The White Conservative Male

I recently watched Django Unchained, a movie I thoroughly enjoyed. At one point, slave-owning Leonardo asks concerning the blacks, “why don’t they just rise up?” The Last Psychiatrist already addressed this better than I could:

Anyway, perfectly ordinary slaveowner DiCaprio asks a rhetorical question, a fundamental question, that has occurred to every 7th grade white boy and about 10% of 7th grade white girls, and the profound question he asked was: “Why don’t they just rise up?”

Kneel down, Quentin Tarantino is a genius.  That question should properly come from the mouth of the German dentist: this isn’t his country, he doesn’t really have an instinctive feel for the system, so it’s completely legitimate for a guy who doesn’t know the score to ask this question, which is why 7th grade boys ask it; they themselves haven’t yet felt the crushing weight of the system, so immediately you should ask, how early have girls been crushed that they don’t think to ask this?   But Tarantino puts this question in the mouth of the power, it is spoken by the very lips of that system; because of course the reason they don’t rise up is that he– that system– taught them not to.  When the system tells you what to do, you have no choice but to obey.

If “the system tells you what to do” doesn’t seem very compelling, remember that the movie you are watching is Django UNCHAINED.   Why did Django rise up?  He went from whipped slave to stylish gunman in 15 minutes.  How come Django was so quickly freed not just from physical slavery, but from the 40 years of repeated psychological oppression that still keeps every other slave in self-check?  Did he swallow the Red Pill? How did he suddenly acquire the emotional courage to kill white people?

“The dentist freed him.”  So?  Lots of free blacks in the South, no uprisings.  “He’s ‘one in ten thousand’?”  Everybody is 1 in 10000, check a chart.  “He got a gun?”  Doesn’t help, even today there are gun owners all over America who feel that they aren’t free.  No.  You should read this next sentence, get yourself a drink, and consider your own slavery: the system told Django that he was allowed to.   He was given a document that said he was a bounty hunter, and as an agent of the system, he was allowed to kill white people.  That his new job happened to coincide with the trappings of power is 100% an accident, the system decided what he was worth and what he could do with his life.  His powers were on loan, he wasn’t even a vassal, he was a tool.

This is not to minimize the individual accomplishment of a Django becoming a free man.  But for the other slaves, what is the significance?

Of course Tarantino knew that the evil slaveowner’s question has a hidden, repressed dark side:  DiCaprio is a third generation slave owner, he doesn’t own slaves because he hates blacks, he owns them because that’s the system; so powerful is that system that he spends his free time not on coke or hookers but on researching scientific justifications for the slavery– trying to rationalize what he is doing.   That is not the behavior of a man at peace with himself, regardless of how much he thinks he likes white cake, it is the behavior of a man in conflict, who suspects he is not free; who realizes, somehow, that the fact that his job happens to coincide with the trappings of power is 100% an accident… do you see?   “Why don’t they just rise up?” is revealed to be a symptom of the question that has been repressed: “why do the whites own slaves?  Why don’t they just… stop?”  And it never occurs to 7th graders to ask this question because they are too young, yet every adult thinks if he lived back then, he would have been the exception.  1 in 10000, I guess.  And here we see how repression always leaves behind a signal of what’s been repressed– how else do you explain the modern need to add the qualifier “evil” to “slaveowner” if not for the deeply buried suspicion that, in fact, you would have been a slaveowner back then?  “But at least I wouldn’t be evil.”  Keep telling yourself that.  And if some guy in a Tardis showed up and asked, what’s up with you and all the slaves, seems like a lot?  You’d say what everybody says, “look wildman, don’t ask me, that’s just the system.  Can’t change it.  Want to rape a black chick?”

Then I read this. According to the statistics given about one in four women suffers violence/rape at the hands of men, although, I have read elsewhere that this number is exaggerated and one in eight would be more accurate. But either way, tThe original giver of these numbers seems shocked that these numbers are so high.

I think the better question is why are these numbers so low?

When men are dominant over women in absolutely every area of power: physical strength, political strength, economic strength, capacity for violence, etc., and these same women hold control over the one base desire to rule them all, why isn’t there more use of force by men to take what they desire?

Women have what men desire and there is little they can do to stop men from taking it. Yet, only a small minority do.

Why isn’t there more violence and rape?

Then I read this: white men are scary. The title says it all. Down in the comments Vanessa stated this:

White men gained power, not because of violence, but because of innovative technology and organization

That’s precisely what makes them scary. They’re not just violent, but clinically focused and horrendously efficient.

I’m German, you know. People think German men are cowards, but they’re not. They’re just very slow to anger, and thank God for that. It is as if the white men of the world have been asleep, and they’re starting to wake up. It’s going to get very scary very fast.

I’ve written about this before. The human male is the apex predator; the single greatest biological killing machine God and/or evolution ever brought forth. White men have brought this violence to levels of horrificness and efficiency previously unknown (except possibly Ghengis Khan).

And yet the question remains, as Vanessa points out:

I think the idea of “white male privilege” is the ultimate Frechheit. It’s not that white males privilege themselves, you ingrates, it’s that they privilege everybody else. They go out of their way to give help everyone else to the same standard of living that they have.

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

I don’t know if this is ignorance, or their hate talking, but it makes them sound like clueless idiots.

I’ve written about this before as well. The white man created the greatest civilization in the history of the world and he has the unrivaled power to dominate any who oppose him and take anything he desires. Yet, instead of using this power for absolute domination and enslaving those who aren’t the white man, he allows others to become a part of his civilization.

Why is this? With this unrivaled power, Why does the white man not take more than a few nebulous “privileges”?

Then, we come to another roadblock: even among white men, there is a power differential, an ideological one.

Simply put, almost the entire capacity for violence among the white man rests in one ideological tribe, which, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll label conservatives. The military is conservative, the police are conservative, gun owners are primarily conservative, white males. This ideological tribe controls every level of violence in society.

Yet, in white society, these conservatives are the outer party. Almost the entirety of the government, the media, the education system, etc. rests in the hands of the conservatives’ rival tribe, which, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll call liberals.

This seems odd. The white, conservative male controls the hard power of society by a large amount, but invites others to share in his civilizational inheritance and allows the other white tribe to control the soft power.

Why doesn’t the white male, armed and capable of violence, take control of institutional soft power from the type of people who believe a moral lecture is “hardball”?

What is it about the white, conservative male that causes him to not use the power he has to dominate others?

Why doesn’t he rise up?

Following that: what happens if the white, conservative male sees he controls hard power and has the capabilities to completely dominate others? What happens if he decides to use it?

What happens when the white, conservative male realizes how the system is set up, and decides fuck this?

The system may seem invincible now, but as Vanessa said:

I think you are underestimating how angry young white men are and how little some of them have left to lose. They used to feel like they were the good guys, and they wanted to protect their reputation, but now they know everybody hates them.

From the Mailbox

Today, two things from the mailbox.

From Europia, one of my readers who wishes to remain anonymous believes that the tide will turn, but not in his lifetime:

You may find the following gem of some interest. The Anti-Family/Child Abuse PONZI Scheme Agenda will eventually cause TOTAL Social Collapse as some people have predicted. This will mean the END of the Cradle-to-Grave Western Social Welfare system. In the LONG-TERM Total Social Breakdown, which will make the Economic Mess TODAY look like a toddlers’ playschool tiff, will benefit Society, especially children. This will mean that a GOOD man of 40 – 50 years of age can marry a lady half his age and father 9 children. The young lady of 23 will have NO PROBLEM marrying a man of 35 years of age and having 8 children as HE will have a house & an income to make a family lifestyle practical. On the other hand a woman older than 35 will have great difficulties becoming a mother. We will see a return of LARGE families of 6 – 10 children as people will NEED the children to support the parents in old age. To a certain extent this return of LARGE families has started in Europe. In Portugal a new Pensions’ Law has linked a person’s pension to the number of children that a person had. So the BIGGER the family, the BIGGER the pension you get. I have NO ILLUSIONS that I might see this day. I reckon that Victory is about 40 years away of not firther away. But WHEN Victory comes and come it will, all the TOXIC PARASITES the “Family Court” judges, Legal Aid lawyers, psychotherapists, mediators, counsellors, social workers, etc WILL have to get a job as opposed to profiting from child abuse. We will also see, possibly QUITE soon, people grow their own food as people will be hungry as opposed to any sentimental reasons.

I found the part about the Pension’s Law interesting. I asked the reader about it, but he had only seen it on TV with no other information. If anyone else has more information or a link, that’d be great.

Second, comes a video sent courtesy of former manosphere blogger Will. It’s a video on how conservatism is a myth and a delusion. It’s pretty good:

Everything he say, more or less applies to Canadian conservatism as well.

Holy Crap: Amanda Marcotte the Libertarian

I never thought I’d see this, but Amanda Marcotte, card-carrying feminist working for Slate XX, has just advocated ending the welfare state.

Amanda “examines” (ie. mocks with snark devoid of intellectual substance, as is typical of these kinds of publications) the idea that not having enough people of working age to support those who don’t work is a problem.

But near the end of her post, she veers way the hell off the reservation:

What really galls me about Last’s piece (and most like it) is the underlying assumption that human beings exist to serve society and not the other way around. Oh, sure, Last mentions a few conservative-friendly policy ideas to help people afford kids—such as reducing the number of kids who go to college, attacking Social Security, and pushing people to move to the suburbs—but if reducing day care costs doesn’t do it, there’s no reason to think these tweaks will either. The reader is left with the feeling that the only solution to save capitalism is to clip the wings of half of the population so they can spend more time laying eggs.

I’d argue instead that if the system is set up so that it fails if women don’t start popping out more kids, then it’s a broken system and should be reworked to account for the reality of America today. If women don’t want to have more children, then instead of abandoning women’s equality as a goal, we should rework our economic system so it doesn’t rely on a steadily growing population to function. After all, the point of society is to serve the people in it, not to reduce us to cogs in a machine that serves no one at all.

This reads like libertarian propaganda. You could put this up at Reason to hearty cheers of comradery and brotherhood (all voluntary of course).

First, she argues that human beings do no exist to serve society, rather the opposite. The individualism expressed here would do Rand proud.

I can’t wait until she gets specific and starts decrying forcing individual to pay taxes to feed the machine.

Then she argues that if the current system requires pumping out children to sustain itself, we should reform the system. She is arguing for the end of both SS and Medicare.

If this is the new direction of feminism I approve.

****

Now, I honestly think it’s unlikely that Amanda Marcotte is going to be voting for Gary Johnson next election. I highly doubt she has carefully examined her views and decided that individual freedom was the goal of politics. Rather this is probably just a case Amanda replaces thought with wish.

She probably just saw someone pointing out one of the logical outcomes of one of her life choices and reflexively through out whatever she came to her so she could avoid having to acknowledge that actions (or nonactions in this particular case) have consequences.

It probably never even occurred to her that SS and Medicare depend on an ever-growing population to remain sustainable. It probably never even occurred to her that her desire for “free” stuff (like child care and contraception) from the government forces other people to serve society.

It is almost sad that non-thought like this can be published by a somewhat “respectable” operation.

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It seems Judgy Bitch found this article as well and posted on it before me. Check it out, it’s a gooder.

Obliviousness, Incivility, and the Destruction of the Old Order

I came across this article from some feminist who, according to the little blurb at the bottom, has written for “Jezebel, The Frisky, The Huffington Post and The Good Men Project.” In it she complains of the incivility of men in public:

It’s a drizzly Friday in Chicago and I’m leaving a bar with my roommate sometime after midnight. We’re on a quest for tacos and we’re discussing the finer points—Should we get pork or beef? From where? How many?—when you decide to make our conversation your business. You’ve been loitering outside the bar with your friends, but you hear the word “taco” and soon you’re in lock step with us, asking us about our “tacos,” laughing, hooting back to your friends. We push past—literally shoving you—and continue on our way.

Here are some things you should know about my week: I’m on the phone with my mom on my way to yoga when a guy leans out of a doorway, drags on his cigarette and gestures with his pelvis how much he is enjoying my yoga pants. I’m walking home from the grocery store and a middle-aged guy, maybe high, maybe drunk, yells at me, “Get back here, girl!” I’m waiting for the bus when a carful of bros whips by; one leans out the passenger window, points at the girls waiting at the bus stop and yells, “Yes, Yes, No…Yes!” After work, I’m walking from the train to my apartment and four teenagers are trailing me, discussing my body, guessing measurements; they know I can hear them.

This behaviour causes her to feel unsafe. This is understandable as she is a young woman and these men are quite obviously under-civilized brutes; rape or violence would not seem to be an impossibility in some of these situations and given the inherent physical inequalities between the sexes there is little she could do to defend herself (excepting carrying a gun, which someone who writes for Jezebel is unlikely to do).

This is not my issue with what she has written. The incivility of modern times sometimes irks me as well, although, as a tall, broad-shouldered man with confident bearing, I rarely worry for my physical safety.

Rather, my issue is that, as feminists are wont to do, she blames “the patriarchy” for the incivility of ruffians.

She, of course, being an miseducated feminist is oblivious to the twin facts that:

1) Men being uncivil is not “the patriarchy”, it is the breakdown of the patriarchy. It is men being freed from the constraints which the patriarchy put upon them.

2) The left-wing feminist politics she advocates are the primary cause of this breakdown.

Because of this her analysis, such that it is, is flawed.

****

Men’s sexuality, absent civilizational constraint, is naturally aggressive and promiscuous. These men laughing at a woman’s “taco”, grabbing ass, and doing pelvic-thrusts, are acting out their natural sexuality.

At one point in our society, this would have been unacceptable behaviour. Under the old order, lovingly referred to as the patriarchy, but probably more accurately referred to as civilization, civility towards woman was standard; it was called chivalry.

Men raised under this order would have been loath to issue even a mild oath in the presence of a woman, let alone crassly harass a woman over her “tacos”. Had a man been uncivilized enough to harass a woman in such a way, he would have suffered immediate consequences in the form of violence from other honourable men, and more permanent consequences from a loss of social status.

As an example of the sort of man the old order raised, we can use one Samuel Proctor, who tipped his hat towards a woman. When said woman asked what that meant he replied:

Madame, by tipping my hat I was telling you several things. That I would not harm you in any way. That if someone came into this elevator and threatened you, I would defend you. That if you fell ill, I would tend to you and if necessary carry you to safety. I was telling you that even though I am a man and physically stronger than you, I will treat you with both respect and solicitude. But frankly, Madame, it would have taken too much time to tell you all of that; so, instead, I just tipped my hat.”

A man raised in the old order as Mr. Proctor was, would never have even considered joking about a woman’s “tacos”.

Civilization was used to control men’s natural sexual aggressiveness to create men like Mr. Proctor, who acted civilized and would control their aggressive sexuality for the betterment of society and the safety of women.

Some decades ago, a cabal of dissatisfied women under the label of feminism and a small, but vocal minority under the banner of affiliated progressive ideologies decided they did not care for civilization and its constraints. They rebelled against it and fought a long, hard ideological war to destroy it.

They won.

This cabal destroyed the old order and with it the control it had over men’s sexuality.

Men are now free to be uncivil brutes. Civilization no longer holds full sway over them.

Hence, “tacos.”

****

So, in finale:

Dear Feminist,

This is the world you desired.

You and your ideological kin spent decades ruthlessly destroying the old order which kept men civilized. You smashed the patriarchy which kept men’s naturally externalized sexuality healthly internalized and productively directed.

You denigrated the institutions which controlled men, smashed the civilization which ordered men, and have created a generation of brutes and half-men.

You asked for sexual license. Men are now free to express their sexuality without consequence.

You asked for freedom to pursue hedonism. Men are now pursuing hedonism.

You asked to be freed from the rules of civilized conduct. Men are now freed from these rules as well.

You rejected your role as a lady. Men are rejecting their role as gentlemen.

These rules were made to protect you, dear woman. The patriarchy was made for your benefit. The old order existed to serve you.

You desired, nay demanded, them destroyed, and destroyed they have been.

When you destroy civilization, incivility will be the order of the day.

You have got what you asked for, enjoy it.

Regards,

A Traditionalist

Sexbots – Redux

Today, SSM had a look at the world of sex dolls and felt both ickiness and sadness. I’m going to talk a bit about it and answer some of her questions. I have already written about the rise of sex dolls* and potential implications here, so check that out first.

Would women have any interest in these whatsoever?

I think no.

I agree; women are generally sexually attracted to dominance and indicators thereof, no sex doll can replicate that. On the other curves of 36-24-36 are not overly complicated to replicate; a pretty face is more complicated, but not insurmountable.

Is sexual activity with a sexbot a sin?  Would it be fornication?  Would it be adultery if the participant is married?  Is there anything in the Bible that would justify condemning the invention or use of sexbots?

It would be neither fornication nor adultery, in itself. On the other hand, it might violate commandments against lust. On the third hand (I’m am mutant), is it lust if it’s not towards an actual woman?

It’s a fairly similar question to masturbation, and whatever your opinion on masturbation should be your opinion on sexbots.

Would it be pedophilia if the sexbot is formed as a child?  Think I’m way off on this last one?

It would be. I think she’s dead on here. As I talked of in my previous post on the subject, illegal and physiologically impossible sex acts are going to be one of the primary drivers of sexbots.

I’ll put it simply, there are more clinical pedophiles out there than there are homosexuals. They can’t sex a real 10-year old (at least not without violating both social taboos and the law), but when they can sex something that looks like a 10-year old without actually injuring a 10-year old, why wouldn’t they?

How do you argue morally against sexual gratification without harm without using religious or socially conservative arguments about the spiritual and/or societal importance of proper sexual relations? Note that the argument for proper sexual relations has been lost for decades, so there is no real societal defence against letting pedophiles get theirs rocks off on toys. In fact, it would probably reduce harm by letting them satiate their perverted lusts on inanimate objects rather than children.

Of course, SSM is not as crooked-thinking and enmeshed in the internet culture as I am, and has not mentioned the potential of sexbots which cry, scream, and resist to satiate the rapists and/or sadists which make up an even larger minority of the population than pedophiles or homosexuals. Then of course there’s sexbots for all the other, weirder and less predominant fetishes out there, which I would suggest SSM not google, such as dickgirls, furries, machina, goo-girls, guro, etc. (Oh why did I ever visit 4chan? Funny memes are assuredly not worth the mind pollution.)

Do people see sexbots as being replacements for actual human life partners?

Some do view it as a replacement for actual human life partners.

Or more accurately, they have been so scarred by negative interactions with women and/or have a keen enough awareness of their own low sexual value that they no longer even desire and/or hope for a normal human relationship with a real women. Instead, they make due with the best alternative.

The better term might be substitute good.

Is that the attraction?

The attraction is simple: for the omega male (and even for the beta male) finding a mate in these times is a grinding, brutal, and confusing process of rejection, mind games, loneliness, shattered hope, hopelessness, boredom, inanity, pettiness, and humiliation. At some point he simply decides it’s not worth it.

A sex doll provides a better than masturbation simulator of the real thing.

If it’s just a sexual thing, why attach a body to it in the first place?

Because it’s a sex thing. Masturbation relieves sexual urges but is lacking a certain something. Sex dolls somewhat close the gap between sex and masturbation; they trick your mind and body (somewhat) into believing you’re with a real woman. The more realistic they get, the better the mind is tricked and the narrower the gap between masturbation and sex.

How would this affect the relationship between men and women?

Once they get realistic enough: poorly.

Relational options for low-attractiveness women would evaporate; why sex a fatty when the sex doll looks better?

A significant portion of omega (and beta) men would leave the sexual/relational market; why waste all the time, pain, and effort required to attract an average looking woman after a decade or two of loneliness, when $3000 get’s you a reasonable facsimile of companionship right now?

Average women will be strongly negatively effected. Sexual/relational options and attention provided by betas/omegas will dry up.

Alpha males and greater betas will make out like bandits, as women becoming more desperate as their options dry up.

Hot women will have their marriage options dry up, but will still be able to get sexual and relational attention from higher status males. Competition from more average women though will decrease their ability to make demands and be bitchy, so they will be forced to be more feminine and nice.

Marriage will become almost solely the domain of the religious. Why would any secular man link up with a woman for life and risk his mental health, property, stability, and freedom on a woman, when woman are so driven to desperation and a sexbot can give a reasonable facsimile of real sex?

Those of you who question if omegas and lower betas would do this, simply lack the understanding of just how brutal the sexual market place is for these folks.

Will we still have any interest in one another?

No idea about women, but a lot of men will stop caring about women. Most women are simply, by male standards, shallow and uninteresting on a friendship level; with sexual desire satiated on demand by plentiful sex (from desperate women and sex dolls) many men will simply stop trying to sift through all the vapid, flaky, emotional, attention-whoring women to find the minority of sane, level-headed, and enjoyable ones; there will no longer be enough incentive to.

If men could choose between an average, real woman and a super-hot fake woman, which would most men prefer?

For the average man, all things being equal, the former, but all things are inherently not equal. An average, real women comes with a lot of costs: the joyless, painful grind of pursuit, rejection, and dating to find her, the emotional costs of living with an emotionally volatile creature, the risk of divorce rape, the risk of her changing and becoming frigid over time, the loss of freedom a real relationship implies, the monetary costs of a relationship, etc.

Even so, I think the majority would prefer the former, if they could get it and the costs were reasonable. Unfortunately for a certain, but unspecific, number of men, they can’t get it or the costs would be unreasonable.

If (probably “when” is a more accurate question) sexbots hit the market, will people buy them?

Absolutely. They will sell well.

MEN: would you buy a sexbot?

As things stand now no. But in the future if the following four conditions are met: my Christian morality fades, my desire for a family fades, they were to get sufficiently realistic looking, and I were to find the costs (material and immaterial) of picking up women too high, I probably would.

Wouldn’t it be a better idea to fix marriage?

It would. Let’s see when ending no fault divorce becomes a viable political debate.

****

I think Cail got to the heart of the issue:

“”"If you think having sex with an inanimate object seems like it would be dispiriting — well yeah, but jerking off into a kleenex doesn’t exactly make you feel like a king. Honestly, the prospect of cleaning the thing disturbs me more than the idea of having sex with it.

That will be most men will take on the issue. A reall women is best, but if they’re gonna end up masturbating regularly anyways, why not do it better.

Of course, some disagree:

“”"With my “no” vote, the poll is back to even. I’m honestly surprised there are that many who would bed a robot, regardless of religious affiliation. It’s a robot.

From my understanding though, Stratton has had a happy marriage from a fairly young age. I would expect this reaction from most men who have never been involuntarily celibate for an extended period of time.

Who uses the bots will depend highly on their success in sexual/relational market in early life. Those men who are successful early and either marry young or have a lot of sex in high school/college, will probably find the idea repulsive. Those who aren’t successful will find the idea more alluring than their hand.

****

* Note: When I talk of sex dolls or sexbots in this post, I am referring to all semi-realistic stand-ins for sex, which would include VR sex, realistic sex dolls, future sexbots, etc.

Americans Deserve to Get What They Want

So, by now most of you have heard Obama won. I’m not American and have been moderately ambivalent about this election; a moderate conservative like Romney is not what America needs at this time.

Despite my ambivalence about which Republicrat won, I think in retrospect this election was very important because of the issues at play and how they were handled. In particular the narrow-minded childishness of it all.

Right now the US is drowning itself in debt, its social security program is unsustainable, entitlement programs are growing and becoming unsustainable, unemployment has been stuck at a high level and the economy is still suffering, the upcoming generation is drowning in student debt and are unable to find gainful employment, one in seven Americans are on food stamps, the fed has a policy of printing $40-billion/month to create inflation, the US is engaged in two wars and a massive assassination program, and Obamacare represented a takeover of a large portion of the economy (along with the attendant side effects). Essentially, America is nearing the end of the process of moving from a (somewhat) free market economy to a broke European cradle-to-grave welfare state.

Whatever side of the issue you fall on (and most of my readers are probably opposed to Europeanization), this is a huge change that deserves debate. Even if you agree that the US is on the right course and should become a European-style welfare state, it is still something that should be debated, voted over, and planned so the US welfare state can become a moderately sustainable one like Germany or the Nordic countries rather than a fiscal disaster like the PIGS.

So, with all these important issues of war, America’s future, the economy, etc. what were the issues that got traction?

Muppets and “binders of women”.

Think about that for a minute: with America’s economic and post-secondary education problems almost literally destroying an entire generation and America’s future in the balance, the issues everybody talked about and that got the most traction were about was a few million dollars of funding for a TV station and whether 30-something women should have to pay for their own contraception.

Really? Fucking really?

What is wrong with you America?

Are you a bunch of fucking children?

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I’m not exaggerating the muppet thing one bit, but I might be being somewhat unfair on the “war on women” thing, so let’s analyze it a bit more.

The war on women has revolved around the following:

1. Defunding planned parenthood
2. Fluke wanting religious organizations to pay for her contraception
3. State laws restricting abortion access.
4. A few dumbasses saying stupid things about rape.
5. “Binders of women” and the pay gap.

The first and second restrict nothing and are no more a “war on women” than defunding Big Bird is a “war on literacy”. Whatever your opinion on contraception and abortion, paying for your own shit is one of the hallmarks of being a responsible adult. That who funds contraception can even be debated by supposedly “serious” people is proof of the childishness of American politics.

As for the third, it is a major issue but not a presidential or federal one.

I’ll write it clearly so all the idiots on both sides can hear it. I don’t care whether you are pro- or anti-: abortion is no longer a federal issue. The courts have decided and are supported in their decision by enough of the population that no president will be able to restrict abortion no matter how much he may want to. There may be some fights at the margins at the state level, but only at the margins and only at the state level.

Any “war on women” rhetoric saying there are threats to abortion at the federal level are simply fear-mongering. Any anti-abortion activists that are are trying to limit abortion at the federal level are frivolously wasting their time, it would be much more productive to focus on changing the culture than the law. Debating abortion on the federal level is about as relevant as debating abolitionism.

Nothing short of the second coming of Christ is going to result in the banning of abortion in the US at any point in the foreseeable future.

As for the fourth, any group of 535 people will have its share of dumbasses. The opinions of these particular dumbasses matters, but only for their congressional districts. Their idiocy is a local matter. Unless the presidential candidate and/or the party as a whole holds these views on rape (which they have disavowed). It is a non-issue at the presidential level.

The fifth may matter if it exists (although, the existence of an actual gap is empirically dubious). But assuming it does exist, a 17% (or whatever the current number being used is) wage differential pales in economic significance to the other economic woes facing the US. The near doubling of the unemployment rate since 2008 combined with a full 2% of the population dropping from the labour market. The 50% unemployment and underemployment rate of an entire generation. The wage gap may be something to debate at some point in the future, but the overall state of the economy is hurting women much worse than any potential wage differential. Act like adults and shoot the tiger in the living room before fretting over the house cat.

In other words, the entire “war on women” is one big non-issue for a presidential campaign.

****

The most important part of this election was simply the frivolity of it.

Elections have always had mud-slinging, character assassination, and stupid political games, but this election was special. There were/are major obvious structural problems with the US and its economy that need to be addressed (whatever the solution) and this election was fought on none of them.

It was fought on frivolities and non-issues.

Up to this point I have had hope for the Republic. Obama may have been a liberal and won in 2008, but he won for some serious reasons (economic collapse). Bush won in 2004 over a debate over a serious issue (Iraq War). Even in 2000, when the US was running smoothly and the US could afford to debate frivolities, the election was mostly about serious domestic issues.

I had hope that someone the serious issues facing the US over the next few decades would be addressed, if not this election than some other one, because at some level I thought adults were running the establishment.

Even is Obama had won because voters debated over and decided they wanted a European-style social democracy rather than a free republic, I would have held some level of hope for the Republic, because then at least adults (however incorrect they might be) would have been in charge. Then when the failure of social democracy became apparent (as it has in Greece) adults would have been able to pick up the pieces.

But choosing the executive based on a puppet show and who pays for contraception (not even the legality of contraception, but simply who pays) when the US is in the midst of the worst recession in decades and the system is eating an entire generation?

Really?

It seems the US electorate are a bunch of ignorant little children.

At this point I’m just going to say, y’all deserve the decline.

I’m going to enjoy a delicious, steaming cup of schadenfreude watching you suffer over the next decade.

****

Tim had similar thoughts:

We’ve re-elected the president. I hope that those of you who voted for him get what you wanted, good and hard.

****

For your amusement, here’s some other bloggers’ post-election writings in no particular order. Doing it this way will avoid clogging up next week’s Lightning Round with only election stuff.

Jerkonomics
Jack Donovan
Rollo and Mark Minter
Private Man
Freedom 25
Empathological
CMD-N
Sunshine Mary
Ian Ironwood
John Wright
White Sepulchre
The Captain
The Captain Again
Vox
Vox Again
GLP
Neanderpundit
Apocalypse Nowish
An Instapundit Reader

Update: More Post-election Analysis – 2012/11/08

Publius
Bill
Tim (@ Matt Forney)
Carnivore
Simon Grey
Simon Grey Again
A Physician (h/t: Smallest Minority)

Update: A few more – 2012/11/09

Bill Again
Young Hunter
Mangan
Professor Hale
Frank Fleming
James Taranto
Beverly Gage

Update: One last time – 2012/11/13

Jack Donovan again
Suyts (Related, Related)

The Squeeze and the Surrogate Family

I came across this article (h/t: Instapundit) about the squeeze middle-aged folks, particularly women, are under as they are stressed caring for both their children and their aging parents. According to the article, it is supposedly difficult and stressful to care “for both their children and their aging parents while also managing their income-generating jobs and keeping their partners happy–all at the same time.”

To which the only possible response is: no duh.

It is difficult, if not impossible, because nobody was ever meant to do all that at once. People simply do not have the time and energy to deal with children, old people, a career, and other activities at the same time.

Traditionally, there have always been societal and biological mechanisms to deal with this, but, over the last few decades, we’ve decided to spit in the face of both.

Throughout history, these mechanisms have varied. Tribal structures, villages, and the like made raising children and taking care of old people a community thing for most people. Combined with the typical “low” age of average death, “early” child-bearing ages, and large families things mostly worked themselves out.

When people started living longer and tribal and community ties began to die due to the mass dislocations caused by industrialization and urbanization, society adapted by adopting what we now know of as the traditional nuclear family in the early 20th century. Combined with some help from local churches and community organizations this worked fairly well, reaching its apex in the decades following war boom.

In the nuclear family model, the family adopts a division of labour to help the running of the household. The husband works and the wife takes care of the family. Families have many kids and they have them at a young age, so when they get old, the children can care for their parents.

Given the realities of modern, mass society, this structure works.

Having children young (in your late teens/early 20s) provided future children to take care of you and makes it so that by the time you need to take care of your elders, your children are already nearing self-sufficiency. It means that you have your youthful vigor to raise your children when you need. (Did you ever think of why you are able to go with minimal and erratic sleep when you’re young? It’s because it lets you physically handle the realities of a squalling infant unable to tell time. You are not built to naturally be able to take care of young children in your 30s and 40s, you lose the vigor necessary to do so as you age.)

Having lots of children meant that there would be enough people to take care of you when you aged without it being an undue burden on any single child.

Having the wife stay home provided the family with a person who had the time to take care of the children. She had time to take care of elderly relatives. She had the time to take care of sick family members.

There was no generational squeeze, because the division of labour and proper family planning inherent in the nuclear family model gave each individual only what they could actually handle and there was no undue burden on any single family member.

****

When feminists, and others, criticize the “housewife”, they miss the importance the housewife has for modern, mass society. Absent the traditional bonds of tribe and villages, anomie was destroying people in an urbanized, industrial environment.The development of the housewife held this back.

The housewife may not contribute to “GDP” but she contributes something just as important, she socially bonds the family together and bonds the family to the rest of the community. She has time to take care of dependent family members. She has time to develop meaningful relationships in the neigbourhood and the family’s social circle. She had time to support local organizations and by taking care of the household, she gave the husband time to support them.

The bread-winning husband is economically productive, while the housewife is socially productive.

In a modern, urban society, social productivity is as essential to the health of society as economic productivity, as the natural social relations and community of a tribal or village lifestyle simply do not exist. But building community takes time, something people working full-time, while taking care of children, simply do not have. The housewife had this time.

She has time to get to get to know Edna down the street and develop a meaningful relationship, which would then transfer into a meaningful family relationship, building community. If Edna’s husband, Bill broke his leg and couldn’t work, her neighbour, the housewife, would have the time to comfort them; she would prepare meals, look after Edna’s children, provide emotional support, run errands, etc., which she was able to do because she had time. She would know that Edna would do the same if something happened to her family.

The housewife would build community where community did not naturally exist.

****

But, some sections of society (read: leftists and feminists) were unhappy with this adaptation to modern society and set out to destroy it.

The traditional, nuclear family was “oppressive” and being a housewife was unfulfilling, so patriarchy had to be destroyed. (Because working 40 hours in a dead-end office job simply to expand your ability to mindlessly consume was somehow more fulfilling than meaningful community).

And destroyed it was.

People started getting married later, had children later, and had fewer children overall. Family became less important.

The housewife was replaced by a second provider. The traditional family replaced by the broken family. Social productivity was exchanged for economic productivity, with little real benefit.

The result: anomie.

The social capital the traditional family, particularly the housewife, created began to disappear. As Robert Putnam has documented this decline in social capital and social trust. As one example, over the last 25 years the average adult has gone from having 3 friends to having only 2; half of all adults have one or fewer real friends.

The squeeze occurred, as no one is able to work full-time, raise children, care for elders, and develop community. There is simply not enough time in the day and peopel simply do not have that much energy.

****

So, how was the squeeze handled?

The traditional family was replaced by the broken family and the surrogate family.

The broken family lost the husband and father. Of course, raising a child, while also providing for this family is brutally hard work, almost impossible. So, the husband and father the broken family did not have was replaced by the state, which became a surrogate husband and father. The state would offer provision through welfare, mandated leave, tax breaks, funded child care, public health care, and a wide array of other benefits.

The housewife was working and could no longer raise her children. Instead, families gave them to a surrogate mother: subsidized daycare and the public school system.

The housewife no longer had the time to take care of elderly or ill relatives and the relatives had forgone having enough children. The work of supporting them became overly onerous, it simply was impossible. So, families entrusted their elderly and ill to a surrogate child, the state. Social security, subsidized senior housing, public health care, and a wide array of government benefits replaced the family.

****

The problem with using the state as a surrogate family is twofold.

First, the state can only provide bread, but man does not live on bread alone. People need community, friends, family, and social interaction. The state is incapable of providing this; it is a cold, faceless, bureaucratic institution. The best it can do is hire a paid nurse or teacher to tolerate your company for a few hours.

The state can not build community. It can only replace community with economic transaction or destroy it.

The state can not end the squeeze, as personal relations are still necessary for the elderly, the infirm, children, and the building of community. It may alleviate is somewhat, but the squeeze remains.

Second, is the cost. The state’s coffers are not bottomless and when the benefits of social capital that were previously built by unpaid labour, now has to be built by labour paid by the state, the costs become onerous.

The state goes broke.

Greece is experiencing it. Other part of Europe will experience it soon. North America will experience it in time if her course does not reverse.

When the state goes broke, it can no longer replace community, but people have lost the community to replace the state. There can only be a void, with people left to their own devices. Those unable to repair community or provide for themselves suffer.

Without the traditional family, the squeeze is unavoidable.

****

The traditional family, particularly the housewife, was essential to building community. The state as a surrogate family has replaced the traditional family. Mindless economic production and consumerism replaced community. The bureaucratic state expanded and replaced community.

For what benefit? A squeeze on the middle, a dubious increase in material well-being, and the end to an amorphous concept of oppression.

I hope those who did this feel it was worth it. Do you think it was?

More Encouragement for Bill

Bill over at Apocalypse Cometh was encouraged by the anger and planning of a young person who e-mailed him.

So, I thought I’d give him a bit more encouragement.

The rage that person expresses is not that uncommon among young men in their late teens and twenties. Our generation has inherited a world of shattered families, smashed gender relations, eroded civic virtue, and decayed social institutions.  Our education system is a broken mess of deceit, mental oppression, psychological castration, and exploitative larceny. When we finally graduate university, we face economic stagnation, unemployment, and hopeless economic prospects.

Rage is not uncommon. As an well-known example, advise him to check out /b/ on 4chan. (The link goes to Wikipedia. I am not linking to the site as it is very much NSFW. Do not visit it if you are prone to being offended by, well, anything). I’m not sure if Bill would know of it or not, it’s not something older folks are generally aware of.

The site is populated by, primarily, young adult males, mostly of the beta and omega male varieties. It is massive; it currently stands at about the 1,000 busiest website in the world (about 500-600th in the US), with about 18 million users a month (about 6% of the US population). As the origin point for almost every popular internet meme you may have encountered, it has huge cultural power.

Out of any place you can check, it is probably the best indicator of the attitudes of current generation of what young adult beta males. The anonymity of the site frees to talk as they wish without the confines of societal pressure.

So what are thoughts of the beta males on this site?

Rage, pain, and cultural nihilism.

It is infested with every kind of racism, violence, gore, misogyny, pornography, and the like you can imagine (and many you never would).  There are no taboos about anything: everything from suicide to religion to the handicapped is mocked and profaned. Those who don’t partake or object are mocked as “moralfags” (everybody on 4chan is labelled a ****fag).

Nihilism, anger, hatred, and sadistic glee permeate the site, but even underneath all that, it is hard to judge them for it. Because underneath all the rage is a sense of bitterness, pain, alienation, and unquenchable loneliness.

They are hurting; they are despairing. They are stuck in a society that is destroying them and are lashing out in the only way they know how.

Check out this comic which explains how many of them see themselves and their site. I’d embed it, but it becomes unreadable.

****

This is the new generation of young males and it’s frightening.

There are 18 million young males spending good chunks of their time on this site. They feel betrayed, hurt, and angry and they are desensitizing themselves to the normal moral prescriptions that hold society together.

When we talk about the decline and the destruction of our youth, this is what we are talking about. When we talk about the economic and cultural hopelessness among our youth, this is it. When we talk of the beta males being ground down, this is what we’re talking about. When idiots talk about man-children or Peter Pan boys who refuse to grow up, this is what they don’t know they are referring to.

All the theory, all the hypothesizing: this is where it exists in reality.

Bill may find “Someone” encouraging, but I’m not so sure. He’s only the small tip.

Most of these people are probably outcasts sitting alone in their basements who will never take action on their own, but out of the millions, there are probably at least a few thousand that are leaders, some that are organizing something.

Even if there isn’t, how can a society continue for long when such a large portion of its young adult males are this disengaged, this nihilistic, this bitter about their society.

What happens when these millions of young adult males bring this bitterness and rage beyond the internet? A few protests from Anonymous (as they call themselves) at Occupy and elsewhere have been largely ineffective so far, but how long will that last?

I don’t know, but when there is this much unfocused rage and pain, among this many of the coming generation, it can’t be good.

What happens when the unfocused rage becomes focused?

Maybe this isn’t encouragement for Bill, maybe it is, but I don’t think the consequences will be anything anybody likes.

The Collapse

XSplat asked, “what, EXACTLY, they mean by “society collapses”? (H/T: SAG)

Yesterday, I noted that government takeover and the collapse of the family from the “long march through culture” led to what you see in black America: high dependence on government, high violence, social problems, etc.

In response to a similar answer, he added:

“I want to know what happens to WHITE society. Show me a WHITE example.”

The trite answer is watch the riots in Greece and see what occurs to them over the next 5 years. There are already riots and they will likely get worse before they get better. The American collapse will be worse though, because there is no EU to bail the US out.

The not-quite-so-trite answer is Rome and the Dark Ages. Rome collapsed over centuries and Western civilization stagnated for centuries more. Collapse for the US will be different, because the US is separated by water from everybody but Mexico and Canada, and so has less of a problem of barbarians sacking them. But still, it’s one possibility.

The even-less-so-but-still-trite answer is that whites and non-whites are inter-mixed in most Western countries, so his point’s fairly irrelevant. If one group in society completely collapses, it negatively effects the other groups in society.

An almost-not-trite answer would be the Weimer Republic. Good times were had by all. The Soviet Union, it’s collapse, and Russia’s collapse into a corrupt oligarchy are another. Yob culture in Britain is another, and is not that far from the American ghetto.

I will come back to this and outline the likely scenarios for an answer that’s not trite, but first we will deal with other parts of his post.

****

Someone else provides him with an answer, which I think is partially correct, which he then follows up with:

“But what these future predictions miss is technology. Where we are today is the result of technology. Future technological changes will change what options we have for our future. How far off do you think biotech is from altering society? What will happen when making designer babies is cheap and readily available? When electronic implants can affect our emotions?”

I’m going to start with this, just to get the objection out of the way, so I can concentrate on the collapse.

Essentially what he is talking about is either post-scarcity and/or the singularity. I’ve written of post-scarcity before, and I believe it to be nearly inevitable; eventually we will pass the threshold of scarcity to where we do not need to “work”. The other concept is the singularity, the point where we reach superintelligence through either AI, the mind/machine interface, or biotechnology. We already have very primitive M/MA, AI, and biotech, just as we have primitive 3D printers, but the endpoint of the three is the singularity.

There’s a good chance we will reach the singularity. The most optimistic predictions I’ve seen is about 2045. Many experts have put it between 2050 and 2100. Others only say the distant future. Many, such as Steven Pinker, an intellectual I respect, doubt it will ever occur. I lean towards the more optimistic side, I’d take a wild guess at before 2100 simply because technology has generally tended to advance faster than most experts think, but I think there’s some wishful thinking in the earlier dates. Of course, the wild guess of some random guy on the internet is not exactly gospel.

I think post-scarcity will come well before the singularity simply because the mechanical is easier for man to master than the genetic, biological, electronic, and quantam. Post-scarcity is less discussed than the singularity, so the only projected date I’ve seen is 2050-75, but thbe post-scarcity from that prediction is a bit different from the post-scarcity I posited.

But anyway, let’s, for the sake of argument, say that post-scarcity will occur by 2050 and the singularity by 2080 (70 years from now, a common prediction).

The question then becomes, when is “the collapse”?

This is more difficult. The collapse, which is probably more accurately referred to as the end of the world as we know it, is a political belief of those on the alt-right, that is not accepted by most of the mainstream, so it’s less looked at by what we would term futurists. Despite this, there’s been some predictions. Patrick Buchanan, probably the best known of those predicting the Death of the West, posits it will occur by 2050, but has since wondered if it could occur by 2025. Mark Steyn’s After America didn’t give a date, but it’s obvious he expects it in the next few decades if there are no changes. If you ask anybody on the alt-right, they’ll probably have a prediction of some sort.

Outside the alt-right, Niall Ferguson has posited the beginning of the collapse of the American Empire within the next five years and Alternet posits it by 2025, but the collapse of empire is somewhat different from societal collapse, even if both are related.

The most important point is nobody really knows when the collapse will come, only that there is a good possibility of it. Just like nobody knows when post-scarcity or the singularity will come. Predicting the future accurately is extremely difficult, we can only look at current trends, extrapolate, prepare, and then take whatever chaotic occurrences come upon us.

But if we look at the predictions, 2025-2050 is earlier than 2050-2100. So, the majority opinion seems to be that the collapse comes first.

If the singularity or post-scarcity occurs, there will be no collapse. If the economy grows rapidly enough that it covers over any other problems we might have, there will be no collapse. If the collapse comes first, there will be some bad years before post-scarcity and it might delay or prevent post-scarcity.

The question is not will technology prevent the coming collapse, the question is which will hit first?

It is a race between science and economic progress on one hand and societal collapse on the other.

****

Wait, X-Splat’s talking of collapse due to family, you’re talking about collapse of empire, collapse due to debt, and economic collapse.

There’s no difference. It’s all related.

The collapse of family, the collapse of empire, the debt bomb, the growth of government, the housing bust, etc. are all the same collapse due to the same reason: they are all symptoms of the collapse of civil society and civic virtue. Civil society is what keeps a free society together and stops it from collapsing on itself. (A tyranny can keep society together through fear and violence, but only until someone else overthrows the tyrant). Civil society is the bonds that hold a community together and civic virtue are the values that keep society from ripping itself apart.

When civil society dies, charity dries up, family collapses, social capital disappears, churches and other traditional institutions die off, business become corrupt, society becomes corrupt, and self-organization withers. When civic virtue dies, people become corrupt, they vote themselves money at others’ expense, refuse to contribute to society, abandon family, stop volunteering, refuse public service in the military, take on huge unrepayable debt, become irresponsible, pursue decadence and hedonism, etc.

No society can survive the collapse of civic virtue and civil society and remain free.

The banging of sluts and the collapse of family are just one aspect of the greater collapse of civic virtue and civil society.

****

So what happens in the collapse?

The answer: that depends. There are simply to many variables to make any conclusive answers. I will give what I think are some of the likelier potentials.

(Note: I am going to focus on North American collapse, to reduce the scope. For the rest of the Western world, the answers are similar on the broad strokes, but many details might be different.)

1) Great Depression Part 2: The Great Recession turns into a Great Depression. The US sinks into a long economic malaise but still has enough civic virtue and civil society to get through it as a free nation. There are rough spots, poverty increases, there’s some minor violence and riots, and it’s tough on everybody, especially seniors for whom SS and Medicare have been drastically reduced, but the US continues to be a more-or-less free and functioning society. Eventually either pulls through or reaches economic scarcity.

This is the best of the collapse scenarios. There is no radical change to American life, just some very tough belt tightening and the occasional spot of violence. This is what blue-pill fiscal conservatives like Paul Ryan are trying to do and are failing at.

2) Brave New World: This is less a collapse than a drawn out decline. Big Brother slowly takes over and America loses its freedom. I don’t think America will slip into outright dictatorship, but democracy will become increasingly a formality rather than a reality, life will become increasingly less free, and the state will slowly replace civil society. The courts will gradually hand more power over to government and government will progressively control more of American life. Americans will essentially live in a gilded cage. Consumer goods and pop entertainment will keep most American’s sated. There will be some illusion of freedom; you will still be able to choose which brand of government approved video games you desire. You will still be free to read most books (except some of those that are “hateful” or “obscene”). You will be able to use the internet for pornography and whatnot, but some sites will be blocked.  Most people will be sated with their illusion of freedom and their consumer goods. Those that aren’t will either be jailed/put on probation for technical regulatory violations or will be given little outlets apart from society as a whole where they can be somewhat free of societal constraints (within reason) without impacting society as a whole (ex. the army). This is essentially the Bonobo Masturbation Society.

I think this is the most likely scenario. This is the Gramscian long march I talked of yesterday. The end game will eventually resemble something like Brave New World. It won’t be hellish; it will actually be somewhat pleasurable, but there will always be that thought in the back of your mind: “isn’t there something more?” and there will always be that edge of emptiness in your life, but, thankfully, the pills and VR will make it barely noticeable.

3) Demographic Violence: As the US economy worsens and people lose their government benefits as it can no longer afford to pay them, various groups will begin to engage in protest and violence. The well-off will separate themselves from it geographically, but the lower and middle classes will be engaged. This violence will take one of three forms: ideological, racial, or generational. Essentially, there will be a long, drawn-out series of riots and low-level violence.  If it’s ideological,it will occur primarily between conservatives and liberals and between fringe groups; it lead to further ideological segregation in society. Racial violence would occur between blacks, latinos, and whites, with Asians caught in the crossfire. Generational violence will occur as seniors protest the death of the social security and medicare they paid for their whole life and the younger victimize the elderly as blame for causing the collapse. Most likely it will be some combination of the three.

There will be violence either way, the question is what level of violence. In this scenario, society still functions, but violence, like the Rodney King Riots, Brehivik, or the English Riots will become much more common. Political protests become more common and often degrade into violence and rioting. This kind of violence will likely accompany any of the other scenarios to varying degrees. Eventually, this sorts itself out politically and economically with reforms or it degrades into revolution or civil war.

4) Revolution: A group revolts and takes control of the government. This could follow demographic violence, replace it, or be a part of it. What kind of society follows will depend on who does the coup.

I think this is highly unlikely. The US is too well-armed and ideologically, ethnically, and regionally divided for any single group to simply have a coup. If a coup occurs, it will most likely result in dissolution and/or civil war.

5) Balkanization and/or Civil War: Due either to demographic violence, revolution, or the reaching of some political or economic tipping point. The US dissolves itself; various states and/or regions balkanize, declare independence, and assert their own governance. This could be peaceful or violent. If done peacefully, it will not be too bad. People will move to whichever region they prefer and there will be some temporary economic and political disruption, but no real long-run problems. If done violently, it could tip into civil war. This could be relatively light war, such as in the books State of Disobedience or Empire, or it could be a major war to rival or surpass the American Civil War.

I think there’s a decent chance of dissolution. Most likely, if it does occur, it will come with some light violence. There will be some riots, a few massacres, and some firefights not really on the level of battles, that will cause the the states agree to dissolve more or less peacefully.

6) A Renewing War: A war in Europe occurs due to similar economic and political collapse. Or a war in Asia due to population imbalances, resource disputes, and ancient grudges. Or a war in the Middle East, because it’s the Middle East. Or a war against Mexico because as the drug war troubles slip out of control into full on civil war, which spills over into the US. Whatever the war, the US becomes involved, and unlike the limited wars of Iraq or Afghanistan, it reaches the level of (near) total war.  The masculine virtues reassert themselves. Unemployment disappears as the war gobbles up all available industry and manpower. Civic virtue and civil society are renewed as people handle the sacrifices of war. Men die en masse and become rarer; society realigns back towards patriarchy as female competition for men increases. Society is forged in the flame and returns renewed and invigorated.

This seems possible. It would also probably follow either #1 or #3 and would be the way past them. (Note: War could occur in other scenarios, but in those scenarios they would not have a renewing effect, it would simply be an adjunct to the rest).

Personally, I think #1 and #2 are the most likely collapse scenarios, with low-levels of scenario three involved in either of them, but none of the others are implausible. What happens depends on the circumstances of the collapse which I can not predict.

****

Any of scenarios #1-5 will result in the end of American hegemony. The US will simply not be able to continue to act as the world police, destabilizing the rest of the world.

Europe will no longer be able to rely on the US’ protection and if the EU dissolves, might become unstable. China will no longer have a check to it’s power in Southeast Asia, while Japan will have to restart it’s own military. India and Pakistan will lose the US’ calming influence. The Middle East will become even more unstable without the US supporting Israel and keeping tabs on the Arab countries. Who knows what will Russia will do.

The UN and NATO will lose their hard power, so international emergency response and nation-building will collapse. The international aid system will collapse without US hegemony protecting it. Africa will become even more unstable than it already is.

The collapse of Pax Americana will have massive repercussions throughout the world and will lead to a large increase in instability and violence.

****

If there are no changes to society as it stands and we continue on our current trajectory, the collapse will occur. What form it may take is an unanswerable question, but a free society not simply survive the combination of massive debt levels, mass dependence on the state, and the dissolution of civic virtue and civil society that is becoming the norm in the West.

But collapse is not inevitable. There’s numerous ways for it to be avoided and the Futurist has outlined a likely path out. All we need is to change the trajectory just enough to delay the collapse long enough for post-scarcity to occur.

Hanna Rosin: Feminists and the Hook-up Culture

Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, commented on Ann Romney’s speech at Slate. Her article ends with this:

But it’s not her particular marriage that gets in the way of reaching certain women, it’s her entire worldview. In Ann Romney’s world, high-school sweethearts are to be trusted, and women should give in and trust them. They do not fail women and they do not let women down, as she said of Mitt. It’s a little bit like Paul Ryan’s imaginary world where men trek off to the tire plant every day and come home and fix the screen door.

But this is not a world that Obama negated with his economic policies; it’s a world that has been slowly disappearing for decades. Most children born to women under 30 now are born to single mothers and in their world, the men are not really to be trusted and they do let people down.

Compare that to her recent article Boys on the Side, which extolled the hook-up culture as liberating for women.

There is no retreating from the hookup culture to an earlier age, when a young man showed up at the front door with a box of chocolates for his sweetheart, and her father eyed him warily. Even the women most frustrated by the hookup culture don’t really want that. The hookup culture is too bound up with everything that’s fabulous about being a young woman in 2012—the freedom, the confidence, the knowledge that you can always depend on yourself. The only option is what Hannah’s friends always tell her—stop doing what feels awful, and figure out what doesn’t.

Young men and women have discovered a sexual freedom unbridled by the conventions of marriage, or any conventions. But that’s not how the story ends. They will need time, as one young woman at Yale told me, to figure out what they want and how to ask for it. Ultimately, the desire for a deeper human connection always wins out, for both men and women. Even for those business-school women, their hookup years are likely to end up as a series of photographs, buried somewhere on their Facebook page, that they do or don’t share with their husband—a memory that they recall fondly or sourly, but that hardly defines them.

How she can not see the contradiction between these two modes of thinking is beyond me, especially given how these two articles were published only about a week apart.

How can the hook-up culture be both something that is liberating to females and supported by females, yet at the same time be something in which women are let down by men?

It can’t.

****

As one commenter at Slate named TheDude commented:

“Most children born to women under 30 now are born to single mothers and in their world, the men are not really to be trusted and they do let people down.”

I don’t sweat this. Double X has taught me that single motherhood is a fine lifestyle to choose, many women choose to do it voluntarily, and that women don’t need men anymore. Who exactly are these guys letting down?

I’ve also learned from Double X that it is in fact men who need women, so the question should be, why are these women letting down the men who need them?

****

The hook-up culture is bad for women (and for men for that matter) but it is a necessary implication of the feminism. Women do not really want the hook-up culture. In fact, except for a minority of high testosterone women, most women do not want most of what feminism is selling.

But the hook-up culture is the natural end-game of feminism. Once traditional marriage, an “oppressive patriarchal” family system, declines, men, no longer constrained by patriarchy, revert to their more primitive instincts. One of the of these instincts is consequence-free sex, the hook-up culture.

The hook-up culture leaves women unable to commit and leaves men unwilling to commit. Given that most women want commitment, at some point, this hurts women.

So, feminists like Rosen know the hook-up culture is the necessary consequence of feminism and is necessary to feminism, but they also know it hurts women. So what do they do, they try to pretend that women like the hook-up culture. Some do, ie. high testosterone feminists, but the rest have to be convinced. So, you speak out of both sides of your mouth: you poison gender relations by blaming men for being unreliable while supporting the very system that makes men unreliable, then tell women that they actually like the system that’s destroying their ability to gain what they actually desire: love, a husband, motherhood, and family.

****

So you get this:

But then, sometime during sophomore year, her feelings changed. She got tired of relation­ships that just faded away, “no end, no beginning.” Like many of the other college women I talked with, Tali and her friends seemed much more sexually experienced and knowing than my friends at college. They were as blasé about blow jobs and anal sex as the one girl I remember from my junior year whom we all considered destined for a tragic early marriage or an asylum. But they were also more innocent. When I asked Tali what she really wanted, she didn’t say anything about commitment or marriage or a return to a more chival­rous age. “Some guy to ask me out on a date to the frozen-­yogurt place,” she said. That’s it. A $3 date.

But the soda-fountain nostalgia of this answer quickly dissipated when I asked Tali and her peers a related question: Did they want the hookup culture to go away—might they prefer the mores of an earlier age, with formal dating and slightly more obvious rules? This question, each time, prompted a look of horror. Reform the culture, maybe, teach women to “advocate for themselves”—a phrase I heard many times—but end it? Never. Even one of the women who had initiated the Title IX complaint, Alexandra Brodsky, felt this way. “I would never come down on the hookup culture,” she said. “Plenty of women enjoy having casual sex.”

Women whose emotional being has been so warped that she wants more emotionally but can’t conceive of an emotional connection beyond going for yogurt. These emotionally scarred women then turn around and defend the system that withered their emotional being because “plenty of women” enjoy it. Note, not because she personally enjoyed it, but because “plenty of women” enjoyed it. Most of these “plenty of women” didn’t really enjoy it themselves, but acted as if they did, because who wants to be the weird person out who don’t enjoy it.

Now some women probably do like the hook-up lifestyle, and some more women probably enjoy it in the moment, but most do not, simply defending it because it is expected of them because others enjoyed it. In the long-term most women suffer the female version of the player’s curse.

Then, instead of blaming the feminism-created system that has left women alone, divorced, and emotionally-scarred, feminists blame men for being unreliable, poisoning gender relations further.

****

The old family system is dying, purposefully killed by minority ideologies of progressivism and feminism. The right knows what is missing and rages at what it is losing, while not being able to free itself from the symptoms of the sickness. The left can not acknowledge that it is sick, because doing so would shatter their ideological myths.

But the left see some who have not been inflicted, and they rage against them, seething at what what they are missing and rage at having it shoved in their face by those like Ann Romney and Sarah Palin, who have and are everything they can not acknowledge they desire.

Meanwhile, the average women laments how she can’t find a good man, while the average man laments how he can’t find a good women. Both emotionally scarred, with their ability to have a loving marriage crippled by the system they support (because its the politically correct thing to support) but don’t understand. They wonder why they just can’t find the love they so desperately want, not being able to see the system that is taking it away for what it is.

They exchange love for pleasure, but in their deepest being they know the pleasure always leaves them feeling hollow. They yearn for love, but are unable to find it because the continual quest for the pleasure necessary to stave of the void in their heart destroys their very ability to experience that love.

The “gender war” continues, pushed by the hurting and the ideologues who need someone to blame for their loneliness and emptiness, but either can not see or can not acknowledge the system that is doing this to them.

Is it any wonder why women’s happiness has been steadily declining?