Ghosts of Christmas Future

[transcript of broadcast recording, c 2048]

And now a holiday message from President Thanyear Feltwine He-Him.

Good evening my fellow Newmericans. Tonight Vice President Tal-Numina Xe-Xir and I begin by acknowledging the Nacotchtank people, upon whose stolen land this capitol stands. We acknowledge the Algonquin people who are the traditional custodians of this land and pay respect to elders past and present of the Algonquin Indian Nation. Nici sigi psach ke-yin, Dich m’djel mieol wagh nuch

I extend that respect to other Native people present, and for the profound contributions they have made to Newmerica.

We acknowledge the descendants of African slaves…

[broadcast fails for 9 minutes 30 seconds, resumes]

…for the profound contribution of Islam to Newmerica…

[broadcast fails, resumes at 7 minutes 29 seconds]

…for the many injustices suffered by Pacific Islanders in the United States…

[broadcast fails, resumes at 9 minutes]

…by finally harnessing the incredible power of that diversity we’ll be able to restore electricity in virtually all of the Eastern Seaboard by the next holiday season.

Good night and good luck to the New State of America. Thank you.

First they came for the leering studio heads and I did not speak out…

Google’s Eric Schmidt is the latest to fall to the sexual inquisition. It isn’t who they’re going after now, but what. Guys with anything to be pilfered away by the current frenzy had better not even think about cheating. Sort of takes all the point out of success:

Schmidt is a known womanizer despite being married for 37 years to Wendy Schmidt, who said in 2012 they started living separate lives because she felt like “a piece of luggage” following him around the world. 

News outlets have been sniffing around Schmidt’s former flames looking for a Harvey Weinstein-like bombshell, a source close to Schmidt told The Post. But sources say there’s nothing there. 

“They haven’t found s–t. Because there is no sexual harassment. There has never been any issue. They have had nothing. People have looked into it and people have not found anything,” the source said. 

The source added that if something foul was afoot, Google would have canned Schmidt completely. 

“Why would they keep him on the board, then have to do this all over again?” the source asked. 

Another source close to Schmidt said that any rumors of sexual harassment were “totally not true.” 

But the insider could not deny Schmidt’s well-documented romantic past and said the techie’s entanglements were “consensual” and that there are “no complaints” against the exec or “settlements” from the company.

This seems a notable escalation. At this rate I predict someone will go down early in the new year for refusing to give oral sex.

Ironic that it’s as if feminism, despite itself, was ultimately all about this: getting that cheating bastard. Feminism is women trying to do what they’ve always done, regulate sexuality, against the current of the same sexual revolution that spawned it. The sexual revolution is untenable, but no one wants to admit it.

Doubly ironic is the purge’s origins, in my opinion at least, in the “pussy hat” movement protesting President Trump as a sexual abuser. I believe it to be a necessary, if not the ultimate, cause of the current hysteria.

 Once Harvey Weinstein’s brother or other rival leaked the story of his behavior to the media a fire was lit. The pussy hat movement had swept through the culture like Santa Ana winds, turning the landscape to tinder. Weinstein’s behavior had long been no secret, after all. There’s a reason it took off now, and that reason is Donald Trump. Ashley Judd’s just-short of unhinged performance at an anti-Trump rally makes sense now, knowing she was one of Harvey’s objects of desire. The actress was channeling big time.

Sadly, men as a group will forever be atoning for men as individuals.

Another thing to remember is the non-hysterical part of the hysteria: for every one of these fellows knocked off his perch there’s someone looking to take his place, usually orchestrating it.

Tongue Tied

New American problerms:

It dangled from a branch for days, wrapped with bright ribbons and studded with large nails and oversize safety pins.
It weathered and hardened from gray-black to a leathery brown. From a distance, as professionals and students walked past the tree at the west end of Palmer Square Park to trains and buses each morning, it could have been mistaken for a hanging length of bark. But within 10 feet, it was clearly something else: a footlong tongue.
Why was a tongue, likely a cow’s, so carefully disfigured and displayed near the luxury apartments and condominiums in rapidly gentrifying Logan Square? In a neighborhood that’s now home to loads of 20-something hipsters, it could be an elaborate performance art piece or a joke. 
But Logan Square and nearby Humboldt Park have much longer histories as working-class enclaves filled with first- and second-generation immigrants, so another possibility presents itself.
Tongues have long played roles in Afro-Caribbean religions like Santeria. The symbolic engine of speech, a tongue can be used in many such faiths to try to get someone to remain silent, according to Lisa Poirier, an assistant professor of religious studies at DePaul University. 
“Often it has to do with a court case,” Poirier said. “You can take a tongue and bind it up to get someone to shut up.”

 Are Santerians joining the fight against gentrification? Was the tongue just there to get the hipsters to shut up, for maybe five effin minutes, about the latest greatest cable series?
More likely it’s a personal dispute involving gossip or snitching. But there’s no fun in that.

Such practices flourished for centuries among enslaved populations in North and South America and the Caribbean who didn’t believe police and judges would treat them fairly, Poirier said.
“They had to find these religio-magical ways to bring about the ends they sought,” she said. “You could put a name on a piece of paper and put it inside the tongue, then seal it in with pins, but you wouldn’t necessarily need to do that,” she said. “You could just have someone’s name in your mind as you dealt with the tongue, bound it up.
“The logic is clear,” she added. “There’s a clear connection between the tongue and speech, and you can find the things you need in an urban setting like Chicago. Cow tongues are easily available.” 

I can get you a toe, Dude. I can get you a toe this afternoon.

The clear “logic” is actually homeopathic magic, attempting to influence events or control people through mimicry–here the ritual tying up of the cow tongue ties the tongue of the target by the law of similarity.
Of course, all roads now lead to racial justice, so the stubbornly benighted nature of blacks and browns is–need I say it?–the fault of white laws.

Poirier said that despite the shocking appearance, it’s not that out of the ordinary, even today. “It’s sort of widespread throughout the Americas,” she said. “It speaks to the fact there are still people who feel they won’t get a fair shake in the justice system.”

It remains to be seen how much more normalization of voodoo and superstition will be necessitated by our new diversity. The expectation that it will wither away over generations, which would have been taken for granted, probably can’t be articulated without controversy now. Now the expectation is that we’ll bring any new religion or culture into the “mosaic” of American diversity, unaltered and celebrated as Vibrant! Make a little room, Lutheranism, there’s another brotherhood of faith here.

The practitioners of voodoo may have magic on their side, but up against real estate equity they haven’t a chance. It’s only a matter of time. The shocked reaction of suburban Americans to the witch doctors and others displaced by gentrification in their midst will provide plenty of grist for the anti-racism mill–from the same poseurs who displaced the diversitypes in the first place.  How dare those losers not tolerate this tradition that’s every bit as venerable as any other?

Walking near Palmer Square Park while the tongue was still in place, local resident Marina Goldshteyn noted the area’s shifting demographics. 

“I know the neighborhood is changing a lot, but it hasn’t entirely,” she said. The cow tongue, however, is no more. A Chicago Park District worker noticed the tongue and cut it down earlier this week.

"In the year three thousaaaaaand….!"

“Well private collections are a problem, certainly. We have no idea how many are out there. What constitutes a collection, also, is a legitimate question.”
Herbert perked up at this.
“Yes. That’s my concern. Say a guy has, in the classic example, an old newspaper announcing the moon landing…”
Genero looked at him with sly sympathy.
“Well, if this friend of yours had only that, and just that, while he’d be in clear violation, it’s not like they’re going to come busting down his door. As long as it doesn’t circulate, he’s not going to get into trouble.”
“But he could be arrested.”
“Yes. Of course. Look what they got that last fellow for, what was he, chairman of the national bank or something? It was a stack of old pornographic magazines. It wasn’t even political stuff, they were more in the line of curiosities.”
“Aren’t they all really?”
Herbert asked hopefully.
“No. No. There’s still some very dangerous stuff out there. Even the sort of stuff in the chairman’s collection, there were to be found political articles expounding the most dangerous ideas. Something of a political nature would be a stew of toxic expression.”
“Really?”
Herbert regretted the intrigue in his voice.
Genero continued.
“But I point him out only to note they had some reason to come after him and the collection was a pretext.”
“They say everybody possessing any text is in violation.”
“Any text older than sixty years, even the most banal. That’s in there. But it it’s not quite everything.”
“And images?”
“Well there’s no reason to worry about photographs, paintings or the like yet, of course, but you know President Feltyear He-Him said just the other night, the international direction is clearly toward the gradual cleaning up and elimination…”
“So, with the inclusion of imagery, it might become true that virtually everyone is in violation of the International Convention on Intolerance and Hate Communication?”
“That’s an exaggeration. But it isn’t such a bad thing. Everyone has something on them. Everyone has a stake in making things work–because everyone is on notice not to screw up or, worse, go over to the wreckers.”
“What did he do, anyway?”
“Who?”
“The bank chairman.”
“Who cares?”

note

I deleted my Twitter account yesterday, exhausted by the pointlessness of it all. I saw a tweet of mine, something I thought clever, had been retweeted by one of my dozens of followers to his dozens of followers and I was plunged into an oh-so-familiar bout of mediocrity-induced depression. It’s not fun to suck. I’m not going to suck anymore–not on Twitter, at least.

I’m not wasting any more time on it. What I’d like to do now is a podcast. Looking for a partner.

I will continue to participate in Torah Talk with Luke Ford of course, until they wise up and throw me out. The idea is to do a short one of my own as well once a week. Two guys talking in a humorous fashion about things.

Alternative Torah with Luke Ford

Evan McClaren of NPI couldn’t join us as intended but a good show nonetheless.

Today’s Torah reading is Parashas Vayigash (Genesis 44:18–47:27) Join the live chat at Luke’s YouTube Channel.

Joseph brings his family to Egypt and they begin taking over.

Last week we talked about Joseph as the prototypical court Jew. His brothers sell him into slavery for his arrogance after he prophesies he’ll rule over them, and the very stars in the sky will bow down to him. Hard to blame them too much.

But Joseph comes to Pharaoh’s attention after interpreting a pair of his dreams–in the only bible passage I can think of where a non-Hebrew’s dreams are brought into the narrative. Because of his superior intelligence Joseph ends up running Egypt for a grateful Pharaoh. He sets about storing Egyptian grain to withstand the seven year famine that he prophesied from Pharaoh’s dreams.

His brothers, suffering the same famine in Canaan, come to Egypt to buy grain. They find themselves before Joseph in his capacity as Pharaoh’s minister and do not recognize him. After some typically Old Testament subterfuge he reveals himself to them, forgives them and invites them to bring their aged father Jacob (Israel) to Egypt.

In this week’s section Joseph presents five of his “weaker” brothers before Pharaoh, instructing them to tell Pharaoh they’re shepherds, not traders in livestock. Shepherds are disdained–but they aren’t an economic threat. Pharaoh gives them a choice piece of land and tells Joseph to put the capable among them in charge of his livestock. The Jewish elite is developing, having arrived via chain migration.

Joseph has wisely stocked up on grain to withstand the famine, and now he’s trading that grain for livestock and other forms of capital–the wealth of the land steadily being transferred into his hands until at last landholders have sold their land to Pharaoh for grain. Egypt is a country of slaves, with a foreign elite at its head. I don’t think the Egyptians of the time needed fascism, anti-Semitic tropes or Donald Trump to have felt some gnawing sense of resentment, to say the least.

But the Torah doesn’t have anything to say about that.

Careful What You Bitch For

Feminism rescued woman from her dependence on men. Nevertheless she persisted. She keeps persisting away at depending on men.

Beneath all the noise the ongoing Hollywood sexual harassment scandal documents the present of an age-old practice, women depending on sex to advance in male-dominated fields (and they’re all male-dominated).

That’s why “male dominated fields” exist in the first place. They’re just vast, organized efforts to meet women.

There is a disparity in power for the women of course. Feminism is an attempt to correct that. Earnest feminists assume the power disparity is yet another trick of the patriarchy, and its elimination won’t come at a cost but with a yield: all that female creativity previously denied bursting forth, presumably.

Mostly at this point feminists don’t care. All “rights” movements are in the appropriation phase, what Steve Sailer has called the “Scramble for America”: each politically favored group scrambling for its fair share of the ruin before the others hog it all up.

But the power disparity in the sex-for-advancement scheme exists for good reason: it’s a lot harder for the male to get where he is than the female, who competes in a too-brief window of high value attractiveness against a sea of beautiful eager faces. What the male has to trade is essentially power that translates into a variety of opportunity (including the competing females); the female is trading her intimate self for just a piece of that. The woman who leverages that into her own genuine power is real but rare. More common I’m sure is the young homosexual twink who manages to do so.
Women simply won’t tend toward the same aggressive/creative behavior in general that put the guys where they are in the first place.

It’s all so depressingly obvious.

The inquisition is ruining it all. Not just for the men, but for the young women who were or would like to be complicit. Hollywood is driving away all those horny creative men that are the backbone of the industry. They are not going to replace them with women, woke transsexuals and gay negroes. Wake the hell up, ladies.

But replacement is precisely the game. The model is that of the university race or rape hoax yielding diversibucks and jobs: X group is deemed offended by Y, only correction for Y is more X.
The only way we’re going to solve Hollywood’s sexual assault problem is by putting more women in Hollywood. And the opportunities for that look promising–replacing men with women, not “solving” a sexual assault problem, which of course could just get worse.

By forbidding any criticism of the women involved (unless it’s the rare case of a powerful woman adopting the male model) feminism seeks to maintain a natural advantage desirable women have always had. But in taking away this opportunity for ambitious men, and in driving so many out of an industry the face of which is already changed, they are squelching a great source of advancement for ambitious young women.

The naive assumption of course is that women will be replacing these men in, say, Hollywood, with no lack of decline in quality or profit–nay, with a certain increase in both.

But the reality is to the extent feminism appropriates Hollywood it weakens it, which, big-picture now, might not be such a bad thing. Because of all the feminism Hollywood puts out.

Misogyny and the Alt Right

Spencer Quinn at Counter Currents relates a personal story in relation to prominent alt right women complaining of being attacked online:

My trip to the bank about a month ago was somewhat unusual, and I knew it would require special attention from a teller…I couldn’t believe that this person was the person with whom I was about to interact. What I was seeing was a beautiful woman. She seemed in her mid-twenties, about five feet seven or eight inches tall. She had exquisitely smooth and lustrous brown hair, arresting brown eyes, and a classic movie-star beauty which reminded me of a young Ingrid Bergman. As I was preparing myself to deal with such a stunning specimen of womanhood, I asked myself, “Why is she here? Why is she not working for a modeling agency selling perfume or diamonds?” 

I asked this because in my line of work and the circles in which I travel, you don’t often find jaw-droppingly beautiful women who are just standing there waiting for you to come up and talk to them. During our encounter I had to look away from her a few times because I didn’t want it to seem as if I, a happily-married husband and father, were mooning over a girl practically young enough to be my daughter. (The temptation was there, believe me.)

Anyway, she was perfectly nice and professional, and our entire transaction took about ten minutes. I left the bank satisfied that I had completed that errand and was free to run the next one. Yet as I stepped into the parking lot, I experienced a thoroughly unwelcome emotion, one I hadn’t experienced in a long time: heartache. A nice, jarring stab of it, too. And this wasn’t even mature, manly heartache, the kind no one could really blame me for having. No, no, this was a return of the angsty, juvenile heartache that everyone over thirty wants to forget. This was the heartache that plagued countless lonely nights throughout my pretty goddamn pathetic youth. I remember them well.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

Of course, I never once felt any resentment or anger towards the nice girl at the bank. But I knew she was the cause of this heartache. But how? Why? The answer came to me immediately: she never smiled at me. Not once. For me, she was nothing less than a vision, the epitome of what the human form can attain. For her, however, I was just another customer, deserving of prompt service and common courtesy and nothing more. This beautiful creature couldn’t even spare me a single solitary smile. Realizing this made me feel so mean.

One thing feminists didn’t conjure entirely out of thin air is misogyny. Males experience evolutionary despair (felt as heartache) at being exposed to desirable females who are not available to them.
Young men now are subjected to endless titillation in an environment, for the regular straight white guy at least, that must feel increasingly competitive and hostile, due to the ongoing migration of females into demographic alternatives.

Sexual liberation has only increased the risk of sexual violence for women in an environment saturated with suggestion. At the same time it subjects young men to a sort of protracted torture of sexual teasing.

Male sexual rage is a biological response to losing out in the evolutionary struggle.
It’s evolutionary terror, a mortal fear. Just as you fearfully anticipate your own death you fearfully anticipate your genetic line dying off in the next generation. That feeling in your stomach is a physical epiphany.

Quinn sees in his reaction to the beautiful bank teller–a reaction we all know–the motivation for a recent online campaign against Lauren Southern and Tara McCarthy from some of the rougher corners of the alt right. The charges against the women are silly (I thought I saw someone confidently “exposing” her one eighth Indian ancestry somewhere); I read them, even of Ms Southern’s swarthy sojourn, which is a shame don’t get me wrong, and I think who are these young men going to hell over this? These guys are going to have to toughen up in the future, because their future is toughening up all the time.

One of the charges against the women is that they’re overrated, as we’d expect attractive women in a movement with few of them to be.  I don’t doubt it; I think the praise premium by which men overrate the intelligence of attractive women (about ten IQ points) is exceeded in constancy only by white liberals’ same application in favor of blacks (about fifteen).

But even if its true, the women are not overrated in what they bring to the movement in charm and grace. I haven’t followed either closely, but as far as I can tell Southern has done some fairly brave reporting in the field and McCarthy’s podcast is one of the better ones (I’ve only recently started paying attention to them).
You need women. It helps if they’re attractive. Even if they are overrated they are not really; they bring something to the table no man can. They broaden the appeal of ideas only kept underfoot by being made to look unappealing.