The Calm of Real-World Liberals, and the One-Sidedness of Parental Signaling

This blog has been cold this weekend as the writer found himself blissfully distant from any sort of internet connection. We spent our weekend camping at a hippie music festival in eastern Missouri with lots of day hiking mixed in. A couple things to mention from that. First, Hawn State Park and Pickle Springs Conservation Area are well worth a visit if you ever find yourself in the St Francois Mountains. Second, the music festival, full of people who are probably leftists (if you asked them), was surprisingly devoid of politics. The most I saw was a single Bernie bumper sticker. I didn't encounter one iota of Trump bashing, which I pretty well expected. The closest I got into politics was with an older fellow decked out in tie-dye whom my girlfriend recognized as a regular from the now-defunct festival Schwagstock. (In fact he lived on the property.) We got into a conversation about how that land had been essentially stolen by the government (it is now Echo Bluff State Park). I decided to test the waters a bit and throw out the analogy with the Oregon standoff, where a group of armed right-wingers -- who were vilified by the media and liberals -- stood ground against the very same sort of shady theft of private land by the government. He understood the comparison and was in complete agreement with me. I don't have any sort of analysis to offer on all this, but I thought the observations were worth sharing. It does seem to me that leftists in the real-world may not be so consumed with the rabid anti-Trump hysteria that we see when we observe the media and even social media. This is a promising observation, of course, and would seem to be counter-evidence to my conviction that the country is headed fast to schism and civil war. Or perhaps the observation is moot. Missouri hippies tend to be people-of-the-woods types who aren't really comparable to the coastal liberals that dominate the left.

Today we picked our daughter up and we're all back home, which is really the happiest aspect of the whole long weekend, and that joy reminds me of the signaling I receive as a parent. Of all the advice I've received as a parent, the most common is that parents need to make sure they fully embrace the joys of parenting while their children are young. We are doting parents and we appreciate the advice and we think it is a worthwhile sentiment. But what I realize is that I very rarely encounter the counter-balancing message. The call to enjoy parenting is representative of the typical theme in modern America: embrace of pleasure. Make sure that you see parenting as pleasurable rather than stressful. Parenting is both pleasurable and stressful, and the advice is somewhat superficial. Does it really matter whether or not I enjoy parenthood? This is the sort of über individualism that permeates our society. I get very little signaling on what matters more: raising a good human. It seems to me that society should be much more concerned whether I raise children who will benefit society rather than whether or not I enjoy the process. I also find that society doesn't help me to counter my natural weakness as a parent. Our tendency (the mother more than me) is to want to indulge the child. To spoil her. We try not to, because of our own convictions. But society doesn't generally help us in that aspect. I find myself being careful not to appear too strict while in public. It seems that society should serve the opposite role. It should encourage proper and, at times, difficult parenting. This may seem like a silly rant, but I can't help but think that the signaling young parents receive might be the most significant observation one can make about a society.

The Expansion and Contraction of Equality

Mark Zuckerberg (do you ever dislike someone so much you cringe at having to type their name?) gave a stump speech at the Harvard commencement. There are many rumors he is toying with the notion of a presidential run in 2020. His approach is to mimic the strategy that made Bernie Sanders so successful: communism.

If we can develop a strong grassroots movement which says that every man, woman and child in this country is entitled to a minimum standard of living — is entitled to health care, is entitled to education, is entitled to housing — then we can succeed. [...] We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.

It's certainly socialism. Free healthcare, free education, free housing, free money. Communism is not a precise term. He's not advocating that the state seize the means of production, but advocating for a cradle-to-grave welfare state is about as far left as you can get before you hit undeniable communism. Is there an increment in between that I'm missing? Zuck (I can type it that way because it kind of sounds like yuck) has discovered the secret to political success: offer the people free shit. Or, more accurately, promise people to give them other people's shit.

But whatever, that's not the point of this post. That the left is openly advocating for communism or almost-communism is quite obvious and not a terribly interesting observation. [What is slightly more interesting is the established pattern that successful democracies end in a brief era of socialism followed by autocracy.] Zucker (rhymes with fucker) also had this to say on the subject of equality.

Every generation expands its definition of equality. Now it’s time for our generation to define a new social contract.

He corroborates the remarks I made in Equality and Other Founding Myths, where I described the same phenomenon. The expansion of equality from the Declaration of Independence has looked something like this.

1. Equality of non-divinity. No man has been granted a divine right to rule over others.
2. Equality under the law.
3. Equality of opportunity. The justification for public education, non-discrimination laws, workplace safety regulations, etc.
4. Equality of outcome. The justification for massive wealth redistribution schemes, affirmative actions laws, etc.
5. Equality of being. No human shall be permitted to be tangibly better than another in any regard.

We're so close to #4 you can almost taste it. We're partially there, of course, but the new hip trend is full-blown equality of outcome. Equality of being is the last remaining possible expansion of equality, save perhaps for human extinction. Because #4 is always disastrous, both theoretically disastrous and empirically disastrous, #5 is also hypothetical, because society will never be able to progress beyond #4. The big question is not what is the next expansion of equality (as Zuckerborg asks), but to what level of equality will we regress after socialism destroys our society?

European Terrorism: Relax Everyone, It's Homegrown

He's just like us

The media, predictable as ever, is running with headlines like this.

Note his image has been altered to make his skin appear lighter. He looks whiter than the blonde news anchor.

To see these kinds of headlines as predictable you have to understand two things about mainstream journalists. First, they are primarily concerned with propagating a certain political narrative. Second, they're mentally deficient and don't even know what a Muslim is. The narrative is dominated by two influences: global corporatism and liberal ideology. Liberal ideology is something of a misnomer because they don't truly have an ideology. What they have is a psychological disposition to reject their own nations, and everything falls out of that. Most of the time the liberals stance consists of identifying the "other" side and opposing whatever it is they support.

Donald Trump has made this a very simple task for them. He has come to personify everything they oppose. He is, in short, the boogeyman. Because he's been widely portrayed by the leftist media as a villain, he is assumed by all on the left to be an extreme far-right ideologue. I've been in discourse with one liberal friend who has decided that Trump is not really an ideologue and even tries to use that as a rhetorical attack against Trump and his supporters. At least he can partially see through the curtain: there's hope for him. Because Trump is framed as an extremist, whenever he takes a moderate position he forces his leftist foes to adopt an opposing position that is either extremist itself or contradicts other aspects of the liberal narrative.

When it comes to immigration Trump is not really an extremist. As far as I know his only strong stances are to end sham refugee programs and to enforce the laws on the books. Enforcing federal law is not an extremist stance. It is the primary duty of the president. Trump has not advocated for reducing legal immigration, which many of us want. Trump has not suggested that immigration should not alter the national demographics, which is the alt-right stance. How do I know Trump isn't an immigration hardliner? Because I am one. We support Trump because at least he fought the open-borders lunacy. He's still miles away from where we stand on the issue.

The media knows the big battle right now is with illegal immigration and refugees, so their headline is crafted to slant towards their position in that battle. No, we can't blame this one on refugees because he is second-generation. He was born and raised here just like you and loves soccer just like you. He's not a foreigner so your xenophobia is totally irrational. This would not have been prevented by ending refugee programs.

That he was second-generation is much, much worse. They're basically saying, even though they don't realize it, that the problem isn't with unvetted refugees, but with all Muslims. Right-leaning Europeans have explained the situation. The first wave of Muslim immigration to Europe (in modern times) was in the 1970s and 80s. These immigrants were heavily vetted and immigration was selective and many were, indeed, doctors and lawyers, as the left think of immigrants today. These immigrants were generally high IQ, conscientious, and grateful to their host nations. They were in smaller numbers and tended to disperse amongst the Europeans and to integrate with them. In short, they were a success story.

The second and third generations have been a different story. Not having been raised in the hardships of the third world, they don't share their parents' gratitude. Their IQs are closer to the racial mean than that of their parents. And as their numbers have grown, they've tended to isolate themselves into homogeneous neighborhoods and to identify by their race & religion. These are the ones becoming radicalized by Islam. The conclusion is becoming clear: we can't even allow well-vetted mass immigration. The left, in their zeal to disprove conservatives on refugee terrorism, are helping make the case against Muslim immigration altogether. Sure the bomber wasn't a refugee. But his parents were. Sure most of the European terrorists have not been refugees. That they're homegrown is a much deeper problem with much more sinister implications for how to deal with the problem. As far as I can tell, the only solutions are a strong heavy-handed police state or removal of Muslims from Europe. Both are problematic, to say the least.

Muh lone wolf

Also predictable has been the media's reflexive insistence that the attack was done by a lone wolf. Which is their roundabout way of saying Islam had nothing to do with this.

Isn't it weird how they always end up making multiple arrests in these lone wolf attacks?

The accused, shortly after working on his tan.

The Bloody Shovel blog suggests that the attacker was a dork who was probably resentful towards white girls and that's why he targeted this particular crowd. Surely all the Islamic terrorists have personal reasons for becoming radicalized.

Children targeted

As predicted, many of the victims were teenagers or even younger. 22 now dead, with 64 remaining in the hospital, 20 of whom are in critical condition. Many of them are young girls who will never become mothers. This is a war to displace Europeans, but only one side is fighting.

Why Muslims Keep Committing Terror Acts in Europe

It has puzzled me for some time why we keep seeing large Islamic terror attacks in Europe. Logically it doesn't make much sense. Assuming the goal is to displace the native population and eventually take the lands for themselves, making very loud noises is the worst strategy possible. The ideal strategy is to lay low, smile and pretend to assimilate (the Islamic act of taqiyya, which was suggested in the Quran) while making demands on society to bend towards the preferences of Islam. Once they have 50% of the population then they effectively own the country and can then become as violent as they wish. They don't even need that many, as the default behavior of r-selected liberals is treason and they will reliably vote in favor of invaders. If we assume the native population is made up of $\frac{1}{3}$ liberals, $\frac{1}{3}$ moderates, and $\frac{1}{3}$ conservatives, then the foreigners need to only make up 25% of the total population to dominate it politically. At that point, they can control immigration and work towards becoming the true majority of the country.

Las of immigrant domination 
To take over a democratic nation through immigration, the invaders must amass a voting population equal to $\frac{1}{3}$ of the native voting population to achieve political dominance.

But they aren't there yet. The last official numbers had some European countries approaching 10% Muslim. That was before Merkel's great gift of cultural enrichment, which brought millions of new Muslims in from all over the world, and they are still pouring in. Europe is bracing for a secondary wave, as the established "refugees" -- mostly young men -- begin importing their families as well. They may well be at more like 15% by now. But certainly still far short of 25%. They should consider that to be the minimum threshold for violence. At 25% violence can begin at a minimal level, throttling up as their percentage increase towards 50%, at which point they can be as repressive and genocidal as they wish. It would seem then that, with all this blatant terrorism, they are letting the cat out of the bag far too soon. Why?

The answer, which took me quite a while to comprehend, is very simple. It's so simple it's tautological. The reason they're engaging in terror is because Islam is a violent religion. Islam is founded on the principle that if you can give cover to men's more sinister urges by giving them holy sanction, and if you can also direct those urges in unison against a common enemy, then you wield enormous worldly power. Just look at what happened under Mohammed's direction. The Arab world exploded from a tribal backwater to the major world power in just decades. What Mohammed did was something akin to discovering how to release energy from the atom. The only other examples of a nation springing forth to prominence so abruptly that I can think of are the Macedonians and the Mongols. All three civilizations were united under great leaders, but Macedon and Mongolia crumbled within a couple generations after their leaders' deaths. Mohammed's leadership was codified into a theological-political machine and to this day it not only survives but is the fastest growing religion in the world.

Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote on the matter nearly 800 years ago.

He (Mohammed) did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth. On the contrary, Mohammed said that he was sent in the power of his arms – which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.

[Mohammed] seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teachings also contain precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men.

Islam allows its adherents to engage in carnal delights without shame. Plunder, rape, and torture of enemies are not only tolerated in Islam, they are encouraged. Some time ago there was an interview of an ISIS operative who explained that the soldiers did not enjoy the brutal tortures they inflicted on their enemies and apostates, but that it was necessary for their holy objective to build the Caliphate. He reasoned that by inflicting those tortures they would so weaken the resolve of their enemies that expansion of the Caliphate could continue with less overall violence. The logic is there, but don't believe for a second that most of these people are not very sadistic men enjoying their work. There's no real logical reason for them to keep all the Yazidi girls as sex slaves except that it is the reward to the men who fight for Islam.

It should be noted that this is nothing like Christianity. You might even call the two religions to be opposites. Liberals love bashing Christians and will routinely allege that it is no different from Islam. But their arguments invariably either reference the Old Testament or some later addition to the religion. It hardly matters what is stated in the Old Testament, which is the Hebrew Bible. While the Old Testament is included in the Christian Bible, the whole point of Christianity is the New Testament. Christianity without the New Testament is Judaism.

Christianity did not explode into the world under Jesus's leadership. It took centuries to rise to prominence and only after it was bent and molded in ways that allowed followers of the pacifist religion to serve in the military. Many criticize the Christianity of later centuries for its threats of eternal burning in hell. It does come close to the level of Islam in focusing on the physical, but that was never core to the religion and has largely disappeared. Similarly, even though Jesus was anti-materialism personified, a great many Christians today have fallen prey to American materialism and consumerism. But there is nothing in the religion that can really justify that. They are living counter to the religious teachings. In Christianity they are tolerated; in Islam they'd risk being killed as Apostates.

At any rate, Islam's inherent violence may actually be hindering its ability to conquer Europe. The Eastern world is known for being strategically cunning and patient, but Islam can no more extract masculine expansionism than Christianity might extract eternal salvation. It's the core of the religion. Much of this is caused by ISIS, who encourage and instruct all living in the Muslim diaspora to attack soft targets in western countries to inflict the greatest numbers of casualties. ISIS has also live-streamed to the world just how ugly the fight for the Caliphate really is. This is a questionable strategy. But it's not really a strategy all. They are merely attempting to follow the religious texts to the letter, to build the Caliphate as Mohammed did. If ISIS fails it will be more a failure of Islam than of their particular strategy or execution. Trump's policy regarding Islam is singularly focused on defeating ISIS. Likewise, it is not a strategy. It is merely responding to the most egregious threat facing humanity. But I have to question if it is the best long-term approach. The worst thing we can do is to make Islam just barely tolerable while their numbers in Europe ratchet upwards towards 25%.

Muslims Kill Liberals pt 5

There was a massive terror attack in Manchester England this evening at a concert. At the time of this writing, the toll is 20 dead and 50 injured. I'm not familiar with Ariana Grande or her music (Chicks on the Right were against her months ago) but, by the look of it, I imagine her concerts are attended mostly by teenagers. I suspect this story will become much more tragic as the details emerge. As bad as political terrorism is, intentionally targeting children is beyond an outrage. And for a country to allow wanton acts of violence against their children is the most disgraceful failure. If protecting children from outside violence is not the primary duty of society, then I don't know what is.

Even the musk ox understands the primary duty of society.

How the Russians respond when you fuck with their kids.

As the trend goes with Islamic terrorism, they're attacking liberals. I'd like to share a couple more images. First is Miss Grande's (that can't be her real name) response to the great tragedy. No, not the murder of children, but the election of Donald Trump. Second is a screenshot from her own website.

If you read here regularly then you're familiar with r/K political theory (if not visit the Anonymous Conservative blog link in the sidebar) and that the r-types are represented by rabbits. Here we have a young lady dressed as a sexy rabbit in front of a pink backdrop with a GIRL POWER! tour slogan. And one cannot overlook the phrase Dangerous Woman nor its accuracy. Once feminism takes power society becomes very dangerous indeed. What has struck me about the last few months & years is how much it all feels like an exhilarating but perhaps cliché novel script. Here we have the scantily clad diva pop star -- driven to tears at the election of the evil racist who wants to end unlimited immigration -- having her performance and her fan base blasted by the same cultural enrichment she apparently enjoys. Could there be a better metaphor for the dangers of a degenerate, effeminate, and irrational society? The left seem to have lost all sense of irony, which is sad. That's just no way to go through life.

Also, many on reddit are reporting that, instead of covering the terror attack, CNN chose to cover the elusive Trump-Russia connection. You really can't make this shit up. They briefly announced the attack and went back to Muh Russia conspiracy. For an hour! How can you talk about a politically motivated conspiracy theory without evidence or even a hypothesis for an hour? By sheer necessity, if you're CNN and the other option is covering radical Islamic terrorism. I almost respect their dedication and devil-may-care attitude.

UPDATE: one victim was sure to let us know beforehand that most victims of terror attacks are Muslim.

Unnamed and uncredible news sources, right in your living room

Mike Cernovich posted on Medium today that he doesn't think Trump is handling the media situation very well. The gist of the article is: why is Trump spending so much time defending from the constant mainstream hit pieces when he could be going on the attack himself. His supporters don't follow the mainstream news anyway, so why does he even bother with them?

He's not wrong that Trump should be attacking more and defending less. But the notion that he could change the media narrative experienced by the segment of the society that aren't rabid Trump-hating lefties is not practical, for a very specific reason. Perhaps you've figured it out already from the title of this post.

If Trump starts ignoring the New York Times entirely, what will change? Cernovich is probably right that most Trump supporters are not regular readers of the NYT. Trump's Twitter account has more direct reach, I'd imagine. But what happens when they run a story? Look at the recent one where allegedly Comey wrote a memo saying bad things about Trump. The source for that story is a guy with a Twitter history of calling Trump supporters racists and saying they should be deported. Not exactly a solid source. So why does the story get so much traction? Is it because so many people have NYT subscriptions? No. Is it because so many visit their website? No. Is it because so many share their stories on social media? That's definitely a factor. But the big reason, the real reason their stories have so much impact, is because the TV networks cover them.

It hardly matters whether or not Trump supporters read liberal newspapers. The TV tells people what the news is. The TV sets the agenda. And the TV thinks that the New York Times and Washington Post are premier credible news organizations. If it weren't for the TV the newspapers would have practically no impact at all. But their stories get covered by the TV. Millions of Americans see the news and that becomes the big issue that everyone is talking about. It gets spread on social media, the radio people then have to talk about it, and soon everyone is talking about what the NYT wrote because the TV made it a story. It's not as easy as just saying Trump should get off the defensive. The problem with Big Narrative is that it's beamed into the retinas of millions of brain-dead zombies all over the country. That's a much bigger problem.

On another note my favorite pro-Trump online hangount, r/the_donald, has gone dark for the evening in protest of the admins' recent purging of top mods there. I decided I'd make the risky venture to Reddit's hub of liberal insanity and check out r/politics. Here's what I found (red texts are my edits).

Of the top ten posts, eight are links to articles where the headline is information attributed to an unnamed source. This is evidence of just how detached they've become. While r/politics may be a special place, it is fairly reflective of the liberal mainstream narrative where a torrent of Trump scandals is dominating the news cycle and is all unverified. It could be made up for all we know. So far no major scandals have been verified with any evidence and several have been shown to be false. The tax return nonsense got blown up by Rachel Maddow. The PissGate thing was a farce. The Russian thing is clearly conspiracy theory but it hasn't blown up on them yet. So what we have is a pattern of the media being wrong about Trump scandals, and yet the left is going nuts over scandal allegations brought by liberal mainstream media outlets citing source that are either unnamed or without credibility. This is not healthy. This is madness. Utter madness.

I agree with Cernovich that there are serious questions about how well Trump is handling all this but they simply pale in comparison to mass hallucination from the voting public . You don't worry whether you paid the electric bill when your house is on fire. You deal with the big problems. Trump's competence might be a problem, but it's not the big problem. The big problem is that we live in a democracy where half the citizens are brainwashed by the TV.

Peak Delusion

The good and the bad news is that we seem to have hit peak insanity. Good because it can't get any worse (right?) and bad because it is really hard to retain much faith in humanity in the face of such widespread lunacy. The thing about peaks is we can't even really be sure we've hit the top. (Or maybe it's the bottom in this case.) I thought we had already hit peak lunacy after the PissGate / Russian dossier fiasco. I believed that is was so clearly insane that the rabid left would surely realize how carried away they have become. But that didn't happen. I guess it's a bit like supposing that this time the schizophreniac will surely realize the voices aren't real. They've basically memory-holed the entire incident. They can't update their worldview to accommodate the new information because they reject it like a failed organ transplant.

For the last couple days I've been engaged in a long -- and highly unproductive -- debate with a couple of left-wingers on facebook. The argument is in regards to someone who posted the recent Washington Post article about Trump revealing sensitive information to the Russian Foreign Minister. My major point has been that, because this is wholly unsubstantiated and refuted by every known involved party, that means we have to question the sole source of this information: the Washington Post. This isn't complicated logic. It's an understanding that all humans innately possess. If someone tells us something and we can't independently verify it, we must consider the integrity of the person giving the information. Naturally I try remind the other party of the false Trump stories with which the mainstream media has already been burned and humiliated, such as the dossier. Never do they respond directly to my mention of those past embarrassments. They either respond only to other points of the statement I made or indirectly as if I had made an entirely different argument altogether. The major evidence at hand -- that the media has provably lost credibility in the matter -- doesn't even seem to register at all.

If you read the Anonymous Conservative blog (linked in the bloglist on the sidebar) then you are familiar with Bob, the case study that led AnonCon to many of his viewpoints on the functionality of the amygdala as well as how it can malfunction. Bob suffered routine humiliation during childhood, and his amygdala became so sensitized, the pain pathways so reinforced, that his psyche seems to have responded by routing painful stimuli away from the pain pathways. AnonCon would experiment on Bob. He deduced something of a formula for what would trigger Bob's amygdala. When used to full effect, Bob would become completely overwhelmed, announce he felt ill, and have to isolate himself and lie down for a spell. When he returned he would be completely refreshed and seemingly incognizant of the interaction that had driven him over the edge. His brain seemed to be coping with the painful stimulus by rejecting it altogether.

This is all eerily similar to what I observe going on with hysterical leftists. All the information that should help them balance the reality of world events against their internal biases isn't there: they've rejected it. All that is left is bias. They respond irrationally when you remind them of the facts regarding the repeated failures of the mainstream liberal narrative because they truly are confused by what you are saying. They filter out the painful part and what is left doesn't make any sense.

The psychological disorder identified by AnonCon has now become a sociological malady which infects a disturbing portion of the voting public. Democracy and rampant hallucination cannot coexist. Not for a very long time, anyway. Reality always catches up in the end. So where does that put us in the context of the Russia investigation? Sociologically it's a disaster. Politically it might be a godsend for the embattled Trump presidency. As mentioned in yesterday's post, it is unlikely anything significant will come out against Trump's team but there are multiple opportunities for the liberal narrative to be routed or for their own scandals to re-emerge. Also, it lowers the threshold for conservatives to push for their own independent investigations. The threshold is either mass hysteria or none at all. Think of how thin the justification for investigation is. There is no evidence of collusion. They say we need to investigate to find the evidence. We need to investigate to find the evidence that might justify an investigation. But it's even worse than that. Not only is there no evidence of a crime, there is no hypothesis for a crime. I've not been able to get a single liberal to even try to explain what exactly the collusion would be. The scenario is something like this, where a policeman knocks on your door.

Police: We'd like to talk to you. You're under investigation for a murder.
You: Okay, do you have any reason to believe I might have committed the murder?
Police: No, but we need to investigate you to see if any evidence exists.
You: Okay, well whose murder are you investigating?
Police: We're not sure yet. We need to investigate to see who you might have murdered.

This is, of course, ludicrous, and is canonical state tyranny. There is no evidence of collusion. There is no hypothesis for collusion. But it will be investigated anyway. The really troublesome aspect of all this is that even if the investigation ends up as a complete routing of the left's accusations; it won't even faze most of them. They'll just move on, still enraged by Trump's Russia ties, still incognizant of the abundance of countering reality. I guess we can only hope that there are enough rational people in the middle that this will allow us to finally marginalize the hysterical left. If that isn't the case, and a majority of the population exhibits incurable delusion, then we are, generally speaking, in a whole lot of trouble, and the world's first modern experiment with democratic self-rule will have reached its conclusion.