NRx and AltRight

Although a few people have attempted to shoehorn me into the "Dark Enlightenment" or classify me as a "Neoreactionary", I've never considered myself part of NRx like I do the AltRight. That's mostly because I don't think NRx exists in the same material manner that the AltRight clearly does, and also because I find its preference for elevated Akademiesprache to be obscurantist faggotry, to put it in AltRight terms. And frankly, Butch Leghorn's attempt to delineate the essential differences between the two doesn't appear to be particularly meaningful, as he attempts to do so primarily on the basis of social class.

NRx is Middle Class

According to Curt’s table, NRx is middle class. Some might take offense and argue that it is upper-middle class. Sure, the leaders of NRx are likely upper-middle class, but the average NRxer is solidly middle class. Software engineering is a middle class profession. People who run teams of middle class professionals are upper-middle class (CTOs, CIOs, CEOs, Directors, etc). The middle class is not a salary range: it is an ability range. The middle class are those who have the ability to engage in the system of production. This is why the middle class seeks liberty: because given freedom to choose their means of production, they will choose and perform, because they can. As an aside, this is why working classes are less interested in liberty, because they simply can’t capitalize on it within the system of production to nearly the level of the middle class. And the lower and under classes have zero interest in liberty, because they are completely unable to capitalize within the system of production; they desire security, not liberty (and that’s what self-interested politicians trade them in return for votes).

We can argue about the parameters of classes, and we should. We should define them. We need to understand their roles and to define the behaviors that makes one a ‘good’ member of any class, because these behaviors and actors do exist in every class. We just need to incentivize them properly, which is why we must define and understand them.

The middle class has certain behaviors which make them middle class. They follow norms of propriety. I was right when I wrote that NRx is Right Brahmin Signalling. From the SJW encyclopedia: “Brahmin is a varna (caste) in Hinduism specialising as priests, teachers (acharya) and protectors of sacred learning across generations”. NRx is a group of teachers and priests, solidly middle class and exhibiting middle class mores and norms, such as the prohibition on ridicule, mockery, libel and slander.

AltRight is Working Class

The working classes do not share the middle class values and prohibitions on ridicule, mockery, libel and slander. I have seen very clearly the revulsion of NRx to the coarse meming of the AltRight. The NRx aspersions about ‘populism’ of the AltRight. This is simply the middle class reaction to working class norms.

The thing is: the middle class needs the working class. They will do the jobs that the middle class just won’t do. Say, for example, openly attack with vitriolic hostility the enemies of Western Civilization using Pepe and Le Happy Merchant memes. Or say, engage in ‘high energy’ physical activities which raise the cost of the status quo on the controlling elite. Once the cost of the status quo is high enough, then that controlling elite will accede to the demands of the Right. Who will formulate these demands? Ultimately, the aristocratic class will, with large input from the scholarly classes. Who will implement these demands at the local levels? Obviously, the people who organize all production, the middle class, under the direction of the upper middle class, with the ‘real’ work being done by the working classes at the direction of the middle class.

This strikes me as a failure to grasp the AltRight, much as various attempts by everyone from NPR to NRO have failed, albeit a considerably more friendly failure. Actually, to be fair, it's considerably better than NPR managed, as NPR somehow managed to get itself so confused that it declared Milo and Allum to be the joint leaders of the AltRight, which was certainly a surprise to both of them as well as everyone else.

While Butch is correct to observe that AltRight is not beholden to conventional middle class concerns about niceness and etiquette and public approval from the authorities and goodthinkers, he fails to observe that the AltRight is, despite its exuberant vulgarity, every bit as intellectually formidable as NRx. Indeed, even the mainstream media has felt the need to warn the unsuspecting and the uninformed not to underestimate us simply because we utilize frog memes and some of the most appallingly crude forms of rhetoric.

I have nothing against NRx, and indeed, consider them to be more or less allies, but the idea that we need them in order to formulate a moral license to defend our nations or Western civilization is simply not the case. Butch himself says that "NRx will become an integral part in granting this moral license or it will fade into irrelevancy", which is why I expect that the compatible elements of NRx will eventually be subsumed by the AltRight, while the incompatible elements - and I have no idea which elements are compatible and which are not - will become increasingly irrelevant over time.

The AltRight has high energy, it has enthusiasm, it has talent, it has brains, and most importantly, it has courage. It understands that it has very little, if anything, to lose, because if the West fails, the future is favelas as far as the eye can see. We have no need of delicate middle-class intellectuals to do our thinking for us because they daren't soil their uncalloused hands with the necessary dirty work.

To paraphrase #GamerGate, stop pontificating, shut up, and meme.

The "liberal" answer redux

David Brooks offers a prescription for rebuilding New Orleans in the New York Times:

If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as rundown and dysfunctional as before.

That's why the second rule of rebuilding should be: Culturally Integrate. Culturally Integrate. Culturally Integrate. The only chance we have to break the cycle of poverty is to integrate people who lack middle-class skills into neighborhoods with people who possess these skills and who insist on certain standards of behavior.

Can anyone spot the flaw in this argument? (Hint: it's the same flaw that caused busing to fail.) You see, functioning middle-class families don't like being used as the tools to fix the struggling lower-classes, to say nothing of the completely dysfunctional middle class.

White people don't move out of a neighborhood because they fear the nice, middle-class black couple who just moved in or because they are unregenerate racists who don't want to set eyes on a darkie from their front lawn, they move out because they know that less desirable elements are likely to begin knocking around the neighborhood in a relatively short period of time.

If the government imposes Mr. Brooks' cultural integration solution, the first thing you'll see is a rash of For Sale signs as the white middle class and the black middle class will race each other to escape the meltdown.

On a tangential note, Fred pointed out this week: "The melding of the races just hasn’t worked and, if examined honestly, shows few signs of working. Fifty years after the Brown decision, blacks remain unassimilated. They appear to be unassimilable. This, after endless programs, after the nation has turned itself on its head trying to encourage, promote, force, or imagine assimilation.... Neither race shows much inclination to associate with the other. Left to themselves, they quickly segregate, in housing, on campus, in night clubs. Only heavy federal pressure produces an appearance of togetherheid."

Nothing else has worked, so let's just try the same thing, shall we? As usual, the "liberal" solution requires modifying intransigent human behavior at gunpoint. The truly sad thing about this is that Mr. Brooks is supposed to be the house conservative.

The great financial rape

Tyler Durden shows how the banks used the housing bubble to rob the middle class of half their wealth:

The Great Middle Class between those in poverty and the top 20%--56 million households-- owns about $2.7 trillion in financial wealth, and the millions with mortgages own an additional $1 trillion in home equity. That comes to $3.7 trillion, or about 6.5% of the total household net worth.

Consumer durables--all the autos, washing machines, jet-skis, etc.--are worth about $2.2 trillion ($4.6 T = $2.4 T in consumer debt). Add the durables and the other wealth, and the Great Mortgaged Middle Class holds about 10% of the total household wealth ($5.9 trillion).

Before the housing bubble, households owed about $5 trillion in mortgages. The housing bubble came along, introducing the fantasy of home-as-ATM-cash-withdrawal-machine, and mortgages ballooned to over $10 trillion.

Back at the top of the bubble, the middle class had $6 trillion more assets on the books. Considering the Mortgaged Middle Class now owns about $6 trillion in net assets, then the bursting of the housing bubble caused their net worth to drop by 50%.

With regards to the importance of real estate and debt, note that household and nonprofit real estate is now worth $18.2 trillion despite its $6.8 trillion decline since 2006. This is non-trivial, given that real estate is still nearly twice the current $8.9 trillion of the M2 money supply. What I find particularly interesting is that mortgage debt and consumer credit are both nearly flat; this indicates that the Fed has successfully resisted the debt-deleveraging thus far while being unable to prop up the prices of certain asset classes.

This is further indication that what we are presently seeing in the equity and commodity markets is a speculative spike driven by liquidity rather than true monetary inflation. The silver market, in particular, has gone nearly vertical, which in most situations would indicate that there should be some further buying opportunities in the relatively near future. Alternatively, if the rising commodity prices are indicative of hyperinflation, we'll see real estate prices start rising soon and silver could go to 400.

I think, however, that we're more likely to see prices start collapsing when QE2 comes to an end. For all that the rising prices look superficially impressive, they're actually quite moderate in comparison with the $5 trillion in global liquidity pumping. No doubt there will be calls for QE3, but given the increasingly obvious failures of the first two quantitative easings and the attention that is being given to the debt, I doubt the Fed will be in much of a position to try it.

Anyhow, the two most interesting signals now appear to be housing prices and silver. Right now, these markets are moving in opposite directions and its as foolish to ignore one as the other. Sooner or later, one of them is going to reach an inflection point and reverse direction and that should provide us with a better idea of whether Federal Reserve pumping has been disguising the deflation or various factors unique to the housing market has been mitigating the effects of inflation in the real estate market.

The allure of gold

BC wonders: Why do you and so many others claim that we need to tie currency to some metal for value? Your argument seems to be that fiat currency has no basis in fact and has its value assigned arbitrarily. How is the value of the dollar any more arbitrary than the value of gold? Gold has value because people desire it. What happens if some day nobody wants gold? Also, there is a finite amount of gold in and on the earth. By enforcing some kind of precious metal currency standard, you would then be setting an upper limit on value, which capitalism doesn't recognize. Basically, a gold standard system is no more contrived than fiat currency backed up by nothing more than the promise of a government to not go out of business.

I don't see any time where people will take a mass of gold in payment for anything, so we would still have some form of paper currency, with some massive pile of metal somewhere in a secured building, where it isn't doing anything terribly productive at all. And that paper currency would have a value based upon the amount of this metal that the government owns, and if the government goes belly up (one of the arguments that seems to be used against fiat currency) they have all the gold, and the guns to defend it, so you're technically in the same place anyhow.

Unless you use the other argument against fiat currency, which is that tied to a standard, a government can't just print more money for some purpose, nefarious or otherwise. Of course, since the value of everything will then be a fixed quantity, there would no longer be any such thing as an upwardly mobile middle class either. I just don't see or understand any benefit to tying currency (which in itself is not an indicator of value, so much as an indicator of desire) to some metal that some people cherish and others just don't give a damn about.

The reason that I and many others champion a gold-based currency is that we value human freedom and oppose government tyranny. BC's first point is irrelevant, because there is no such thing as objective value. Value is subjective, and is independently determined, which is why the first thing a government does in establishing a paper currency is to ban all competitors. An objective value is forced upon many who would otherwise value it at zero. Here, we must accept the the worthless paper debt instruments as valid - you cannot refuse to accept a Federal Reserve Note for any debt, public or private. As to the mass of gold argument, that is silly, as there are already numerous private technological solutions such as e-gold; a government's refusal to pay its gold debts would likely destroy it as well as its economy. That's one reason why governments hated the gold standard in the first place.

However, BC does glimpse the real issue. The amount of gold increases very slowly, as opposed to the massive inflationary increases in the money supply which are revealed in the national debt and the M3 money supply - not the fraudulent CPI - and are inevitable in any paper money system. Paper money always fails and becomes worthless in the end, the only question is when the end will arrive. The important thing about gold - or an alternative metal - is that it prevents the steady increase in central government power created by this inevitable inflation. The notion that there would be no middle class without inflation is bizarre - the value point is irrelevant, as above - and the middle class itself developed prior to the establishment of the current fiat regime. In fact, the position of the middle class has been greatly weakened, as only the addition of a second income has allowed most middle class households to remain where they were fifty years ago. (There's a good study on this somewhere, I'll try to find it. Basically, the increase in taxes which stem from inflation eat up the entire second income so the disposable income has remained approximately the same. Of course, easy debt has allowed many to live beyond their means, but at a price.)

In short, gold is the ultimate weapon of financial freedom and an important foundation of economic and political freedom as well. The USA has profited greatly by suckering billions of dollars daily out of the poor fools buying our debt, but eventually foreigners will wake up to the fact that they've been robbed by the unconscionable counterfeiting. Some factors indicate that this is already beginning to happen. I suspect that we'll all own million-dollar homes before this comes to pass, though.

Margaret Thatcher was right

The politicians have run out of the middle class's money after spending it all on the bankers, the immigrants, and the poor... who, it occurs to me, can be described more succinctly as "the non-working class":

I watch countless news stories about people who are criminals (illegal aliens, felons) liars, cheats, or just stupid getting help with their mortgage loans because they “need it”. And people getting free medical services because they “need it”. And people declaring bankruptcy because it’s just too hard to pay the bills, they “need to”. All the while I see my government crushing people like me–expecting us to just keep doing, just keep paying, just keep being responsible in order to make up for all of those people who were not.

The American middle class is on the verge of collapse, at which point it will almost certainly revolt in some manner. It will likely be less spectacular than the burning buildings in Cairo, but there is no way that the confluence of collapsing bubbles in real estate and education are not going to have a significant effect on middle class behavior once it becomes sufficiently obvious to everyone how they have been played for suckers and financially raped by the banks with the full connivance of the state and federal governments. The middle class revolt is going to start with a refusal to continue paying its debts for mortgages, credit cards, and college degrees. As for where it's going to end, who can say?

Run away, run away

Morgan won't answer a simple question:

I'm hardly going to take the bait you've dangled and offer up any ten points to just please you and your Amen Chorus.

See Morgan write. See Morgan evade. The usual pattern. This is why she remains, intellectually speaking, a featherweight. If one wishes to be taken seriously, one cannot argue that I am attacking an extremist, straw version of an ideology by asserting that one's own version on the ideology is different and then refuse to define that version. To do as she has done is a tacit admission of either intellectual cowardice or intellectual incompetence. I assume the former, but the latter is always possible.

To summarize the discussion to date:

VOX: Feminism is bad.

MOTL: You can't say that because there are many different kinds of feminism. Never mind that there is a recognized canon which is taught in major universities across the country, my feminism is different.

VOX: Fine, so what is your feminism?

MOTL: I'm not telling!

I'm amazed that she doesn't find this even a little bit embarrassing. I'd abandon my column in a heartbeat if I was ever reduced to that sort of pathetic evasion. And before she attempts to sidetrack the issue by claiming that I am avoiding what wasn't even a direct question, I will point out that women have always worked. 29.6 percent of the workforce was female in 1950, prior to "liberation", the difference is that married women, especially married middle-class and upper-middle class white women, did not work.

Since the workforce is now 46.6 percent female - an additional 48 million women - this has suppressed wages to the point that Moglie's husband can no longer earn enough to provide her with the sort of insurance that would serve as an adequate safety net. The great irony of feminism is that through its advocacy of work for women, it has effectively removed the choice to stay at home for lower class, and to a certain extent, lower middle-class women.

This is not debatable, it is merely the operation of the iron law of supply and demand. And as Camille Paglia points out, the sole concern of feminist leaders from the very start has been the white, female upper-middle class.

As for Morgan's bizarre attempt to muddy the issue with Christian denominations, I merely ask this: what is the feminist analogy to the belief in the birth, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ - not to mention the Bible - in which the failure to the orthodox view makes it clear to all that the self-professed Christian is not a Christian at all?

It is a simple matter to define Christianity as well as the differences between Southern Baptists, Catholics and Methodists. Given that feminism has been around for significantly less time and that many of its leaders are still alive, it should be even easier to provide equally clear definitions for feminism and its various strains.

The end of trend

Nicholas Kristof is correct to say that men should not be written off, but for the wrong reasons:

With women making far-reaching gains, there’s a larger question. Are women simply better-suited than men to today’s jobs? The Atlantic raised this issue provocatively in this month’s issue with a cover story by Hanna Rosin bluntly entitled, “The End of Men.”

“What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” Ms. Rosin asked. She adds: “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today — social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not predominately male. In fact, the opposite may be true.”

It’s a fair question, and others also have been wondering aloud if a new age of femininity is dawning. After all, Ms. Rosin notes that Americans who use high-tech biology to try to pick a baby’s sex seek a girl more often than a boy. And women now make up 51 percent of professional and managerial positions in America, up from 26 percent in 1980.

This demonstrates the problem with the linear thinker. Those who see the transformation of the workforce and academia into female-majority populations are assuming that the present post-industrial system is sustainable. But it isn't. It's true that women will continue to collect more and more worthless degrees than men and fill more and more needless paper-shifting jobs than men right up until the point at which a debt-laden society can no longer afford to pay for people to learn nothing and do nothing.

A private sector job which exists solely to comply with government-dictated paperwork is every bit as government-manufactured and unproductive as a public sector job. And that is precisely the type of job which is going to disappear entirely once the debt edifice collapses and the extent of the dollar-denominated imaginary economy is revealed. Just as stripping out the debt-funded component of GDP reveals that there has been no actual economic growth for decades, stripping out the paperwork jobs will demonstrate that the real labor force is still roughly 2/3rd male, just as it was in 1950.

Note for the historically illiterate. Women have ALWAYS worked. One-third of the labor force has ALWAYS been female. A more accurate description of "women in the workplace" is "middle-class mothers in the workplace". The idea of the American stay-at-home mother was always a fundamentally middle-class one, and now, thanks to the increase in the labor supply combined with increasing taxes, most middle-class couples require two incomes in order to stay middle-class.

And the idea that the few Americans (300 million) who use sex selection technology to choose girls are going to counterbalance the millions of Chinese and Indians (2.3 billion) who use it to select boys is obviously absurd.

The non-linear thinker is forced to contemplate very different questions. Rather than occupy himself with asking if men are at an end or will be employable in a world of government-dictated make-work, he is forced to ask when the inevitable employment and academic collapse will take place in America and when the war between China and India, never officially ended, will resume. In other words, is it the end of men or the end of a societal trend?

Economics and the fate of feminism

What we have here is a failure to connect the obvious dots:

 Over the next 30 years this emphasis on equalizing gender roles at home as well as at work produced a revolutionary transformation in Americans’ attitudes. It was not instant. As late as 1977, two-thirds of Americans believed that it was “much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” By 1994, two-thirds of Americans rejected this notion.

But during the second half of the 1990s and first few years of the 2000s, the equality revolution seemed to stall. Between 1994 and 2004, the percentage of Americans preferring the male breadwinner/female homemaker family model actually rose to 40 percent from 34 percent. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of full-time working mothers who said they would prefer to work part time increased to 60 percent from 48 percent. In 1997, a quarter of stay-at-home mothers said full-time work would be ideal. By 2007, only 16 percent of stay-at-home mothers wanted to work full time. 

Women’s labor-force participation in the United States also leveled off in the second half of the 1990s, in contrast to its continued increase in most other countries. Gender desegregation of college majors and occupations slowed. And although single mothers continued to increase their hours of paid labor, there was a significant jump in the percentage of married women, especially married women with infants, who left the labor force. By 2004, a smaller percentage of married women with children under 3 were in the labor force than in 1993.... 

For more than two decades the demands and hours of work have been intensifying. Yet progress in adopting family-friendly work practices and social policies has proceeded at a glacial pace.

Today the main barriers to further progress toward gender equity no longer lie in people’s personal attitudes and relationships. Instead, structural impediments prevent people from acting on their egalitarian values, forcing men and women into personal accommodations and rationalizations that do not reflect their preferences. The gender revolution is not in a stall. It has hit a wall.

In today’s political climate, it’s startling to remember that 80 years ago, in 1933, the Senate overwhelmingly voted to establish a 30-hour workweek. The bill failed in the House, but five years later the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 gave Americans a statutory 40-hour workweek. By the 1960s, American workers spent less time on the job than their counterparts in Europe and Japan.

Between 1990 and 2000, however, average annual work hours for employed Americans increased. By 2000, the United States had outstripped Japan — the former leader of the work pack — in the hours devoted to paid work. Today, almost 40 percent of men in professional jobs work 50 or more hours a week, as do almost a quarter of men in middle-income occupations. Individuals in lower-income and less-skilled jobs work fewer hours, but they are more likely to experience frequent changes in shifts, mandatory overtime on short notice, and nonstandard hours. And many low-income workers are forced to work two jobs to get by. When we look at dual-earner couples, the workload becomes even more daunting. As of 2000, the average dual-earner couple worked a combined 82 hours a week, while almost 15 percent of married couples had a joint workweek of 100 hours or more.

The reason "gender equality" stalled is because it is an economic impossibility.  The reason the average hours worked is so much higher than in the more "sexist" 1960s is because primarily there are more women in the workforce.  While immigration too plays a role here, the only significant effect native women have when they enter the labor force in greater numbers is to depress the price of labor.  Unlike immigrants, they don't bring in new consumption to help mitigate their wage-depressing effects; the reason real hourly wages peaked in 1973 and have been falling ever since is because that was the year that the number of men younger than 20 and older than 65 leaving the labor force was surpassed by educated, middle-class women entering it.

One-third of working class women have always worked.  The change brought by feminism is that now middle class and upper middle class married women work as well.  And the more women that work, the more women have to work and the less time women who don't work will have with their husbands who support them, because an INCREASE in the SUPPLY of labor necessitates a DECREASE in the PRICE of labor, demand remaining constant.

And to make matters worse, demand does not remain constant, but actually declines, because a woman who works is statistically much less likely to eventually become a wife and mother, and even when she does, she becomes one several years later and has fewer children.  This means that feminism is a structural economic failure as it creates a downward-spiraling vicious circle of three easily identifiable revolutions:

1. The increase in the supply of labor causes wages to go down.  This is indisputable in either logical or empirical terms.
2. Female hypergamy, female independence, and opportunity cost reduces the marriage rate and the average birth rate, while increased male work hours and work-related romantic opportunities increases the divorce rate.  These connections are all logically sound and readily observable.
3. The reduced birth rate has a negative effect on consumption, and therefore the demand for labor, 20 years before the consequent negative effects on the supply of labor can help balance it out, putting further negative pressure on wage rates.  This is also indisputable, both logically and empirically.

While this didn't have to be the case, feminism has also played a role in the debt crisis of the United States, as the Social Security system, Medicare, and Medicaid were set up structurally to be dependent upon the male breadwinner/female homemaker family model and a birthrate higher than the replacement level.  Funding for those systems was doomed post-1973, necessitating either their complete restructuring or funding them through debt; obviously the latter path was the one taken, much to the detriment of those who are now on the hook for it.

The complete systematic failure of feminism as well as every society which incorporates the concept of sexual equality is no less predictable than the complete systematic failure of socialism.  Ludwig von Mises correctly predicted the failure of socialist societies in his "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth", published only three years after the October Revolution, on the basis of socialism's intrinsic inability to establish a pricing mechanism.

The economic flaws of feminism are no less obvious, no less fundamental and no more avoidable than the economic flaws of socialism.  Feminism's structural inability to sustain wage rates and birth rates spells the inevitable doom of every feminist society, as surely as the inability to calculate prices spells the doom of every socialist society.  "Gender equality" hasn't stalled because it isn't being sufficiently enforced by the government, it has stalled because it is in the process of collapsing along with the society it has infested.

The impossibility of sexual equalitarian societies has nothing to do with fairness, traditional religious beliefs, human rights, or how intensely one feels that women are equal to men in every way.  It is a straightforward and unavoidable consequence of the law of supply and demand, and as such, is far more reliable than the Malthusian equation of the geometric increase of population outstripping the arithmetic increase of the food supply.

She did the math

Nice to see that women are capable of grasping that feminism is bad for more women than it benefits economically:

Author Fay Weldon has risked infuriating fellow feminists by claiming their cause left two-thirds of British women worse off. In an interview in The Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine today, Weldon, 85, says the feminist revolution had adverse implications by ‘halving the male wage, so it no longer supported a family.’ That meant some women had to get jobs, even if they would rather have been at home with their children. ‘Women had to work to support the family. So for two in three women, it really was a problem.’

I first pointed this out back in 2007:

Anyhow, it's interesting that people are finally beginning to pay some attention to the basic economics of the issue. I expect more than a few people on both sides of the feminist aisle are going to be very upset when the period from 1970 to the present is studied.

Feminists will be upset because it will make feminism look like a disaster for women. Working, married non-feminists will be upset because they'll realize that they are essentially working for nothing. Men won't like it either, since they'll realize that they're getting paid less for the same work that their fathers did.

It's interesting how everyone understands that immigrants cause labor prices to fall, but most people don't grasp that a substantial increase in domestic work force participation, by any group, has the same effect.

For the benefit of those who needed me to type more slowly, I spelled it out in more detail in 2013:

While immigration too plays a role here, the only significant effect native women have when they enter the labor force in greater numbers is to depress the price of labor.  Unlike immigrants, they don't bring in new consumption to help mitigate their wage-depressing effects; the reason real hourly wages peaked in 1973 and have been falling ever since is because that was the year that the number of men younger than 20 and older than 65 leaving the labor force was surpassed by educated, middle-class women entering it.

One-third of working class women have always worked.  The change brought by feminism is that now middle class and upper middle class married women work as well.  And the more women that work, the more women have to work and the less time women who don't work will have with their husbands who support them, because an INCREASE in the SUPPLY of labor necessitates a DECREASE in the PRICE of labor, demand remaining constant.

And to make matters worse, demand does not remain constant, but actually declines, because a woman who works is statistically much less likely to eventually become a wife and mother, and even when she does, she becomes one several years later and has fewer children.  This means that feminism is a structural economic failure as it creates a downward-spiraling vicious circle of three easily identifiable revolutions:

1. The increase in the supply of labor causes wages to go down.  This is indisputable in either logical or empirical terms.
2. Female hypergamy, female independence, and opportunity cost reduces the marriage rate and the average birth rate, while increased male work hours and work-related romantic opportunities increases the divorce rate.  These connections are all logically sound and readily observable.
3. The reduced birth rate has a negative effect on consumption, and therefore the demand for labor, 20 years before the consequent negative effects on the supply of labor can help balance it out, putting further negative pressure on wage rates.  This is also indisputable, both logically and empirically. 

They can't steal if you don't work

Gonzalo Lira of Zero Hedge is correct. Once the middle class realizes that they are being scammed and participation in the scam is no longer worth it, what is presently and fraudulently passing for "America" is doomed.

Just like the poker player who’s been fleeced by all the other players, and gets one mean attitude once he finally wakes up to the con? I’m betting that more and more of the solid American middle-class will begin saying what Brian and Ilsa said: Fuckit.

Fuck the rules. Fuck playing the game the banksters want you to play. Fuck being the good citizen. Fuck filling out every form, fuck paying every tax. Fuck the government, fuck the banks who own them. Fuck the free-loaders, living rent-free while we pay. Fuck the legal process, a game which only works if you’ve got the money to pay for the parasite lawyers. Fuck being a chump. Fuck being a stooge. Fuck trying to do the right thing—what good does that get you? What good is coming your way?

Fuckit.

When the backbone of a country starts thinking that laws and rules are not worth following, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to anarchy.

TV has given us the illusion that anarchy is people rioting in the streets, smashing car windows and looting every store in sight. But there’s also the polite, quiet, far deadlier anarchy of the core citizenry—the upright citizenry—throwing in the towel and deciding it’s just not worth it anymore.

If a big enough proportion of the populace—not even a majority, just a largish chunk—decides that it’s just not worth following the rules anymore, then that society’s days are numbered: Not even a police-state with an armed Marine at every corner with Shoot-to-Kill orders can stop such middle-class anarchy.

It really isn't even debatable anymore. Does anyone seriously believe that the bankers who are now known to have stolen literal billions from the government and from the public alike are going to spend any time in prison, let alone 12-15 years like my father? There is no rule of law, there is only the massive and ongoing monetary rape of the middle and lower classes by the financial-government complex. The latter have been gambling, and losing, at the former's expense for decades; they have set up an indefensible system where it is heads they win, tails everyone else loses.

But more and more Americans are finally realizing that they can't steal what you don't earn. They may not have minded being milked, at least not within reason, but they also understand that there's no benefit in being turned into hamburger.

St. George shrugged

I was amused to hear about these two English gentlemen, who simply walked away and left a strong independent woman to fend for herself on the London Underground.

Tamara Cincik, founder and CEO of Fashion Roundtable, attacked on busy Tube. Mother-of-one kicked and threatened by an 'unwell' 6ft man as passengers fled. She has slammed two 'white middle class men' who left her to defend herself.

The fashion CEO is keen to stress she does not blame this man, who she believes needs medical help but said the incident was 'terrifying'. Instead she is upset that two men she describes as 'white and middle class' chose not to help and moved to another carriage. 

Ms Cincik said: 'Children were crying and women were crying, it was awful. I wasn't crying I was in shock. I remain more angry with those white middle class men who left me to it. As fathers, husbands and sons they should be ashamed of themselves.'

Why should they be ashamed? They did nothing of which to be ashamed. She isn't their daughter, wife, or mother. They had no obligation to risk being injured or having the polish on their shoes scuffed for her. She's lucky that they didn't simply sit there and laugh at her, as the younger generation of white men are increasingly inclined to do. Women have spent the last fifty years telling white men that everything is their fault and that they are both unneeded and unwanted. Women broke the socio-sexual contract, which is why many white men quite reasonably feel absolutely no duty to look out for women, children, or anyone else for whom they are not directly responsible.

Of course, African and Asian men never have. Isn't it wonderful that white women have successfully convinced white men to adopt non-European cultural values! Diversity truly is a wonder.

Given her subsequent reaction, those two men were absolutely right to leave this woman to take her beating. She's a typical left-wing idiot, blaming the men who had no obligation to her but letting the man who actually attacked her off the hook. Had they done anything, she probably would have screamed at them for hurting the poor, harmless crazy man.

Melinda Gates is another white woman for whom no self-respecting white man will ever lift a finger.

I am specifically looking at funds who over-index on women-led and minority-led businesses. I’m asking a lot of business questions about how they will go about their funding, how they will over-index on women’s businesses, and how they will hold themselves accountable for a great return.

Some of these big firms often believe in the white guy in a hoodie disrupting a whole industry. So we’re going to disrupt it by making sure we’re indexing for women and minorities because they’ve got great ideas.

Many of them think if they have one female at the table, they’ve done their job. Another big one is when they say that they have trouble finding women. Those are just excuses. They don’t know what investing in these areas looks like until they get several women who are partners in their firm.

Meanwhile, her husband's former company is now an Indian concern, thanks in part to "over-indexing", which is the approved new pseudonym for "affirmative action".

The #MilRight is inevitable

Even Rod Dreher, among the cuckiest of cuckservatives, sees that civilization's hope rests upon the Alt Right.

Middle-class male culture, at least white male culture, doesn’t know how to nurture a healthy masculinity. The middle-class white American church certainly doesn’t. Eventually, the provocations of Social Justice Warriors, especially when they are race-based, is going to empower the militant whites, especially those drawn to pagan masculinity, and they are going to do what the rest of us would not do: Fight. This, because the best — that is, those who want peace, civility, and tolerance — lack all conviction to defend the conditions under which we can have those things against their enemies.

Trump is a vulgar, crass, alpha-male brute. But he doesn’t care what SJWs and liberals say about him. He fights, and sometimes fights as dirty as they do. That’s not nothing. White liberal middle-class society and many bourgeois conservatives have demonized within themselves, collectively and individually, the instinct that would have given them the strength to fight civilization’s enemies on the Left and on the Right.

Forget the cucks, forget the Churchians, forget the equalitarians, forget the Constitutionalists, forget the conservatives, forget the nice people, and forget the tolerant. They are worse than useless; they are the Sarumans who counsel submission and surrender due to their lack of courage and their fear of being called bad things.

The answer to this racist SJW garbage is not to embrace white supremacy! But without a forceful, effective, unambivalent response to the unhinged militant left, sooner or later the forces of white supremacy are going to organize the dispossessed, demoralized, chaotic white rabble, and the SJWs, as well as the Washington elites, aren’t going to know what hit them. God knows I’m not saying I want this to happen, but I think it probably will happen if we continue on this current trajectory. Slouching rough beasts and all that. It’s Weimar America.

The answer isn't white supremacy because white supremacy simply isn't true. Whites are not superior, but whites are the only tribe willing and able to maintain Western civilization because they are the only tribe that truly values it. The answer for those who support Western civilization, regardless of sex, color, or religion, is to embrace white tribalism, white separatism, and especially white Christian masculine rule.

Detroit is what happens when white rule is abandoned. The migrant invasion of Europe is what happens when masculine rule is abandoned. And the EU is what happens when Christian rule is abandoned.

The other tribes have been playing "who, whom" for decades. It is time for whites to understand that the rules have changed and begin playing accordingly.

But don't get too carried away by Dreher's post. He's still a cuck. "I would much rather my kids marry Ethiopians who were believing Orthodox Christians than marry fellow white people who aren’t. I really mean that."

I believe he does. And that's why he is still a dyscivilizationist.

Mailvox: the power of freedom

A reader writes about a recent life-changing experience:

Yesterday, me and my wife took the second step in buying a gun -- attending a four-hour Basic Firearms Safety Course .  The first step is finding out whether your town's police authority will give out gun licenses.  Since [State] is a "shall issue" state, forget about getting a licence in [Big City] or another large city, forget it unless you're well-connected.  The instructor said that this de facto ban was illegal, but what are you going to do?

All 40 seats were full.  This facility hold this class every day.   The instructor said that ever since the Paris attacks, they haven't been able to keep up with the demand and would hold a second class if they had the range time.  The demographics were quite telling.  There was a 50/50 gender mix with six other couples.  There was one 18 year old guy and only one other guy under forty.  The rest of us were middle-aged and middle-class.  And... we were all white.

I wasn't alone in having trouble practicing loading/unloading the full-sized guns.  My hands weren't big enough, and I ended up waving the barrel around too much while trying to release the magazine clip.  Oops.  And my index finger ended up sliding down from alongside the barrel into the the trigger guard.  Double oops.  And I pointed the revolver up in the air when unloading it.  Nope nope nope.  Beginners mistakes; easily identified and fixable with training.

On the range, I got a very good cluster.  The instructor was astonished that I'd never picked up a handgun before, and my last time firing a gun was a 22 for the Boy Scout merit badge.  

I really enjoyed firing.  I lined up the sights, felt an adrenal rush, stopped thinking, slowly squeezed, and watched bullets hit the target.  It was a shock when the gun went 'click' instead of 'pop'.  So here's my problem.  All my life, I've been told guns are evil and as a upper-middle class white guy, I shouldn't use one.  But it was fun, dammit!

Next step is to get a licence.  And more classes, leading up the practical purchase of a pump-action shotgun with an 18-22" barrel that both my wife and I can handle.

The American militia is awakening. I have no doubt it will be ready when the time comes. None at all. Will it be enough? Only time will tell.

And if you haven't armed yourself and your family, what are you waiting for? You can't possibly say that you haven't been warned. Repeatedly.

The mystery of US inequality

Ugo Bardi finds it difficult to explain the post-1960 rise in US income inequality in his very interesting book The Seneca Effect, which seeks to apply some of the concepts that NN Taleb has developed while investigating the science of collapse.

Obviously, the larger the Gini coefficient, the larger the income inequality. The case of perfect equality has Gini = 0 since the area of A is equal to zero. The opposite case would be when only one person owns all the wealth while all the others own nothing. This condition would generate a Gini coefficient equal to 1. Both conditions are obviously improbable and coefficients measured for different countries range, typically, from 0.2 to 0.7 (sometimes given in percentiles, that is from 20 to 70). Some countries are less egalitarian than others: for instance, South-American countries have normally high Gini coefficients, with Brazil perhaps at the top with around 0.6. On the opposite side, European countries are rather egalitarian, with income coefficients in the range from 0.2 to 0.4, especially low in Scandinavian countries. About the United States, it had seen a trend toward lower inequality that started in the ninetieth century and that accelerated after the end of the second world war, thus making the US trend similar to that of most European countries. But the trend changed direction in the 1960s-1970s, to arrive today at values of the Gini coefficient between 0.4 and 0.5, typical of South American countries. This phenomenon is part of the series of economic changes in the US economy that was termed “The Great U-Turn” when it was noted for the first time by Bluestone and Harrison.

There is no general agreement on what happened to the US society that caused such a change in the trend of the income distribution. What we know is that a lot of money flew away from the pockets of middle-class people to end up it in the pockets of the wealthy. As you may imagine, we have here another one of those problems where the large number of explanations provided is an indication that nobody really knows how to answer the question. For instance, there is no lack of conspiracy theories that propose that the rich formed a secret cabal where their leaders collected in a smoke-filled room to devise a plan to steal from the poor and give to the rich. Recently, I proposed that the “U-Turn” may be related to the peak in oil production that took place in the US in 1970. At that moment, the US started a rapid increase in the imports of crude oil from overseas. The result was that the money that the Americans spent on foreign oil returned as investments in the US financial system, but from there it never found its way to the pockets of middle-class people. But I am the first to say that it is just a hypothesis.

Actually, something else happened right between the 1960s and 1970s, in 1965, as a matter of fact, that just might have had a little something to do with the lower-income classes suddenly facing more competition and more pressure on their wages, and the higher-income classes benefiting from larger corporate profits.

I refer, of course, to the 1965 Immigration Act that has resulted in 130 million new !Americans! as well as 45 straight years of lower average wages since 1973.

And there is one other obvious hypothesis that Bardi fails to note, which is a little ironic in light of what he writes about the specific way in which the very rich are different than you and me, which is how that they go about making money and building wealth in a more holistic and heavily networked manner.

The rich, apparently, can even defy entropy by following a wealth distribution that ignores its effects. But what exactly makes a person rich or poor? An interesting feature of the thermodynamic distribution model of incomes is that being rich or poor is purely casual; the rock-paper-scissors is not a game of skill (nor is the second principle of thermodynamics!). Certainly, in real life, skill and grit count in one's career, but it is also true that most rich people are the offspring or rich families. As you may imagine, the idea that wealth is inherited rather than earned is not popular with the rich but, for some reason, they seem to be the ones who are most active in dodging and opposing inheritance laws.

Still, that doesn't explain why the rich seem to live in a world of their own in which thermodynamics laws don't seem to apply. Perhaps we can find an answer noting that power-laws tend to appear when we look at the evolution of highly networked systems, that is, where each node is connected to several other nodes. The Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics may be seen to apply to a “fully connected” network in the sense that each molecule can interact with any other molecule. But it is also true that, at any given moment, a molecule interacts with no other molecule or, at best, with just one in the kind of interaction that, in physics, is called “pairwise.” In a gas, molecules bump into each other and then they leave after having exchanged some kinetic energy; these pairwise interactions don't affect other molecules and so don't generate feedback effects. And, as it is well-known, there do not exist phase transitions in the gas phase; only solids (and, rarely, liquids) show phase transitions as the result of feedback effects Something similar holds for the kind of economic interactions that most of us are involved with: we get our salary or our income from an employer and we spend it buying things in stores, and we pay our taxes to the government, too. These are, mostly, pairwise interactions, just like molecules in a gas and it is not surprising that the resulting distribution is the same. The rich, apparently, are much more networked than the poor and their many connections make them able to find and exploit many more opportunities for making money than us, mere middle-class people. So, they don't really play the Boltzmann game, but something totally different....

Today, salaried people engaged mostly in pairwise economic transactions may have become much more common. So, it may be that over time there has been a sort of financial phase transition where some money “sublimated” from the rich to move to the poor, an interpretation that is consistent with the trend for lower inequality that has been the rule during the past century or so. As times change and the trend is reversed, the rich may regain their former 100% of the distribution, leaving the poor totally moneyless; maybe as a result of the “negative interest rates” that seem to be fashionable today. But that, for the time being, is destined to remain pure speculation.

It is said that Scott Fitzgerald said, once, “The rich are different from you and me” or “The rich are different from us.” To which Ernest Hemingway replied: “Yes, they have more money." But, maybe, Fitzgerald had hit on something that only much later the physicist Yakovenko would prove: the difference between the rich and the poor is not just the amount of money they have. It is in how they are networked.

If only we could identify a highly networked group of people, concentrated primarily on the financial sector, who were not particularly influential in the United States before the 1960s, we might be able to understand who were the primary benefits of this massive shift in income inequality as well as how they took advantage of it. But since it is clear that no such group of people exists, this leads me to conclude that Signor Bardi is most likely correct with regards to his hypothesis about the socio-economic effects of the rapid increase in the imports of crude oil from overseas.

Fortunately, since the problem of excess oil imports has already been successfully addressed by increased domestic oil production and a concomitant reduction in US reliance on foreign oil, we can be confident that this post-1960s shift in the Gini coefficient will be corrected any day now and US income inequality will shift back to traditional European standards rather than the third world standard it has more recently come to resemble.

The transformative magic of the passport

This purported criticism of passport snobbery is still indicative of an amount of silly passport snobbery:

It’s not because there’s something magical about exposure to the quirks and customs of other cultures that transforms you into a better, wiser person. It’s just that there’s a certain provincialism that surrounds populist politicians and those who are attracted to them. And traveling widely — whether on the great continental landmass that Americans live on or across national borders and oceans — tends to not only break down said provincialism but demonstrates a curiosity about the world around you that is a vital characteristic for national leaders.

This was clearly written by the sort of individual, usually left-leaning, who genuinely believes that there is some sort of magic inherent to travel and some sort of evil inherent to what they invariably label "provincialism". Interestingly enough, in my experience it is Americans living in the East Coast Axis of Boston to Washington DC and Canadians who are most susceptible to the disease of passport snobbery; the only Europeans who are impressed by the low percentage of American passport ownership are those who haven't been to the USA and don't realize how big it is.

The irony is that the passport snob primarily subscribes to the myth of the mind-expanding magic of travel due to his own provincialism. You may recall the attempt of The Prince of Wängst to label me, a multi-passport multi-lingual, expatriate who studied in Japan, as "provincial". This was more than a little amusing given Mr. Bakker's literally provincial existence, having been born in Ontario, educated in Ontario, and presently residing in, you guessed it, Ontario. Even more amusing was the example I have previously related of the self-appointed Canadian Euro-sophisticate from Quebec. He was happily occupied with lecturing Spacebunny and I on the near-European nature of Montreal and how it compared so very favorably to the Minnesota peasantry at the party we were attending when his fiance joined the conversation. And he was visibly put out to discover we had flown in that very morning from either Zurich or Milano, I don't recall which.

"Well, what were you doing there?" he demanded.

Strangely, he didn't seem to want to talk to us anymore after he found out we lived in Italy, although we were quite willing to hear more about what a European city Montreal is. Fascinating stuff.

The truth, as those who have not only traveled around the world, but who actually speak different languages and have lived in different cultures for extended periods of time, is that there are far more similarities than differences among the civilized peoples of the world. The mountain peasants of Italy, the agricultural peasants of France, and the rice paddy peasants of Japan have far more in common with each other and with the rural working class in the Midwest than they do with the Milanese industrial magnates, the banking gnomes of Zurich, the powerful, but self-effacing executives of the great keiretsu, or the Wall Street elite.

And neither transnational group has much in common with the angst-laden middle-class would-be intellectuals, whose desperate pretentiousness and feverish pursuit of credentials sets them in a particularly annoying transnational class of their own. The European ones confide to you how American they feel themselves to be while the American version forever bears the imprint of the semester it spent in [insert European capital]. The Canadian version is either the saddest or the funniest, depending upon your perspective, because it genuinely believes that a semester in Nashville or Iowa City counts as magic travel.

But there are interesting things to be learned from every group, in every country. My soccer teammates are mostly peasants, with one notable exception. My social acquaintances are mostly petty international class, and my interests tend to most closely resemble the aspirational middle-class intellectuals. But it is as shallow and ultimately pointless to look down on the rural peasantry for their lack of passports as it is to criticize the rich and powerful for their accounting strategies or the aspirational academics for their insecurities. Such things are more definitive attributes than correctable actions.

Travel doesn't make you a better or more curious person. It simply presents you with more information. What you do with that information, and how it effects your thought processes and future behavior, will have more to do with who you already were than any transformative magic courtesy that comes from the possession of a government document.

For me, the experience gained from living most of my adult life as an expatriate that has given me a greater respect for the unique nature of historical American society as well as a deeper sorrow for that which Americans have lost.

Don't cry for me, Consuela

The Evangelical Outpost points to an interesting article in The Atlantic, entitled How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement. It was interesting to me primarily as a voyeuristic experience in wading through the morass of what passes for feminist thinking, which, like the entire history of American liberalism, could be entitled Getting Bit in the Butt by the Law of Unintended Consquences.

Pity the poor upper-middle class working mommy, who is outraged that she can't Have It All. She can't figure this out, apparently, until she hits 30 and has already spawned, while even the most benighted boy is capable of figuring out that he is not going to be an NFL quarterback and an NBA point guard by the time he is 12, and those few who might actually have the talent to do both - New York Knicks fans, please note I said might - are generally quite willing to choose between the two without railing against the cosmic unfairness of it all.

The irony is that these overeducated self-indulged women actually want three things, because it's quite possible for a high-powered career woman to marry, have children, and then park them at home with Daddy all day. There's plenty of men who'd be delighted to sign off on such a deal. Stay home, play with the kids, do a little laundry while watching ESPN - it's all good! The problem is that this idyllic arrangement totally precludes her marrying the even higher-powered Alpha male that sets her greedy little heart atwitter.

Freud once asked the famous question, what does woman want. The correct answer in this case clearly is: woman has no clue. Read the article, it's astounding. If she stays home, she wants a career. If she has a career, she wants to stay home. In either case, and with every permutation in between, she's unhappy. This is grass-is-greener syndrome on steroids.

The notion of playing the hand that's been dealt has obviously never entered these pathetic little minds; even the notion of having to play the cards that they've personally selected is, somehow, offensive and "oppressive". I'd say that I was unsympathetic to their plight, except that the word is inadequate. What a contemptible lot! The only people I feel sorry for are their children and nannies. I'd feel sorry for their husbands too, except based on this article, those men are clearly smart enough to spend every waking hour at the office or anywhere else that will afford them escape from these obnoxious creatures.

The irony is that it is these very careers which have forced their less fortunate sisters - whose plight some of the authors have attempted to coopt in a vain search for sympathy by proxy - to enter the workforce as well. As I have previously demonstrated, the influx of women into the workforce had two consequences. 1) allowed men over the age of 65 to retire en masse. 2) lowered the average real wage rate. Combined with increased taxation, a working class man can no longer support a family on one salary, thereby depriving working class women of any ability to choose between work and home. No wonder working class women hate the Sisterhood. They may not understand the fullness of who has put them in this difficult situation, but they have an intuitive grasp of the truth.

I once wrote that "being romantically involved with an intelligent, educated, upper-middle-class American woman steeped in 20 years of feminist indoctrination is about as desirable as being flayed alive and rolled in salt." I doubt I have the words to express the torment that must result from marrying one of these creatures, and I am ever so delighted to know that I will never need them.

Free trade reduces US income

As I have repeatedly shown, the Rising Tide school of economic thought always leaves out the fact that the rising tide must inevitably come at the expense of workers in the wealthier societies:

Branko Milanovic, a visiting professor at CUNY who once served as a senior economist at the World Bank, has tracked worldwide changes in income growth from 1998 to 2008. Milanovic calculates that the middle class in China and India experienced 60 to 70 percent income growth from 1998 to 2008, while growth stalled for the middle and working classes in the United States.

The question then becomes, in Milanovic’s words, “Does the growth of China and India take place on the back of the middle class in rich countries,” especially the United States? Milanovic does not claim a direct causal relationship, but contends that the two “may not be unrelated.”...

Entering the fray, three economists – David Autor of M.I.T., David Dorn of the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Spain, and Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego – have analyzed the employment consequences of globalized trade and technological advance.

In a series of papers they wrote together – “Trade Adjustment: Worker Level Evidence,” “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States,” and “Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labor Markets” — Autor, Dorn and Hanson find that in the case of trade with China, there are very painful consequences for specific categories of American workers.

Their findings show why voters are wary of free trade agreements.

Relative to the average employee in manufacturing, workers in industries that face stronger competition from imports “garner lower cumulative earnings and are at elevated risk of exiting the labor force and obtaining public disability benefits,” Autor, Dorn and Hanson write.
Continue reading the main story

And if manufacturers are ranked on a scale of 1 to 100 for exposure to import competition from China, between 1992 and 2007, workers in firms high on the exposure scale lost nearly half a year’s pay, compared to workers in firms at the low end of the scale.

And this doesn't even begin to get into the fact that the expansion of domestic free trade into the international arena would INEVITABLY RESULT in the same sort of labor movement that one sees in the USA. Don't like the fact that your kids live in a different state? Well, in a true free trade regime, they might have to go to Bangladesh or Peru to find employment.

Free trade is logically incompatible with national sovereignty, the Constitution, and the maximization of human liberty. This should be obvious, as it is an aspect of globalism and a major objective of those who advocate global government.

Decline and fall

In a single family. A Virginian inadvertently chronicles American genetic decline:

My people are pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater. I am Frederick Venable Reed Jr, my mother’s maiden name being Betty Venable Rivers–a cousin marriage, which some will suggest explains a lot. The Venables were prominent in the gentility of Southside Virginia.

Why is this of interest, if indeed it is? There are reasonable people today who believe that traits such as politics, way of life, occupation, talents, and intellectual bent are genetically determined. Some time ago I found an interesting study showing that families–those studied were English–maintained distinguishable traits for many generations, suggesting that these were innate. For a generation or two similarities might be explained by children copying their parents. Over many generations, it would appear otherwise.

I wondered whether this would hold for my own family. It seems so. The first mention of Venables was of Walter de Veneur at the Battle of the Ford in 960. He did nothing astonishing, but I think that just being mentioned by name would suggest membership in something similar to the upper middle class. The name is baronial, from the town of Venables, near Evreux, in Normandy. In France, it morphed into various Latin and French forms such as le Venour, or Venator, or Venereux, becoming, after the clan came to England with William of Orange, Venables-Vernon. (Spelling was not an advanced science in those days.) These never sank into the lower classes nor rose to produce dukes or earls, but several barons, members of Parliament and such. Upper middle class. Honorable mention. Respectable, but not important.

Richard Venables is recorded as having purchased land in Virginia in 1635. The Venables became a distinguished family, of the ruling class but without doing anything to get them into textbooks. They were in the House of Burgesses. In 1776 Nathaniel Venable founded Hampden-Sydney College, which provided schooling for many of Southside’s leaders.

The Cavalier society of Tidewater was perhaps the high point of American civilization. The people were extraordinarily literate, steeped in the thought of the Enlightenment, imbued with a profound and kindly Christianity. From them came the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, the Lees and Custises. It is hard to imagine any modern politician, or his ghost writer, writing either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, the latter being the framework, enduring until perhaps 1960, of an entire nation. The Virginians did.

All that illustrious lineage, and now Fred is reduced to denying human biodiversity in defense of the members of La Raza Cosmica with whom he cohabitates. It rather reminds me of the women who are ferociously proud of their blue eyes and blonde hair raising their brown-eyed, black-haired children. They have proven themselves wholly unworthy of their heritage by virtue of failing to pass it on.

Fred writes: "The facial resemblance to the men in our line is strong. So is the character and cast of mind." When the former disappears, the latter usually will as well. As Le Chateau likes to say, physiognomy is real.

See, that's precisely the problem, Fred. They're not your children's people. You're the end of the line. Whatever comes after is not that pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater of which you are so proud.

Indeed, if my experience is any guide, people will very likely tell your grandchildren that they have no connection whatsoever to the Cavaliers and they are lying if they claim they do.

Mailvox: surviving in the coming chaos

DA seeks advice on the matter:

Dear Rabbit Hunter Extraordinaire,

I write to you seeking your help in how millennial young male should go about preparing for the future. To provide some context, I am a 20 year college sophomore. Additional not-insignificant details about me include black, upper middle class, Traditional Catholic, and if it helps, my college major is in computer engineering. ( I included this to get your opinion on the usefulness of my degree. I also add that I will leave college debt free.). Forgive me if I come across as attempting a snow-flaking/woe is me act, but my circumstances do leave me fairly isolated. To make matters worse, my political sentiments lean very heavily towards the far right( think Walter Williams) and I'd rather avoid getting caught in the crossfire between the "vibrant" cohorts.

I've been reading/lurking/commenting occasionally on your blog for the past three years and your writing has contributed greatly to my current understanding of economics and history. Though my knowledge of said topics is not nearly as comprehensive, it doesn't require a genius to know that current times are bad and are going to get a whole lot worse.

Having said all that, what are your recommendations as to what I should do to hopefully survive the coming state of entropy? I understand that providing a definitive response to this may be difficult but anything at all would be very much appreciated.

Cue a few thousand little rabbit minds exploding.  Anyhow, being black, intelligent, aware, and intrinsically attractive to SWPL's seeking token black acquaintaces to prove their SWPLness, DA potentially finds himself in an excellent position to not only survive, but thrive, in the increasingly difficult times ahead.  What looks like a serious disadvantage given the increasing polarity of the American racial divides could actually prove to be an opportunity for a young man of his abilities.

The greatest advantage will be to do as the rabbit people do, but in reverse; a sort of wolf in rabbit's clothing.  By taking advantage of the SWPLs' desperate desire to be seen as anti-racist, DA will be able to write his own ticket so long as he keeps his very incorrect ideology to himself.  At the same time, DA will have to realize that the days of whites pretending to be color-blind are over.  Only those SWPL who live in 98.9% white communities can still affect the pretense any longer, but the end of nominal color-blindness will make SWPLs even more desperate to seek absolution from him than they already are.  The more racial polarization, the more the left-liberal white class will be seeking to cling to their living, breathing, get-out-of-racism free cards.

I doubt it has escaped DA's attention how certain whites fall all over themselves for the likes of Obama and RGIII.  It's an advantage freely offered to any sufficiently well-spoken black man, so why not avail oneself of it?  The key to success here is to always exceed their secretly lowered expectations.  Being a former white sprinter who is now an American soccer player in Europe, this is something with which I am very familiar myself.  The less they expect, the better you tend to look.

The degree is potentially a good one, particularly as it came debt-free, but programming can be a career dead end and credentials mean little in the programming world.  DA should be careful to keep up on the latest fads and shoot for design and management opportunities as they present themselves.  But, at the same time, he should insist on keeping up with his programming, as the most valuable managers are those that genuinely understand the issues involved.  He should stay away from the false security and bureaucratic mediocrity of the large corporations and look for opportunities in small-to-medium size firms where he can take advantage of his ability to exceed expectations.

In terms of avoiding the crossfire from the vibrant cohorts, the best place to be is in the SWPL strongholds.  Being upper middle class, he'll be more than welcome among them so long as he doesn't burst their bubbles by betraying what he thinks of their ludicrous equalitarianism.

Another feminist myth exploded

The notion that equal access to higher education was going to cause a flowering of female intellectual achievement was always false, because it observably didn't happen the first time around.

Although the fact is not widely known, the ratio of male-to-female undergraduates in the United States was about at parity from 1900 to 1930. Male enrollments began to increase relative to female enrollments in the 1930s and later as GIs returned from World War II. A highpoint of gender imbalance in college attendance was reached in 1947 when undergraduate men outnumbered women 2.3 to 1. But starting then and continuing until the present in an almost unbroken trend, female college enrollments have increased relative to male enrollments. 

In other words, elite women were attending university in equal numbers to elite men, but more middle-class and working-class men going to college threw the balance out of whack.  Middle-class women followed suit, and the consequent collapse in national demographics caused the replacement of 60 million aborted natives with 60 million alien immigrants.

Brilliant.  Just brilliant.  Short of poisoning the water supply or dropping a large quantity of nuclear weapons on the major cities, it would be hard to concoct a more efficient means of crippling a nation.