Symbols Of The Times

A few symbols of modern life I encountered yesterday.

The Gameshow

My exposure to cable news programming is mostly limited to what I occasionally glimpse at the gym, where they have TVs playing the major 3 networks. Yesterday, all were focused entirely on the beginning of impeachment hearings being held by House Democrats. The coverage itself is the actual end goal of the hearings; not impeachment. It's all about keeping the people distracted and fixated on Orange Man Bad.

From a distance, the whole spectacle resembles a game show. The contestants are on because they want prizes and the publicity of being seen on TV, but the overall point of the show is to entertain and distract. The whole thing, with the DOJ and Russiagate first and now the Democrats and Ukrainegate is just a mutli-series gameshow extravaganza called Who Wants To Get Trump?

The proceedings are a celebration of a large portion of the country - and nearly the entire ruling class - embracing a ludicrous and easily refuted lie. It is not just wrong but evil - and worthy of our full disdain. Still, as a pro-Trump partisan, I have to think that the impeachment hearings only improve his re-election prospects. He desires to remain in the limelight, and the Democrats are doing all his marketing legwork for him. They are not acting strategically; they are treading water. The moment they don't have an enemy to rally around, they start lashing out at each other. Nancy Pelosi kept impeachment at arms length until AOC started calling her a racist. We are certainly in the equivalent of the late-Roman stage of Bread & Circuses.

A Luxury Sail Yacht

Greta Thunberg has vowed not to fly in airplanes because of their carbon footprint. She was stranded on the wrong side of the ocean after a climate conference was moved to Spain after protests erupted in Chile. Now, she will be making a 3-week trans-Atlantic journey aboard a 48-foot sailing yacht.

The boat has a carbon-neutral footprint as it's powered by solar panels and hydro-generators. By comparison, a roundtrip flight from New York to Madrid generates about 848 kg of CO2 emissions, according to an estimate by the German nonprofit Atmosfair.

The boat does not actually have a carbon-neutral footprint. Much like the wind generator and the electric vehicle, the sailing yacht actually causes higher carbon emissions than the system it replaces. Inconvenient technical details aside, you have to stand in awe of what is perhaps the greatest example of limousine liberalism that we've ever seen. "You plebes are destroying the world by flying cramped in coach. You need to be more like us and sail the seas in a private yacht."

Incredible gall. If you hate climate hysteria, realize that Greta is probably doing more to hurt her cause than anything else. As it turns out, this isn't her first chartered yacht trip, as she originally sailed to the US by yacht in August on the Malizia II.

The boat served as a transport vessel for Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who sailed across the North Atlantic Ocean from Plymouth to New York City in August 2019 without causing carbon dioxide emissions during the voyage. France 24 reported that several crew would fly to New York to take the yacht back to Europe. The trip was led by Boris Herrmann. Thunberg's crossing of the Atlantic started on 14 August 2019, and concluded on 28 August. The value of the boat has been estimated to be around £4 million.

This is hysterical. Even if the yacht was zero-emissions, or even lower-emissions, the trip to save Greta a trip across the puddle caused "several" additional flights to get crewmen to the boat. This follows the general pattern, that even if their claims were true, they'd still be failing horribly by their own standards. (As discussed in Hooks & Pivots, I suspect that is a feature, not a bug. The goal is for the lie to be clearly ridiculous. Why else would heavily converged Wikipedia include that aspect of the story?)

As is often the case, I actually support the lefty notion that we should restrict international travel to zero-carbon means. The world is getting too small, which is causing big problems. Europe is now being invaded by passenger plane. Young adults are obsessed with adding exotic travel photos to their Instagram feeds rather than starting families or really being of any use to anyone. I support Greta in her war against air travel, in her indirect coup against the Swedish state, and I recommend that we limit all international travel to hand-powered rickety row boats.

Gang Slang

Someone shared this video of a Chicago gang on a forum, indicating that he can't even tell what they're saying. As far as dialects go, I don't think it's particularly indecipherable - not much starker a contrast between American standard English and, say, the Irish or Australian versions of the language. Many commenters would say "they're so stupid they can't even speak English," but I'd be careful about making those assumptions. Gangs are true meritocracies, and the guys at the top have earned their spots one way or another.

Gangsta dialect has arisen not because they can't speak normal English, but because they don't want to. E Michael Jones has said in a number of interviews (such as this one) that whites should be careful about the growing white identitarianism because white is not a culture. He says that the primary shared aspect of a nation/culture is language, not ethnicity. "Do you speak white?" he quips.

Funny he should ask, because there are already groups in America who speak in ways to establish themselves as having a culture distinct from standard Anglo-American. It has largely been assumed that the information age will cause convergence to a common language or set of languages - which has been the trend - but it only applies so long as people want to share in the culture that speaks a particular language. Blacks actually do speak Black. Latinos are similar. It is assumed by many civic nationalists that the Latinos flooding our borders will eventually Americanize. They look at past immigrations like that of the Irish or Polish for comparison, but they are mistaken. The era of Anglo-American identity is gone, and the age of multiculturalism is here. The more Spanish speakers that arrive, the less likely they are to adopt English. In fact, I'd guess that instead of seeing Latino immigrants becoming increasingly Americanized, we're going to see the populations of Americanized (or partly Americanized) populations of Hispanics start to drift back towards their own ethnic cultures. When the bulk of the nonwhites are speaking their own languages and dialects of English to establish a nonwhite identity, then speaking standard American English will, in fact, amount to speaking white.