Randoms

– Jim on the Dark Enlightenment. I’ve got a few quibbles, but this is good:

The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.

– Rod Dreher thinks that somebody did warn a student about the perils of the hookup culture on college campuses. Alas, they don’t. They warn men that about half of them will be rapists by the time they leave college and that the other half are probably gay. That’s about it as far as warnings go. My wife is still angry that no one, throughout her education and career, ever told her that she might – just might – really like having and taking care of children. A civilization is defined by its priorities.

– For some odd reason, I’m zero percent surprised by the notion that central banks are now sovereign. Perhaps nothing could better symbolize modernity than rule by economists.

– In completely unrelated news, it’s apparently difficult to get good institutions in Honduras.

– I’ve tried to explain how strange the gentrifying parts of DC can be many times. It’s hard. Here’s a drug deal going down in the middle of the day in a park that’s a few blocks from the Supreme Court. The nearest home for sale is a four bedroom listed at $1.2 million. On any given day, the park is parody of SWPLdom.

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Review of “Prelude to Foundation” by Isaac Asimov

I loved the Robot Series and was distinctly unimpressed with the Galactic Empire Series, so I was a bit concerned about the Foundation Series. This book, however, was great.

This book flows nicely from the Robot Series (though lots of time has elapsed). The events in the Galactic Empire Series, which took place in between, seem not to have had much relevance. In addition, much of the history that had been lost during the time period of the Galactic Empire Series had been rediscovered.

We also get back to the most interesting story lines from the Robot Series, like the spacers vs. settlers issue and the robots issues. The settlers seem to have decisively won and expanded throughout the galaxy – what was tens of planets is now thousands or millions of planets. The remnants of Aurora are still around – there may be some spacer remnants there too. There are definitely some human-form robots remaining, but we don’t yet know how many. Asimov also gives us some detail on the empire that is the background to the Galactic Empire Series. It’s modeled on the Roman Empire.

The book is about Hari Seldon, who is developing psychohistory. Psychohistory seems to be a huge regression equation that will probabilistically predict the future.

What I found most interesting was that the presence of at least one robot who lived through all the millennia in which the universe was settled and the empire was founded gives a great sense of societal decay.

We tend to think of decay, retrogression and the fall of civilizations as events that happen on some specific date, but the reality of large-scale decay is that it happens slowly. Decay is masked to any individual observer because it happens so slowly. It’s also masked by progress in certain, isolated areas. To robots that have seen it all, however, decay is painfully apparent.

Our old friend, Daneel, is interested in psychohistory because of the limitations on his actions due to his hard-coded ethical system. He can act to benefit humanity, even if doing so harms a specific individual human, but it’s very hard for him to know what will benefit humanity. Psychohistory would allow his to quantify the costs and benefits of various actions with respect to humanity. Perhaps, allowing him to act to prevent decay – or at least to act to minimize the fallout.

Randoms

– Kanazawa:

What I have learned in this ordeal [i.e. his Two Minutes Hate] is that, in the Year 2011, there are certain questions that scientists may not ask, or, more accurately, for some questions, there are certain answers that scientists must a priori preclude from consideration. There are certain conclusions that scientists may not reach about some groups of people.

If you stop and think about this for a second, it means that “science” isn’t really science anymore. I’m pretty sure that means we’re fscked. More bad news here.

– AnomalyUK on Michael Lewis’s Obama propaganda:

If Lewis’s account is to be believed, the decision to take out the Libyan army on the road to Benghazi, thereby destroying the Libyan state and producing a revolutionary government, was made entirely on the basis of the humanitarian issue caused by the steps Gadaffi would be likely to take to regain control of Benghazi. The arguments made against decisively taking the rebel side in the civil war were purely based on the cost and the risk of tying up further US military resources. The question of who would take over Libya and what they would do afterwards doesn’t seem to have arisen; rather, “The ghosts of 800,000 Tutsis were in that room.” The mind boggles.

– Is the Chicago teachers’ strike really about HBD:

So what’s the sticking point? In exchange for the salary increase, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and others are insisting that standardized test scores play some role in evaluating teachers and that school principals be given more power to run their schools the way they want to. Teachers say they don’t have enough control over their students’ socioeconomic situations to be judged on what they teach kids.

– Note to self: do not go to the Czech Republic.

– “And we white Americans? Are we the most pussified of all—the pussies of the world?”

– Detropia.

– Gay

Black crime victims

While we’re having fun with The Atlantic . . .

Ta-Nehisi Coates takes to The Atlantic to argue against racial stereotyping. Apparently he thinks this will be best achieved by writing exclusively about how racist white people are in a super angry tone.

He gives one example of white violence against blacks – the Trayvon Martin case. (Apparently he couldn’t find a “white” person who committed crimes against a black person who doesn’t qualify as black by the standards of affirmative action in America). Then he notes that white people can’t “moderate their own penchant for violence.”

Just how violent are whites toward blacks? John Derbyshire dug up the numbers a couple weeks back:

The first time Mrs. Obama registered on my consciousness was that interview on the 60 Minutes show back in 2007 when she told Steve Croft that, quote: “As a black man, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.” Given that rates of interracial violent crime run about 85 percent black-on-nonblack versus only 15 percent nonblack-on-black, that may be the wrongest thing anyone ever said on 60 Minutes.

Apparently it got by the layers of fact checkers at The Atlantic as well.

What’s with the focus on white violence? Surely it would be more logical to focus on some aspect of “racism” that’s not so easy to disprove, no?

The end of men

Heartiste has already written about this, and so has Stuart Schneiderman (HT: Paleo Retiree), but a closer look is worthwhile, as Rosin’s own reporting does a better job of destroying her thesis than anything else I’ve read.

Here’s Hanna Rosin explaining how the hook up culture is good for women:

For an upwardly mobile, ambitious young woman, hookups were a way to dip into relationships without disrupting her self-development [i.e. career – “self-development” should in no way be confused with starting a family] or schoolwork. Hookups functioned as a “delay tactic,” Armstrong writes, because the immediate priority, for the privileged women at least, was setting themselves up for a career. “If I want to maintain the lifestyle that I’ve grown up with,” one woman told Armstrong, “I have to work. I just don’t see myself being someone who marries young and lives off of some boy’s money.” Or from another woman: “I want to get secure in a city and in a job … I’m not in any hurry at all. As long as I’m married by 30, I’m good.”

What happens in the meantime? What does this woman bring to the table as a 30 year old? Let’s explore the lurid carnival of hook-up culture with more from Rosin’s article:

members of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity stood outside freshman dorms chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!” I’d heard this phrase before, from the business-school students, of course: on spring break, they had played a game called “dirty rounds”—something like charades, except instead of acting out movie or book titles, they acted out sex slogans like the one above, or terms like pink sock (what your anus looks like after too much anal sex).

Ah, progress – are there no limits to your extent?

David Brooks explains that Rosin’s thesis is that women are more adaptable than men, which is why women are now more successful in the modern economy.

Might it instead be that men just aren’t willing to work that hard when the only reward is a women like the ones described above? Who wouldn’t want a completely unfeminine, over used, and desperate 30-year old woman in a sea of 20-something women giving it away?

Well . . . basically everybody.

The oddest part about this discussion is that no one brings up the fact that we know exactly what an “end of men” society looks like. What Rosin describes is basically modern African-American society.

I’ve seen almost nobody, no matter how PC they are, argue that this society is the one on which we should model our future. Nor frankly does it seem particularly good for women.

Rosin seems to have pulled off a strange feat. She’s trumpeting the success of a lifestyle that’s visibly failing as she trumpets it. She’s the Baghdad Bob of modern feminism.

QE4eva

If you count operation twist as QE, we’re at least on the fourth try. This QE is “unlimited,” (economics has gotten much more scientific in recent decades, in case you hadn’t heard) so I think QE4eva is a much more apt title.

One would hope that this would be true: “The good news is, when we go into a recession in 2013 well be able to say, DEFINITIVELY, that QE doesn’t work.”

Err, nevermind. Professor Sumner says that we’ll never know.

See how scientific economics has become? Would just one falsifiable statement be too much to ask for?

It looks like the Fed will buy more than 50% of new Fannie and Freddie mortgages. So, I guess the sage advice we’re getting from modern economics profession is that the best way to recover from a housing bubble is to start another housing bubble.

That’s almost as absurd as cheering for this operation to buy unlimited amounts of mortgages while demanding that housing costs come down.

I always thought that economics was nicely encapsulated in the statement: there’s no such things as a free lunch. I guess somewhere along the line they discovered free lunches: “I see this as a free lunch, and I am quite curious to find out just how big or small of a free lunch it is going to be.”

This stuff basically makes fun of itself. I give up.

Let’s give Hayek the last word:

The increased dependence of the individual upon government which inflation produces and the demand for move government action to which this leads may for the socialist be an argument in its favor. Those who wish to preserve freedom should recognize, however, that inflation is probably the most important single factor in that vicious circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary. For this reason, all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their efforts on monetary policy. There is perhaps nothing more disheartening than the fact the there are still so many intelligent and informed people who in most other respects will defend freedom and yet are induced by the immediate benefits of an expansionist policy to support what, in the long run, must destroy the foundations of a free society.

Review of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” by Tom Wolfe

Certain parts of history are very tough to understand. Some parts of history are really boring. In general, it’s also very difficult to understand more recent events. Nevertheless, I find the late ’60s/early ’70s to be particularly difficult to understand.

Imagine being at Leonard Bernstein’s fundraiser for the Black Panthers. That shit actually happened. Even terrorism was cool. It certainly wasn’t the sort of activity that would prevent you from teaching at major universities or associating with future Presidents.

In some ways, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test may help you understand these times better. However, in general, it just adds a lot of items to the list of things that happened in the late ’60s/early ’70s that don’t make any damn sense.

The book follows Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they sort of invent/discover Hippiedom.

Wolfe’s description of it all is fantastic, and I’m sure realistic (which is perhaps why none of it makes sense to me). Wolfe claims he didn’t try LSD, but it seems like he must have.

My favorite part was the pranksters at a Unitarian conference. Their sex and drugs bit didn’t play too well. But the Unitarians wanted to be non-judgmental, I guess.

I suppose if you want to under this time period, this is required reading. On the other hand, I’m not sure it’s possible to understand this time period.

Bruce Charlton’s “Christianity”

Take a moment to read Bruce Charlton on being a reactionary and on Christianity.

Charlton always has good things to say, but I confess that I’m unable to understand his belief in “Christianity” as essential to a reactionary.

Are liberation theologists really on the same side as those who reject Vatican II? Are unitarians on the same side as the Eastern Orthodox Church?

I am not religious, though if forced to choose between a pro-Christian and anti-Christian position, I would take the pro-Christian position if I were allowed to define my position a bit.

This blog subscribes to Mencius Moldbug’s theory that modern progressivism is form of Christianity, a sort of ultra Calvinism. In other words, it’s no accident that unitarian universalism is headquartered in Boston. Nor is it history’s largest coincidence that all of the descendants of Puritans are today’s super-Progressives. Regardless of your religious beliefs, do you really believe in coincidences that large?

Actually this blog subscribes to the theory that lots of ideologies are best understood as religions. Unfortunately, they’re not all separated from the state.

I have a friend who’s a priest and he makes a very convincing case that everything is Martin Luther’s fault. Frankly, he might right.

I can sympathize somewhat with the position that belief in some sects of Christianity is a necessary condition for reaction. I disagree, but I can see the logic in such a position. But I’m totally lost when this position is extending to all types of “Christianity.”

Randoms

– The anti-enlightenment versus mainstream conservatism (HT: AnomalyUK).

– LMAO

– If a “personal poverty coach” could “coach” you into certain jobs and into making all your important life decisions, wouldn’t this be a sort of watered-down slavery? Well if they’re bringing back colonialism, why not slavery?

– Ron Unz does some legitimate gloating about hispanics and crime. Fair enough, but he sounds like a retard when he talks about this stuff. First, his findings are arguably more politically incorrect than the hypotheses of his “racialist” opponents. If hispanics act like white people when they’ve been in the US for a while, blacks must be really f’ed up. Second, the fact that he’s discussing these topics makes him as much of a “racialist” as anyone else. The only non-racialist position on these issues is pretending they don’t exist.

– I would never tell you whether or not to get married. In the debate, this seems about right to me.

– Elusive Wapiti on illegitimate rape:

one thing is clear: the rate of false rape accusations is not zero. Not even close. The data seems to suggest that somewhere between one in twelve to one in four rape accusations are reliably false.

– No one is cool anymore.

– Why on Earth would someone close comments?

Review of “I am Charlotte Simmons” by Tom Wolfe

This book was published shortly after I graduated from college. While Tom Wolfe was visiting top ranked national universities to conduct his research for this book, I was attending a top ranked national university.

And the book is nominally about university life in the dawn of a new century. I think the book is really about, as Wolfe put it elsewhere, the death of the soul. It just so happens, that university life at the dawn of the 21st Century provides particularly good insight into the consequences of the death of the soul.

Do pause and read that article, as it’s really what the book is about. Here’s an excerpt for those who don’t want to read the whole thing:

Thereupon, in the year 2006 or 2026, some new Nietzsche will step forward to announce: “The self is dead”—except that being prone to the poetic, like Nietzsche, he will probably say: “The soul is dead.” He will say that he is merely bringing the news, the news of the greatest event of the millennium: “The soul, that last refuge of values, is dead, because educated people no longer believe it exists.” Unless the assurances of the Wilsons and the Dennetts and the Dawkinses also start rippling out, the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase “the total eclipse of all values” seem tame.

“The lurid carnival” is a nice description of university life in the early 2000s. While visiting the lurid carnival, Wolfe also touches upon the higher education bubble, the lack of meaningful educating at universities, higher education’s absurd diversity fetish, the sexual marketplace, elitism and the rise of the “aristo-meritocrats.”

The book opens with Charlotte Simmons leaving her small, appalachian, religious, traditional home town for Dupont University, one of the best schools in the country.

The game-o-sphere often mocks people for saying that certain girls are “not like that.” Presumably, girls that are not like that will really fall in love with a nice guy and love him unconditionally, or whatever. The point here is that if any girl is “not like that,” it’s Charlotte Simmons.

These traits are interesting from a game perspective and from the neuroscientific perspective that Wolfe is more interested in. We come to find out that Charlotte is basically like that, but nevertheless, there just might be a little bit of a soul that somehow survives the lurid carnival of Dupont University.

Wolfe doesn’t spend much time actually describing the university, but when he does the descriptions leave a sense of steady decline. There are beautiful buildings and vast libraries that are basically unused. It’s all geared towards imparting knowledge, yet everyone around is busy trying to have sex with each other or desperately trying to out PC each other.

The male characters (an omega, an alpha and a super-alpha), in addition to Charlotte, dominate the novel. Let’s meet them.

The first is Jojo. He’s a white basketball player (basketball is everything at Dupont – think Duke – making Jojo our super-alpha). Jojo’s character allows Wolfe to provide various insights into university life. For example, Wolfe has lots of fun ripping on universities’ religious-like belief in diversity. However, their diversity is bullshit all the way down. First, it’s only “skin-deep” diversity. Admissions officers are paid six-figure salaries to select minority students who will act as much as possible like the wealthy white kids that make up most of the student body. Second, once these non-diverse diversoids are all together at the university, they segregate themselves by race anyway (one of the students always refers to “dispersity” instead of “diversity”).

The basketball team best shows this, since the blacks kids on the basketball team are really diverse. They’re dumb, they’re aggressive, and (coincidentally of course) they’re from poor backgrounds. The actual diversity between the basketball players and the students occasionally pops up, mocking the whole carefully constructed and controlled “diversity” created by the highly-paid admissions officers.

Jojo also helps highlight the black/white dynamic that is similar to the one in Wolfe’s earlier novels. The athletic fetish of the university and the racial taboos (racial insults are “worse than homicide” at universities) put blacks in position of power and (the former particularly) allow the athletes to reap huge (generally sexual – though sex is the de facto currency of the modern university) rewards.

Jojo is not particularly bright – he’s an idiot by the standards of the rest of the Dupont students. But he’s a sincere guy with a thirst for knowledge. Alas, since he’s an athlete in a modern university, nobody wants him to actually learn anything. Except Charlotte, who treats him like a normal person (after all, she’s used to dealing with people that aren’t brilliant, unlike the rest of the students).

The next character is Hoyt Thorpe, our alpha. Hoyt is a fraternity member and lacrosse player. We meet him as he’s on his way home from a party. On his walk back, he encounters a Republican Presidential hopeful getting a blow job from a student.

Hoyt allows Wolfe to portray fraternity life in all its lurid carnality. Despite the vulgarity, sexual depravity, and general hedonism, Wolfe seems to have some sympathy with fraternity brothers. They are the only men left on a campus filled with absurd diversity standards that beg to be mocked. In an environment in which gays are “moral superiors,” a little manliness is desperately needed.

The final main character is Adam Gellin. He’s a very smart kid who is my new archetype for the beta male. Adam is Wolfe’s “aristo-meritocrat.” He’s the sort of guy that goes on to positions of power in the Cathedral, and he knows he deserves it (because, after all, he’s so smart). At the same time, he’s basically lost in the university. It’s no longer a place for obtaining knowledge. Instead, it’s a lurid carnival of sexuality, in which guys like Adam just keep losing even though they’re so smart.

He vaguely knows why he always loses, but he bristles at the injustice of all. He should get kudos for marching in favor of gays, but he’s afraid everyone will just think he’s gay – and frankly, he might as well be.

Frankly, everyone at Dupont is a future aristo-meritocrat. Adam is just at the top of the intellectual pecking order. Wolfe’s portrayal of the elite is interesting when compared to Charles Murray’s. The elite seem to use university as a way to get out all of their worst behavior, after which they settle down to nice, conservative lifestyles.

Now that we know the characters, let’s get to the plot.

Charlotte gets to school and starts doing well. She’s doing really well, since she’s the only student that actually reads the books, attends all the classes and pays attention (this guarantees at least a B+ depending on what you’re studying).

Outside of classes, she’s lost in the hyper-sexualized university.

She meets all of the male characters. She begins succumbing to the sexual nature of Dupont. Can she resist? Is there a “she” to do the resisting?

Adam falls in love with her, but she has no interest in him beyond being friends. She starts falling for Hoyt, but wants to take it slow (to his shock and frustration, but he stays interested while seeing other girls).

Eventually Hoyt invites her to a formal fraternity party in Washington, DC. Charlotte gets drunk and loses her virginity to Hoyt (in a super painful sex scene), who then loses interest.

She’s mortified and devastated. Her grades slip and she falls apart. She runs to Adam for help.

Adam gets her back on her feet, though in the meantime her grades slip to Ds. These grades are the only unrealistic part of the book. There’s no way she wouldn’t still be getting As or Bs.

There are some super painful scenes with Adam during this part of the book. For example, he tells her he loves her in a totally inappropriate setting. He’s constantly hugging her, and when he does so, he always sways gently. She’s, of course, totally creeped out by his beta-ness, but it “would be so much simpler” if she could just like Adam.

During all of this, another story that involves Jojo and Adam unfolds. Jojo has a leftist professor who’s out to expose the academic fraud that is the basketball team. Jojo, of course, doesn’t do any of his own work. In fact, Adam does it all for him.

This professor busts Jojo and Adam. The professor is ready to turn them in, thereby destroying Jojo’s basketball career and Adam’s academic career. However, before the professor turns them in, Adam (who reports for the school newspaper) publishes the story about the Republican Presidential hopeful getting a blow job from a student. The professor’s concern for academic integrity loses out to his desire not to help a Republican, and he drops the matter.

In the end, Charlotte falls for Jojo and they start dating (really dating) on Charlotte’s terms. Both she and Jojo seem to escape the lurid carnival in their own ways. Perhaps even a bit of a soul ends up sneaking out.