting their mindset, or fighting fire with fire. It just means solving societal problem's and keeping the meritocratic gap small and safe from exploitation.
Second is to expose the religion's manipulations by telling the truth. There's no high bar here, no need to reach a million listeners or practice perfect logical deconstruction of their fallacies. Merely to exist and tell the truth is enough. If no one challenges a false religion, then it must be assumed to be legitimate. You can deny them that conclusion, and take great joy in possessing a mind that has not fallen to their influence, as few as the number of your brethren there might be.
The third step is just the preventative step, which is to not allow the meritocratic gap to grow very large in the first place. For a society, this means not falling prey to false schemes. For instance, socialism would seem to be a solution to the meritocratic gap: just use the government to balance the sheets. In reality, socialism always increases the meritocratic gap. Socialism is system that spots a meritocratic gap, offers a solution, which increases the gap, which gives ever more leverage to argue for socialism, and repeat until collapse. Vote for socialism, flee for capitalism, vote for socialism, etc. It is worth noting the minor concessions we might make with the left accumulate over time. They exacerbate the meritocratic errors that we should be working to reduce, giving more and move space for a false religion to grow and sing its siren's song. Quarry slabs are split from a single tiny crack, which is leveraged to tear the great monolith apart.
Friday, November 9, 2018
Election Recap
I've been under the weather this week, but was finally able to get a video shot recapping the midterms.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/skufhPFj7W0e/
There are a couple regular posts in the works which I hope to get out this weekend.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/skufhPFj7W0e/
There are a couple regular posts in the works which I hope to get out this weekend.
Sunday, November 4, 2018
Tradition For Thee
I watched a movie this weekend. Since I rarely watch movies, and I have a kindergartener, that means I watched a Disney movie, which is fine for our interests since an analysis on social signaling should be most concerned with the youth. This particular movie was Coco, which came out about this time last year. My daughter was familiar with it and wanted to watch it because they had started - but not finished - watching it in her Spanish class.
Coco is built up around the mythology of Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican version of Halloween. Miguel is a young boy who dreams only of being a musician, a profession that is shunned by all his family. He discovers, through an old photograph, that his great-great-grandfather is the folk legend Ernesto de la Cruz. Through some Disney magic that they don't really try to explain, Miguel is sucked into the underworld and must obtain the approval of his family to return to the land of the living. He soon finds out that his dead relatives are just as aggrieved of musicians as his living family, so he decides to seek out his estranged great-great-grandfather, the biggest pop sensation in the realm of the dead, to obtain his approval.
Eventually, the two are re-united and, indeed, seem to be of a kindred spirit. It is clear that Miguel is winning the approval he needs. He eventually asks his great-great-grandfather about the sacrifices he had to make as a musician, particularly regarding family. De la Cruz responds, "The world is my family." At that point I started to feel that Cold Anger bubbling up. Sweet Maria, I thought, I can't believe they're being so blatant with the programming. If you had to formulate a five-word motto for the left, you'd be hard-set to come up with anything more apt than the world is my family. Call it liberalism in a nutshell. And there was Disney promoting that message directly through the movie's great hero. Well, my cynicism was a bit impatient. As it turns out, de la Cruz is actually the movie's villain, a charlatan and scoundrel who murdered Miguel's real great-great-grandfather, Hector, to steal his songs. You'll have to pardon me for not seeing that twist coming. Who would have thought that, in 2017, Disney would make a movie where a character is practically given a name tag that reads modern liberal and is then revealed as a soulless vampire who's entire existence consists of achieving worldly power by sucking the lifeblood of others? The comparison isn't faulty, I just can't believe Disney would be the ones to make it.
In hindsight, though, it could have been predicted. Last year we analyzed another 2017 Disney film in r/K Themes in Moana. The major premise was that the tension between Moana and her father hinted at r/K conflicts within the tribe, but another was that the story was very moving because it was able to harness the power of ancestral ties, which is no longer permitted for Europeans. The same applies to Coco, which culminates in a moving scene where Hector is finally re-united with his daughter, Miguel's great-grandmother. Europeans aren't allowed such powerful themes, because our ancestors were all bigots and the sole source of evil to infect the world. You really have to compare these movies to Frozen, the major Disney flick of the last decade that gave a definitive Old Country vibe. [Brace yourself, Frozen 2 is due out about this time next year. Prediction: non-white human character(s). In the original, trolls were cast as a poor man's ethnic diversity, but I don't suspect that will fly in the current year plus one.] What exactly is the point of that movie? As best as I can tell, it's one big homage to malignant narcissism. Are Scandinavians proud of it? Which character would you want your child to emulate? There's Elsa, the queen of isolation for whom feeling anything and harming others are equivalent actions. Ana, the sweet but naive princess who foolishly sacrifices herself for someone who would never act in kind. Christoph, the competent but bumbling earthly man; masculine yet emasculated. You almost have to encourage your wee one to positively consider the role of Prince Hans - portrayed as the villain - who schemed to oust the whole lot of them, a would-be liberator of Arendelle.
In Frozen, there is no clear moral underpinning, like national tradition (Moana), or family lineage (Coco). Those movies both praise the transcendence of the individual to a cultural and genetic legacy. Rejecting national heritage - symbolized by mooring the canoes in a cave - is the path of decay, even doom. Replacing family life with a cosmopolitan the world is my family ethos is the domain of the wicked and rootless. Those are powerful and virtuous messages, just the kind we right-wing hate merchants like to see. Compare that to Elsa, who ran from her own feelings, underwent no sort of spiritual transformation, and was only saved by the actions of others. Both Coco and Moana took deep dives into spirituality. Dia de los Muertos is not as secularized as Halloween - and it is hard to fathom a more religious movie theme than reuniting with loved ones in the afterlife. Moana sailed with her ancestors under the guidance of the gods.
At this point, if you want your children to experience strong pro-social messages in their movies, then choose movies clearly set in a non-western society, because filmmakers who wish to incorporate themes of family, nation, and tradition must make them that way. And if you want your children to mimc characters who exhibit strong anti-social traits, show the movies with a clearly European setting, because studios aren't permitted to depict traditional western society as virtuous, transcendental, or spiritual. I suspect you might find movies that praise the west if they are produced by leftists in non-western countries. For instance, the liberals in Russia are generally pro-Western. The cultural rule of leftism remains unchanged: tradition for thee, none for me.
Coco is built up around the mythology of Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican version of Halloween. Miguel is a young boy who dreams only of being a musician, a profession that is shunned by all his family. He discovers, through an old photograph, that his great-great-grandfather is the folk legend Ernesto de la Cruz. Through some Disney magic that they don't really try to explain, Miguel is sucked into the underworld and must obtain the approval of his family to return to the land of the living. He soon finds out that his dead relatives are just as aggrieved of musicians as his living family, so he decides to seek out his estranged great-great-grandfather, the biggest pop sensation in the realm of the dead, to obtain his approval.
Eventually, the two are re-united and, indeed, seem to be of a kindred spirit. It is clear that Miguel is winning the approval he needs. He eventually asks his great-great-grandfather about the sacrifices he had to make as a musician, particularly regarding family. De la Cruz responds, "The world is my family." At that point I started to feel that Cold Anger bubbling up. Sweet Maria, I thought, I can't believe they're being so blatant with the programming. If you had to formulate a five-word motto for the left, you'd be hard-set to come up with anything more apt than the world is my family. Call it liberalism in a nutshell. And there was Disney promoting that message directly through the movie's great hero. Well, my cynicism was a bit impatient. As it turns out, de la Cruz is actually the movie's villain, a charlatan and scoundrel who murdered Miguel's real great-great-grandfather, Hector, to steal his songs. You'll have to pardon me for not seeing that twist coming. Who would have thought that, in 2017, Disney would make a movie where a character is practically given a name tag that reads modern liberal and is then revealed as a soulless vampire who's entire existence consists of achieving worldly power by sucking the lifeblood of others? The comparison isn't faulty, I just can't believe Disney would be the ones to make it.
In hindsight, though, it could have been predicted. Last year we analyzed another 2017 Disney film in r/K Themes in Moana. The major premise was that the tension between Moana and her father hinted at r/K conflicts within the tribe, but another was that the story was very moving because it was able to harness the power of ancestral ties, which is no longer permitted for Europeans. The same applies to Coco, which culminates in a moving scene where Hector is finally re-united with his daughter, Miguel's great-grandmother. Europeans aren't allowed such powerful themes, because our ancestors were all bigots and the sole source of evil to infect the world. You really have to compare these movies to Frozen, the major Disney flick of the last decade that gave a definitive Old Country vibe. [Brace yourself, Frozen 2 is due out about this time next year. Prediction: non-white human character(s). In the original, trolls were cast as a poor man's ethnic diversity, but I don't suspect that will fly in the current year plus one.] What exactly is the point of that movie? As best as I can tell, it's one big homage to malignant narcissism. Are Scandinavians proud of it? Which character would you want your child to emulate? There's Elsa, the queen of isolation for whom feeling anything and harming others are equivalent actions. Ana, the sweet but naive princess who foolishly sacrifices herself for someone who would never act in kind. Christoph, the competent but bumbling earthly man; masculine yet emasculated. You almost have to encourage your wee one to positively consider the role of Prince Hans - portrayed as the villain - who schemed to oust the whole lot of them, a would-be liberator of Arendelle.
In Frozen, there is no clear moral underpinning, like national tradition (Moana), or family lineage (Coco). Those movies both praise the transcendence of the individual to a cultural and genetic legacy. Rejecting national heritage - symbolized by mooring the canoes in a cave - is the path of decay, even doom. Replacing family life with a cosmopolitan the world is my family ethos is the domain of the wicked and rootless. Those are powerful and virtuous messages, just the kind we right-wing hate merchants like to see. Compare that to Elsa, who ran from her own feelings, underwent no sort of spiritual transformation, and was only saved by the actions of others. Both Coco and Moana took deep dives into spirituality. Dia de los Muertos is not as secularized as Halloween - and it is hard to fathom a more religious movie theme than reuniting with loved ones in the afterlife. Moana sailed with her ancestors under the guidance of the gods.
At this point, if you want your children to experience strong pro-social messages in their movies, then choose movies clearly set in a non-western society, because filmmakers who wish to incorporate themes of family, nation, and tradition must make them that way. And if you want your children to mimc characters who exhibit strong anti-social traits, show the movies with a clearly European setting, because studios aren't permitted to depict traditional western society as virtuous, transcendental, or spiritual. I suspect you might find movies that praise the west if they are produced by leftists in non-western countries. For instance, the liberals in Russia are generally pro-Western. The cultural rule of leftism remains unchanged: tradition for thee, none for me.
Thursday, November 1, 2018
Migrant Caravotes
Around these parts we're big fans of r/K theory, which I sometimes call the fundamental theory of politics. The reason I'm so won over is that I've never found any other explanation for the strange grouping of contradictions littered throughout leftist discourse (and perhaps the right, to some degree). Our normal go-to example would be that they are feminists who advocate mass immigration of 3rd world Sharia law proponents. The intersection of the two positions seems to be that Western women should reject even the slightest hint of Western male authority, but be indifferent towards - or even embrace - authority of Muslim men. Because they tend to reject that logical implication as valid, we confirm that the driving force of their stated positions must be psychologically lower than cognition.
The essence of the theory is that the K-selected engage in competition and the r-selected avoid it. Humans seem to be born with genetic dispositions towards one strategy, but are influenced by environmental cues. Resource-scarce environments favor K-selection, and resource-abundant environments favor r-selection. The r-selected are generally anxious that they are disadvantaged in times of open competition. They may respond by migrating elsewhere, acquiring new resources, influencing the society's institutions of competition, or overwhelming the K-selected through numbers. The latter may be achieved by allying with outsiders against their K-selected brethren. To the r-selected, invasion is often less feared than open competition for scarce resources with their own.
In modern democracy, the left is a political system that achieves power by expansion of the electorate. They promise to intervene in the competitive free market to acquire bribes for votes. Consider this Tweet today from a Democrat official.
The is no logical system or ideology where it is consistent to say that we need caravans of immigrants because they'll "do the work Americans won't do" - meaning they'll work for low pay - and simultaneously call for an end to their low pay. Again, the intersection of the two positions reveals their true - if somewhat subconscious - agenda. We need to import "Latinas" who will vote against the interests of white men, and we will reward them by redistributing the wealth in their favor. This is canonical r-selection in action. Note that an even larger gap could have been had by comparing to Asian or Jewish men, but those demographics are of the alliance, so they stuck with their preferred bogeymen of K-selection.
The essence of the theory is that the K-selected engage in competition and the r-selected avoid it. Humans seem to be born with genetic dispositions towards one strategy, but are influenced by environmental cues. Resource-scarce environments favor K-selection, and resource-abundant environments favor r-selection. The r-selected are generally anxious that they are disadvantaged in times of open competition. They may respond by migrating elsewhere, acquiring new resources, influencing the society's institutions of competition, or overwhelming the K-selected through numbers. The latter may be achieved by allying with outsiders against their K-selected brethren. To the r-selected, invasion is often less feared than open competition for scarce resources with their own.
In modern democracy, the left is a political system that achieves power by expansion of the electorate. They promise to intervene in the competitive free market to acquire bribes for votes. Consider this Tweet today from a Democrat official.
The is no logical system or ideology where it is consistent to say that we need caravans of immigrants because they'll "do the work Americans won't do" - meaning they'll work for low pay - and simultaneously call for an end to their low pay. Again, the intersection of the two positions reveals their true - if somewhat subconscious - agenda. We need to import "Latinas" who will vote against the interests of white men, and we will reward them by redistributing the wealth in their favor. This is canonical r-selection in action. Note that an even larger gap could have been had by comparing to Asian or Jewish men, but those demographics are of the alliance, so they stuck with their preferred bogeymen of K-selection.
Repeal Em' All
In response to the news that Trump may end "magic dirt" birthright citizenship, the left has resorted to their normal go-to justification for liberal policies: the 14th Amendment. It seems that the downsides of that amendment must surely outweigh the positives. We'll explore it as well as all the other amendments, and see that they demarcate a clear transition in both the scope and style of American government.
This one was done in video only.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)